Notices by Mason Loring Bliss (mason@partychickens.net)

@lxo Gmail is a terrible email neighbor. It's worth getting more people into self-hosting.

@jeneralist "His coverage had been terminated after three months of unpaid premiums totaling $28.80."

So, they lost coverage for not paying $9.60/month.

"Wellcare terminated coverage for about 140,000 Value Script beneficiaries in April."

We desperately need single-payer healthcare.

@alexmu You've conflated "vibe coding" with programming. It's a common mistake.

The popularity of McDonald's restaurants doesn't make their food or business practices any more acceptable.

"[Leo] referenced The Lord of the Rings in his encyclical about AI—an expert (if unintentional) troll of tech billionaires who keep misinterpreting the series."

Which see:

“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”

https://www.wired.com/story/pope-leo-schooled-the-tech-bros-on-tolkien/

#tolkien #pope #llm

@hey Agreed about Friendica being good. I ran it before I ran Mastodon, and I'm going to go back to it when I get enough free time to do it.

I moved away when I thought it had issues with managing its database, but they ended up instead being issues with the hosting provider I was using offering block storage that was so uselessly slow that operations would simply time out, which ended up being a recipe for database corruption. My next implementation is going to be on real hardware.

@hey @re Ah, DNS issue more than functional issue with the server itself then, if I'm understanding you. That should be straightforward enough to tackle.

@mhoye Not that the BSDs are in any way a bad option, but don't forget that it's entirely reasonable to use Debian without systemd. I'm doing it now.

It's well-supported by active volunteers:

https://packages.debian.org/trixie/sysvinit-core

And there are other good options: Slackware and Alpine stand out. Gentoo is a bit heavy with its config syntax, but it's a super solid option.

@hey @re What's your Friendica instance doing?

@soatok @chiraag Interesting. Thank you again. That said, I'm still curious how their constant updates, their constantly pushing binary code but not offering a change log, doesn't shake your confidence a bit. Again, do you read each commit as it comes in? And even if you did, what confidence do you have that the binaries they're pushing correspond to anything you've seen published?

They've lulled their entire userbase into accepting a stream of constant undocumented updates. Who's to say some government doesn't hold them at gunpoint some day and send out one with a keylogger randomly? They're very clearly a juicy target.

The operational unknowns scare me too much even if they have a great security model as published. And I didn't know they had some cryptocurrency tie-in before reading your article. *That* is a hot "no" all by itself.

(Vaguely related, it bothers me when otherwise good organizations accept cryptocurrency donations. The FreeBSD Foundation is one such. The only thing keeping cryptocurrencies from being a headlining environmental disaster is that LLMs are worse, and extend beyond environmental damage into cognitive, social, and economic damage while they're at it.)

@soatok @chiraag The silence means you take it on faith that their constant updates are fine, and you don't track what they're doing more than anyone else does.

I'm a little surprised, given the detail with which you look at their technical choices and those of competing projects, but we all make compromises.

@soatok @chiraag Have you decided to just stick with Signal then? If so, do you watch the commits as they come through?

This belies a fundamental ignorance of the platform on my part, but what I've read suggests it's nearly impossible to run your own server, and one of your pieces I read today stressed software freedom as a critically important component of these things. Have I misunderstood the feasibility of running one's own Signal server? Or do you trust the client such that the server doesn't matter, with the inability to run a server being something you can live with?

Just curious.

@Gustodon @micchiato I've got some thoughts about this. I'd point to both the Greens and the DSA as groups that are genuinely loaded with concrete ideas for making things better. However, both groups are blocked by our deeply broken system.

This breakage that exists to keep the red and blue teams in power is what makes people want to look to revolution - even violent revolution - for an answer, because it's frustrating seing nothing change. The blue team, if they come back into power, wants to go back to what we had. That path has a bad end for everyone, even if it's a slower path to Hell than the red path, which runs towards our self-destruction gleefully.

But there are some problems with revolution that make it a bad bet.

Let's look at the most relevant, visible example of violent revolution - the American Revolution. If we fast-forwarded a thousand years and looked at the highlight reel, the American Revolution will probably be remembered for giving us the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and consequent annihilation of the civilian populations there, more than a century of violent regime change in the name of Capitalism, and probably the history books will cap us off with Trump.

The French Revolution started off with a bang - read about the Reign of Terror, and then check out the consistent (until recently) support for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

How the collapse of the Soviet Union will be recorded probably depends on whether they can ditch Putin.

If we succumb to the temptation to conduct a violent revolution, even if it succeeds we won't likely have anything measurably different from or better than what we've got now.

Happily, rather than just saying we're doomed, I'm here to offer a better way.

Many (or most?) states have mechanisms for ballot initiatives, and for many (or most?) states, those supercede the legislative process. They are the will of the people.

What we can do is use ballot initiatives to force change. The most productive change I think we can force is to institute ranked choice voting everywhere. It might not be perfect, but it's worlds better than the two-party deathgrip we're in now. A great recent example of what RCV gives us is Zohran Mamdami.

If that seems like it's going to be tough to do - it is! And the reason it's tough is because we have to overcome the root cause of ALL the issues we're facing. We need to reach our fellow citizens and convince them to act ; convince them they *can* act and that it *will* make a difference, and that things *can* be better.

We have big issues to resolve, like the existence of billionaires and the capitalist system that allows them to exist. We need to repair our standing in the global community, and become the nation we all know we can be if we really try. We need to institute a real social safety net and take care of people, and throw off the brainwashing of the oligarchy that has us pointing at each other instead of pointing up at the oligarchs who are hoarding all the cookies.

We can do this, but the only sustainable outcome comes from our reaching each other and moving together. And that will be hard. But it's what we have to do if we really want to do BETTER than what we've accomplished so far. I'm not aware of a single nation on Earth that does things right, but if we pour our lives into it, we can become a model for a healthy representative democracy with social welfare and the good of the people at its heart.

@soatok @chiraag Oh, hey. Thanks for chiming in. I'd meant to find an address and ask if you'd written up an analysis of Delta Chat. I didn't see on one your blog, but I might have missed it.

Were the vulnerabilities you found in Conversations fixed? When you say "a month or so ago" that makes me think 2.19.9 or thereabouts according to their changelog's history, and nothing from that version on (or from that version earlier, looking again) suggests corrected security flaws.

I just can't bring myself to use Signal. Two or three pushes a week with not the first notion of what they changed is worrisome, and I don't see a changelog maintained in their github repository. "Trust us" as the only alternative to "read each commit" leaves a lot of room for a middle ground where they describe what they're changing. A codebase that *needs* that level of churn would seem to be wildly unstable, untested, unmanaged, or something along those lines.

Anyway, this is lots of questions about stuff that's not your responsibility to manage. But from what I can see, your opinions are worth knowing, so thanks in advance if you feel like answering any or all of this.

(PS: Not a furry here, but I do play an anthropomorphic chicken in at least one online community.)

I want to break a local community free from Signal, and I've been thinking about XMPP. In reading some analyses I found this gem:

https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/matrix-vs-xmpp/

I stopped using Signal because I just don't trust it. Why so many updates with no explanations? Is it so unstable and insecure that it needs them? Also, check out search results for running your own Signal server. Technically it's free software, but practically, good luck.

So I guess I need to figure out persistence and E2EE for XMPP, and land on a server and clients. I'm inclined towards ejabberd, because Erlang!

I'd welcome thoughts.

#xmpp #jabber #signal #matrix

@aral Where are the markets getting food when so much farmland has been maliciously destroyed? I've seen videos of concrete being poured into wells. I'm glad there are souces of food, but it can't be enough.

As many are, I'm very distressed by all of this. I'm hoping the Sumud Flotilla can raise awareness. I'm not sure if they'll actually get food in - I hope they do.

It seems like sources of news have dried up. Even Al Jazeera has stopped covering Gaza, but I can't imagine the blockage on fishing has lifted, and all I hear from the big organizations is that they're being locked out, with tons of food rotting at the borders. Such horrible malice...

If we can help individuals that's unambiguously good. I'm just writhing with frustration that there isn't more being done, and moreso WHY there isn't more being done.

@aral How are they getting food? Where are they buying it? As heartbreaking as it is for them individually, I've always felt like it helps more people if I support the UNRWA, the World Food Programme, and similar - people working to get resources in for everyone.

I'm thinking about the people who can't get Internet access and who don't have access to the modern banking infrastructure. I want to help everyone, not just a few. So yes, we need to give, and to support more than just a few organizations, but we need to help at scale.

This feels like giving a food bank a can of food as opposed to giving them money they can use for efficient bulk purchases.

It's also important to address medical needs, so that's Doctor's Without Borders and the Middle-East Children's Alliance and similar.

It shames me that my country is co-owner of the genocide.

@johnzajac @sidereal There is such a thing as too much efficiency. There is such a thing as "enough". Endless economic growth is a fiction. Imagine if we all strived for endless personal growth instead.

@lxo Sadly, "do not bomb, this is a school" has no meaning to the people dropping the bombs, let alone their tools.

Thanks for starting this project. I love the idea of being able to spike code to prevent theft.

@mttaggart It's dreamy thinking of all of them just going away.

Billionaires and millionaires too, while we're at it.

@dalias I've been engaged in that campaign for a while for the reasons stated. Abrasives are not the only source of microplastics and similar. Look at, for example, car tires as they wear away. Even silicone breaks down and emits harmful particles.

If you want to overthrow fascism, convenience (Amazon, McDonald's, 3D printers) isn't the answer. Decide if you're going to pick up a gun or, instead, push for a representative democracy with things like ranked choice voting. Nothing else is going to save us.

For my part, I completely oppose guns, so pushing for citizen initiatives to enact ranked choice voting and calling my representatives to try to influence their voting is what I've got - that and trying to live the changes we're going to need to not snuff ourselves as a species.