The western economy is a boom and bust cycle, most often driven by US loosening of economic controls. I’m sure the Chinese property bubble will burst too and then we have to deal with that one too.

How I long for social democratic, Nordic style government everywhere.

Setting up a fully automated system to download, track and organise … eh … Linux distributions …onto a NAS under the stairs. I used to subscribe to a bunch of services that would … eh … provide access to all sorts of … eh … Linux distributions … for a flat monthly fee, but I realised that I often was only really interested in one or two specific Linux distribution so I really didn’t need to pay for these services.

Now I just download the … eh … Linux distributions that I actually want to install. It also prevents my kids from … eh … endlessly installing different Linux distributions. Not really a productive use of time.

Congrats, you managed to turn this conversation into a socialism vs fascism conversation. It wasn’t easy but you spotted an opportunity and you took it. Now we can all talk about your favourite topic!

Of course not speaking for experience. I’ve personally never broken the law.

But often when companies listed their contact information they’d have a phone line and a fax number. If those numbers were near each other, you could pretty much guarantee that there would be a phone number somewhere in that sequence, or just past it, that would let you dial into their network, often weakly guarded with default password on common user names.

While it could take a little while, I’m aware of people collecting company phone numbers and war dialling overnight to find the network service number. Once you spoke to a modem it would give you a telnet connection and there was hardly ever any form of rate control. The worst I’ve hear about was getting chucked off after three attempts. But you could just dial up again.

I’ve heard of many, many company secrets being found that way.

I actually do think I’ve invented a data structure for interleaving multiple streams in a single file in a really efficient way. I can’t find something that looks like it, and it seems obviously faster and more logical than anything else I’ve seen. It’s the level below B-trees so not optimised for least amount of lookups within a record table, nor would it be efficient for adding records in a middle of the stream, but for treating data streams like files (append, shrink) I do think it’s significantly more efficient than what else I can find. One of these days I really should submit a paper and see what reviewers say.

And you can direct traffic with a high viz vest.

I actually managed to come off it completely. Even though Lemmy is 10000x smaller, it still scratches the same itch for me.

I actually do. For some reason my children are fascinated where it all goes, so we’ve seems lots of videos on plumbing, in house and on the street. They’re absolutely bowled over by how it all works and it’s made me appreciate it so much more.

It’s also an enormous hygiene booster; running water, waste management etc. If you have a working water system in your neighbourhood you’re blessed. It’s one of those things Stone Age people would barely believe was real.

Which reminds me of a comment I read on Lemmy not too long ago - someone was wishing for a robot to handle the laundry. And I was like: “What do you think a washing machine is?!”

Product management.

All of them.

If there was a way to enable “see verified accounts only”, and “verified” actually meant using a system of legal identity verification in each territory, I would.

By how accounts talk on social networks, I struggle to see more than 5% actually coming from real people. The alternative, that people really are this uneducated, fooled, mean and angry, is just too horrible to bear. I have to believe it’s discord bots destroying our democracy, not actual people. It is, right? Right?!

Ah right - oh well, however it’s achieved I don’t have see every post in my feed turn into a discussion with two sharply defined poles: Nazis and communism.

I’m confused. Maybe I don’t understand federation as well as I thought.

~~This post originates on .ml, right?

So what does .world’s federation status with hexbear have to do with my ability to see hexbear posts on .ml?~~

Edit: Ah, no, the post does in fact originate on .world so .world’s federation status with hexbear is determinant for the lack of hexbear posts, not my individual blocking of the instance.

I actively ban hexbear’s entire instance. I relish the fact that I simply can’t see all the hexbear responses to this thread. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone on hexbear (pre banning) that was even remotely open to considering other viewpoints. It just became so toxic, so quick, whenever their users get involved.

Yes but lots of non-American readers see this post. So your wording is still a bit specific.

Americans: Have you ever traveled outside of America?

Would have made more sense.

No. I believe all things have a natural explanation.

I do believe we won’t be able to understand every natural explanation that happens in the universe, though.

You can’t teach a dog quantum physics. I don’t think we are so special that we will be able to understand everything. We may hit a limit where our math (a formal language of reasoning that we have developed) can’t model something or our brains simply refuse to accept its conclusion.

We can operate with irrational numbers but it’s not like our brains can truly comprehend them. Nor does quantum physics really make sense; I mean, mathematically we can reason about it but we can’t comprehend it. The speed of light being a constant and warping time is another example of something we can experimentally verify but can’t logically comprehend.

There’s no reason to believe everything will be understandable. So I’m open to something “unexplainable” happening that seems supernatural. I definitely do believe it’s natural at all times.

And while I’m open to “natural things we cannot comprehend” I simply struggle to believe for a second theres something that exists on another “plane”, which we cannot see signs of, that somehow judges us and takes an interest in our individual lives, as anything but fanciful. If such an entity exists, and it seems to us omnipresent and omnipotent, I doubt it takes any more interest in us than we would an ant in a forest on the other side of the planet.

That’s numberwang!

What’s wrong with drinking out of your hands?!

By the way?

Always tinkered with Linux, since eeeearly Red Hat days, but took the first full move when I set up my home lab and needed to host some docker containers with hardware pass-through.

Turned out my hardware was a bit too new for the kernel I had to install so ended up teaching myself a lot in terms trying to get everything to work.

Because of that I got quite comfortable on the terminal and from then, the UI suddenly made sense, because I understood better the concepts underneath.

Run three boxes with various versions of Linux now, a couple more if you count dual booting, a couple more if you count Mac as some kind of Frankenstein UNIX.

The “small boats” will be used this time. Anything that can be seen to cater to the Tommy Robinson crowd is likely to be accepted by a large majority unfortunately.