I get that per Wikipedia, the source of these is:

In the Spring 2003 issue of the secular humanist magazine Free Inquiry, Laurence W. Britt, who is described as “a retired international businessperson, writer, and commentator” published “Fascism Anyone?”, which included a list of 14 defining characteristics of fascism.

But you have to get that a random unsourced image of white text on a black background is some real “trust me bro” Facebook shares from Grandma type shit.

Getting tired of “it’s okay when our side does it because we’re right, but we’ll clown on it when the bad people do it because they’re wrong”. Just be better.

And while I’m complaining, the source of these is a fucking editorial by someone with no actual credentials or qualifications to declare this shit. Now it’s being passed around online like it’s certifiable fact because it sounds accurate.

All of those are problems. All of those are bad. What is happening in the USA is bad. But muddying the waters by taking random bullshit like this as certified fucking fact only makes talking about shit harder, as everyone has their own set of things they think are truth, most of which have been latched on to for no reason more than “it sounds right and reinforced my beliefs”.

Grumble grumble grumble

It helped that there were used and rental markets for relatively “modern” titles that are now almost entirely non-existent.

You worked places with style guides? Did… Did you have a real testing environment that wasn’t prod too?

I got taken off a project recently for being too direct about how the rest of the team was just spray and praying entirely AI generated code with no standards or review whatsoever, and they were charging ahead like it was a race to implement features we hadn’t even discussed if we wanted/needed.

If you can’t tell me how it works, you can’t confirm that we actually need it, you can’t tell me the upstream and downstream effects (or confirm they don’t exist), and you can’t even confirm that we even want it to do the thing it only supposedly does, then we have better things to do than go on a wild goose chase trying to debug it when there’s a looming deadline for things that legitimately do not work that we need. Stop vibe coding and actually review the existing shit for fucks sake. If the requirements have never been clear, solve that instead of generating more slop. Maybe update some of the existing documentation instead of having AI wholesale hallucinate entirely new not quite right ones over and over.

Anyway, please tell me more happy development bedtime stories. I need to chase away the nightmares.

Depending on the legality and safety of doing so, you may also want to look into tech for avoiding censorship and oppresive regimes.

Things like TOR, running your own DNS server, etc.

Edit: I didn’t want to just leave this vague, so I looked up the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense guide hoping for some better specifics, but unfortunately it looks like it’s mainly about making security plans, understanding your risk profile, using secure settings on your personal devices, using signal, using TOR, and selecting “the VPN that’s right for you”.

Like you really have a choice of “the VPN right for you” when they shut down things to only approved in/out IPs.

There might be useful info there, but it wasn’t quite what I was hoping to point you at, sorry.

Considering the risks involved with hosting something like this, I would probably start with research on how you could host this safely/anonymously. That would be my first priority. Can’t help people if they take you out.

Next step would be looking at piefed/Lemmy or whatever systems you’re thinking about hosting and identifying what features/logs/etc you would need to disable, modify, or set up to clear themselves automatically so that you wouldn’t have information worth going after in the first place.

Or just let the replies sit unopened.

Until some regulation is passed and enforced that they have to be closed loop, it’s cheaper for them to fuck up the local ecosystem by using evaporative cooling or local water sources as a heat sink.

I legitimately have not had virus issues with Windows in over a decade. Using uBlock Origin for ad blocking and the built in Microsoft antivirus. Every few months for the first few years I’d put it through the wringer of a bunch of USB-bootable antivirus scanners. They kept finding nothing, so I slowed and eventually stopped bothering.

Common sense and an ad blocker do wonders.

Usually not ones that are still compatible with modern cell tower networks.

You absolutely can remove every app (including hidden base OS functionality that is packaged as an installed app) through ADB, or through tools like Shizuku that give you effectively “on-device” ADB. There are GUI based apps to do this for both PC and runnable on Android itself.

It’s not easily accessible for the average user, but it’s literally easier than flashing a custom OS, if you’re already looking into that level of things.

It’s one of the better ones, and basic functionality is braindead, but I’ve definitely found some pain points.

• My work requires us to use company branded video chat backgrounds 🤮. Whatever way my co-worker deployed them, they aren’t available through the mobile app.
• There’s a feature to create unified groups (Teams groups) with membership lists hidden from non-members. It is only available through PowerShell.
• Got users that want to use their group like a distribution list? They all have to personally choose to subscribe to incoming email. You can set the group to auto-subscribe new members, but subscribing existing members requires some basic PowerShell fuckery.
• Sharepoint backend for file sharing. Less said about that shit the better.
• If a user’s display name updates, how it syncs to different places that display their name in Teams and how long that takes is inconsistent as all hell.
• Better hope you never get a ticket from your legal team to pull chat history. Pain in the ass to do, horrid fucking output format.
• No way I’ve found to disable the damn upsell “Get Premium” button. Granted I haven’t checked in a while.

Paywall. What is visible indicates cuts to arts and languages degrees.

Lol, are you kidding? IT gets to experience the suck of using it, and of administrating it. For as bad as the front end of Microsoft stuff is, the back end is usually worse.

Elias Thorne, goblins and ghouls, is there somewhere all these “sticky topics” have been aggregated?

“memory famine” -> “AI data center greed”

God, I was just enjoying some cyberpunk-adjacent media yesterday and laughed at the satire of an in universe news outlet complaining about “anticonsumerist terrorism”.

Something something torment nexus

“Fun” fact: Windows is finally just now, in the year of our lord 2026, trying to release some updates as “live”. As in not requiring reboot.

It’s going better than you’d expect, but still far worse than they have any excuse for.

More importantly, to link multiple device fingerprints to a single identity.

I can only assume there’s a different backdoor for 10 that just hasn’t been published. Even if there isn’t, Windows defaults to backing the key up to the attached Microsoft account. You think they’d ever tell intelligence agencies to come back with a warrant for that?

Just use Veracrypt folks.

Fuck, I have one from 2024 that’s been sitting in a box until I had the time to get into 3d printing (like yours, it was a gift). Guess I need to buy a fire fighting ball thing for it when I finally get it set up.

That plus the ever growing push for device linked personal ID on personally owned device feels like the real end goal. Governments can already snoop all web traffic. Now they want to close the gap on device level surveillance by pushing more and more people towards renting virtual devices with traceable payment methods. For people who don’t, device link to personal ID means they no longer have any of that mess of having to prove ownership or who took the action.

Removing the tinfoil hat though, I really hope this causes cloud resource cost to drop through the floor.