Even if we find ourselves on opposite sides of a conflict, that does not change that we have always shared many values with the American people, we have always worked together to promote our shared values in the world, and I certainly hope that always continues. As fellow supporters and defenders of the freedom of all people, we will always be allies in that. And no matter how many freedoms you seem to be losing down there, I hope that you will never lose the freedom to choose where to point your guns. Choose wisely, because your choices will have consequences, either good or bad, that’s all I will say.

I don’t think any of us pretend to know why your dictator in chief does anything anymore, but we’re going to try to be as fully prepared for the possibilities as we can be, and given our propensity for creative forms of violence, it is our duty to provide you fair and adequate warning of the potential consequences in advance. Consider yourselves warned.

I’m not sure prison terms are still relevant anymore, it seems like the choices are becoming either indefinite, deportation, death, or no enforcement or punishment at all (if you’re rich or powerful)

He’s still alive right now, it can’t take that long to build a guillotine, what exactly are we we waiting for?

You should probably talk to a psychiatrist about it to be honest. I’m not a professional, and I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, but the fact that you seem to be having trouble distinguishing your fantasy from reality, and choose to write that your cat says these things, without taking responsibility for the fact that it is you saying these things in your own head, suggests you may be suffering from some mental illness, in which case you need to see a mental health professional, or you’re trolling, in which case kindly go fuck yourself with a rusty knife.

Your cat doesn’t do anything. You are doing it. That said, thoughtcrime is not a crime. However, you should probably spend some time having some deep thoughts about why you choose to imagine your pet this way, because it says a lot more about you than it does about your cat, and maybe by continuing this, you’re not reinforcing helpful thoughts, ideas, and behaviors for yourself. Or maybe it’s just a harmless fantasy. I’d be more concerned with outcomes than the actual method you’re getting there in your own head. Do you think this is having a positive impact on your life? Is it relieving stress and giving you joy? If that’s all it is, no judgement, have fun with it. Just make sure it doesn’t start leaking out of your head and into your real life where it doesn’t belong.

That’s an interesting approach and probably convenient for some people to put their passwords safely into the “cloud” but it doesn’t hold a candle to the capabilities of my Keepass database. I’d need to use it for quite awhile before I started to have any confidence or trust in it, they haven’t posted a blog entry in almost a year either so I’m not sure how active it is. Nice to have other potential options to keep in my back pocket though and it seems like they have a good philosophy.

They’re trying to thread a needle, because they want to have their cake and eat it too. They’re not succeeding. They’re never going to. Either they are on the side of defending society and civilization, or they are trying to destroy society and civilization and profit from it. They think they can find a middle ground when there is no middle ground left anymore. The wealth gap has sprawled open into an impossible and still growing chasm that nobody can stand in anymore. That’s where the middle ground used to be. Now, it’s class war, us against them, and I find it hard to believe they’ll ever do the right thing or pick the right side. So they can keep trying to thread that needle if they want. It will do them no good. Their thread is too thick to fit. They have lost their social license to operate. They are not getting it back. Not from me, anyway.

I am not implying that anything will happen to them anytime soon, and as you suggest they may even profit in the short term, but I do think they might end up with a shortened lifespan eventually, or if they’re particularly lucky, just a significantly less free one.

Before you even start, consider adopting an ‘infrastructure as code’ approach. It will make your life a lot easier in the future.

Start with any actual code: If you have any existing source code, get it under git version control immediately, then prioritize getting it into a git hub like forgejo to make your life easier in the future. Make a git repository for your infrastructure documentation, and record (and comment/document too if you’re feeling ambitious) every command you run in a txt file or an md file or a script, and do that as religiously as you can while you’re setting up all this self-hosted stuff. You may want to dig it up later to try and remember exactly what you did or in case stuff goes wrong and you need to back off and try again. It might seem pointless now, but a year from now, you’ll thank me.

Especially prioritize getting your git stuff moved into a self-hosted forgejo if any of your stuff is hosted on the microsoft technoplague called github.

There is no more United States. They would have to be United for that name to still apply. Now there is only the Disunited, Distracted States of America and the rapidly growing Fourth Reich taking their territory from within.

You get what you pay for. Sometimes you get more than you pay for, sometimes you can get lots for free, but you’ll never get a guarantee. If you want anything resembling a guarantee, you have to pay.

You sound like you want guaranteed advice, but for free. That isn’t going to happen.

If you want non-guaranteed advice, just ask anywhere on the internet, like here for example. You’ll get lots of answers, none of them guaranteed, but some of them quite possibly very correct. Is that worth the price of “free”? It should be.

Minnesota is already honorary Canadian and in my opinion, always has been.

Constitutions are made up by people and people can change them. All you need to do is either get everyone to agree, or make sure the people who don’t agree can’t stop you. Trump chose the latter, and has completely ignored and dismantled the US constitution. Whatever comes out the other side is going to be very, very different. I’m not saying that we should do that. But in the face of an existential threat like that, I don’t think it’s beyond reason that we could, in fact, get everyone to agree. It’s amazing how staring mutual death and dissolution in the face can change the bitterest of rivalries into if not perfect alignment, at least a functional working relationship. Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.

I ran Matrix for like a year, and pretty much hated every minute. It was fragile, complicated, and incredibly, bafflingly resource intensive. Matrix is an overengineered nightmare in my opinion, and it seems to be quickly distancing itself from self-hosters while pursuing enterprise usage. Neat technology, horrible implementation, misguided company.

XMPP is a breath of fresh air in comparison. Just like we still use email everywhere (even for authentication nowadays, fun!), XMPP is not obsolete simply because it’s older. It’s a solid foundation, plenty extensible, and does almost everything I can imagine needing to do without unnecessary complexity.

Matrix’s bridges are its killer feature, and it’s nice… when it works. But it’s simply not worth the headache of dealing with Matrix, in my opinion.

If the polls are rigged, does that imply that most Israelis don’t support the genocide? So … you think you’ve got a majority of people who don’t support the genocide and with that majority you plan to do … nothing? Just gonna … let the minority do what they want?

There’s a word for that, the word is “support”. You might not think you’re supporting it, but if you’re not doing something to fight it, then yes, you are supporting it. Get to work. Nobody ever promised that doing the right thing has to be easy.

We are so, so, so thoroughly cooked. I can’t even.

Lots of enabling in your comment.

People like you, with no control over the big decisions. Just like Palestinians can’t control Hamas, Russians can’t control Putin, US citizens can’t control Trump, and so on.

If people can’t control their own governments, who can? Who should? Other people’s governments? Is that how you think it’s supposed to work? That’s why Israel is obliterating Gaza? Because Gaza can’t get rid of Hamas themselves so Israel is going to do it for them? Do you think that is justified and the right way to do things? Is it Canada’s job to rescue the US? Is it Europe’s responsibility to stop Russia?

Are Iranians responsible for the Iranian regime? Yes, they are, that’s why they’re fucking protesting and dying in the streets right now. Resist, fight back, don’t comply, undermine your illegitimate government until they can be toppled.

Take responsibility. I am responsible for the actions of my government and my country. And so are you. You will be held responsible. And you should be. Other countries are not responsible for fixing your shit. You are. Fix it. Figure out how. Stop acting like it’s somebody else’s problem and you are just a humble peasant. Humble peasants can start revolutions. Lazy citizens who are happy with the status quo while pretending they don’t agree with it do not start revolutions. Which one are you?

This situation is literally what the second amendment is for. When Americans were asserting their right to buy and own fully automatic assault rifles and the NRA would defend them, the second amendment is why. The amendment exists because the citizens of the time believed they would need guns to eventually defend themselves against a tyrannical government.

Now they have a tyrannical government. I’m not convinced guns are actually what they need, but this is precisely what the second amendment is for and it’s not really a surprise to find the NRA is still in support of it.

In my opinion, the problem is not with the second amendment itself, or the NRA’s unflinching support for it, at least in theory. The problem is, in practice, 90% of the people who are the most heavily armed Americans with the biggest arsenals under the second amendment are the ones who openly support the government tyranny: racists, bigots, and fascists who want their white-ethno-state. So not only are the genuine “second amendment” defenders against tyranny, like presumably Alex Pretti, going to find themselves outgunned by a heavily militarized police force and government, they’re also going to be outgunned by their heavily militarized angry white neighbors.

They built a society based on a foundational tolerance of gun ownership, and then they were tolerant of all the wrong people, the most intolerant people, getting lots of guns, while the tolerant people said “we don’t need guns, because we live in a tolerant and just society and the second amendment is outdated”. Meanwhile, their intolerant neighbors were steadily building an arsenal for the civil war that they were planning on starting. And now it’s starting. The second amendment isn’t going to be the panacea that the founders thought it would. It’s been working against them and contributing to the problem. And that’s why reasonable people have been against the NRA and the second amendment for years (and probably still should be, although it’s probably way too late to change anything significant now), because we could see where this was headed. Everyone you don’t want to have guns, were getting lots of guns. And everyone you do want to have guns, doesn’t have nearly enough guns to matter. Yeah, it was everyone’s “right” to own a gun, but most people didn’t take advantage of that right, while the people you didn’t want to abused the hell out of it. It’s not solving any problem, it’s making it worse.

The resistance is going to be in for a long, brutal, deadly slog this time around, but at least we’ll still have the best tunes. They’ll never take away my mp3s.

“I AM THE LAW” --Judge Dredd