Evidence that I’m really out of touch with current paranoid conspiracy theories? Check!

Take the first management promotion; turn down the rest. It’s not worth it.

I just came to say: I hate git with the passion of a thousand burning suns. There is no other open source software I hate nearly as much; not even Poetteringware. It’s astonishingly poorly designed, given who wrote it, has an awful UI, and is just one big footgun.

And autoimmune diseases suck. We don’t really understand them, have no good treatments, and some are disfiguring and ultimately fatal.

It’s never a good time when your body is attacking it’s own tissues.

I’ve been really happy with them.

Lots of good ideas.

I’m a fan of stow-like tools, but there are advantages to using something like Salt (or similar) if you’re dealing with VPSes that share don’t common configs like firewalls. There’s a lot to learn with things like salt/chef/puppet/attune/ansible, whereas something like yas-bdsm, which is what I’m currently using, is literally just:

1. Keep your configs in a git repos, in a structure that mirrors your target
2. Run a command and it creates symlinks for the destination files
3. Commit your changes and push them somewhere. Or just restic-backup the repos.

The config file formats are irrelevant; there’s no transformation logic to learn. Its greatest feature is its simplicity.

Yeah, if you zoom in, you can see metal posts between the legs of the athletes at that level. I can’t discern any other structure at other levels, but at least the guys on the outwards-facing level can’t be bearing much weight on their rear-stretched arms, even if they’re doing it entirely through tension. The women at the bottom are mostly hiding the platform level 2.5 is at.

It’s a nice display, regardless! I also like the subtle, probably unintended metaphor of all of those people at the heights - mostly layers of men - standing on a supporting base of women. The other metaphor is that the masses are being held up by a few strong men, which is dumb. And I honestly believe this is a purely aesthetic display, and that the metaphors I’m seeing are entirely of my own construction.

Those are great suggestions; I don’t use them only because neither is keyboard oriented, so I tend to vacillate between Luakit, Surf, vimb, and Nyxt (although the last still has serious hard-hanging issues and an obscene configuration).

On this topic, I’d be interested in a terminal browser that tries harder on the layout front. w3m, links, links2, elinks - they all work, but none focus on layout and rendering even as much as terminal Markdown renderers such as glow and hike.

That’s good advice, but I beg to differ about the perspective on browsers.

There are a very few browsers that only render content. Most do much more: tabs, bookmark management, cookie management, password management, plugins/extensions/add-ons, history management, JavaScript, downloads management… they’re full-on mini desktops, and they do much more than just render content. And all of this - while useful and desirable to many people - costs, in compute and especially in memory. Unless you’re running an Electron app, odds are that your the browser is the single largest consumer of memory on your computer at the monogamy moment. If I run Firefox, it even tops Factorio with multi-planet factories.

Unfortunately, Acid2 compliance is very complex, and the content of many websites is inaccessible without JavaScript, so the idea of just something like Evince for HTML isn’t pragmatic. However, having an engine that only renders CSS and XHTML could still be useful. Many sites are either JS-free, or the JavaScript only adds functionality that might be irrelevant to the content: commenting and feedback support, for example.

Gemini has failed, but a really pared down browser can still be valuable, and a fair portion of the web is still browsable without JavaScript. I think OP’s question is entirely rational, and practical.

An example that illustrates my point is epub, which is just xhtml and assets in a zip: images, yes. JavaScript, no. I can imagine a wrapper that does the networking to fetch assets, bundles the allowable ones into epub, and then runs an epub renderer. It would be an order of magnitude smaller, and cleaner, than even one of the minimalist WebKit browsers like luakit, surf, or vimb.

I run the smallest browser I can, and only open Firefox when I hit a site I both a) want to see, and b) requires JavaScript to be at all functional. Most online shopping stores fall into this category, but banking’s another. I don’t begrudge the more demanding requirements of those sites, but I don’t want the needless resource consumption of Firefox when the sites don’t require it.

These days, with the proliferation if SPAs and descendants of Ajax, much of the web is inaccessible unless you also execute JavaScript.

I’ve heard of it, and I like Doctorow, but haven’t read it. I’ll put it in the list.

I haven’t! At least, I don’t remember reading it, but I just looked at the wiki Wikipedia entry and it looks good!

so often depicted from the perspective of humans.

You’re right; AFAICR, the economy is only ever depicted from a human perspective. Either in contrast to external cultures, or just describing daily life. Your Guinea Pig example is quite apt: humans in The Culture really are just pampered pets; or, maybe more like working dogs, although ship remotes could probably do all the stuff Contact agents do.

Have you ever read The Golden Oecumene trilogy, by Wright? The last chapter, in particular, is what I’m thinking of.

I’ve heard that, about that first chapter. He, and Iain Banks, are two writers I’m particularly sorry about having had their times cut short.

But the way you described it sounded more nefarious

Oh. Yeah, I don’t think they’re being malicious; I just get frustrated with that sort of behavior. The primary DNS servers for usps.com, neakasa.com, and vitacost.com all block DNS queries from Mullvad’s DNS servers, and one of them blocks all traffic from at least some of Mullvad’s exit nodes. It means I have to waste time working around these blocks, because I’ll be damned if I’m going to take down the house VPN just to visit their stupid sites. So, I hard-code DNS entries for them, and route traffic to the one through one of my VPSes. It’s annoying, a waste of my time, and I’m just generally offended by the whiff of surveillance state about it, even when that’s not the reason why they’re doing it.

Really, it boils down to the fact that I’m offended by the presumption that their (not OP, but VPN-hostile companies in general) anti-spam or whatever they’re trying to accomplish takes priority over my right to privacy. So, yeah; I generally have a bone to pick with any site that’s hostile to VPNs.

Maybe that’s just my perception.

I have no doubt at all that you’re right. And, they have no obligation to accommodate me (which I think is not true for companies I’m trying to do business with).

I’m just uppity about the topic, is all.

I enjoy these discussions. I sometimes gain some new knowledge out of them.

I’ll happily have a cordial disagreement with anyone arguing in good faith. It’s echo-ey enough, and these are good conversations.

Um. The wrong end will be floating, unless you can breath through your butt like a pig - except, even if you could, you’ve blocked the air-hole.

IMHO, post-scarcity is really the only way communism works. And it’s not true communism in the Culture; people still own things - artifacts, art, themselves. And it’s also not communism in the Marxist sense, where the workers own the means of production, because there isn’t a working class and production is largely automated. It’s some sort of post-Communism thing we don’t have a name for. Or, maybe we do, and I just don’t know it?

I agree.

I understand the purpose, though. It takes time and effort to develop ideas. Odin forgive me for sounding like I’m defending the pharmaceutical industry, but it can cost hundreds of millions of dollars in salaries, materials, and everything else to develop a product. Without IP, someone else will just take the result of your R&D and go straight to development and selling; you make the investment, they profit. So, what’s the alternative? How do you get people to dump vast amounts of money in research without giving them some mechanism for recuperating their costs? Or will everyone just suit around waiting for someone else to do the research, so they can snatch up the results and start selling product?

Personally, I think R&D should be done by public institutions and funded by the public, and then be IP-free. I’m not certain that it would be a complete solution that replaces the system we currently have, though.

Naw. I’m in the burbs, in a big house. The 5G signal doesn’t reach everywhere, and the 3G isn’t too strong in the far corners.

I can see three of my neighbor’s networks. Most of the channels are open and clear, so plenty for everyone and no congestion.

Hold on a tick.

Specifically blacklisting a group of users because of the technology they use is, by definition, “targeting”, right? I mean, if not, what qualifies as “targeting” for you?

And, yeah. Posting a sign saying “No Nazi symbolism is allowed in this establishment” is - I would claim - targeting Nazis. Same as posting a sign, “no blacks allowed” - you’re saying that’s not targeting?

I know we’re arguing definitions and have strayed from the original topic, but I think this is an important point to clarify, since you took specific objection to my use of it in that context; and because I’m being pedantic about it.