My TikTok feed is full of content that I find interesting and educational, from creators who work hard to make something valuable.

For them, banning TikTok means the work they put in to curating an audience will be partially lost, they’ll retain only the followers who find them on another app. If they are monetizing, they’ll potentially have to start over. That may discourage some who are just getting started from developing their craft.

If china, bytedance, meta, or any other platform is collecting user data in such a way as to be a national threat they definitely need to cut it out and this should be regulated. For example, it should be impossible to identify the location of military generals based on where their wives access TikTok from, or who’s having an affair with who based on proximity to each other, or to develop a vast dataset of individually identifiable profiles of every user that could be used to selectively damage their character.

Aside from these problems, which are potentially solvable, I think the individual creator/maker economy is an awesome way to give more power to the people.

I think there are two answers to this. First, there is a long standing tradition in the US that the new guy doesn’t put the old guy in jail.

Look at so many other countries and so much of world history to see how that style of governing is problematic to the transfer of power from one regime to the next and why it causes its own set of problems.

The second, and arguably the most important, is that the American people as a whole can elect whoever the fuck they want to be president, no matter what any mid level beurocrat, judge, lawmaker or even current president or other official says about the issue, even if said person is in jail at the time.

The law and its punishments should still apply to all, including the president and former presidents, however.

I’ve never really spent much time with uv, I’ll give it a try. It seems like it takes a few steps out of the process and some guesswork too.

Python developer here. Venv is good, venv is life. Every single project I create starts with

python3 -m venv venv

source venv/bin/activate

pip3 install {everything I need}

pip3 freeze > requirements.txt

Now write code!

Don’t forget to update your requirements.txt using pip3 freeze again anytime you add a new library with pip.

If you installed a lot of packages before starting to develop with virtual environments, some libraries will be in your OS python install and won’t be reflected in pip freeze and won’t get into your venv. This is the root of all evil. First of all, don’t do that. Second, you can force libraries to install into your venv despite them also being in your system by installing like so:

pip3 install --ignore-installed mypackage

If you don’t change between Linux and windows most libraries will just work between systems, but if you have problems on another system, just recreate the whole venv structure

rm -rf venv (…make a new venv, activate it) pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Once you get the hang of this you can make Python behave without a lot of hassle.

This is a case where a strength can also be a weakness.

He seems to lack competence in many ways, but some of the guys around him are a whole lot more conniving and potentially effective.

It’s also not likely Trump feels any urge to hire a somewhat moderate(ish) cabinet of professionalls like he did last time. I assume he learned his lesson given that they all eventually turned on him.

So let’s see. I think he’s spent the past 4 years surrounding himself with some bad hombres, to borrow a saying, and now he’s ready to act with fewer guardrails.

The problem with telegram is the recent revelations that there is little to no backend privacy. So I’m not totally sure who your userbase might be?

Open source afficionados who also don’t mind random cops trolling through their contacts and messages? Seems like a rather small overlap.

Or maybe I’ve misunderstood the recent media attention that telegram has gotten or your proposal.

It’s important to realize that in most democracies this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature of the system. The founders of these systems wanted to ensure that major decisions were deliberated, not rushed into, and that there wasn’t a lot of room for an executive power to make snap choices that would determine the future of the nation.

What is the state of I2P vs Tor these days?

The HOA is the owners. The owners vote in some board members who do the work on behalf of the majority of owners.

Sometimes the HOA hires some 3rd party management company to handle stuff, but in our case we felt it was wasted money because we would care more about the results. In the end I can see why a lot of owner boards do that as the day-to-day of running the place is obnoxious.

The public spaces were on our property, so our responsibility.

Chuck Testa!!!

I was the president of my HOA. Somewhat not intentionally.

It was my first home, a condo, and I bought it at launch right after it was built. After about 6 months of living there, a neighbor approached me and said the whole rest of the board had flaked out, and would I like to be president of the HOA?

I said sure, it seems interesting and I definitely want the value of my ownership to be protected.

So me, him, and another guy formed a new board.

Oh man, the messes we started to uncover. The super low dues didn’t even cover the trash removal, hallway electric lighting bill, elevator maintenance contract… Much less any landscaping. No wonder the place was looking rough.

And of course there was no budget to put money away for long term needs like reroofing or whatever.

So we worked hard on a plan to propose to the owners to increase the dues about 70% so that we’d have a well landscaped place and hopefully no surprise expenses ever because of an ample rainy day fund.

Less than 10% of the owners even showed up to the HOA meeting, so we didn’t meet quorum.

We tried again, and finally got quorum after knocking on doors and asking for people to please come and vote.

This was just one issue. I’d get regular calls like hey, somebody dumped an old mattress by the dumpster. Can you call the removal company (the regular trash service wouldn’t take that kind of thing). Or calls like “there’s some sick trees in the front yard, when are you finally going to get an arborist out here?” And so and so’s room is leaving trash in the hallway, can you please go talk to them?

I resigned within a year. Screw those guys and I’ll never co-own without getting to choose my partners again.

The US projects its own interests worldwide but those often overlap with the interests of other as well.

For example, the US often stipulates intellectual property and worker rights in it’s trade deals. The US actively protects shipping lanes. The US actively negotiates visa-free entry for American passport holders to other countries. The US invests in the economies of foreign countries to stimulate trade opportunities. The US controls the SWIFT banking network which makes it so that we don’t need to send gold bullion or pallets of cash to buy things from other countries, and participating in the system requires member countries to have certain controls in place that attempt to block bad actors. The US, through it’s embassies and ambassadors, deploys it ideology to foreign governments, and makes deals that allow foreigners to invest in the USA and Americans to open businesses in foreign countries.

The US actively shuns and makes life difficult for menace dictatorships on the global stage by creating trade exclusions.

There have been coups since the beginning of time and always will be, as it’s human nature. Many citizens of other countries have no belief that the future of their country belongs to them after decades or centuries of dictatorships or kingdoms. On the whole, history shows that kingdoms rise and fall for many reasons and the people sometimes benefit and sometimes suffer for it.

Obviously it’s a highly complex topic, but if the US wasn’t doing these things, then Russia or China would be, or there would be more powerful regional factions, which could reduce the size of the world in terms of travel and trade options for many.

Whether the US is the right one to be in control of this at this point in history is a matter of intense debate among some, but it could absolutely be worse than it is now.

The moment I start to think about meditating, my mind explodes with alternative ideas until I forget. In fact it’s so efficient at not meditating, that even though I have time and space set aside for it daily on my calendar, some subprocess in my brain still often subverts the whole thing. It’s a scary place before I get there.

But I have never once completed a meditation that I regretted. Even the meditations that are difficult to get through - usually because my mind is really jumpy - still feel like a nice piece of self care at the end.

I think the more routine the practice, the easier it is to start and better your mind becomes at focusing on your breath without allowing all the various stressors of the moment take control. And that is a powerful muscle to build up.

I thought by now we’d have seen a fuckton of celebrity deepfake nudes and rule 34 porn of every variety, plus apps that let incels create it from pics of their high school crushes/enemies, but it seems like that tidal wave hasn’t hit yet.

Or perhaps the legal protections arrived just in time to discourage those with the know-how

Second this, Pihole is great and protects every device on your network too - mobile phones, smart TVs, tablets, Nintendo Switches, etc.

It’s wild how much telemetry is baked into stuff that you can just cut the nuts off of.

It sounds like they’re going to rewrite a bunch of code and decided to not invest the capital into Linux.

That’s a strange problem to have these days since libraries like this are often designed to run on all platforms, but what do I know.

But if it’s true that fewer than 1% of users are on Linux and it’s costing them more than other platforms, it makes no financial sense to keep it going.

I see this often. That tells me I’ve done enough scrolling and it’s time to get back to work.

I usually browse /all and top 6 hours

Driver support was so dicey. If you had anything even remotely not mainstream, you would be compiling your own video driver, or network driver, or basically left to figure it out for any other peripheral. So many devices like scanners and very early webcams just claimed zero Linux support at all, but you could at times find someone else’s project that might work.

I tried to switch to Linux as a desktop system several times in the late 90s but kept going back to windows because hardware support just wasn’t there yet.

Wouldn’t be surprised if there was an exceptionally well funded US startup that makes a debut before TikTok is blocked if they don’t sell. TikTok has to weigh the possibility that they can’t compete if they don’t exist.

I think this was the version right before WYSIWIG support was added. So you could still use fonts, and change font sizes but on screen it would show a strange notation but not the actual font. Complex layouts were tough 😅