No, not really. I didn’t downvote you btw.

Edited my original comment to avoid suggesting that.

toxic men

Kinda sad and ironic, that the term “toxic masculinity” began as a way to describe how culture manufactures a harmful concept of what it means to be a man, and it seeps into men and damages them like a toxin… but now we use it to mean that the man himself is toxic, undermining the whole notion of thinking of the problem as systemic rather than one of individuals.

Anyway, patriarchy is absolutely demolishing men right now, and the political right is saying “women’s fault” while the left is saying “lmao skill issue”. If we don’t get our shit together and start treating this seriously, we’re gonna have big problems.

It’s okay, Let’s Encrypt only provides SSL certs for… 63.7% of the market?

Okay okay, that is a lot. But what does a CA need funding for anyway? It doesn’t take much bandwidth to send out new certs.

The only thing that could be expensive is if they had to rapidly invalidate thousands of certs to protect the security of the entire internet.

But haha, that’s a pretty outlandish scenario that would never happen.

Behind the Bastards had a Christmas special non-bastard episode on the Tupamaros of Uruguay and Pepe Mujica. It does seem like they have some decent politics there.

thousand’s*

Wind of change: did the CIA write the cold war’s biggest anthem?

True… but you can sure enable one by not voting.

Running both Linux and macOS on a daily basis… They’re both completely competent, and have basically the same amount of rough edges once you dig in and get your hands dirty. If you find one of them impossibly difficult, it’s a skill issue.

Just to be clear, I was referring to a poem by Dayna EM Craig, titled “A Narcissist’s Prayer”.

How does that one go?

It seems like any time you criticize AI, you get an escalating series of responses akin to the narcissist’s prayer:

• It must be faked
• And if it wasn’t faked, you were using the wrong model
• And if you weren’t using the wrong model, you prompted it wrong
• And if you didn’t prompt it wrong, don’t worry — “this is the worst it’ll ever be”

Some editor ran this piece through a shredder. The main content is good, but the headline and intro are terrible.

Here are the highlights:

One reason this administration is so disorienting is that U.S. foreign policy has been guided for decades by the opposite of realism. The key fights in Washington, especially in recent decades, were between neocons who wanted to spread democracy through war and liberals who wanted to spread democracy through soft power like U.S.A.I.D. contracts to bolster civil society.

…

While Mr. Trump embraces some elements of realism — giving in to the strong and sacrificing the weak — his tariff wars and threats against peaceful neighbors could end up being as costly as the military adventurism of the previous liberal order. Rajan Menon, a professor emeritus at the City College of New York, told me that people who expect the Trump administration “to follow the playbook of realism” by showing restraint “are going to get very disappointed.”

…

To Mr. Trump, America is a great power that Russia wouldn’t dare attack, and Ukraine is a pawn that can be sacrificed. But here’s the thing about great powers: They all decline eventually. Neanderthal realism doesn’t save them. After Athens sacked Melos, word of its brutality spread. Its allies turned against it. Athens lost the war. Noble ideas, it turns out, do matter.

A cheap ARM laptop.

Pinebooks have been sold out for ages, and then it’s a massive leap up to MNT Reform or Copilot+.

I just started watching eBay for used Pinebooks, but nothing has popped yet.

Edit: Actually, there are some decent options for Snapdragon 7/8 refurbs on Amazon. Mass market brands can be so hit or miss by model, so this’ll take some research, but it looks like there are 20-30 results to consider.