Yes and no.

You can bet that there would have been 8 years of propaganda against her. And we would have lost even more house/senate seats because people on the left historically decide to not bother to vote in midterms unless there is an active threat on CNN.

And… I am pretty sure we would have lost in 2020 because of COVID. Which would basically put us back to where we were in 2020 in terms of having a deranged fascist who nobody realized was too dumb to accomplish anything (not a problem this time. See Project 2025).

The main difference would be the Supreme Court. Yes, republicans did everythiing they could to protevent Obama from appointing anyone and I would not put it past them to have stretched that out for a full four years. But Scalia (Rest in Piss) would still be dead and so would Ginsburg (fuck her for putting us in this mess). Which would have made the math a lot tighter. 7 justices but the math would have been tight enough that Hilary likely would have gotten to appoint at least one moderate.

I think Hilary would have bought us the better part of a decade because, like her or not, she is an incredibly effective politician… when nobody thinks she is running for POTUS. She is/was even more generally liked by both sides of the aisle than Biden and would never have had to make concessions to sanders and The Squad for the 2020 ticket (Biden is an asshole but his platform is shockingly Left leaning by US standards…)…

And I think trump would have faded into nothing. But there are plenty of other people who were just looking for an excuse to become a magat on the republican side. And people like cruz and romney and even liz cheney would not be complete laughing stocks without trump. So, at best, we were looking at a ticking clock to the next “reagan republican” as it were.

Like, there are a lot of people who consider the day Ginsburg died to be the day the US collapsed. And we are seeing exactly the repercussions of that with shit like today.

I know. We have too many guns and nobody can keep track of them to the point they end up with foreign paramilitary organizations. So let’s build even more guns

Not sure if google is particularly different but the way this works for the other services is basically low energy bluetooth scanning coupled with the phones providing their location*. So basically all the devices on that scanning/spy network periodically ping/listen for nearby devices/trackers. When it finds one, it sends a quick message to the servers with that phone’s location and the ID of the tracker. Get enough of those pings and you can triangulate the position of the tracker pretty precisely.

Which… is why this fundamentally does not work with “hacker” solutions that allegedly emphasize privacy. Because you just don’t have enough devices listening. This was painfully obvious with tile back in the day and is still an issue with Samsung in some countries.

*: Via a combination of gps, cell tower, and wifi network scanning. The less obvious part of that being wifi networks which is the majority of how interior positioning works.

I mean… bluetooth is literally broadcasting your position (sort of/it depends on the implementation). It is not at all a stretch that you should turn that off if you care about privacy. Same with not scanning for what wifi networks are available or even pinging GPS satellites (because that leaves a log). Hell… cell tower logs are a treat for cops/TLAs for a reason.

Aside from that? Good for you. If you actually follow through on that I can respect it. My point is more that this particular solution seems like the worst of all worlds.

Either you are demolishing your battery with regular phone homes to a server you hopefully control or you are relying on a push via SMS and the hope that you lose your phone somewhere you havea reception. And you still only have YOUR phone and YOUR network to track it which has significant drawbacks if you travel.

If people truly change their lives and focus on it, you can do a lot. But it does not take much, at all, to become compromised to one degree or another and people vastly underestimate the amount of redundancy. Or even the impact of a sibling or partner or even friend.

Instead, the common case is people will tweak one small aspect and think that does anything other than inconvenience them. Or, worse, they’ll watch a youtube and decide to put EVERYTHING through their vpn which… defeats the purpose because they are still one easily collated set of profiles/cookies that can trivially reveal that “Fred Smith in Afghanistan” is really “Fred Smith in North Carolina”

Which is why my approach is that there is data I very much want to protect and data I know I can’t. So I focus on understanding the former while doing what I can with the latter.

And something like this? There are probably specific niche use cases for this. But it is a product/service that fundamentally requires aggregated data. And, depending on the implementation, it is going to fuck with your battery hard.

I guess. But it is really going to depend on where you live and just how frequently it does dial home.

My personal use for these networks is luggage tags. But a friend lost her phone on a hike a few years back and the find my phone stuff was more or less useless due to poor reception and ever dwindling battery.

The real benefit is the low energy bluetooth magic and OTHER devices to do the phoning home. Because maybe I have shit reception but someone hiking a hundred feet away has good reception and updates the ping.

Took a bit to figure out what it was even claiming to do

When enabled your phone constantly sends e2e encrypted your location to the server where you can than access it from a webbrowser.

God no. Just take a hatchet to my battery and be done with it.

Also: Until a month or two ago, sure. But google finally got their shit together-ish and set up a tracking network the same as apple and samsung. And that is what you are sacrificing your privacy for. Yes, you give Big Tech tracking information… that they already have. In exchange you can actually have peace of mind of knowing your luggage is in the same airport or even where you parked. And you can’t really self-host a crowd-sourced network.

Video length is incredibly important to The Algorithm and a LOT of content creators time their videos to the second. Taking away control of that (even if the end result ins the exact same length) is going to ruffle a lot of feathers and lead to a lot of people who want to “be a champion for the viewers who should like, comment, and subscribe and use my referral code for war thunder” as a result.

You act like republicans think pedophelia is a sin

Again. EVERYTHING republicans accuse others of doing is projection. They lack any degree of empathy or shame so if there is something they do then Others are doing it but bad.

It was inevitable (and is arguably the “logical” extension of sponsor segments).

As for what it will do to timestamps: The same thing it does to timestamps in podcasts. Some podcast players have a special way to tag the timestamp to adjust with the inserted ads but NOBODY hosts with those. So they are rendered useless.

On the youtube side? They could potentially be auto-adjusted because youtube will know how many ads were inserted . But considering the goal of this is to serve ads…

Please don’t conflate tankies with leftist thought. They are not leftists. They are fascists with strong ties toward fascist regimes that are “known” to actively usurp elections around the globe.

A good metric is: a very hardline Communist might have an argument for why effectively slavery is ethical because social and economic planning requires people to engage in jobs they actively do not want to do. I personally consider that the reason that Communism can never work at scale but that is a discussion that needs to be had.

A tankie will just justify anything that China or Russia do. Usually with an attempt to deflect by pointing out something the US or, increasingly, certain EU countries did.

But, regardless: There is another issue with your “just let everyone taolk it out” nonsense. Because the ml moderation team(s) and admin staff have increasingly been using mass bans and false claims of xenophiobia to shut down anything that is not tankie bullshit. So there is no discussion. Just one sided propaganda in some of the largest communities on lemmy.

To expand on the moderation strategy a bit. A LOT of people who aren’t increasingly of one nationality and ethnicity have a lot of problems with ResetEra’s moderation strategy. The mods and admins are known for using a heavy hand and outright mockery against anyone who they disagree with and the remaining community stumble over each other to be part of the “cool crowd”.

But you can also very easily see why the vast majority of leftists and PC gamers and… Asian people left. Because they have a policy to only edit user posts when they contain actively dangerous/illegal statements. So you can see when someone catches a permaban because they dsiagreed with an admin or joked about the corporate interests behind brexit. And you can see the discussion of the remaining users on why that was so fucked… up until the thread gets permanently locked.

With the model ml (and certain other more "world"ly instances…) use… you don’t. You just see comment branches disappear the moment anyone pushes back on some propaganda. And if a user pisses off the admins, they get banned straight up. Often with some comment about how they are racist or xenophobic in the modlog with all of their comments removed but NOT in the modlog. And that is a problem because, unless you were actively following along with that discussion, you never see anything other than MAYBE “wow, a lot of really racist people disagree with this very smart discussion on why Chinese Taipei was always a part of China and is totally not a sovereign-ish nation called Taiwan”

I guess I am not getting it.

If you can access your files, you can copy your files. If the concern is that you only know how to connect from a full PC, consider plugging a laptop into the switch (or even just set up a VM).

Hard to give much more help without knowing your actual setup. But one nasty solution is to ssh into the server then connect to the running container (or mount the same storage into a different one) if there are some shenanigans going on there.

But yeah. My general rule of thumb is that if something needs to outlive the life of a container then it is being stored on the local filesystem or a zfs/ceph pool.

Because the vast majority are just as stupid as the libertarians. They don’t actually know what socialism or even communism is. They just know they were told that capitalism is bad (and… it mostly is) and that if they support this revolution they’ll get everything they want.

Its why so many are hellbent on accelerationism. They think that they’ll become warlords during the civil war and get exactly what they want.

Honestly… yeah.

Hexbear is a no brainer to block but ml was very much “fine” with a high tolerance for tankie idiots. But it feels like the hexbears figure out they are all blocked and are now just moving to ml en masse.

Sucks because there are actually some good users on there. But I just can’t with the swarm of righteous stupidity.

That is the same kind of mess that made the no fly zone so untenable.

But to the eyes of a public who are not sure if they are more afraid of World War 3 or Iraq War 3? Having that line of “We are only helping Ukraine to defend themselves, not to escalate this war” “works”.

And if it sounds like we don’t actually care about the Ukrainian people and just view them as a tool to keep Russia busy?

The same reason most of NATO have been very hesitant and the like:

Supporting a defensive war is one thing. Supporting an offensive war, against a nuclear power that threatens to nuke people on days ending in ‘y’, is another. And while it is incredibly unlikely that putin would actually attack anyone (since they can’t even handle a Ukraine with one arm tied behind its back), it will still lead to political turmoil as people insist the world is about to end.

But now? This is a REAL good way to distract people from the other, much less defensive, war that we are financing.

Not sure if they had a third party manage it for them (there has been a LONG history of super vague “secret” dealings) but it was for their kickstarter rewards through backerkit or whatever. So the same survey you get asking how many extra books you want to buy or whatever.

King under the Mountain always rubbed me wrong. They hit right at the tail end of “wow. kickstarter is awesome” and right before people realized how many DF-like colony sims there actually were. And then their kickstarter survey, for a key with no add-ons, required an insane amount of personal information. I think they claimed it was for VAT but saw a few “ask a lawyer” threads that pointed out that was nonsense and could have been done with a checkbox.

And the super duper secret publisher right around the time interest was spiking because of DF-GUI was more than a bit sketchy

I dunno. I know that it is hell out there for indie devs (not so much in 2021/2022 but…) but all that combined with the game never feeling like more than a “unity school project” REALLY raises a massive number of red flags. Probably just a single kid in over their head and trying to act like a “real” studio but… yeah.

Still, good to see it was released as open source and here is hoping the fanbase that glommed onto this can carry it forward.

Ventoy is a tool I want to use and that would regularly fix issues when I am simultaneously provisioning and diagnosing a system.

But it feels like it breaks if you even look at it in an unexpected manner or if any distro updates at all.

So end result is it works once or twice and then I need to reformat the stick to pop on mint or debian server or whatever anyway.

Honestly? No

The good news is that we have a lot less of the dumbfuckery where people think the pinnacle of their life is a chain of meme posts.

But I think the decentralized and duplicated nature of lemmy prevents any meaningful conversations. People who just want an echo chamber stay in their version of a board and rely on moderators to scorched earth anything that doesn’t fit a narrative. But it also means that people who DO want a conversation might never even see each other or not want to repeat themselves. Interesting point made in the world version of a thread but you tend to hang out in the zip? Yeah…

Which… is kind of message boards. Reddit was “successful” because it was effectively a single vbulletin site that EVERYONE was on so you basically only had one or two gaming forums and so forth. Whereas this is back to the days of usenet and everyone having a phpbb. You might recognize some folk from the Beyond Unreal forums at TTLG but those are different forums with different “cultures” and so forth.

That said: I can’t help but gush over Mastodon. That is increasingly my favorite social media… ever? Because lemmy very much feels like a bunch of people who can’t get over their ex and keep bringing them up in ever increasingly weird ways. Whereas Mastodon feels like everyone collectively said “Fuck twitter. I always hated it. Let’s actually make a good town hall site” and… we kind of did. Yeah, you still have brigading dumbasses and a lot of the decentralization issues. But you also have people who actually respond to comments and have discussions. And while you still have the inherent flaws of trying to convey a point in a microblog, you also have a lot more “Wait, what are you trying to say?” kind of comments.

And… I am not sure what “lemmy” can really do. I think we have all collectively agreed to block certain instances (whether at the instance level or accounts blocking them ourselves) which helps with the… terrorist threats. But unless “lemmy” can decide to stop talking about reddit and stop trying to reinvent reddit… it is never going to be a place worth developing a community at. Shitposting and one off questions? Sure. But it won’t be somewhere that you actually go to interact with other human beings.