Spent yesterday washing and undercoating my cars. I do it in the spring to get the salt off. I'm now very sore. I also tried to fix a power steering leak at the return hose junction which went very poorly. I did get the Tacoma drivable again but man what a pain.

Another reminder to get off as many Google services as possible. Check out my guide to get off US tech more widely: disconnect.blog/getting-off-...

France passed a law requiring solar panels on every parking lot with more than 80 spaces. Equals 10 nuclear reactors Reduces heat island, shades cars The US -- 800 million parking spaces. Most of them are uncovered asphalt sitting in direct sunlight. Why aren't we doing this?

"Viewpoint diversity," is just their way of saying, "Let the nazis talk!🤡" It's silly and I don't have time to pretend that it's not. But when people complain about the left not "being unified" and "always disagreeing with each other?" That's real viewpoint diversity. That's supposed to happen.

Happy Tax Day, New York. We’re taxing the rich.

We can punch them. I'm not advocating punching them, to be clear, I'm just pointing out that it is a thing we can do to stop them, theoretically. So it's weird to ask "what can anyone do?" when there is something fairly obvious. Whether we want to, or should, is another matter entirely.

Gentoo just masked keepassxc-2.7.11 due to it still using qt5, the note about it mentions the new AI policy. keepassxc with qt6 isn't stable yet. Trying to understand the unrelated qt situation I ended up reading some of the forum threads about the AI policy. I'm really curious to see it play out.

Saying "You should promise to vote for whatever candidate Dems put up" is asking for permission to put up a bad candidate. They want our promise so that they don't have to promise anything to us, do anything for us, or try for our vote, and can just do whatever their corporate donors ask.

I regret to inform y'all that Hans Zimmer fuckin sucks.

I saw one just the other day. The argument was that Microsoft can revoke signing keys from open source projects, so you can't trust open source projects will continue working. It was completely left out that they can do the same to corporations. That's besides this being a reason TO ditch windows.

I think a lot of people here are way underestimating how difficult it is to break a sexual abuse story *even when everybody kind of knows it* unless you can get victims on record. it is very, very hard.

The state forester pointed out that the honeysuckle bush just down the hill from our house was an invasive variety. Today the ground was just right to pull it out: dry enough to support the tractor, but still good and damp. I wrapped a chain around it and the loader pulled it out in one go.

The LLM hacking stuff IS literal PR. These papers are published by the AI companies, which also means it's whitehat and not widely accessible YET, and not an emergency YET. It's also true that it's a big fucking deal, a very very important development in security, and may soon be an emergency.

Good explanation of what's going on. I'm suspicious that execs might even know it's happening to some extent (probably not to the full extent). Remember how even before the AI bubble they were laying people off to get stock bumps. Who needs a product when you have short term gains?

I took a class from Bo Brown years ago at a traditional skills gathering. Amazing ecological knowledge and one of the most experienced in the U.S. with trapping animals with traditional traps. I just tripped over this in my feed. I'd lost track of him as I don't live in that region.

I've turned off AI output from the search engines I use (qwant and duckduckgo). It's too hard to stay vigilant ALL the time. If it's there you'll eventually read it. This way I only have to stay vigilant on the rare occasion when I use a different search engine (like Google).

New, by me: Mounir Idrassi, the developer of the popular file encryption software Veracrypt, says Microsoft has locked his account used for sending software updates, and warned that Windows users who encrypt their PCs with his software may soon find it "impossible to boot," Idrassi tells me.

I think there's a really huge gap between software that some person wrote and said "Hey, anyone who wants this can have it". And projects like Gnome or LibreOffice that have corporate backing, pools of devs, and PR campaigns. I see a lot of FOSS discourse that doesn't bother to differentiate.

This is a surprisingly interesting idea for improving democracy: www.schneier.com/blog/archive... Lots of details obviously. I like the basic idea of gathering, coalescing, and modeling voter opinion this way does make some sense to me. Surveys suck enough that it doesn't have to be that great.

Disappointed (not surprised) at hints the general strike on may 1'st will be 1 day. I don't think we have the people for a real strike, but I'd hoped we'd aim for multiple days to build muscles for doing a month later. I'll do it of course, but this doesn't feel like it goes anywhere. :sigh:

The described behavior actually gets a reliable block from me. If I see it on a random thread it's an opportunity to never interact with that person. I am here to talk to humans and learn things, actual knowledge, from them. LLM output is not knowledge.

The spam calls have really skyrocketed lately and I got fed up. I installed SpamBlocker off of F-droid (so FOSS software), and set it to block any number not either from my state, or in my contacts. Since my number is out of-state that blocked basically all the spam calls. Highly recommend.

This 1990 speech by Carl Sagan is timely times two: #war #climate

I want more Dems talking about Nuremberg 2.0, but even more I want them drafting model legislation for it that we can use for the midterms and 2028. Show us you mean it. Write it up. Let us demand every single candidate vote for it. (also, we need lustration. transitional justice and lustration.)

Just walked our property with a state forester. Apparently there's now beach *leaf* blight (different than bark blight), and I'd never heard of balsam fir adelgid. She talked a bit about lungwort, and noted some of our Aspen's are nearing EOL. The 0-3ft of snow made it difficult though.

I just contacted my reps explaining why the Forest Service is critical (and irreplaceable) for ecological services and the logging industry itself. You should too... ASAP. morethanjustparks.substack.com/p/breaking-t...

If you inexplicably feel the urge to help Nestlé with ANYTHING, maybe remember the 10+ million infants they murdered in the last half century

It's the same old failure of thinking economics is a zero sum game. It's not. See, capitalist economies change the amount of wealth (free stuff) we have to share over time... like by destroying it.

Trying to listening to the trans people around me I'm hearing: Yes listen, yes hold space, yes love them, but maybe don't suddenly contact someone only on specific dates to make yourself feel better about being a moral person?

I guess the policy is now just intentionally driving people into bankruptcy? This sounds good for the economy, oh wait... no... no it doesn't. In fact, I don't think anyone benefits. Note that bankruptcy doesn't discharge student loan debt these days without a whole other pile of paperwork.

I already was skeptical of Pritzker. Age verification is part of the fascist project and if he can't see that (or more likely can and doesn't care) then he shouldn't be in power right now. Children and women are not property. Age verification is privacy violating bullshit.

"Software engineering" isn't engineering. Engineering is a precise process guaranteeing a needed result. We do not do this, are not trained to do this, and are embarrassed by the term engineer being applied. You think software sucks. We know it's actually far far worse than that.

A remarkable photo from #NoKings in DTLA from Connor Sheets of @latimes.com www.latimes.com/california/l...

If nothing else, flexing organizing muscles is useful. No Kings 3 here in Montpelier, unlike 1 and 2, had trained and organized peacekeepers and legal observers, a planned backdrop, complex sound, and 2.5 hours of speakers. People who've never been involved before are learning to lead a movement.

I picked up half a whey fed forest raised pig this morning (already processed). That should be the bulk of our meat for the next year, hopefully together with a little beef this fall from friends who raise. Together we eat ~1lb of meat a week, though we might increase to more like 1.5.

Suggestion: Call the no-kings event a "rally" rather than a "protest". Rally is more precise, and makes it sound as safe as it is, and may encourage folks who are nervous about reprisal. Many people understandably associate "Protest" with arrest and civil disobedience, an idea reinforced by media.

I just updated my rayhunter: www.eff.org/deeplinks/20... In preparation for tomorrow's rally. I was going to peacekeep, but it turns out I can't spend time in the relevant public spaces to attend the meetings due to medical issues. On the upside, I can run my rayhunter tomorrow instead.

It's a good thing I've already lost all respect for the Olympic committee or I would've just lost all respect for the Olympic committee.

Just let planes fly without TSA screening, like we used to. TSA doesn't actually make us safer. They only ban small knives because people flipped when they stopped. Literally TSA doesn't even think that policy helps. TSA is the fascism we're used to. That doesn't make it good, or even okay.

I've been hearing about this, but finally actually read it. It's a takedown of CA age verification, as well as an approach to fighting back. The main idea is to make extremely clear but obviously stupid violations, sit back, and say: "Go ahead and prosecute us, we DARE you." agelesslinux.org

I haven't faked my own death... yet. But I'm thinking about how I should cut back my credit card use as I type on this macbook pro (because why buy a Thinkpad when I was gifted this) running Gentoo and look out my windows where there is not another house for ~1/4 mile through dense forest.

CERN took some antiprotons on a field trip! apnews.com/article/cern... (HT @matociquala.bsky.social)

It's SO hard to answer normal user's questions about security that I tend not to even talk about it, despite it being a major interest of mine. Security is fundamentally holistic and every choice is a tradeoff. Once you pass the level of "use a password DB and 2FA" the advice just isn't simple.

I've had lyme 3 times and my mom had at least 8 strains of it (yeah, it's a weird story). Anyway, I will absolutely line up for this, and I hate standing in lines.

#Gentoo If you fight with your package manager frequently and sometimes even win, Gentoo might be the right distro for you. If you compile software manually because you want options your package manager lacks (or want such software managed as a package), Gentoo might be the distro for you. 1/5

Made grocery list this morning. Cooking 3 dishes this week: roast chicken, chicken soup, and red curry, but I forgot to add chicken or tofu. Got out the shelf stable Tofu, but it's past the sell-by and smells funny. Declaring mulligan and eating instant stuff. On a roll. I'm claiming brain fog.

It took reading Sotomayor's dissent for me to realize a "rear wristlock" seems to consist of threatening to break, and potentially breaking, someone's wrist. This is the thing that was ruled in summary judgement to not be excessive use of force on a non-violent protestor passively resisting arrest.

Holy shit we might have a cure for sickle cell anemia

Reminder: March 28'th www.nokings.org This is a step in the process to make change. We need to field enough people so we can move forward to things like a general strike. More drastic action requires more proof of buy-in. This is the proof. So come rally.

I knew there was a reason I didn't wanna deal with systemd all the way back to RHEL7....