While I love the idea, the “go figure it out” workflow can lead to catastrophic data breaches when you’re exposing things to the open internet. And the worst part is that the user may not even realize they have messed up. Because they haven’t been shown how to do things like properly set up their email with a custom domain, or how to set up subdomains for whatever they’re hosting while keeping those services secure.

Hell, just glance at Shodan to see how easy it is to accidentally expose your devices and services to the open internet.

I still remember where I was when I saw that things had mathematically tipped past the point of no return for Hillary. It wasn’t a huge shock to me, but that’s mostly cuz I saw the writing on the wall when Hillary’s entire schtick for a while had been “no worries, we’ve got this, it’s not even a problem.” Democrat victories have historically hinged on whether or not they can motivate people to vote, and Hillary’s entire strategy did the exact opposite of that. Every single person independently went “she’s been saying for months that she already has it in the bag, so why bother voting?” And that led to her losing a lot of votes.

If you already have a NAS, (since SMB was mentioned, I’m assuming there’s some sort of NAS setup going) then you may even be able to host Plex directly on the NAS. It likely won’t be powerful enough for things like video transcoding, but just audio should be fine.

Yeah, therapists have noted a sharp upward trend of people dealing with politically driven grief. Basically, people separating from their family members due to political differences. And it’s almost universally from liberal people cutting off their Trump-crazed parents.

There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there’s no need for debugging.

Yeah, fuck this specifically. I’d rather have a good troubleshooter. I work in live events; I don’t care if an audio technician can run a concert and have it sounding wonderful under ideal conditions. I care if they can salvage a concert after the entire fucking rig stops working 5 minutes before the show starts. I judge techs almost solely on their ability to troubleshoot.

Anyone can run a system that is already built, but a truly good technician can identify where a problem is and work to fix it. I’ve seen too many “good” technicians freeze up and panic at the first sign of trouble, which really just tells me they’re not as good as they say. When you have a show starting in 10 minutes and you have no audio, you can’t waste time with panic.

Yeah, and you can dupe items in RuneScape by dropping them and pressing Alt+F4. Don’t worry, I’ll stand way over here to prove I’m not trying to steal it. If I try to pick up the item you’ll see me move, and you can just pick it up first.

It’s a police protection bill. Sanders was already under secret service protection by that point, and the secret service was who coordinated all of his security. So Sanders’ campaign manager basically told the city to bill the secret service instead of Sanders. Because again, the secret service was who requested the additional officers.

I’m a venue manager. If Trump’s team wanted to organize a rally at my venue, (and I was forced to allow it), I would require 100% payment in full before they were allowed in the building.

In fact, my building collects a refundable cleaning/damage deposit, and I would intentionally over-estimate everything about the event; We estimate the event costs and require clients to pay up front. Then any overages can be claimed from that deposit, or invoiced after the event. Equipment costs, labor needs, room rental times, catering commission, merch commission, etc…

I would intentionally over-estimate all of that. So when they inevitably have some overages, (like maybe they use more mics than expected, or maybe they show up two hours early), those are already paid for in their initial payment. Then I’d just return any unused overages with the deposit, which is SOP. Because I know that if I had unbudgeted overages and tried to invoice after the fact, I’d never see a single cent.

Target is notorious for this. Loss Prevention has literal evidence binders for repeat offenders. They’ll tally up everything you’ve stolen, and then sit on it and continue tallying until you have stolen enough to be charged with a felony. Once they have a dollar over their local felony amount, they’ll send their LP team in to pull you aside and you get arrested for felony grand theft.

The saddest part is that it’s not even an “or” statement. Police don’t even care if you’re a bootlicker. When push comes to shove, they’ll gladly stomp on the bootlickers too.

Just a dude who wants to love his neighbor.

And the big issue seems to be that the two sides have drastically different definitions of the word “love”. There was a study a while ago, which found that conservatives are more likely to have liberal friends, while liberals are less likely to have conservative friends. It sounds odd on the surface… But the reality is that if a liberal hangs out with conservatives long enough to become friends, those conservatives will eventually get comfortable. Comfortable enough to start using hard slurs, or they will call the liberal “one of the good ones” as if it’s a compliment.

It’s no wonder that liberals are less likely to report having conservative friends. Liberals have tried, and have been burned by all of the conservatives that they got close to. Meanwhile, the most offensive thing a liberal does around conservatives is just… Exist? Relatively speaking, it’s easy for a conservative to keep liberals around, because the liberal isn’t constantly trying to undermine the conservative’s right to personhood. Whether or not you can own guns isn’t an immediate existential threat to a conservative.

Shit you get to print yours? Look at moneybags over here. I have to copy the broad strokes down by hand, and walk back and forth between my console and the family computer on the opposite side of the house T.T

Because conservatives control the house, which is the first step in impeachment. Even if the speaker allows it to come to a vote (he won’t) they will just vote it down.

Yup. Pretty much anyone who knew anything about copyright law agreed that they were making a monumentally stupid move. And their only defense basically boiled down to “bUT wE’rE a LiBRarY.” Which completely ignores the fact that even libraries need to comply with copyright laws for ebooks, via licensing agreements with the publishers.

At least on iOS, it takes it a step farther and tells you specifically when an app is accessing your location, microphone, camera, etc… It even delineates when it’s in the foreground or background. For instance, if I check my weather app, I get this symbol in the upper corner:

The circled arrow means it is actively accessing my location. And if I close the app, it gives me this instead:

The uncircled arrow means my location was accessed in the foreground recently. And if it happens entirely in the background, (like maybe Google has accessed my location to check travel time for an upcoming calendar event,) then the arrow will be an outline instead of being filled in.

The same basic rules apply for camera and mic access. If it accesses my mic, I get an orange dot. If it accesses my camera, I get a green dot.

Discord is not a good replacement for support forums. Discord isn’t searchable by search engines.

Historically, if I had an issue with a product and I googled “[product] [issue]” I’d be met with a support forum post, with someone describing the same issue. I could read the thread to find how they resolved it. I don’t actually have to interact with the post at all, and I don’t need to ask the same question again. For most (decent) forums I don’t even need to make an account just to read the post.

Discord throws that all out the window. Now I’m met with a “JoiN OUr dIScoRd SerVEr to GEt suPPorT” page. Nothing is searchable via a search engine. And Discord’s server searchability (even in the app) has always been, at best, absolute dogshit. You already need to know exactly which text thread things were posted in, (because you can’t search the entire server at once), and you need to know exactly what was said, (because there’s no fuzzed search terms).

So 99% of the time, you just end up asking the same question that has already been asked a hundred times in the past, and now you need to wait for someone to respond. It also puts a lot more strain on the support staff, because they’re answering the same question a hundred times instead of just the once in a forum.

And don’t come at me with the “but Discord recently added a support forum feature where people can start threads and save the conversation for later” bullshit. That’s a band-aid, at best. It still isn’t searchable via search engines, so it means the above issues with Discord’s search function still apply, and the forum function is essentially useless as support forums.

Lastly, why the fuck should I be forced to join another server just to get support? What if I don’t have a discord account? What if I live in a region that Discord doesn’t support? What if I just plain don’t want to clog up my server sidebar with dozens of servers that I have only visited once? What if I just really hate the fact that your server has been configured to push notifications for every single message by default? What if I just fucking want to google my issue, and get an answer without any further effort?

If it really boils down to this, how can one fight back?

Historically? Guillotines in the village square, and/or Molotovs through the front windows of the overlords’ house. The rich learned a long time ago that when no other recourse is left, people will eventually turn to violence. And they learned that keeping the poors placated is a matter of life or death. Because money and fame won’t stop an angry mob, and even trained soldiers will get overwhelmed by sheer crowd size.

I believe Sun Tsu wrote something applicable in The Art of War, along the lines of “Always leave a surrounded army a way out. Show them a way to life so they will not be compelled to fight to the death. Because even an exhausted army will fight to the death if they have no other option.” So the rich and powerful set up systems that are heavily skewed in the rich’s favor, but at least attempt to appear fair on the surface. They set up a visible “way to life” so that people could at least feel like they had a viable way of fighting back without resorting to violence.

But recently, the rich and powerful seem to have forgotten that, and have dropped all pretext of fairness. Now it’s just blatant “you’re going to be killed and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Which means that the people are eventually going to be forced to fight to the death, because they’re cornered and see no other option. And I genuinely believe that if things carry on this same trajectory that people will turn to violence as a means of recourse, because it’s quickly becoming the only effective recourse that is within reach.

The next generation of script kiddies is going to be iPad babies. It’ll be interesting to see, since the majority can’t use anything in tech unless it’s an app.

We built computer labs in schools, to teach kids how to use computers. Then we decided computers are ubiquitous enough that we didn’t need computer labs anymore. And now we have an entire generation that doesn’t know how to use computers, because they use their phones and tablets for everything instead.