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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Set up a proper backup system for your server. I like to use borg. Just to be safe, make a copy of your drive as well (like full disk rsync). Then do a clean install and restore as if your drive had failed. If your backups missed anything, you will now know and can fix your backup system and can still recover from your rsync’d drive.

    You might also want to take this opportunity to start administering your server with code, like using ansible or other remote provisioning tools. This makes your system configuration reproducible so that you only really need to back up a few kinds of data like media files or databases.


  • Employers in the US often include “morality clauses” that mean they can fire you because they deem you to be harming the reputation of the company due to behavior outside of work.

    More importantly than “the rules”, though, US employers can fire you for basically any reason they want and then just lie about it. Nobody is going to force them to be truthful. Not even if they are union busting. The Biden-Harris NLRB, which the president dragged his feet staffing and staffed with wet blankets, has even upheld the Trump NLRB Electrolux decision - and the vast majority of people never get to the point of launching a lawsuit that would be relevant, as it costs tens of thousands of dollars.

    If you want power in the workplace you need to organize a union competently and develop capacity real leverage (direct action, community support, naming and shaming).


  • We had a nice run where everyone was working together or are last tolerating each other, it was peaceful. But the US Russia and China are drifting further apart and becoming less reliant on each other, which sadly means it’s not going to be as peaceful going forward.

    At which point was it “peaceful”? The US invaded 3 countries around then and bombed and couped many more. Millions were killed.

    Also they are not going to tolerate each other as much China Russia already have their versions of Linux distorts just imagine there might be more differences in the future.

    Yes this will eventually lead to forks due to the US forcing decoupling. It is a highly aggressive terrorist state.


  • I think it is unlikely that they are simply bad at PR and not trying to do damage control for something they would like to push anyways eventually. Why are they creating a proprietary element in the first place? Is the selling point of their product not that it is open source? They are making some changes.

    …or they made an honest mistake and don’t care to put it back on F-droid for reasons to which we are not privy.

    An honest mistake of hosting their entire own repo and writing up documents for it? It isn’t just off F-Droid, they are doing their own thing.

    I bring up these counter-examples not as a way to point out where I’m right and you’re wrong, but to point out that there are other candidate explanations, and it’s not justified to infer that malfeasance is the only likely possibility.

    Yes you are suggesting that people give them the benefit of the doubt. And I am saying that would be unreasonable given the facts.

    I also understand why you would cynically think that Bitwarden might succumb to Capitalism—I too live in a late-stage-capitalism country—but that’s not a forgone conclusion, and I say again that we don’t need to be imagining villains when there’s plenty of objectively real ones at which to point a finger alreadIy

    Bitwarden has already succumbed to capitalism, it is a product by and for a for-profit company. It is, with few exceptions, just a question of when they will have a profitability crisis and need to find avenues by which to increase revenues or decrease costs. Sometimes that takes 15-20 years, sometimes it takes 3.

    I have not followed their finances but I would be curious to know what they are doing at the moment. Could be seeking to get bought out, could be looking for new funding, could be working around the needs of a major client, could be something else.

    As always, when a project is backed by a company we should approach it tentatively because while they will provide support for it for some time they will eventually be tempted to do something shady to increase profit. Or to just be profitable at all, which investors always want ASAP when interest rates are high. And then we will need to fork it and see if it is feasible without VC backing. To my knowledge the only other viable path for an open source company is to become an industry standard where the major monopolies decide to not fight about it and instead say, “it is fine as it is and won’t be profitable but it is a useful thing to share costs on”. Docker, Inc. is somewhere along that path, scraping together products at the periphery of the software while the industry monopolies more or less share the core project in its various compatible forms. And Docker similarly tried to ham-fistedly seek profit sources like when it tried a silly fee scheme for Dockerhub and created a small exodus that the monopolies ate up (e.g. GitHub).


  • Where is that a excuse? I was pointing out that it’s not a petty dispute, russia is trying to wipe out Ukraine…the fuck.

    You just repeated the excuse. Right there, lol. And Russia has caused far less damage to Ukraine and its people than the US has to its targets. You are simply inconsistent and don’t believe your own logic. Your true motivations are elsewhere.

    Ooo oo, I know this one…is it…whataboutism again for $400 alex?

    Oh, am I not allowed to point out your inconsistency because you have a term for doing that?

    Yea…no it’s not, russia is doing that on their own.

    This post is about a thread where the people who removed Russians from the list did so under pressure by the US federal government are: their sanctions policies. It is literally exactly what I said and not at all what you said.

    Please do your best to speak the truth.

    Ok. Reality, russia is a fucked up authoritarian state that willfully sends it’s people to rape, murder and commit war crimes, like it got its war plans from the viking era. How’s that for some reality. Champ.

    It’s you distracting yourself through repetition because you cannot honestly respond to my points. So it is the opposite of facing reality, it is evasiveness.

    Yea…yea it is.

    Nope

    Sweet…are we getting somewhere…

    No it is just trivially the case.

    Ahhh nope apparently not…still humping about the USA.

    Because they did the thing that you agree deserves kicking out their citizens from the maintainer list. And they did it more.

    Hahahhaha holy fuck…o wait you’re a tankie…

    Are you laughing at the mass civilian bombings or the starvation of children?

    And a russian apologist…man this is just hilarious…you really are following the .ml tankie guidelines.

    It seems you are afraid of basic facts that contradict your beliefs.

    Lol for all the west’s faults, we’re still not even half as murderous as the authoritarian dictatorships you love.

    The West’s civilian death count is orders of magnitude higher than the RF invading UA.

    Yea no…

    You did, accidentally.

    Because it’s easier to just use sanctions as the reason. The idea that a authoritarian state wouldn’t force their devs to create backdoors for their state is hilariously naive, but you won’t see it that way because you’re a brainwashed tankie.

    Ah yes, the thing you just made up that hasn’t happened and calls every developer in the country “their devs” is surely more correct than decades of code review practices and individual track records.

    Re: brainwashing, you will notice that I am not the one running away from inconvenient facts at every turn. I am not afraid of such things, but they are clearly a threat to your way of thinking.

    Yea no shit? Who said they are?

    I quoted what I was responding to and that sentiment permeates it.


  • Of course you inherently cannot trust a private company to keep their product open, including open core models. In that situation everyone using or contributing should be making a gamble: that if they go too far the project will be forked, the company will cut its community in two, and the fotk will go on to be decently successful as a community project.

    Their inability to do the right PR things is just a signal that they can’t be bothered with the facade that is useful for them to maintain community support and FOSS nerd marketing for their product.

    Re: ethics, they are no longer on F-Droid because they tried to get this in under the radar and include non-free code in builds. Instead of fixing that problem they made their own repo.

    Bitwarden will likely eventually destroy their FOSS model for profit-seeking, it is just a matter of when. This is how these things work.






  • No this has nothing to do with the USA right now.

    Here’s you making excuses for removing all the Russians from the contributor list: “Russia invaded a sovereign nation…but that’s a petty dispute…are you sure you’re on the right instance? Sounds like you need to recreate your account here on ml…”

    Your logic, if you can call it that, is that if the country you’re from invades a sovereign nation, it makes sense to get kicked off the list. Guess which country invades sovereign nations every 3-6 years.

    To make another point, of course the US is relevant, its government is the one making this exact thing happen.

    No more excuses, champ. Gotta look reality straight in the face.

    It’s a strawman to whip out the “but the USA” card.

    lol no it isn’t.

    Russia has sanctions

    Yes we all know this.

    they invaded a sovereign nation

    The US has invaded at least 4 sovereign nations in the last 21 years. It has bombed far more in that time, including couping Libya, turning it from the highest HDI country into a failed state with open air slave markets.

    and are willfully targeting civilians

    The RF has been comparatively less harsh on civilians. Look at what the US, NATO, and Israel do to civilians. They bomb residential buildings, pharmaceutical factories, hospitals, schools, buses, civilian infrastructure. Millions died in Iraq, about half children, in the 90s due to the US systematically destroying civilian infrastructure and then coordinsting tight sanctions.

    And do you know what preceded the RF invasion? Ukraine ramping up its civilian shelling campaign in Donbas.

    They’re fully against the west at this point

    Given what the West does with its power that is a smart position to take.

    allowing them continued access to help build tools the west uses,

    Yes and? You’re just admitting that this is a chauvinist political move headed by the United States.

    is not only against the current sanctions, it’s also a dumb security risk as well.

    It’s not a security risk at all, the Linux team has tight review procedures and all of these people have been making contributions as maintainers. There were zero concerns raised about their code.

    PS the US is not entitled to the world and every international project.



  • Ukraine had a national identity before Lenin, tho.

    It was suppressed and the language was dying out in written form.

    Although the dude is/was ahead of it’s time. And the social idealism that follows looks pretty neat. Sadly he quickly died and another fella came to power. Usually when people bash USSR they bash Stalin’s regime. It’s far from socialist ideals. You shouldn’t mix it up and just nitpick what you like.

    It was Stalin’s USSR that transformed from a quasi-feudal backwater into a superpower that defeated the Nazis. It did so following Marxist-Leninist principals, which is to say, the development of Marxism based on the Bolsheviks’ contributions - they seized the reins of capital and directed them to develop productive forces at a lightning pace and in a way that is never an option for imperialized countries. They ended famines, electrified the country, built rail at a scale that horrified and surprised the Nazi invasers, who remarked that little of it was on their mapsnfrom just a few years ago. And it did this under sanctions and attempted isolation by the major powers, the European capitalist forces that capitulated to the fascists, refused pacts with the USSR to build an alliance against the fascists, as they hoped they would turn east and deal with their red problem.

    You should educate yourself about the USSR.

    If people are subjugated and still remain under democratic rule, they can still be under repression, due to voting majority.

    This can happen without voting as well and it is not inherently good or bad, relative to circumstances. We oppress murderers in one form or another. The impetus for thatbis understandable. Some have oppressed ethnic minorities for land grabs. That is not acceptable. Revolution requires oppression, you have to undo the order against which you are revolting. It does not immediately disappear just because you seized the army or run the newspapers.

    It’s the same reason why Israel fears giving the vote access to palestinians.

    Israel oppresses Palestinians because it seeks to steal their land and they know that Palestinians will oppose them in this. Israel is not an example of “tyranny of the majority” and it is not democratic. It is an ethnic supremaxist settler colonial apartheid state and should be destroyed as such.

    You can try to follow Nazi fascism idea of fascism by following history notebooks. But it will get us nowhere.

    That will get you the whole way. You must read history to understand this historical reference. No shortcuts!

    Since for example Lithuania had a president which was with dictatorial levels of power during the time. He was not aligned with Nazi Germany. What kind of word would you use to describe the rule? There are reasons why fascism is defined like it is.

    Lithuania’s president was a racist, antisemitic anticommunist liberal nationalists that dabbled a bit with fascists. Liberals have had all of the qualities of fascists over time and done the same kinds of deeds on a much greater scale. This is why you have to read history. If you just go by simple modern definitions, they will tell you that liberals are all about personal freedoms and equality. They will neglect to mention that liberals were the most brutal and racist colonizers and ethnic supremacists and misogynists and that this might pose a problem for their definition. They become an infinite No True Scotsman, defined in a way that means they never committed any crimes and it may be that, per their logic, no liberal has ever truly existed.

    Fascists are really just a form of reactionary liberals that emerged out of inter-imperialist struggle after World War I. The fallout of WWI led to various nationalist and separatist movements in Europe as well as attempts to claim imperialist power. In particular, fascism rose most strongly in those places where conditions were degrading and communists were organizing for revolution. Fascists presented a triangulating position. They criticized the problems of capitalism by coopting socialist phrases but sought, in reallobersl simply organize capitalism into a nationalist form that had ambitions for Imperialism of their own. They built on the “fallen nation that must return to glory”, a sentiment that could only resonate among people living in a country losing its status and among degrading conditions. They offered scapegoats playing on old forms of racism. Antisemitism, anti-Roma, Anti-Russian, many more. And most importantly, they opposed the communists, which is why they were so well-funded by capitalists and found friends among liberals. Fascists found their most committed and prominent recruits from the petty bourgeoisie and their sons, an inherently liberal base.

    And dude, you can’t be racist against a country.

    I think you did not mean it to be racist. But Russian is also an ethnicity and Russophobia is at a peak in Western countries and they are reviving their age-old racist talking points. Tell me if any of these old school racist talking points seem familiar: they’re just throwing masses of soldiers at the wall hoping to win, they are uncivilized/barbarous, they are not European, they are inherently untrustworthy, they are ugly, and their lives are just plain worth less.

    You and I operate with completely different definitions. I doubt we’ll come to a conclusion. Would love to discuss it next to a beer, since it’s fascinating to find these so wildly difderent ideas. How do you even get to a point where you know so much but manage to draw completely different conclusions.

    It is because communists live in the same world as everyone else and describe it in nearly the same way as liberals, but emphasize knowledge of history, political theory, and real-world organizing experiments. In contrast, liberalism is hegemonic ideology that offers narratives that, despite being false or misleading, go largely unchallenged. In a disagreement, someone drawing from hegemonic liberalism only needs to pluck an idea from a massive vat of talking points they have been bombarded with since birth. A communist needs to become fairly familiar with the topic, as they must criticize it and defend their talking points against hegemonic liberal ideas. They have to read the sourcec materials and understand why, say, Robert Conquest was an absolute hack when it came to certain topics because a liberal will unknowingly repeat one of his lies as “common knowledge”.

    Ukrainians aren’t russian.

    Many people in Ukraine are ethnically Russian. Ethnically Russian people have faced reoression in Ukraine since Euromaidan, particularly those in the separatist Donbas areas. Those there under the Kyiv regime face(d) cultural oppression. Those in separatists controlled areas face(d) artillery shelling.

    Their language is different.

    Many Ukrainians speak Russian as a first language, their everyday spoken language, and their language at work. Most people in Ukraine do not speak Ukrainian in that capacity. Ukrainian is more of a way for people from different backgrounds to communicate with one another.

    Since Euromaidan, Ukrainian nationalists have been imposing Ukrainization on their people, suppressing other languages in schools, offices, and public life.

    Their culture is drastically different.

    Ethnic Russians in Ukraine have both cultures. Averaged out, Ukrainian and Russian cultures are very similar. Russians have an affinity fot the Kievan Rus, like an origin story nostalgia, and tie many of their practices to those of Ukraine.

    Damn even regions inside Ukraine could count as different cultures.

    There is certainly cultural diversity in Ukraine, yes. Some is represented by ethnic Ukrainians, some by Poles, some by ethnic Russians, and some by various diasporas.

    For the split. It happened quite recently. I do recommend talking to people why they split and what was the common ideas on the streets back then from people who lived there.

    Speaking of Ukraine, polls consistently showed that the generations that were adults at the time preferred to stay as part of unuon with Russia, I.e. “be in the USSR but with reforms”. Those same people said it was better to live in the USSR than after it fell. Such a story is fairly typical of most post-Soviet states with the exception of the Baltics, who are a whole host of things, but the main one is their astonishing level of racism.

    There were massive forced mixing in of Russians in those countries.

    That sounds like a racist framing to me.

    Those people are usually the ones that still find as “it was better back then”.

    Central Asians also had this opinion. It is really basically everywhere except the Baltics and Czechia.



  • I don’t think I’m better than the books you cited.

    You obviously prize your guesswork and imagination over the historical work you were provided. You are repeatedly announcing, with certainty, how correct you are based on a screenshot of a review of several books, in contradiction of what the book I cited will tell you.

    Like I said, I can’t force you to read. You are welcome for the book recommendations.



  • Just beause Russian Empire rebranded itself it ia still basically the same size with the same subjugated people.

    I addressed this in my previous comment. If you’re not going to even read and respond to what I sau, what are we doing here?

    The same yakut people are still subjugated.

    Good example. The Yakut people were conquered and annexed by the Russian Empire and many were forced into diaspora. The USSR created a Yakut autonomous region and gave them far more control over their own fates and lands. The RF has done very little other than the usual capitalist exploitation of resources. Three unique stories and three different experiences.

    The cataclysmic event you’re talking about is workers revolt.

    A revolution and creation of a new state premised on substantial regional autonomy and protection for local cultures. Ukraine today owes its entire national existence to Lenin’s insistence on promoting Ukrainian national identity and degrees of autonomy and cultural protections.

    The other is the collapse where quite a bit of countries at least managed to escape.

    A collapse due to capitakist takeover, a time period where the country was subjected to “shock therapy” and dissolved / split against the will of its people. Tens of millions died due to the sudden deprivations. That is the doing of your Western powers whose lines you are echoing

    All we can hope is for the fall of russia and for other cultures to emerge.

    Please refrain from racism.

    Here is the common definition: Fascism - A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.

    Yeah that’s not what you said before. Can you spot the differences? Though of course to understand fascism you will need to learn history and politics, not just Google “fascism definition”.

    Even if you have 2 fascist countries, their goals and decisions are and usually is different.

    Given that you don’t know what fascism is, why are you confidently announcing generalizations about it? In order to have correct ideas and be helpful to others, it is important to have humility.

    And for consent. Look at bloody linux distros. Even if people actually want consent, it is basically impossible to achieve. Every expert will interpret it differently and you will have multiple narratives.

    You did not understand my reference.