Fabio Manganiello

:platypush: Tinkerer and main #developer @ #Platypush
:mastodon: #MastoAdmin @ social.platypush.tech
:booking: Senior #software engineer @ Booking.com
⚙ #Automation addict
🤖 #AI builder
:linux: #Linux user since 2001
🔓 #FOSS contributor
:arch: Prone to unsolicited "btw I use #Arch" statements
🏡 #SelfHost all #tech!
🔬 Open #science and open #data advocate
🎶 #Music geek
🎸 #Guitarist + occasional composer
🛹️ #Skater
🏄 #Surfer
👪 #Dad of a small geek

🇮🇹 ⇒ 🇳🇱

Public Key

npub1v78mmuz20p6qd6nve30axhqu74avwn4f6z4grhug7755rat7wh3syukv0u

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsx0raa7p98saqxafkvch7ntsw027k8f65ap25pm7y0022p74l8tccpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds66ag8a

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1v78mmuz20p6qd6nve30axhqu74avwn4f6z4grhug7755rat7wh3syukv0u

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Published at

2024-01-25T23:45:49+01:00

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Event JSON

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Last Notes

2024-01-25 21:55:51

My new social home is almost ready at @npub13uu…pvgs. All of my followers can start following me there, if they want to.
Checklist:
✔️ Configure DNS + nginx + SSL boilerplate
✔️ Install Akkoma
✔️ Clone profile + settings
✔️ Import list of followed accounts
✔️ Import list of blocked/muted accounts
✔️ Clone list of blocked instances
⌛ Clone posts (if someone has a quick way to migrate posts from Mastodon to Pleroma/Akkoma, please let me know, before I dive down the rabbit hole of either SQL or API scripting)
⌛ Replace all references of `rel="me"` and my PGP keys to point to the new profile
⌛ Formalize the transfer and move all the followers along
⌛ Help/wait for the few users on this instance to export their data before shutting down social.platypush.tech
I may speed up things a bit more because Redis on my instance is dying with out-of-memory every couple of hours now. And I'm running a dedicated Linode box with 8GB of RAM, not an early Raspberry Pi.
Not only Mastodon isn't meant to scale, but it fails miserably even at managing things at a micro scale.
You can't tell people "we're democratizing things, everybody can run their own instance", if running even a personal instance with a decent amount of connections to the rest of the Fediverse involves spinning up a machine with 8GB of RAM, either 100GB of storage or a decent S3 bucket, and forget running this stuff in your home network if you're planning to plug it to a relay.
Its bad design decisions turned it into the Bitcoin of social platforms, and it has become a liability for the Fediverse more than an asset. I'd have saved quite a lot of money had I decided to switch to Akkoma earlier.

2024-01-25 02:39:55

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@npub12p2…s8wv There are usually scheduled tootctl scripts that admins run to clean up stuff older than a certain threshold. But the cache folder itself can't simply be wiped before basically everything on the instance breaking (including emojis and avatars), and it's often very painful to fix it.
It seems like one of those bad design decisions where the cache folder has been used as a dropbox for almost everything, including things that the software is supposed to store long-term.
So even with the cronjobs scheduled to run every day and very little local traffic, an instance connected to a few big relays ends up having many GBs of media cache that it can't touch.

2024-01-24 23:41:39

The plans are moving to pull the plug from this instance and migrate to a new one.
Running Mastodon really isn't fun anymore. I need 100GB of space on an S3 bucket just to store a cache that I can never delete, and 6GB of RAM constantly allocated by Redis or sidekiq just to run an instance with me and 3-4 more active users. There must be a better way.
I have registered a new domain, configured the DNS, and I'm currently toying with Akkoma to see if it meets my needs. I may also toy with CalcKey before taking any decisions.
Of course, I'll personally reach out to the active users on this instance to check if they need any assistance with migration / data dumps before it shutting down.

2024-01-24 02:47:30

Another textbook example of enshittification: profit through rental when profit margin become too thin.
Hardware companies are no longer happy with making money out of the hardware purchases that you make. And not even with all the data that they scoop and sell about you.
Their ultimate goal is for you to pay a subscription in order to keep using their hardware.
Everybody wants you to subscribe to everything. Everybody wants money to come in no matter what.
This race towards the bottom has reached such nauseous heights that it requires public intervention.
Subscription-based models can obviously exist, but, especially in the case of hardware, they should always be sold as add-ons on top of the physical product.
The product should be able to operate with or without the subscription. And even if the producing company goes out of business.
Finally, I'm no legal expert, but I don't see how "genuine cartridge checks" processes etc. can be compatible with the right to repair - and inter-operability more broadly.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/hp-make-printing-subscription

2024-01-23 12:55:22

I thought that in 2024 we would have had a simple answer to the question "if I have an <input type="range">, how do I apply a different style to the part of the slider before the thumb?"
I've been stumbling on this problem for the past decade, and there seems to be no solution yet.
On Firefox, it's quite straightforward. The `::-moz-range-progress` pseudo-element has been around for a while.
On Chrome and friends, for some sadistic reason that I'm still failing to understand, I still have to resort to ugly workarounds that involve stuff like `clip-path: polygon` on `::-webkit-slider-thumb`, because for some reason cool web engines have decided that web designers shouldn't bother to apply a different style to the progress in a slider.
The style that I've written in the Slider element of Platypush https://git.platypush.tech/platypush/platypush/src/branch/master/platypush/backend/http/webapp/src/components/elements/Slider.vue may be some of the ugliest CSS I've ever written in my life.
Oh, and let's not even get started with the issue of sliders with two thumbs and range values. I've decided to entirely give up writing a cross-browser implementation for that.

2024-01-19 11:35:50

We don't have to cede control over our devices in order to secure them. Indeed, we can't ever secure them *unless* we can control them. Self-destruct switches don't belong on the bridge of your spaceship, and trusted computing modules don't belong in your devices @npub1hyk…3p33 https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/18/descartes-delenda-est/

2024-01-19 10:36:05

Funny. Training and running ChatGPT alone pollutes as much as a small developing country, but Microsoft can't afford to give more than 20GB of cloud space to researchers (who btw are still mandated to keep all the results of their studies for 5 years) because "data centers are destroying the environment and cloud space should be used more responsibly".
Why not start with pulling the plug from all the AI hype that is literally boiling the oceans, and maybe pair it with a firm condemnation against cryptocurrencies still running on PoW? Or maybe think of how to use resources more efficiently - do we really need to destroy and recreate containers that often?
We all have our share of guilt and sins, but I don't think that the biggest culprits of the unsustainability of our tech stack are the poor researchers who dumped more than 20GB of raw data on their Microsoft cloud storage.
20GB of data, if not more, is a likely weight for an average data-intensive research, especially if some large ML models were generated/involved or if large raw datasets were used. What researchers will do is probably store this kind of stuff on their own USB sticks like it's 2003, if given no alternatives. So much for security.
It's probably time for Microsoft to GTFO academia and institutional places. A single dumb decision by a single dumb executive (which may be motivated by marketing, public perception, or any other dumb short-term hype that the jerky corporate world loves so much) is enough to jeopardize the way millions of researchers operate.
I'm wondering what's preventing more academic institutions from plugging their own Nextcloud instances, save money, have full control over their data and scale hardware as they need, other than Microsoft sharks that always manage to get into any room where any deal about cloud infrastructure is discussed.
https://scholar.social/@researchfairy/111778617625312456

2024-01-17 22:50:07

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@npub1sle…n575 I get intermittent errors when setting the UA to `Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Miniflux/2.0.51; +https://miniflux.app)`. It's not very consistent though, so it seems like a policy that depends both on the UA and on the number of calls made in a certain day.

2024-01-17 14:01:49

Several websites now have #RSS feeds that seem to block bots - Reuters, ANSA and Dutch Review are among those.
I've noticed it because several feeds had become unavailable in the past days on my Miniflux instance.
Apparently setting HTTP_CLIENT_USER_AGENT to a Firefox/Chrome user agent rather than a string that contains "Miniflux" is enough to bypass the block.
This kind of stuff just baffles me.
1. How do they expect people to consume RSS feeds? From their browsers? That's a bummer, because both Firefox and Chrome haven't even rendered RSS/Atom content types for the past decade, so it'd require people to be quite fluent in reading XML in order to consume the content.
2. If for some reason they expect people to consume feeds from the browser, then how are they going to notify people that there's a feed available when they navigate on their page? Reuters doesn't even bother to use a <link> attribute in the DOM, for instance, nor it bothers to tell folks about the feeds on the homepage.
3. If, realistically speaking, feeds can no longer be read in a browser in 2024 (sure, there are folks like me that use custom Firefox extensions, but realistically we're <0.1% of the traffic), then of course the only alternative is an offline aggregator. So what's the point of blocking bot user agents, if that's exactly the way things are intended to work?
4. How is a mechanism that simply throws a 403 if the request comes from a user agent containing e.g. "Miniflux" or "libcurl" supposed to be "bot protection", when I'm only one step away from spoofing my user agent?
5. If these folks are really so hostile towards feeds, then why do they even bother to still run feeds?
My proposal: all large news outlets should have mandatory support for RSS/Atom feeds, properly advertised as a <link> tag and/or on the homepage, and with no barriers (especially barriers as dumb as a static UA test).
Being a large news outlet (especially, as it's often the case in Europe, a large publisher partly funded by public money) means that your information *must* be accessible even to users that don't/can't read your articles in a standard web browser. Especially if we want to set up automatic alerts/notifications based on some events. Twitter and its APIs used to be a temporary replacement for this kind of service until Musk took over, but now that the risks of delegating the delivery of information in the public interest to a private for-profit business are clear we need legislation that enshrines the duty for large news providers to adopt open feeds as a way of delivering content.
Sure, I can technically bypass all the dumb barriers and all the pointless friction points that both browser manufacturers and news outlets add to discourage people from using feeds. But at some point I just run into technical fatigue. Open feeds for large outlets that deliver critical news services, and are often partly funded by our taxes, should be a mandatory requirement. Not a war that should be fought only by tech savvy citizens on an individual level.

2024-01-17 13:57:55

Several websites now have #RSS feeds that seem to block bots - Reuters, ANSA and Dutch Review are among those.
I've noticed it because several feeds had become unavailable in the past days on my Miniflux instance.
Apparently setting HTTP_CLIENT_USER_AGENT to a Firefox/Chrome user agent rather than a string that contains "Miniflux" is enough to bypass the block.
This kind of stuff just baffles me.
1. How do they expect people to consume RSS feeds? From their browsers? That's a bummer, because both Firefox and Chrome don't even render RSS/Atom content types anymore, so it'd require people to be quite fluent in reading XML in order to consume the content.
2. If for some reason they expect people to consume feeds from the browser, then how are they going to notify people that there's a feed available when they navigate on their page? Reuters doesn't even bother to use a <link> attribute in the DOM, for instance, nor it bothers to tell folks about the feeds on the homepage.
3. If, realistically speaking, feeds can no longer be read in a browser in 2024 (sure, there are folks like me that use custom Firefox extensions, but realistically we're <0.1% of the traffic), then of course the only alternative is an offline aggregator. So what's the point of blocking bot user agents, if that's exactly the way things are intended to work?
4. How is a mechanism that simply throws a 403 if the request comes from a user agent containing e.g. "Miniflux" or "libcurl" supposed to be "bot protection", when I'm only one step away from spoofing my user agent?
5. If these folks are really so hostile towards feeds, then why do they even bother to still run feeds?
My proposal: all large news outlets should have mandatory support for RSS/Atom feeds, properly advertised as a <link> tag and/or on the homepage, and with no barriers (especially barriers as dumb as a static UA test).
Being a large news outlet (especially, as it's often the case in Europe, a large publisher partly funded by public money) means that your information *must* be accessible even to users that don't/can't read your articles in a standard web browser. Especially if we want to set up automatic alerts/notifications based on some events. Sure, I can technically bypass all the dumb barriers and all the pointless friction points that both browser manufacturers and news outlets add to discourage people from using feeds. But at some point I just run into technical fatigue. Open feeds for large outlets that deliver critical news services, and are often partly funded by our taxes, should be a mandatory requirement. Not a war that should be fought only by tech savvy citizens on an individual level.

2024-01-17 11:00:38

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@npub1nfg…w507 I think that wording matters here. Eventually it's up to the website to decide, what they deem "necessary".
If you're "fair" website, then by "necessary cookies" you probably mean the first-party cookies that should be required for your website to function properly. Without a session cookie in some form, every single request made to the website will have to be authenticated, for example, breaking user experience basically everywhere.
However, it should be noted that that kind of "first-party" cookies aren't actually covered by GDPR. The regulation clearly states that explicit consent is not required for first-party strictly functional cookies: https://gdpr.eu/cookies/. So if some websites still ask for explicit consent even for these, my suspicion is that, at least in some cases, they aren't so "first-party strictly functional only" after all.

2024-01-17 10:31:52

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@npub194p…tdp2 The balance rule in this case is in jeopardy: if I have to pay unconditionally for the energy that I push back onto the grid, then there's no zero-sum offsetting of the energy I take from the grid.
I definitely see the point that energy suppliers are trying to make - energy that is produced needs to be handled and distributed immediately if we don't have proper storage facilities.
But the statement of the problem also contains the solution: just build more storage, and the problem is solved. We'll need plenty of it anyway if we want to pivot away from fossil fuels. Without having to rethink the business model and the system of incentives that are already in place. But, of course, charging customers is always an easier solution than investing in proper solutions.

2024-01-17 09:40:36

Bi-directional power generation is the future of sustainable power generation.
If I have solar panels that produce more energy than I need, I push thay extra energy back to the grid so others can use it. That reduces the demand for dirtier energy by design.
If I pay for consuming electricity, then I should be paid for creating electricity.
Unfortunately, more and more energy companies seem to go in the opposite direction. As many struggle to remain profitable as they are finally forced to pivot away from dirty energy generation, they're desperate to find other sources of revenue. And they couldn't come up with anything smarter than turning domestic electricity generation from a (tiny) cost for them into an undeserved revenue stream. These companies would literally prefer you to waste your excess electricity, or use it to mine Bitcoins or whatever, than distributing it back to appliances which may need it.
If you are Dutch and you have a contract with Budget Energie, or with any other company that has irrationally decided to turn electricity production into a cost for the producer, then consider terminating your contract with them immediately. The world doesn't need these parasites who readily sacrifice long-term viable business models on the altar of short-term profitability.
https://www.dutchnews.nl/2024/01/budget-energie-to-charge-solar-panels-owners-a-fee-for-grid-use/

2024-01-15 22:15:23

Migration from #Bluehost to #Porkbun accomplished for my two personal domains.
Migration steps: set up two glue records that point to my existing DNS servers. End. And maybe also glue the DS records if you use DNSSEC.
I've spent the last couple of years with a service that tried to convince me that there was no way of buying only a domain name and make it point to my mail and name servers in the 2020s. That I *had* to buy the whole package of hosting, Wordpress and Office 365, even if I intended to use none of those features. And I probably had to thank them because at least they still allowed me to generate my own certificates with certbot rather than forcing me to buy their own, like GoDaddy does.
And in the latest rollout of their UI, Bluehost has also taken care of hiding the DNS configuration panels under 5-6 layers of dark patterns, advanced settings hidden under advanced tabs, pointless warnings that can't be dismissed, and they have even made it impossible to configure your own nameservers.
Then I just turn around the corner, and I find a service that's like "you just want a name? Sure. No hosting, no mail, no Wordpress? Sure. You already have some DNS server? Sure, just pass the glue records before the transfer is complete. We'll take care of everything else. With no downtime. And with a free API. And for a tiny fraction of the previous bills. Have a nice day".
It feels like enjoying a gourmet dinner for the first time after a couple of years of McDonald's.

2024-01-09 11:10:40

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Ok, I've decided to give #Porkbun a try by registering a random domain, and it's amazing.
It even supports glue records - you add your DNS addresses to their DNS configuration, then configure those addresses as the primary DNS servers for your domain, and there you go, you have your custom DNS.
That's literally all I needed, and Bluehost made it impossible - well, their new UI purposefully makes everything related to DNS management impossible, since geeks who register subdomains on domains that they already own aren't as profitable as newbies who buy a new Wordpress blog per week.
Oh, and they also have a free and easy API to also cover the dynamic IP use cases that I previously had to cover with ddclient + dyn.com.
Now I just have to wait a couple of days (and probably go through a lot of marketing upsell BS) for Bluehost to kindly release the domains that it's keeping as hostage, so I can move them to a better place.
Thanks to everyone for the suggestions!

2024-01-04 11:04:51

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@npub1ahk…rlfs I've been surprised myself to find out that in 2024 it's apparently very hard to have a domain registered with a registrar without having any form of hosting attached (and pay for it).

2024-01-04 10:57:40

I'm looking for a service where I can just buy a domain name - no hosting attached.
I'm tired of 80% of my Bluehost bills being for hosting+WordPress (a service I've never used) when all I need is just a domain name.
And I don't like Bluehost's dark patterns either - in their new UI they've made sure to hide DNS management under many, many clicks under the advanced tab, even with a non-dismissable warning. I'm not sure it they are planning to make it a premium feature in the future.
Requirements:
1. It needs to be certbot/Let's Encrypt friendly - that excludes GoDaddy
2. It needs to provide me with the ability to register as many subdomains as I want and manage the DNS records however I want
3. No mandatory hosting+WordPress upsells. If I never asked for it, it means that I don't want it
4. I'm also happy (if not happier) if it simply allows me to point to my own DNS server
Of course, registering my own registrar with ICANN may be an alternative, but for obvious reasons I'd rather avoid that path if possible.

2024-01-03 06:44:34

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@npub1lp3…wl3w who shot to peaceful protesters in Independence Square has to be clarified. If the shots were actually not fired by police forces, then the real culprits need to be punished.
But these reports ignore the simple fact that Yanukovich was a corrupt and very unpopular leader who stuffed all the levels of government with clientelism. My own friends were protesting in those days, risking their own lives together with tens of thousands of others - rest assured that they aren't American agents.
Later on, Zelenskiy won the elections on a strongly pro-European platform. Not with 51% of the votes, but with nearly 75%. Ukrainians were so desperate for change after being treated like a satellite of Russia that they democratically elected a comedian with no political experience because he promised them closer ties with Europe and less corruption. That definitely wasn't a coup, and the current government isn't illegal. Assuming that Yanukovich's ousting in 2014 was a coup (and I still have many doubts about that), then how do you call ousting a president elected with nearly three quarters of the votes years later?
As a parallel, take Belarus. Following the Russian textbook, Lukashenko jailed anyone who could pose a political threat to him, exiled his main political opponent, ended up with an election that was almost a joke, and quashed protests with forced incarcerations and gratuitous police violence. Did the EU call that a coup and invaded Belarus in response? Sure, we condemned them and put sanctions on them, but not a single soldier crossed the border. Then why should we allow Russia to behave differently?
> There is no higher authority above a nation. Nations must therefore do whatever is needed to protect themselves.
Absolutely not. International law exists for a reason, and the right to self-determination is an integral part of it. Invading a nation with internationally recognized borders is a violation of the UN treaties that most of the countries (including Russia) signed. Just because nobody seems to give a fuck about the UN and its resolutions and laws nowadays it doesn't mean that it's the right thing to do. If we remove those founding international treaties, then only diplomacy, nuclear deterrent or greater military power are what separates a civilized world from a jungle of nations dropping rockets on one another.

2024-01-03 00:01:49

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@npub1lp3…wl3w it is wrong in the 21st century, period. It was wrong when the US saw Cuba as a threat and it actively tried to sabotage them. It was wrong when it actively interfered with the politics of Nicaragua, not to mention Vietnam and Korea. It is wrong for Russia to do the same with Ukraine.
A country must have no control whatsoever over what another sovereign country does - that's the whole point of self-determination. They can try and leverage decisions with diplomacy, but when diplomacy fails they should just STFU and accept that other people with another flag who live on the other side of the border have all the rights to decide what they want to do with themselves.
Ukrainians elected Zelenskiy, not Putin.

2024-01-02 23:05:53

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@npub1lp3…wl3w Who's Putin to have a say on the alliances of another sovereign and independent State? I've been to Kyiv several times before the war, and I remember seeing EU flags on the streets and meeting people who were mostly pro-Europe. If the people of a country want to take a certain political side, who's Putin to say if it's right or wrong?
Belarus is an example of a pariah State passively aligned with Moscow and governed by a dictator who keeps death penalty legal. And it borders EU and NATO country. Did we ever complain that Belarus should be aligned with us or stay neutral, or threaten to invade it and reduce it to a failed State? No, because that's not how the right to self-determination works.
About invading Russia through Ukraine - we're not in 19th century anymore. We don't need an old fashioned land invasion to attack a country, and Putin knows it quite well. And, if we really wanted a land invasion, we could also start it from Finland (a NATO member now, thanks to Putin's reckless war), Poland or any of the Baltic States. So that argument also doesn't make any sense.

2024-01-02 19:23:17

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@npub1lp3…wl3w here's the fact check + sources of the 2005 speech where he called the break up of the USSR the greatest tragedy of the 20th century, and called it his mission to revert as much of it as he could: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2014/mar/06/john-bolton/did-vladimir-putin-call-breakup-ussr-greatest-geop/.
And this is Vladimir Solovyev, TV propagandist and often spokesperson of the Kremlin's line, recently stating "the only guarantee for our safety is to reach the Atlantic" https://nitter.net/Gerashchenko_en/status/1732041019930145153.
He made similar statements in the past, he called for a nuclear WWIII initiated by Russia ("we're all going to die one day anyway": https://www.newsweek.com/russian-state-tv-comforts-viewers-nuclear-war-we-all-die-someday-1701580), and he clearly stated that Ukraine was "only the beginning" https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/03/top-putin-propagandist-says-the-ukraine-war-is-just-the-beginning/
About Donetsk and Luhansk, I have several friends who live or used to live there. Before 2014 they didn't mind what they were part on. Half-Ukrainian, half-Russian families are very common, and kids traditionally learn both the languages. Putin just blew on the fire of ethnic divisions that nobody used to care of earlier, and used the Stalinist excuse of "protecting Russian-speaking groups" as a pretext for an invasion. If his goal was just to grab those two Russian-speaking regions, then why didn't he stop there? Why the bombs on Kherson, Kyiv, Odessa, all the way to Lviv on the Western border? Why did he take the Zaporizhzhia plant? Why did he try and stop so many times even grain exports? Why did his troops leave hundreds of km of landmines behind them? The answer is simple: he just wants Ukraine to collapse (all of it): if he can't have it, then he'd rather turn it into a failed State.
Which, from a historic point of view, puts him in a position that is actually even worse that Hitler's, and makes him deserve an even worse death.

2024-01-02 18:34:44

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@npub1lr3…5y4w sure, you could spin off a Docker container with an old version of Gitlab or Gitea. But unless you have back-compatibility constraints I would just use Forgejo - it would support a code forge that is still free and the new federation features seem very promising too.

2024-01-02 16:39:34

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@npub1wjw…ue5t I'm talking about this outstanding issue on initial sync for clients that don't come with internal sorting capabilities, ending up with messages that are out of order: https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-bridge/issues/326

2024-01-02 13:39:15

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@npub1cu4…mcxv @npub10up…tqyu Gitweb is ok for small personal projects, but it can't replace a full forge UI with all the bells if you work on larger projects with other collaborators - pull requests, issues, epics etc.
But if using a full blown completely free UI becomes a lost cause I may also settle for Gitweb or Sourcehut.

2024-01-02 13:32:14

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@npub1z0y…letn I had many friends who were in Independence Square in 2014. Yes, the US interfered, but the protests were mostly genuine. Yanukovich was an unpopular and corrupt president and a Russian puppet, who found refuge in Russia after being ousted.

2024-01-02 05:27:25

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@npub1lp3…wl3w If Russia gets away with this, it won't stop with Kyiv. Putin wants the old USSR borders back, and something more.
This is how world wars begin - with a lunatic in charge of a powerful army who decides to grab as much as they can.
Had the world supported Poland and Belgium unconditionally, and immediately thrown all of their military power against Hitler, history may have taken a different bend.

2024-01-02 05:09:29

I've had to take down my Piped instance at piped.platypush.tech.
As my Linode bills were getting more and more expensive, I've had to move some services inside of my home network - and Piped is among them.
Once I moved Piped within my home network, it really started taking a toll on my connectivity. Streaming videos to ~20 users simultaneously, with no Cloudflare in front, from a home DSL connection takes quite of a toll.
Since many have been using the service but nobody has bothered to contribute to so far, I've decided to take it down and move it to a domain that I won't advertise this time.
I like to self-host, and I'll always keep doing it. And I also like to give something back to society - many have been using my services for years, and I'm ok if others use them. I'll always offer them free of charge and I'll always respect everybody's privacy.
But there's a limit to everything.
One thing is to offer a search engine aggregator or an ebook hosting service for free. Another thing is to provide a media streaming service, running on a home connection, for free.
It cost me money to run Piped on a Linode instance (precisely ~$100/month extra on my Linode bills for a beefier 16GB machine), and it costs bandwidth and electricity to run it on my home network.
Free software (and services) should be free as in speech, not as in a free beer.
I've asked multiple times for users to contribute to keep the lights on, but haven't received a single penny - all while I got on average ~5 video views per minute that prevent me from even having a videocall on my own home network.
If you really love free software, but you can't run it yourself on your machines for whatever reason, please at least bother to financially contribute to the instances that you use. Otherwise you're just a freeloader who does more harm than good to the free software.

2024-01-02 03:11:43

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@npub10up…tqyu I've recently written a post on my source forge migration adventures https://social.platypush.tech/@blacklight/111655737001373938, from Github, to Gitlab, to Gitea, to Forgejo.
Hosting your projects on a truly free platform that is relatively shielded from risks of enshittification has become a challenge.
I understand those who feel like giving up, but personally I will never give up.
Exhaustion/apathy by continuous enshittification and hostile practices are exactly the final goal of platforms like Github. I won't let them win this war, even if it costs me one source forge migration per week or writing my own. And I hope that more developers join me in this war (because it's a real war against surveillance capitalism that we are fighting) rather than giving up.
Once Forgejo has full federation support, its greatest pitfall (fragmentation, and the need of one account per platform) will also be mitigated.

2024-01-02 02:44:44

No peace will be possible until Russia is brought on its knees and Putin's head is transfixed by a stake.
Until then, it's our duty to provide Ukraine with all the weapons it needs to win the war against the ogres.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-drones-attack-bombardment-1e381d5e7fa71fb5549af354e3649681

2023-12-31 15:19:47

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@npub19qm…sn8k the real question is "what does this signature aim to protect/validate"?
If it aims to validate that the original image wasn't AI-generated, even if it was edited with Photoshop and friends, or even post-processed by AI, then an EXIF header with the signed metadata should suffice.
If it aims to validate that the image was neither AI-generated nor tampered (including Photoshop), and thus is the genuine raw output of a camera, then it should probably contain a full signed checksum of the image data.

2023-12-31 15:14:25

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@npub19qm…sn8k it depends on how this "signature" is implemented.
We already have image metadata stored in most of JPEG images - it's called EXIF headers. Photoshop and GIMP already know how to deal with them (they may add their own headers on save but not touch existing ones). If such signature is just another EXIF headers, I don't see how an AI algorithm couldn't simply mimic the header (you don't even need AI for that).
Unless the header payload is encrypted with a private key that only the manufacturer owns, of course - but then the question becomes "how do you efficiently distribute the public key to everyone to decrypt/validate the header".

2023-12-29 15:41:27

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@npub1wjw…ue5t how about testing the bridge with mail clients other than Outlook and Apple Mail? Thousands of Linux users will be very grateful.

2023-12-29 13:48:34

Standing ovation for Rep. Rashida Tlaib.
It takes guts in the West to call out Netanyahu for what he really is (a fascist genocidal maniac and a war criminal), and it takes even more guts to do so if you're a US Congress representative.
To the intellectual dishonest journalists covering these facts:
1. Stop calling the Squad's Congress minority a "far-left" group. Their mild social-democratic ideas and their support for a sensible welfare state are close to what in Europe would be defined as "moderate center-left". The fact that such ideas are considered extremists in the US tells much more about how far to the right the political baricenter has shifted in the US, rather than how extremist the alleged "left" (or whatever is left of it) has become.
2. Stop writing blatant falsehoods like "The group has been vocally against Israel since its conception". Nobody in the group has ever tried to deny the existence of Israel as a State. They only call for Israel to respect the UN resolutions, after violating >100 of them since 1948, respect the international boundaries drawn by the Oslo accords, stop its illegal settlements and evictions in the West Bank, end the state of "perennial occupation", and make progress towards a two-State solution. The fact that calling for Israel to respect international laws and institutions is now considered "anti-Israel", or even "anti-semitic", tells much more about the absolute impunity that Israel enjoys rather than the group's allegedly extreme positions - and how morally bankrupt and intellectually dishonest mainstream media has become.
https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/rep-rashida-tlaib-calls-netanyahu-genocidal-maniac-via-instagram/ar-AA1mbGbh

2023-12-28 22:54:26

There was a time when #HackerNoon was actually good. It used to be one of my favourite (if not THE favourite) daily read to understand what was going on in the tech world. And I even learned a lot from smart folks who would write about distributed systems or advanced programming techniques.
I used to write a bunch of articles there too, and even won a few awards for three years in a row.
Then HackerNoon just decided to go all in on #Blockchain and #crypto crapware. Open their website today, and you'll have to scroll through quite a few articles on DeFi, NFTs, shitcoins, smart contracts, more Web 3.0 piper dreams, new supposed revelations of Satoshi Nakamoto's true identity, before finding something that is actually relevant.
I decided to stop publishing for them because it's humiliating for me to spend days (or even weeks) writing a long article on e.g. how to build your own self-hosted smart home bridge or media center, or some considerations on advanced ML techniques, only to see it buried under a pile of one-page articles with no technical insights written by fanatic crypto-bros seeking either for undeserved attention or a way to shine a spotlight on their favourite cryptocoin.
Now that Web 3.0 has largely become the crumbling house of cards that it was always destined to be (and that both I and other tech writers predicted it would be a long time ago), HackerNoon is trying to re-position itself by proposing a "Web 2.5" approach.
It's so sad to see a once great publication fall so low.
https://hackernoon.com/unveiling-the-web-25-documentary-navigating-the-future-of-the-internet

2023-12-28 15:11:35

Here we go again. #India seems to really love installing spyware on journalists' and political opponents' phones, while still pretending to be a democracy.
All the products developed by #NSO must be clearly called as illegal by an international moratorium, and all the contracts the company signed with governments should be nullified. No more "we need these tools to keep an eye on terrorists" excuses. Real terrorist groups don't communicate over WhatsApp on their personal iPhones. This kind of software has been, again and again, *only* used to illicitly spy on political opponents and journalists.
#Pegasus must disappear, and any government who is caught using it must be sanctioned. It won't solve the problem of State-sponsored hacking, but it'll make the entry barriers high again.
https://www.dw.com/en/india-journalists-targeted-with-pegasus-spyware-reports/a-67840337

2023-12-28 12:20:20

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@npub1sqm…6m2d @npub1hyk…3p33 unfortunately this seems to be a common trend after the MeAnd23 data leak: https://social.platypush.tech/@blacklight/111572255838897602
It seems that more and more companies are trying to force users through streamlined arbitration processes when the company fucks things up, rather than a normal legal process that can expose them to higher fines or publicly impact their reputation.
I'm appalled that they can override centuries of achievements when it comes to the rights of citizens to escalate issues through the judiciary with a simple ToS clause, and get away with it.

2023-12-28 04:42:37

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@npub1tky…5ekf Mercurial never actually convinced me.
It's probably easier to use for the uninitiated than Git (and harder for a novice to mess up a codebase over a rebase gone wrong), but its branching model is also way less powerful.
Branches in Mercurial are lines of consecutive changesets, while Git doesn't have the requirement about linear consecutiveness - you can basically merge and rebase anything anywhere.
Also, since commits are tightly coupled to changesets, which are tightly coupled to branches, it's not really possible to delete branches, while in Git you can do whatever you want with them.
If I were to start a team today filled with junior developers who have never touched a VCS before, I probably may consider Mercurial, as it simplifies things and makes the branching model easier to digest. But, after more than two decades using Git (and >95% of the projects out there using it too), I feel like the cost of a weaker branching system and the overhead of memorizing another set of commands isn't worth paying.

2023-12-28 04:23:49

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Ok, git.platypush.tech has successfully been migrated from Gitea to Forgejo.
It didn't take long - it is indeed a drop-in replacement, but the systemd configuration packaged with Arch required a bit of tweaking to point to the previous Gitea paths and some permissions changes, *only then* it's an actual drop-in replacement.
Luckily I've always used `git` as a username rather than `gitea`, so that part, after a few changes in the configuration, won't require any more changes.
Tip: never, ever use the default username provided by your code forge (gitlab, gitea, forgejo...). Code forges come and go, and one after the other they are doomed to enshittification. Code repositories, configurations and scripts are there to stay instead. So never use a username that is tied to your code forge, or you'll have a hard time changing it later.

2023-12-28 04:05:13

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@npub1tky…5ekf Sourcehut is also an option, but IMHO it's too minimal and elitist. It belongs to that "we're elite h4x0rs that use 1990s interfaces and only communicate over email" school that eventually pushed a lot of people away from many interesting open projects. But if Forgejo also had to go down the enshittification road in the future (I trust nobody at this point), then I guess the options would be between Sourcehut and coding my own source forge.

2023-12-28 04:02:15

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@npub1tky…5ekf I'm now in the process of migrating to #Forgejo, which is supposed to be a fully FOSS fork and drop-in replacement for Gitea - let's see how long this lasts before pushing all of its users to their cloud offering too...

2023-12-28 03:42:18

I the beginning there was (mostly) Github.
Then it got acquired by Microsoft, it started taking down repos and accounts at every whim, it started violating FOSS licenses by training their closed models on our open code, and I started self-hosting my Gitlab instance instead.
Then Gitlab enshittified, its open offering started falling apart and serious bugs were left open for months, it started to aggressively push users to their cloud offering, it even embraced openly hostile practices (such as deleting repos and accounts that hadn't been active for a few months), and I migrated to Gitea.
Now Gitea is also enshittifying, providing features in Gitea Cloud that aren't available on the open core (one example, a stupid limitation on the maximum number of users allowed on a server, when it's my own fucking business to decide how many users I want to store on my own database on my own machine), and probably it won't take long before they start pushing their users to migrate to the cloud version by breaking even more basic features on their open version. So I'm in the process of migrating to Forgejo.
Luckily I have enough technical skills to migrate things around and even patching code. But just because I can it doesn't mean that I should. Especially when the trend is that of a code forge migration per year just because all of them have decided to enshittify and are trying to upsell me stuff that I either never asked in the first place, or that was given for granted and it suddenly became a premium.
I just want to have a service to upload and share my own open projects, I'm fine to run it on my own machines with no customer support involved, and I'm fine to even contribute to their codebase. I'm not asking much. I shouldn't go through so much trouble. I haven't been always so hateful towards the techbiz, but the techbiz has made me so embittered because business people keep breaking *our* tech on a daily basis and force me to invest all of my time and energies in seeking alternatives.
I seriously just want all these business parasites that have taken over my industry gone and dead by now. I fucking hate every single one of you.

2023-12-28 02:59:59

Dear #Threads, if you're showing me snippets from your platform inside of Instagram to convince me to create an account there, you're doing an awful job - unless you're trying to make my blood boil until I answer this scum.
All I see is misogynist, transphobic and white supremacist content, as well as posts from Zionists proud of their status as genocidal colonizers.
The only post I saw that made sense is from a fresh user who genuinely asked "why is Threads so full of fanatics and lunatics?"
We did a good choice to defederate this crap before it even hit the Fediverse.
https://social-media.platypush.tech/media_attachments/files/111/655/431/668/673/329/original/65b0972376df4147.jpg
https://social-media.platypush.tech/media_attachments/files/111/655/431/745/802/044/original/8597ef8e2350ff53.jpg
https://social-media.platypush.tech/media_attachments/files/111/655/431/871/165/651/original/0107f6545cbb52aa.jpg
https://social-media.platypush.tech/media_attachments/files/111/655/432/025/988/713/original/fa0fa45e9a337fb5.jpg

2023-12-28 00:01:57

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@npub1zl8…pnyf I also think that if you dig enough you can actually find amazing music. The releases of Lana Del Rey, Spiritbox and Queens of the Stone Age have all blown my mind this year. But what gets to the surface is not necessarily what's objectively better.
Pitchfork has surely its faults, but it's not alone. Even the Grammies have 10 categories for R&B and rap and only 5 for rock+alternative+metal - and Olivia Rodrigo managed somehow to sneak even in those. And when I turn on the radio on any major channel I basically never hear any of the artists above - in the US I mainly hear cheap R&B and hip-hop, in Italy mostly local trap, and in the Netherlands it's mostly such bad autotune crap rapped on top of cheap hi-hat sounds that I struggle to even fit it into a genre. What all of these trends have in common is length - radios used to rarely stream anything that was more than 5 minutes long, now they barely stream anything that is more than 3 minutes long.
I'm no longer sure of how to disentangle this chicken-and-egg problem. Is it the public that has become spoiled by an endless selection of music at their fingertips and lobotomized by short content in the age of TikTok, or is it the media industry (and the journalists around it) that are trying to shovel crap into our throats, by repeating ad nauseam the same formulas, featuring the same handful of artists everywhere, and trying to convince us that this is the best that the music world can provide to us?

2023-12-27 22:07:58

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@npub18r0…3xe7 "Deutsche Grammophon invita a provare l’esperienza chiamata “Beethoven – The Piano Sonatas in under 15 minutes. Anche 15 minuti si rivelano presto troppo gravosi. Il New York Times ha ora abbracciato con orgoglio le presentazioni di cinque minuti alla musica classica".
🤮 🤮 🤮
A questo punto perche' non collegarci direttamente un cavo dietro la testa come in Matrix e imparare al volo l'intro di Moonlight Sonata senza manco ascoltarla?

2023-12-27 21:47:59

There's a bit of a sad trend in #Pitchfork's list of best songs of the year.
Basically more than half of the songs on that list are less than 3 minutes long or barely reach that threshold - with a few notable exceptions, like the 8 minutes of "Bending Hectic", Cole Pulice's 22 minutes epic ambient track, and Lana Del Rey's masterpiece.
How can a piece of music even have enough time to breathe, develop and sink in the listener's ears without even being 3 minutes long - let alone be considered as one of the best songs of the year?
Am I just getting old, or is the average attention span shortening so much that even "art pop" has become a product to be consumed within the length of a reel?
https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/best-songs-2023/

2023-12-27 00:27:42

Israel, in its current incarnation, is a genocidal and Nazist State. And they have lost so much of their decency that they are no longer afraid of being very explicit about it.
Anyone who still supports them should be called accountable by history.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/26/israel-military-gaza-ground-offensive-urban-refugee-camps-00133212

2023-12-26 19:26:49

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@npub1grx…uxfe the path is the right one - one chronological timeline with curated content, and one explore timeline.
We just need to empower the tools on the explore timeline, and make the search feature better (on Mastodon >=4.2 they're already much better than before, but a lot more can be done).
Development has been slow mainly because of many minorities that have come to the Fediverse to seek refuge from bullying on other platforms, and they rightly don't want their content to be easily discovered. And, as many of them are also core contributors to the platform, they have vetoed many decisions that go towards better discoverability.
While I understand their point, I don't think that everyone should settle for a partly crippled version of the Fediverse just to protect them. Trade-offs can be made - for example, by letting users decide whether they want their content to be returned in search results or on the explore timeline.

2023-12-26 19:11:02

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@npub1n4r…sctd @npub1grx…uxfe I don't think that discoverability necessarily means reels, stories and other media content designed for people with the attention span of a goldfish.
And I don't think that discoverability and curation are necessarily in mutual exclusion. I like Mastodon's approach where you have two timelines - one is the default chronological timeline populated with content from all the accounts that you follow, and one is the explore timeline. You can easily toggle between them depending on the experience you want. Any attempt of mixing them up (as Instagram has been trying to do for a while) creates garbage.

2023-12-26 17:31:53

"We don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse".
So goes #Substack, for good.
If you don't like Nazis, white supremacists and conspiracy theorists, you kick them out and demonetize their content, period.
I don't know what's so hard to understand. If you throw a party, and invite someone who shits on the floor, vomits in other guests' cups and insults anybody with a different creed or tone of skin, then all decent people will leave.
If you let Nazis hang out at your party, then your party will become the Nazi party, period.
And I'm sick of reading "we're becoming too polarized, liberals no longer want to share spaces with conservatives, extremes are winning" etc. No, we are NOT becoming more extreme on the left - quite the opposite. It's the other political side that has decided to go full in with their extremely distorted and intolerant views of society. And it's our duty, as a civilized society, to confine them to the sewage they belong to, before their shit talk takes over all the platforms.
https://substack.com/@hamish/note/c-45811343

2023-12-24 13:47:57

A reminder that you should never use services like #SignRequest to handle your legal documents.
I have an account because I had to sign some of my past employment contracts through platforms like these.
Now that enshittification has removed all corporate ethical boundaries, I may have to upgrade to a premium account if I want to maintain access to my old contracts and documents, or my account will be removed with everything attached to it.
I'm not even sure if it's legal to delete legal documents from a digital platform because of sudden changes in marketing practices, with no guarantees to be able to access content as sensitive as employment contracts without paying a premium for it.
In the meantime, please just send a PDF via email and ask the recipient to send a sign copy back to you.
There should be no space in this world for services with little to none added value like SignRequest that sell our sensitive information to other parties and even threaten to delete it if we don't pay.
https://social-media.platypush.tech/media_attachments/files/111/635/436/135/937/836/original/276c55f0103963c5.jpeg

2023-12-20 14:02:23

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@npub1vx5…pty8 @npub1y98…gke7 IMHO if the largest instances take the explicit step of defederating Threads they may lose thousands of accounts overnight, and the ideological wars that would ensue may split the Fediverse along a very predictable fracture line.
I think it's safe for Eugen not to do anything on the largest instances, and those who don't want to compromise and have bytes about them relayed back and forth to Meta's servers can either join smaller instances that block Threads, or run their own.
This could be an occasion for Mastodon to really decentralize, but without a needless ideological war that could threaten its integrity.

2023-12-20 12:39:44

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@npub1y98…gke7 what I'm denouncing here is not those who defederate Threads (after all I've also done it on my own instance), but those who defederate those who don't defederate Threads.

2023-12-20 12:01:17

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@npub16nz…kyqx Regularizing undocumented workers is one of the few points of the bill I agree with.
About welfare benefits, they should be proportional to the gap between an individual's current position and their expected position in society. By cutting out those who have recently moved in or haven't gotten a job yet, while doing nothing to empower integration programs, the law is doing exactly the opposite. It's leaving behind those who need more support, and making it harder for them to integrate into society.
And the bill also contains other xenophobic abominations that have become common among all European far right parties - such as not granting French citizenships to those born in France by foreign parents, the abolition of State Medical Aid (the only kind of healthcare available to undocumented people, thus no documents=no doctor), a cap on the number of foreign students, and harder requirements for familiy reunifications.
To be clear, these are all things that belong to the political programs of folks like Wilders, Meloni and Le Pen, so either Macron is finally showing his real face, or he's really desperate for the votes of the most racist sectors of society.

2023-12-20 11:49:32

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@npub1jw3…h3v8 I defederated Threads for very similar reasons, but I wouldn't go as far as applying the transitive property to anyone who doesn't defederate them. I feel like it can quickly escalate in a nasty twist of the "my freedom ends where somebody else's freedom begins" principle. On top of that, gratuitous defederation makes the Fediverse more fragmented - and that's exactly what Meta wants.

2023-12-20 11:11:46

#Threads is now officially defederated on this instance.
Meta has gotten countless chances of doing things the right way, it has screwed up each single of them, and I want each single byte coming from that morally bankrupt monstruosity out of my life, my house, my network and my instance.
Note however that, unlike other defederation talibans, I won't give a damn if you're an instance admin and you decide not to defederate Threads.
I'm not afraid of Meta scraping my instance through other federated instances that haven't blocked them. If they want to scrape this instance, they can already do so via API, no need for federation - and they obviously won't give a fuck about your robots.txt or #nobot hashtags, we're talking of a company with no moral compass after all.
If you want to give Threads a try, go for it. If you still need more evidence that Meta is irredimable and rotten to the core, go for it. Who am I to ban you/defederate you for holding a different opinion?

2023-12-20 09:15:17

"We needed to put out a racist law otherwise next year we'll lose to a racist party".
Well, this is *exactly* how progressive parties lose to fascists.
When a far-right party loses its ground, do you ever hear its leaders says "maybe we need to be a bit more tolerant/liberal/open to diversity"? Absolutely not! They'll just throw a few more scapegoats in the mix, blame somebody else for being unpatriotic, poison the political discourse even more, and push themselves even more on the extremes.
You know how many times a progressive leader gained consensus for mimicking the far-right? ZERO! If people really want to vote for a fascist then they prefer the real one, not an imitation!
Macron has run out of steam and ideas, and if all he can do is to mimic Le Pen, deny welfare measures to migrants, harass foreign students or deny French citizenship to people who were born in France, then he'd better be gone sooner rather than later.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/20/france-immigration-bill-passed-controversy-emmanuel-macron-marine-le-pen

2023-12-17 17:33:56

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@npub1stc…nghs My comment on this article from a couple of days ago: https://social.platypush.tech/@blacklight/111561006035045374

2023-12-17 17:27:08

The evidence of gratuitous violence against civilians, for no other purpose other than banal, evil hunger for genocide, is starting to pile up.
Netanyahu, his fascist government and anybody who supports them deserve to rot in jail and burn in hell. Israelis and Palestinians won't have peace until the fascists who rule those lands are gone from both sides.
Until then, we have the moral obligation to treat Israel as a pariah State on par of Russia, Iran and North Korea. There's no reason why a destabilizing military regime bent on imperialism, ethnic replacement and genocide should be treated differently from another.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/17/israel-presses-ahead-in-gaza-as-errant-killing-of-captives-adds-to-concern-about-its-wartime-conduct-00132166

2023-12-17 15:05:14

#Israel in its current incarnation is a #fascist and #genocidal State that needs to be isolated and treated like a pariah on the same level as Russia and North Korea. And no peace is possible until Netanyahu and his neo-Nazi allies are in power.
It's good to finally see some unease with Israel's imperialist and genocidal positions come even from its strongest allies. The earlier Biden pulls his support from the evil Jew regime, the earlier the carnage is over.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/17/israel-presses-ahead-in-gaza-as-errant-killing-of-captives-adds-to-concern-about-its-wartime-conduct-00132166

2023-12-15 15:50:12

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@npub1dw4…9aap same here - apparently we may live in a world where loans and mortgages buy a guarantee that our deaths wouldn't be unnoticed for too long.

2023-12-15 15:39:32

The frequency of episodes like this in #Amsterdam has become worringly high, and this probably won't be the last one.
What happens when you die in a city where even neighbours mostly don't know one another, where a lot of people live far from their families, where it's hard for expats to form durable friendships and bonds, where most of the people work remotely or frequently swap jobs, so they often don't manage to build bonds with colleagues either, and where a lot of people live on their own?
If the decomposition is quick, neighbours may notice the smell and somebody may open the door of your apartment after a couple of weeks/months.
Otherwise, odds are that nobody will even notice that you're gone for at least a couple of years.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2501688-bewoner-ligt-drie-jaar-dood-in-eigen-woning-amsterdam

2023-12-15 13:41:32

This is the picture of a drug dealer who's desperately trying to convince us that drugs are good. #Cop28 should have NEVER been hosted by one of the biggest polluters. For clarity:
1. There's no such thing as "low-carbon" fossil fuels. All fossil fuels are made of hydrocarbons, and all hydrocarbons release carbon when you burn them. Let's start calling immoral marketing stunts and outright lies by their name.
2. "At the end of the day, remember, it is the demand that will decide and dictate what sort of energy source will help meet the growing global energy requirements" - sure, just like it's demand for heroin that keeps heroin dealers in business. Demand alone doesn't legitimize business practices. Otherwise we should all make and sell sandwiches out of our crap - after all, 10 billion flies in the world surely can't be wrong about what tastes good.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/15/cop28-president-sultan-al-jaber-says-his-firm-will-keep-investing-in-oil

2023-12-15 09:39:03

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@npub1kjk…p4dw The alternative solution I've heard more often is to move away from a voting system based on unanimity, where every State can veto anything, and replaced it with qualified majority.
But any vote in that direction will be obviously vetoed by Hungary, and probably openly criticized by all the rightwing forces on the continent amid fears of losing control of the laws in their countries.
A good starting point would be to remove the unanimity condition from any motions on international politics, as the "it impacts my country" excuse is a bit less relevant. But even such a vote would be strongly opposed by Hungary.
It sounds to me that the best solution is to kick them out, then forge EU laws in such a way that a Hungary case is unlikely to occur again in the future, and once Orban is gone they can apply to join again, this time abiding to the new rules.

2023-12-15 09:17:42

The EU urgently needs a process to expell a member State.
#Orban and his vetoes are no longer welcome. We can't be a functioning family if one of our members keeps benefiting from our money while not being aligned on a single one of our values.
There's no space for this Hungary in the EU.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/15/hungary-blocks-50bn-in-eu-aid-for-ukraine-hours-after-membership-talks-were-approved

2023-12-14 12:53:10

To me this paper states the obvious, but sometimes it's better to state the obvious to make sure that everybody in the scientific community is on the same page:
1. p-points are a useful statistical tool to infer significance, but they aren't the ONLY statistical tool.
2. Setting the threshold for statistical significance at p=0.05, with everything above it bring inconclusive/insignificant and everything below being surely statistical significant, is a completely arbitrary convention that does more harm than good. Probabilities are continuous, and any attempt to discretize them (or, worse, build dichotomies on arbitrary thresholds) ends up distorting results, discarding potentially useful results, or enforcing unethical practices ("just massage the data until you get that p=0.05").
3. It's not the job of researchers to draw conclusions from their researches. All the studies should be published, in a way or another, and conclusions should only be drawn after quantitatively comparing results from different papers.
https://phys.org/news/2023-12-abandon-null-hypothesis-significance-default.html

2023-12-13 15:20:20

“No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument of the Incorporated National Will. When our dictator turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”
- Dorothy Thompson on Hitler, 1935.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-journalists-covered-rise-mussolini-hitler-180961407/

2023-12-13 09:51:57

Surveillance capitalism is like a slowly boiled frog. You don't realize how much it has bent every single aspect of our lives in its favour unless you take a step back and ask yourself "how would the world have reacted had this thing happened 10-20 years ago?"
#MeAnd23 is a good textbook example.
Had such a massive hack happened 10-20 years ago (we're talking of the records about 7 millions individuals, like the whole population of a small/medium country, including names, emails, dates of birth, addresses, members of the family tree, ancestry etc.: lists of people with Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry were already available on the dark web hours after the hack), I have no doubt of how things would have unfolded.
A big public outcry, a big class action against the company for not enforcing sufficient protection against personal data, boycott acts, the board stepping down, etc.
How do things unfold in 2023 instead?
The hack is barely mentioned in the news, it joins a neverending list of data breaches (by now we can all safely assume that some criminal out there has at least our phone number, email address, date of birth and physical address, fished from thousands of data dumps on the dark web), and the company simply rushed to push out a new ToC that simply states that, if the nature of a complaint against them is similar to those of many other users, then there will be "procedures that will encourage a prompt resolution of any disputes and to streamline arbitration proceedings".
In other words, closes door arbitration and dispute resolution to avoid a class action where they could be publicly called accountable for mishandling the personal data of millions of individuals, be given harsh fines, or have the board forced to resign.
Of course, the new ToC is opt-in by default, unless you send them an email within 30 days. So it's safe to assume that anyone who doesn't file them an email within that time window will lose their right to sue a business for leaking their most sensitive personal data to criminals.
If you're asking yourself whether today's tech companies are above the law, you're probably asking the right question.
Btw, never ever consider sending your hair, blood or spit to one of these ancestry discovery companies. You're basically giving them the keys to your most sensitive and valuable personal information. Hackers are very well aware of the value of that information on the dark web and regularly target these systems. It's a ticking bomb, and it's just a matter of time before data about your ethnicity and family tree is leaked.
https://www.engadget.com/23andme-frantically-changed-its-terms-of-service-to-prevent-hacked-customers-from-suing-152434306.html

2023-12-13 08:30:40

The #Firefox extensions on mobile open day is coming up tomorrow!
I'm not yet sure if I'll manage to iron out the remaining items to make my RSS viewer extension mobile-ready by tomorrow https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rss-viewer/ (the only hurdle is about the mobile API's ability of drawing custom icons in the URL bar, like a feed icon), but I'm working hard on it.
Hundreds of extensions have already been marked as mobile-ready, and once I bring RSS discoverability back to mobile I feel like browsing on a smartphone may actually become a fun and empowering experience again.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2023/11/28/open-extensions-on-firefox-for-android-debut-december-14-but-you-can-get-a-sneak-peek-today/

2023-12-13 08:17:18

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@npub180y…5nth I've noticed that my PiHole lists already do a good job catching any suspicious address the TV tries to connect to. The only downside is that it also blocks the app store on my smart TV, but I literally use it once in a year at most.

2023-12-12 14:17:40

If big fancy smart TVs nowadays seem cheaper than they should be, it's because they are.
You are no longer purchasing a TV, you're purchasing a device that will forever yield profits for its manufacturer by scooping up and selling data points about everything you watch in the screen. The money you don't pay to Samsung or Sony for your TV will be paid many times over through telemetry.
The MIT's advice on how to disable aggressive telemetry definitely work. But you can go even further with a an even simpler advice: enable PiHole on your local network and configure it as your default DNS.
Since I did it a couple of years ago, I haven't seen a single ad or sponsored content on my Samsung TV, and all the requests to sewage domains like lcprd1.samsungcloudsolution.net or device-metrics-us-2.amazon.com are diligently redirected to /dev/null.
https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/12/12/your-smart-tv-knows-what-youre-watching

2023-12-12 09:40:04

This is a great day: #Google has officially been found guilty of monopolist practices when it comes to app distribution and fees collection, and the jury took the decision unanimously.
To be clear, I don't like Epic either, and I consider them just as evil and wannabe monopolistic as Google. But Google's app distribution monopoly could be taken down only by another large-size business which could afford years of legal battles.
https://www.theverge.com/23945184/epic-v-google-fortnite-play-store-antitrust-trial-updates

2023-12-11 11:23:50

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@npub1url…a8jv That feature back in the day inspired other browsers (namely Firefox and Chrome) to do the same ~15 years ago. After Steve Jobs did it, competitors quickly rushed and added a feed icon to the URL bar, and even a built-in viewer.
Out of curiosity, I went to check what's the current state of the RSS features in Safari. Unsurprisingly, the feature was removed around the same time Chrome removed it too. And it's now available as a $0.99 browser extension, yay! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rss-button-for-safari/id1437501942?mt=12

2023-12-11 10:10:58

I definitely see the author's points in this article, but I disagree with the proposed solution. Feed discoverability should be a basic browser feature, not something web developers need to actively implement.
I have made an extension that parses the <link> tags and puts back the feed icon where it's supposed to be (on the right side of the URL bar), and also renders the feeds properly rather than just spitting out the raw XML: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rss-viewer/
This is how the web used to work 10 years ago. The <link> tag has a purpose: it instructs browsers that the current page has a feed, so the browser can parse it and show a feed button to the user. Both Firefox and Chrome used to work this way 10 years ago.
Then motherfucking evil Google began its war against feeds. It killed Google Reader first, then it removed the feed icon from their browser. Firefox quickly complied too.
Let's make it clear once and for all: yes, I, can add an RSS URL to my website to make discoverability easier, but it's not my job as a web developer to make feed discoverability easier. That's just a workaround. My job as a web developer should be to provide the right <link> element, and then the browser should know what to do with it. Expecting web developers to make their feeds easily discoverable is like expecting web developers to implement radio and toggle buttons from scratch in JavaScript+CSS: nobody does these things anymore, they're supposed to be native browser features, right?
And, as a user, I shouldn't write my custom JavaScript to parse the feed URL from the DOM. Just like I'm not expected to write my JS user script to get the title of the page. If the browsers refuse to provide such basic features, then it's a browser problem. I would say "choose a browser that natively supports feeds", but there's none left. So use extensions to mitigate the impact of feed-hostile browser politics.
https://rknight.me/please-expose-your-rss/

2023-12-10 10:01:19

The cancer of morally bankrupt tech companies is becoming harder and harder to eradicate.
What to do when you are a researcher in the disinformation field at Harvard when you get your funding withdrawn, because Meta's multimillion funding is apparently conditional to cutting the funding to the researchers who can call the company accountable for its immoral practices?
What to do when your own boss uses the Facebook gaslighting textbook, with phrases such as "misinformation is a fluid and subjective concept" and "we shouldn't be arbiters of truth", to justify the cuts to your funding?
I won't tell what I would do because I may be accused of violent language. But what I'm sure is that the physical safety of execs who are so invested in dismantling the fabric of our societies for profit, and are so invested in silencing researchers who call them accountable too, shouldn't be taken for granted in a healthy democracy. Democracy can survive only if those who actively try to poison the quality of the information given to the voters are hung on the streets.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/12/10/0035234/harvard-accused-of-bowing-to-meta-by-ousted-disinformation-scholar-in-whistleblower-complaint

2023-12-06 09:32:06

"Social investment" sounds like another terminal phase of the capitalist disease.
It occurs when even the most cynical anarcho-capitalist acknowledges that there isn't any investment left in roads, schools, hospitals, public transport, pensions etc., tax money basically goes to /dev/null, and the fabric of society won't hold much longer if things don't change.
However, the reaction STILL involves the topic invisible hand of the market.
Rather than acknowledging that public investment is required to keep the lights on and keep societies from falling apart, the social investment way expects private investors to pour money into things the government no longer want to do - and, of course, they're expected to act solely on the basis of profitability.
If the idea of private unelected individuals having the power of shitting down hospitals, schools and pension funds on the basis of short-term profitability sounds a lot like the plot of a dystopian cyberpunk novel about late degenerate #capitalism, it's because that's what it is.
https://theconversation.com/the-government-hopes-private-investors-will-fund-social-services-the-evidence-isnt-so-optimistic-218512

2023-12-05 14:50:54

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@npub1z0h…g8d7 sometimes you may have to make things more insecure in order to help Google protect your security.

2023-12-05 09:14:36

User scripts on Chrome (which includes TamperMonkey, Greasemonkey, Violent Monkey etc. and all of their customizations) will require developer mode to be enabled.
Of course, I'm very sure that this is because of non-technical people installing one of those extensions by mistake, copying and running some non-trusted JavaScript by mistake, and mistakenly getting their browser compromised.
Not because Google is an evil company that has decided to use all of its weight to break the browsing experience for all the power users, if that's what it takes to kill adblockers.
Google and its executives must burn in hell for their evil. And if you still use a Chromium-based browser you're also part of the problem.
Yesterday I also received a passive aggressive email from Google informing me that my MV2 extensions will stop working by June of next year, and hence I have only 6 months to rewrite them with MV3.
I'll make sure that not a single one of them gets migrated to their declarativeNetRequest abhorrent API. Using the MV3 API is like playing a piano blindfolded and with the right hand tied behind your back for no practical reason other than the owner of the piano being a sadist. I won't waste a single minute of my dev time to rewrite my software in a way that benefits a rotten company that forces thousands of developers worldwide to invest days or weeks of development time to rewrite their extensions only because they've decide to declare a war on adblockers.
My extensions from now on will be Firefox-only, I'll pull out the entries from the Chrome Store, and you folks don't have a single excuse not to use Firefox.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/userScripts

2023-12-04 12:33:09

Not all of my concerns about the #EU Cyber Resiliance Act (#CRA) have been dissipated - some aspects of its actual implementation are still a bit hazy.
But the biggest one seems to be addressed in the most recently proposed text (art.10):
"In order not to hamper innovation or research, free and open-source software developed or supplied outside the course of a commercial activity should not be covered by this Regulation. This is in particular the case for software, including its source code and modified versions, that is openly shared and freely accessible, usable, modifiable and redistributable".
I'm reading this correctly it means that the new constraints won't apply to open-source projects, and the usual no-warranty/as-is clauses of our licenses will still be valid.
Any legal expert out there that can confirm my interpretation?
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52022PC0454

2023-12-04 10:04:29

Are there any fellow Amsterdammers coming to see #Tool on May 27th? (It's going to be my 4th time, but there's never too many)
https://www.bandsintown.com/e/1030148894-tool-at-ziggo-dome

2023-12-03 12:03:00

Hosting #COP28 in #Dubai is like hosting a meeting for victims of sexual abuse in the house of a serial rapist.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/03/back-into-caves-cop28-president-dismisses-phase-out-of-fossil-fuels

2023-12-01 09:45:41

This article rang a lot of bells with me.
I heard about the inhumane performance evaluation at #Amazon before. And I experienced it on my own skin when working at #Flexport - which, at least during my employment there, proudly applied the Amazon performance management textbook.
I wouldn't advise Flexport to my own worst enemy, and I guess the same applies to any company whose HR strategy is inspired by Amazon's.
Flexport is the kind of company where people would literally receive an email along the lines of "we're going to lay off 20% of our staff soon, keep an eye on your mailbox in the next 5 minutes to know if you're in or out, and if you're a manager don't write directly to your reports to find out if they've been laid off until official communication comes". And, if you dared to criticize such an inhumane way of running a company on social media, you would literally get HR to harass and threaten you until you removed the comments. (I don't give a damn anymore now btw: I already left that cesspit a while ago, so I'm finally free to call a cesspit by its name).
I ended up on a PIP myself back in the day, after almost a whole career as an over-performer. And what the writer wrote in this article resonates so much with my experience.
In this kind of companies, you can end up on a PIP literally out of the blue, and even after having received literally zero negative feedback from your manager until then. A PIP with no prior warning isn't about improving your performance: it's just a way for the management to say "we genuinely don't give a fuck if you're out tomorrow, but we can't fire you because we actually don't have a reason for firing you".
In this kind of companies, performance isn't actually about the value you add. It's all about identifying a proxy metric that gives managers the illusion of objectiveness, slicing employees in buckets of arbitrary size based on that proxy metric, and anyone who is unlucky to end up in the bottom 20-30% goes on a PIP with no warning. In Flexport's case, the metric for engineers was the infamous number of commits and lines of code, even though basically everyone realized that it's as good as judging the quality of a book by its number of pages.
In this kind of companies, managers aren't even expected to have the skills to understand your job: they are just given a bunch of Github dashboards showing them how their reports perform according to the selected proxy metrics. Managers in this kind of companies don't give a damn if your job is to improve supply chains or to lay bricks.
Being a manager is a hard job because it requires people who excel both in hard and soft skills in order to understand all the nuances that go into somebody's performance and evaluate it properly, while also taking into account all things that happen to humans in their lives. In this kind of companies, however, the illusion of a objectivity and "performance through dashboards" removes that constraint: anyone who can look at a graph and read numbers can become a manager. Performance management becomes a multi-layered Kafkaesque nightmare. You don't go on a PIP because somebody genuinely felt that you were under-performing. You go on a PIP because "computer said so".
In this kind of companies, treating people like humans with their dignity and their complexity is seen as a liability rather than an asset. Once I emotionally broke down and told my manager some of the health+family issues that prevented me from giving my 100% in a given month, just to have him respond to me with "well, my father passed away a couple of months ago, but I didn't tell anyone nor I let that impact my performance: why should I care about your issues?". You'll notice that managers in these companies don't even bother to do team building activities, or facilitate communication and bonding among their employees - after all, why invest in people in a place where everyone is seen as a disposable asset?
This kind of companies are morally bankrupt, have the potential to permanently harm talented people and jeopardize their career, they are the worst emanations of the worst cynical capitalism, and we should always make sure to steer clear of them.
In this kind of companies, PTSD and burnouts are extremely common, and the management simply doesn't give a fuck about the damage they do to people unless it harms their finances and funding.
If hitting their wallets is the only way of getting them to care about their own employees, then it should probably be everybody's duty to ensure that their wallets are hit as badly as possible.
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-hr-performance-improvement-plans-pip-pivot-had-to-quit-2023-11

2023-12-01 02:59:04

This article rang a lot of bells with me.
I heard of the inhumane performance evaluation at #Amazon before. And I experienced it on my own skin when working at #Flexport - which, at least during my employment there, proudly applied the Amazon performance management textbook.
I wouldn't advise Flexport to my own worst enemy. It's the kind of company where people would literally receive an email along the lines of "we're going to lay off 20% of our staff soon, keep an eye on your mailbox in the next 5 minutes to know if you're in or out". And, if you dared to criticize such a way of running a company on social media, you would literally get HR harassing you until you removed the comments. (I don't give a damn anymore now btw: I already left that cesspit a while ago, so I'm finally free to call a cesspit by its name).
I ended up on a PIP myself back in the day, after almost a whole career as an over-performer. And what the writer wrote in this article resonates so much with my experience.
In this kind of companies, you can end up on a PIP literally out of the blue, and even after having received literally zero negative feedback from your manager until then. A PIP with no prior warning isn't about improving your performance: it's just the management saying "we honestly don't give a fuck if you're out tomorrow".
In this kind of companies, performance isn't actually about the value you add. It's all about identifying a proxy metric that gives managers the illusion of objectiveness (in Flexport's case it was the infamous number of commits and lines of code), slicing employees in buckets of arbitrary size based on that proxy metric, and anyone who is unlucky to end up in the bottom 20-30% goes on a PIP with no warning.
In this kind of companies, managers aren't even expected to have the skills to understand your job: they have plenty of dashboards showing them how you perform according to their proxy metrics, and they don't give a damn if your job is to improve supply chains or hit nails on their heads.
Being a manager is a hard job because it requires people who excel both in hard and soft skills in order to understand all the nuances that go into somebody's performance and evaluate it properly. In this kind of companies, however, the illusion of a objectivity and "performance through dashboards" removes that constraint: anyone who can look at a graph and read numbers can become a manager.
In this kind of companies, treating people like humans with their dignity and their complexity is seen as a liability rather than an asset - once I told my manager some of the health+family issue that prevented me from giving my 100% in a given month, just to have him respond to me with "well, my father passed away a couple of months ago, but I didn't let that impact my performance: why should I care about your issues?". You'll notice that managers in these companies don't even bother to do team building activities, or facilitate communication and bonding among their employees - after all, why invest in people in a place where everyone is seen as a disposable asset?
This kind of companies are morally bankrupt, have the potential to permanently harm talented people and jeopardize their career, they are the worst emanations of the worst cynical capitalism, and we should always make sure to steer clear of them.
In this kind of companies, PTSD and burnouts are extremely common, and the management simply doesn't give a fuck about it unless it harms their finances and funding. Let's all make sure that their wallets are actually hit badly, if it's the only way to nudge them to actually care about their employees.
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-hr-performance-improvement-plans-pip-pivot-had-to-quit-2023-11

2023-12-01 01:30:03

Denouncing the #genocide that #Israel's #Nazist government is committing in #Gaza must be the equivalent of a death sentence I guess, even if you are literally one of the smartest journalists alive today.
It doesn't matter how much traditional media tries to cover up the real genocidal motivations behind this war. History will never forget, history will never forgive Netanyahu. Hell awaits him and everyone supporting him.
https://presswatchers.org/2023/11/msnbc-cancels-mehdi-hasan-a-truth-teller-in-a-time-of-crisis/

2023-11-30 15:59:48

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@npub1v2s…mqq5 I'm firmly in the progressive and non-violent side. But Popper's paradox of tolerance kicks in every time I think of how to handle the violent and the intolerant who wouldn't think twice of being violent against me. And history teaches that WWII fascism was defeated only when Mussolini and Hitler respectively were hung upside down or had a bullet engraved in their skull, not through free and fair elections.

2023-11-30 11:12:05

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@npub1anr…s48g of course, that's been a fixture in my playlists for a couple of years heje

2023-11-30 10:21:40

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Instructions on how to set up your music automation yourself are available here: https://blog.platypush.tech/article/Automate-your-music-collection

2023-11-30 10:21:06

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And there we go with my top tracks of the year too - powered by #Platypush and #SQL.
https://social-media.platypush.tech/media_attachments/files/111/498/743/380/706/907/original/7abdddc6472d9dfe.png

2023-11-30 01:00:25

When it's that time of the year where all of your friends share their nice #Spotify Wrapped stories, but you haven't used Spotify since the time they broke libspotify without providing alternatives. Instead you have a script that logs all of your tracks directly to your db, so you can generate your own Wrapped stats with a simple SQL query.
https://social-media.platypush.tech/media_attachments/files/111/496/523/711/288/096/original/9c4d1bde5c7de5e7.jpg

2023-11-29 21:02:28

#Wilders is and will always be the worst vulture and scum of this earth.
https://www.dutchnews.nl/2023/11/raised-eyebrows-at-geert-wilders-kijkduin-refugee-visit/

2023-11-28 17:03:30

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@npub1jxe…6us2 Yes, neoliberal parties are (finally) dying off, after four decades, together with all of their cynical free market utopia.
But the "marginalized left" problem is really something that keeps blowing my mind. Up to the 1990s the most marginalized/oppressed communities used to compactly vote for Labour/socialist parties. Now they've flipped to the other side of the spectrum.
I've heard all kind of reasons behind this change - from the left having turned too much towards the center, to the left having turned too much towards the left and alienating moderate votes, to the left turning too much towards the elites, or too much towards the oppressed minorities, to favouring electoral coalitions that are so broad that ideals get diluted, to favouring fragmentation in the form of small parties that eventually gives the majority prize to the opposition.
It almost sounds like whatever we do, we're doomed to do it wrong in somebody's eyes, and we deserve to be punished. In these elections we had a very strong candidate (Timmermans), with a strong alliance between Labour, green and socialist left, and a strong program. Yet, we lost again to a fascist piper. I'm really not sure anymore if the problem is us or something else.

2023-11-28 16:38:40

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@npub1qjs…xp6v That's indeed true. And that's also the reason why the farmer's party (BBB) briefly became the top party in opinion polls a couple of months ago, before being deflated by its own lack of ideas - like all movements born out of protests, it didn't have solutions for anything.
Being a good opportunist, Wilders has taken all of their points into his own electoral program (like scraping the environmental commitments of the Netherlands, including limits to nitrogen emissions from fertilizers and methane emissions from cattle) and basically ripped off all of their votes.
I feel like the green transition will keep being a hard political issue to tackle because of the position that most of the far-right has taken on the problem.
Short-term sacrifices are easier to swallow if all the political forces across the spectrum agree that they're required, or we'll all get very harmed very soon (starting from the rural communities). And that was indeed the case until recently - until a few years ago no party would have been so reckless to campaign on an openly anti-environmentalist and climate-skeptic platform. Now that the taboo has been broken, and pro-environment politices have been labelled as elitist and pointless, it'll be much harder to get anything done.

2023-11-28 16:16:25

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@npub1nky…rk4g I'm always careful before falling into such generalizations, but I feel like it definitely applies to the Netherlands today.
Since 2020 we've been suffering of acute job shortages in the most basic professions that have almost become chronic.
Finding primary school teachers has become so difficult that we've opened the gates to foreign teachers who don't even know Dutch, and even lowered the bar to include people who don't even have academic degrees.
And let's not even get started with childcare (basically all of the workers in my kid's daycare are Moroccan, and getting them expelled from the country would mean nobody to take care of my kid when I work), healthcare (hospitals have become chronically understaffed, not because of shortage of doctors but because of shortage of nurses, janitors and basic ER personnel) and even public transport (we struggle to even find enough bus and train drivers, and more and more connection services get cancelled because there's nobody to operate the means of transportation).

2023-11-28 16:05:46

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@npub1qag…9gyn Yes, that's definitely a solution. But making cities like Amsterdam more affordable again will also help.
My city used to have a lot of social housing earlier, and buying a house was affordable by almost anyone with an average salary up to a decade ago.
If only the super-wealthy can afford a house here now (and even I couldn't afford my own house if I had to buy it today) it's mostly because we've let private corporations buy apartments in huge lots (plus lots of Airbnb/short-stay speculation up to a couple of years ago). That drastically reduced supply just while demand was ramping up, and corporate speculation means that most of those who owned a house actually had interests in pushing prices up.
For the first time since I've moved here homelessness has become such a big issue that even long-time local residents have been pushed out of their own houses, and a whole generation has been pushed out of home ownership.

2023-11-28 15:58:40

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@npub12tk…ga9f Well we aren't that far to have experienced many businesses and highly-skilled workers migrate to the other side of the North Sea :)
But, again, folks in Amsterdam know how many banks, companies and institutions have migrated here from the UK - even those who don't work in these industries have seen new corporate buildings being erected and more English-speaking folks in supermarkets.
Those in the countryside have literally had zero exposure to the fallout of Brexit. Even my mother kept telling me until recently that Brexit wasn't as tragic as many of us thought, simply because people like them have had literally zero exposure to the fallout.

2023-11-28 15:54:10

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@npub1kja…e5gq IMHO that doesn't apply everywhere (I've got the impresssion that political candidates in this election in the Netherlands really campaigned everywhere), but I feel like it may definitely apply to the US.
The US is a huge country with a long rural tail. Going after every little rural community is expensive, and given the limited amount of time in an electoral campaign it would mean to sacrifice some of the urban strongholds.
So I've also got the impression that most of the left-wing candidates have given up campaigning in rural America, while the more right-wing candidates have almost entirely given up campaigning in urban centers. Unfortunately, that's only going to increase the divide...

2023-11-28 15:42:11

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@npub18kk…6me4 @npub1r9j…4h54 @npub1zl8…pnyf Yeah, I've heard this objection before too...like, what can possibly be so complicated in putting a sequential number next to each party, with 1 indicating the top preference? 😆

2023-11-28 15:33:49

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@npub1h55…jfjp Agree, a more correct expression should have been "against my short-term interests".
Paying more taxes on my salary, on my house or on my bank account would definitely be against my short-term interests.
But those taxes will fund a better public healthcare (and I'll also benefit from it if I get sick, unlike the crappy state of the Dutch healthcare system), better public education for my kid, more affordable housing (which means less homeless people and less burglars, which have become an issue even in my posh Amsterdam neighbourhood), and a more sustainable green transition.
And, most of all, people that don't have to fight for their basic necessities and don't have the instruments to understand the full picture of the problems that afflict them are less likely to be embittered and angry to the point of voting for fascist pipers.
So yeah, on the short term more taxation and wealth redistribution definitely isn't in my narrow interests. But on the long term it'll definitely benefit everyone.
I think that most of those in my demographic+age group have understood this. We have become what years ago would have been described as the "elite" - educated wealthy mostly white folks who work in the wealthiest industries. Yet, unlike the elites of the 1970s-1990s, which used to vote for conservative jerks like Reagan, Berlusconi or Thatcher, who selfishly defended the narrow interests of the elites, we mostly vote for parties that put the common good before our own narrow short-term interests.
And, while in the 1970s-1990s the least educated and least wealthy used to cast their votes in the direction of Labour, socialist or even post-communist parties, they now cast their vote on the opposite side of the political spectrum, even if those people clearly state that they won't do anything to make their lives better.

2023-11-28 15:20:46

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@npub1057…a853 I wish my conclusion was wrong, but unfortunately data proves the theory to be right again and again.
There's a simple way of validating this hypothesis, and that's to super-impose a population density map to the map of electoral results. Doing this, either in the Netherlands, France or the US, shows the same pattern again and again.
There may be a couple of outliers (like Rotterdam in the Netherlands, or Austin in Texas), but the trend is very clear: cities are strongly left-wing, the countryside is strongly right-wing.

2023-11-28 15:14:05

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@npub18kk…6me4 @npub1zl8…pnyf I have various hypothesis about the detachment between polls and actual results.
First, I think that polls don't accurately capture the sentiment of the more rural electorate. They traditionally concentrate where the bulk of votes is (i.e. large cities), rather than going after the long tail of rural votes (which, especially in the US, is particularly long).
Second, it *may* be that those who vote for those parties don't actually say that they will vote for those parties when interviewed - either because some of them usually don't have an opinion until literally the last minute, or because they also know that they'll be perceived as intolerant/bigots.
Either way, the poll problem must be definitely solved. I can have a vague idea of what may cause it, but I don't have full access to the raw dataset to prove my hypotheses.

2023-11-28 12:00:56

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@npub1r9j…4h54 @npub1zl8…pnyf I don't think that I'm generalizing. It's just become hard to ignore the patterns at work here, if the same patterns keep repeating across different countries and different elections.
These patterns are mostly rooted in the far right's ability of identifying and "hacking" well-known sociological and psychological mechanisms.
The mix of us-vs-them rhetoric, keeping populations uneducated and angry, and making sure that they keep hating anything they're unfamiliar with rather than understanding them and interacting with them, has become such a trademark of 21st century far-right politics that everybody, from Wilders, to Orban, Salvini, Trump, Putin, Le Pen, Farage, AfD, PiS, have simply to leverage that textbook again and again.
They will keep winning or representing a continuous threat on our political systems until we either use their own weapons against them (which would suck IMHO), or we make sure that enough people have access to good education and develop critical skills (which is unlikely to bear fruit until the next ~20 years), or we try and target the issues of polarization and voter apathy with something along the lines of the Australian model (which probably won't fix all the problems, but it may fix some of them: Australia is basically the only Western country that hasn't been threatened by far-right forces also thanks to its political system that naturally neutralizes the extremes).