Roberto von Archimboldi

https://kolektiva.social/@RobertoArchimboldi

Born following the unholy union of a duck and a cardboard box, Roberto von Archimboldi entered the world as a broken, diseased disaster. He has been searching for joy ever since.

My profile picture is of an apple, the upper third of which is brown because it is rotten, held lightly between thumb and fingers

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Last Notes

2026-05-19 09:29:51 GMT

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I was going to try the liver one tonight. Fish here is very expensive and a bit out of my budget

2026-05-09 09:21:46 GMT

Here is my UK election hot take:
The people who vote Reform are small business owners and home owners in post-industrial parts of the country. That is owners of property with competitively low rental value. They are being shafted by the UK being an offshore money laundering centre and service centre for US capital.
The people who vote Green are the precariate, small time traders, and members of the repressed priestly caste (academics, researchers, charity workers, doctors, social workers). They are renting or heavily in debt to own property with a high rental value. They are being shafted by the UK being an offshore money laundering centre and service centre for US capital.
The Reform voters are pinning after an imagined empire. The vision sold is of Britain being top dog, exploiting all those foreigners for their wages and resources.
The Green voters are pinning after another imagined empire, although theirs has more potential, that of the EU. That pan-European empire also exploits non-Europeans for their resources and labour. It is less explicit about it, wrapped up as it is in talk of rights and the rule of law.
Neither party will deal with the fundamental problem which is that empire has never benefited the masses. Empire has always been a tool of capitalism. Capitalism is not just a mode of economic organisation. It is a political project. It maintains that power should flow from the ownership of capital. Empire benefits a tiny ruling class. The small time owner has no stake in that power.
Big capital destroyed the political power of the state from the late 70s onwards to prevent the transfer of power to the masses so that they could maintain their dominance. Austerity is just structural adjustment brought home.
Any project for change needs to be internationalist and democratic. The Greens, as the political wing of the anti genocide movement, might yet get there, but I doubt it.
#ReformUK, #GreenParty, #UKPol, #LocalElections

2026-05-08 10:23:18 GMT

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I can think of nothing more thrilling :)

2026-05-08 10:07:32 GMT

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the best resources for you are https://www.asaproject.org/
and Right to Remain: https://righttoremain.org.uk/toolkit/
In short, if you arrive on the beach you will be put in a hostel, if you are lucky you get a room to yourself. if you are unlucky, you will be sharing. If you are really unlucky, you will be in a camp. You get meals but that is it. This is section 98 support. You should be signed up with a GP by Migrant Help. Children have a right to school. Charities might visit and sort out some clothes, shoes and a SIM card. Care for Calais do that a lot.
After 5/6 weeks, you will probably be in the same place but you will get £9.95/week for essentials. You might get relocated anywhere in the country into a shared house. You might have to share a room. You will then get £49.95/week. That is section 95.
You are not allowed to work. You do have a right to legal aid, but you have to find the lawyer. There are very few people doing legal aid work

2026-03-07 11:01:14 GMT

I think that I am getting something wrong and maybe being unfair, but I don't quite see why all you coders are so upset about LLMs in code and then I am slightly suspicious that the real objection is being hidden.
The objection seems to break down into 3 distinct complaints:
1. The tech doesn't work
2. It is doing people out of job
3. It is bad environmentally and exploitative
1 may well be true, but is a shallow objection in the sense that if and when it turns out to be false, you should adopt vibe coding. If true, it is a good reason to avoid automatically generated code. It makes more work and projects worse. It can't explain the hostility. It can't ground that avoidance as a principle. It just a heuristic.
2. Is a bit rich coming from coders. Computers are ubiquitous because they do people out of a job. They were adopted at scale precisely because they reduced the need for human labour. Don't forget that in the 1960s a calculator was a job.
3. Is very true. It is awful. It is also true of clothes, food and the hardware it runs on. It must basically be true of every product we use. Veggies are grown by exploited migrant labour. Clothes are made in sweatshops in Bangladesh. The minerals and metals used to make the machines are mined in hellish conditions. I get not wanting to have one more thing that destroys life on earth and exploits racialized people because, hey, racism. But you need to take more radical action than raging against the slop machines. It requires concerted, independent, international working class organisation and action, not a boycott of one particular product. You really should take the organisation seriously. It is the only way we have a future on this planet.
Here is where I get uncharitable. I once read an interview with the less charismatic of the two programmers who wrote Elite (Ian Bell I think). He was complaining that no one had to write machine code anymore. It wasn't real programming to use libraries and abstractions and things I don't understand. I could imagine that Von Neumann thought that assembly language was cheating. You should just set the switches.
It feels like the objection is that it is no fun just having to think about the architecture of your code at the highest level, describe the problem you want solved and get the machine to solve it. If so, that is not a deep objection. Coding has changed and you will have to learn new skills that may be less interesting to you.
#LLMs, #VibeCoding

2026-02-23 16:03:21 GMT

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I hope that you are right. You probably are. We should note though that outside of a very few places, the sort of medicine that keeps me alive does not exist at the moment. I have full respect for a politics that says that it should.
Humans are good at looking after each other. There are skeletons of people with congenital disabilities who lived to an old age from the stone age. In addition technology does not require industrialisation. We see amazing tech from every continent long before capitalism got its boots on.
I do think that capitalism is a prerequisite of the sort of high tech medicine that we are discussing. I also think that capitalism is unredeemable and inherently racist. Capitalism is the combination of two theories. Firstly that nothing has value, merely price. This is the transformation of things into capital. Anything and everything is a fungible input into production or output for consumption. I think that the insight of double entry accounting is that everything is both. The second thesis is that the world should be run by and for the owners of capital. That is, by those who control the means of production.
Things are not capital. 10 carrots are not equivalent to a cheap paperback, though they may cost the same. More importantly, your land is not equivalent to the value of the iron deposit underneath it. However, by insisting on viewing the world in those terms, capitalism does lay the conditions for the creation of material abundance. We are seeing the effects of over production.
Marx thought that the problem was the second thesis, not the first. Maybe you do too. Sometimes I think that Marx was right. He thought that if the working class controlled the means of production, if they owned it collectively, they could plan production properly so that we produced what we needed for a good life for ourselves.
The reason that I usually think that Marx was wrong is that things are not capital. They are things. Land especially is the space of our lives. It is not something that can be exchanged because it is more efficient to pull the iron out than to grow crops or sunbathe on it or have meetings and so on.
It is here that capitalism and colonialism come together. Capitalism requires turning the space of our lives and our capacities to work and to care into inputs into production. Before the British colonialised most of the world they kicked the poor off the land and enclosed the commons. British capital having run out of places to invest at home (read: dispossess) went abroad and repeated the process. At its heart capitalism is about bringing more and more people into the world markets, that is to say subjecting everything and everyone to logic. It will have to create a group who has not to produce for those who have.
The problem is that is the logic of turning everything into capital that allows for the extraordinary technological acheivements of industrial society. The Marxists found that having control of the means of production still required a massive dehumanising bureaucracy. I think that is because freedom requires seeing each other and our world as valuable and non-fungible. Once you do that, you cannot ask me to give up my home, my sunbathing spot, my time for your high speed train.
It is not primitivism. We know that pre-colonial, including European societies, were technologically, artistically, spiritually, politically, and philosophically rich. They were not utopias, but they show the extraordinary range of ways that we could organise our lives. They cared much more deeply for disabled people than we do, but there were many things that they could not do.
My hope is that we can find ways of doing things that are better. I think that being able to work with others to create and to do, ie to be free, is better than a world where a privileged few have access to MRIs.

2026-02-08 12:21:24 GMT

I feel like there is a lot of confusion over the decision to seek re-trial in the Filton case. A number of different charges were tried together. Aggravated Burglary, Violent Disorder, GBH with intent, and Criminal Damage. Only one defendants was charged with GBH.
It is normal to try multiple defendants together on multiple charges. The test is: do the charges arise from the same incident or form a course of conduct? You might still split the indictment if some of the charges would cause prejudice or embarrassment. The default is to join the charges. The jury are then asked to come to separate verdicts against each of the defendants on each of the charges. Essentially you hold separate trials but at the same time because it is convenient and less stressful for victims and witnesses. It also reduces the chances of inconsistent verdicts.
Everybody was acquitted of Aggravated Burglary and three of the six were acquitted of Violent Disorder. There is no retrial of those charges. The acquittal is absolute. Yay
I can't say that I am surprised about the aggravated burglary acquittals. It was an ambitious charge. The prosecution would have had to show that the activists entered with the intention of using their hammers against people. Given that to the jury they are going to seem like brave, moral citizens committed to preventing genocide, it is hard to see how the prosecution could ever make a jury sure of that charge.
Without seeing the evidence the violent disorder acquittals are more surprising, but they would have argued that any violence that would have put a reasonable person of firm disposition in fear of her safety (the test) was done in self defense. That seems like it might be a plausible account of what went down.
The jury couldn't reach a verdict with respect to three of the violent disorder charges or the criminal damage or the one charge of GBH. The CPS will retry those charges. This is normal. Generally where the jury can't reach a verdict, the Crown has another go. The trial will only be of the GBH, violent disorder against three of the six and criminal damage. If the jury cannot come to a verdict again, normally the state gives up and does not seek a retrial.
There was no defense to the criminal damage charges, so the jury has been perverse there. Go jury.
The TL;DR is that the jury was not obviously perverse on the majority of the charges. The acquittals are absolute. The state is not being malicious in seeking a retrial. The state should stop selling weapons to Israel. The state is evil but the prosecution decisions are normal.
#Filton24, #PalestineAction, #LawFedi, #JuryTrial

2026-01-08 11:42:53 GMT

Is there a sensible application, ideally integrated with nextcloud, that will allow electronic authorisation? I would like to do two things for our charity:
1. Create a digital authorisation for storing and processing data for GDPR purposes
2. Create a digital authorisation to act on someone's behalf (a form of authority)
#HelpNeeded, #FOSS, #Nextcloud, #GDPR

2025-12-31 21:59:18 GMT

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now they are some seriously SMART objectives

2025-12-30 15:10:35 GMT

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signal does allow you to hide your number, though obviously not your Signal username. If you switched to that, you would at least limit the contact into available. Maybe it does not go far enough

2025-12-29 22:22:19 GMT

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I am genuinely laughing out loud

2025-12-29 21:55:03 GMT

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I love it.
Joking aside, I think that they forgot that he had a politics. In their heads he was a poor, oppressed human rights defender. They were shocked to discover that, despite not being white, he had views about power and who should have it

2025-12-29 15:44:44 GMT

I see that the hard right have decided to be upset that Egyptian revolutionary Alla Abd El-Fatteh once tweeted that we should kill all cops and Zionists.
I do think that something strange has happened to mainstream discourse. They are really scared of dissent. Nobody thinks that these tweets are a problem. Everybody, or almost everybody, thinks that lethal violence (killing) is justified in some circumstances, against some agents.
The British government flies reconnaissance flights over Gaza to support Israel in their war against Hamas (in reality to facilitate their complete destruction of Gaza). They think that in the circumstances people must be killed. It is not a radical position. The difference between Badenoch and El-Fatteh is who they want dead. (I would be very surprised if Kemi opposed the US killings in Nigeria).
This faux outrage serves only one purpose. It is to crush dissent. The Palestine solidarity movement with its call to globalise the intifada terrifies those in power. They know that there is a growing anti-colonialist movement that has serious revolutionary potential and they are scared. It must be deligitimised.
#AlaaAbdElFatah, #UKPol

2025-12-27 21:55:52 GMT

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I also thought that this article, though not easy to follow, was very powerful:
https://freesudangazette.com/2025/12/17/from-revolution-to-ngo-business/

2025-12-27 16:58:53 GMT

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now that is a feast. I know that it wasn't Christmas, but I hope that your Christmas was as good

2025-12-23 04:58:24 GMT

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good news

2025-12-22 22:01:58 GMT

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you are too kind

2025-12-22 21:50:59 GMT

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wow thank you. It was my reflection on a conflict that never got resolved at a social centre I was involved in

2025-12-22 20:59:46 GMT

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I don't know very much about the bad space. I will say this: the Jews who are complaining that comparing Israel to Nazis is antisemitic believe it. They may even be right. I am a Jew who used to think that. Binyamin Netanyahu is in terrible faith, but that doesn't mean everything he says is wrong or that anyone who thinks what he says is just trying to cow others into submission.
It is also obvious that people should be able to say that Israel is a Nazi state or that Zionism is racism or that the IDF is like the Nazis. 1. They might be right. 2. even if they are wrong and it is antisemitic, they are not trying to eliminate the Jews. They are just wrong and need to do some political work. This makes me think that TBS genuinely believed that Nina, Rich, Kolektiva are racist but they wrong to think that means that they must be driven off the fediverse.
Rich is right though. We don't know how to deal with abuse. I just think that our current 'strategy' is counterproductive. It is a vector for abuse and it destroys things that are good.

2025-12-22 20:44:56 GMT

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that is very true. I also find that in the spaces I move in we politicise the behaviour. Instead of saying, 'you are an arsehole and a bully' we say, 'you are racist and transphobic'. They probably are but this is not why we are so upset with them. It becomes a weird political fight instead of a straightforward conversation about the actual problem. The latter is much harder for the arsehole to wriggle out of

2025-12-22 19:32:31 GMT

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makes sense. Still, I want to go shop(lift)ing in London Drugs

2025-12-22 19:27:03 GMT

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Wait, there is brand called 'London Drugs' in Toronto?

2025-12-22 19:14:53 GMT

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I agree on the last point. I agree that people get tired of shouting at each other. I think that is a political failure and enables abuse. I also think that we should be slow to judge that someone is in bad faith. To prevent our charity in interpretation being abused, we need to be prepared to shout back. This does not of course deal with the problem of abusers in our spaces.
I have no idea whether the bad space people were on a power trip or trying to make the world a better place. They were certainly misguided. There is nothing safe about a world full of cops, even if you are a cop. You can of course create your own private space run on your own private terms, but don't mistake that for the public sphere.

2025-12-22 18:55:34 GMT

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I agree that we do not have good ways of dealing with abuse and abusers. I also think that we need to be much more into shouting at each and much less into treating disagreement as a reason to drive people out.
The Bad Space thing is a good example. I'm sure they genuinely thought that Nina and others were racist. They should have been taken seriously, but even if they were right, Nina should not have been ostracised. On this assumption, she is just wrong. They had a political disagreement. She wasn't and isn't a threat to anyone. She doesn't want black people dead, enslaved or out of society. if you take that view, bad faith actors can't manipulate what is in the end political disagreement to take power.
Even if they are not in bad faith, it is a still a problem. You end up requiring an arbitrator and then cops to enforce their decisions. In other words, you need a hierarchy. Policing speech is inherently conservative. It is seen in the way that mastodon.social excludes Palestinians because some Jews genuinely think that they are being antisemitic and the moderators are sympathetic. They are also enforcing their rules. The rules are bad. They require top down power. We should work to get rid of those dynamics by going back to shouting at each other.

2025-12-20 20:12:21 GMT

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that is awful. That is so unjust

2025-12-20 11:10:30 GMT

From a 'realist' foreign policy perspective why are European states so keen to get behind the US?
The current US regime is determined to extract ever higher tribute from its European vassal states. They want the EU to fund their war against Russia. (This is not to say that people in Ukraine don't have their own reasons for resisting the invasion, but those don't motivate the powers that be in Washington). The European powers don't have political or moral aversion to authoritarian war mongers. They are happy to work with Israel and the gulf states. They will get behind a US invasion of Venezuela.
So why line up behind the US? Why not make deals with Russia and China? They would have more power in that alliance. Is that so much European capital is actually US capital that the US could bankrupt Europe if they moved out of line or is it just good old fashioned racism? In end is it a commitment to white supremacy?
#EUPol, #Questions, #Politics, #ForeignPolicy

2025-12-20 10:12:37 GMT

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You are not so late. I have been trying to get my head round the documentation. I am not sure that I can install this stuff. Thank you. It does look like fresh has the best features

2025-12-19 18:22:27 GMT

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I certainly don't envy you having to navigate that minefield

2025-12-19 17:55:47 GMT

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thank you. I hope that liberation comes soon

2025-12-19 17:19:19 GMT

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you too. May it be full of joy

2025-12-19 16:16:37 GMT

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this is mind blowingly stupid and depressing. To think that the US academy used to laugh at Soviet biology because ideology drove what theories were accepted

2025-12-19 09:21:31 GMT

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this is probably the simplest

2025-12-18 23:34:17 GMT

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thank you. I will try

2025-12-18 23:34:05 GMT

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it looks like FreshRss it is. Thank you

2025-12-18 22:52:22 GMT

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thank you. I will investigate. I am a bit scarred by my ongoing struggles with nextcloud and php, but I should not let that deter me

2025-12-18 22:15:58 GMT

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do we know why the government decided to release some prisoners?

2025-12-18 22:14:55 GMT

I'm opening a can of worms, but now that I have a shiny server, I want an RSS server. I want to be able to point my phone and computer at it and see all my favourite blogs and podcasts. I also want it easy to install, configure and maintain in Debian. What do people recommend?
#RSS, #Debian

2025-12-18 17:38:18 GMT

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today and every day

2025-12-18 09:16:50 GMT

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thank you. That is a very good tip. I can have a go setting up and migrating to a test suite. I will need to find a spare machine, but I guess that I can just use a virtual box on my laptop.
I need to get into the discipline of taking notes too. It will help me move from following recipes online to understanding what is happening

2025-12-18 08:57:15 GMT

Maurice Stierl is right. Unless we resist the EU's continuing insistence that migration is a crisis and an emergency will end any democratic norms and rights.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2025/dec/18/ten-years-fortress-europe-served-cruelty-profiteers-racists-next-decade-up-us
#AbolishFrontex ,#FortressEU, #NoBorders, #Migration

2025-12-17 20:06:36 GMT

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good point. well made

2025-12-17 19:33:10 GMT

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that is the worry. Commercial kitchens can be pretty terrible places. I know nothing about bakeries. If your experience generalises, you will just have to found a cool, queer cooperative bakery making the best cakes

2025-12-17 19:28:37 GMT

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I hope that other bakeries are better

2025-12-17 19:23:26 GMT

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if only I knew what I was doing

2025-12-17 19:18:55 GMT

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I genuinely don't get why I would be more worried about Chinese surveillance than US or UK surveillance. The Chinese government has no power over me. The other two do. I like privacy too so I try to keep things off the internet, but in terms of surveillance, I would much rather use Chinese the western tech

2025-12-17 19:07:55 GMT

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can you point me at a guide to containerise nextcloud? It sounds like the way ahead. I must have done something wrong when installing the repository because my nextcloud instance through an error post update

2025-12-17 18:16:38 GMT

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it looks like I have to add this SURY repository. Still that is doable. I will do that. Thank you

2025-12-17 18:08:46 GMT

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oh brilliant. Thank you so much. I had no idea that I could get PHP8.0 on bullseye

2025-12-17 09:24:12 GMT

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I am using Debian. With bullseye the max php version is 7.4. With bookworm, the minimum is 8.2. nextcloud 25 maximum is 7.4, below nextclouds 26's minimum, but unfortunately 8.2 is also too advanced

2025-12-17 09:18:38 GMT

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thank you. I will do that

2025-12-16 23:59:09 GMT

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thank you. Could I move the nextcloud installation to one in a container? It has a lot of data on it.
It turns out that I am getting something about the update to bookworm wrong anyway because it decides that the new kernel has a problem and can't be configured

2025-12-16 22:35:10 GMT

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I can't get any further than 25 because 26+ require PHP >7.4 at least that is what I think is happening

2025-12-16 22:01:17 GMT

More help from clever people needed:
I am responsible for a small charities server. It is very out of date. With some help it has been updated to Debian Bullseye (I know, I know). With some struggle, I got our nextcloud instance up to 25 (I know, I know).
Updating to bookworm looks like it brings with it PHP8.2 which seems to be too advanced for Nextcloud 25. If that happens can I simply disable PHP8.2 with 'a2dismod PHP8.2' and enable PHP8.0 with 'a2enmod' or am I first going to have to find out how to install 8.0?
#HelpNeeded, #Debian, #Nextcloud, #PHP

2025-12-16 10:49:42 GMT

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love it. It stands in sharp contrast to the nonsense idea that does the rounds that ending oppression is the responsibility of the oppressor

2025-12-16 09:12:18 GMT

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it is a form of racism, but it is worth thinking about its specificities too. Racism has two poles, exclusion from the body politic and exploitation. The former leads to Treblinka the latter leads to chattel slavery. Both are evil. Antisemitism is very heavily characterised by the exclusionary pole. Anti-Black racism is much more about exploitation. If you are Black, you have to be kept from owning stuff but, in good times,
it is easier to have a political voice, as part of the working class. If you are a Jew, in good times, you might be able to own stuff, but you don't get the political power that would otherwise come with ownership.
Then there are other more contingent specificities. Islamophobia in Britain and the US is also about exclusion, particularly in its anti Arab guise. But where antisemitism pursues that exclusion through the conspiracy theory, the Jew preying on the vital strength of the nation and controlling the government, anti-Arab racism is pursued in clash of civilisation terms, the barbaric hordes coming to replace us.
Things might be very different in Australia. They are in France where the Arabs are very much part of the working class and excluded from politics. I imagine in Australia the 'replacement' fears are focused on China and the murderous exclusion on the indigenous population.
My two cents

2025-12-15 22:36:00 GMT

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I am fairly in favour of the ECHR, but look at Article 1 of protocol 1. It is a fairly strong protection of private property and would, for example, probably prevent a future left wing government from nationalising Thames Water by appropriating it. It also just doesn't protect classically liberal rights, like for example, freedom of movement, despite the wording of Article 8. It allows a great deal of state intervention in the affairs of the people within its jurisdiction.
It is not that I am against liberalism. I think two things: 1. The British establishment is not now and has not been liberal for a very long time. 2. The ECHR is not such a liberal document. It was conceived to protect western European states from a very particular threat. They have always chaffed at its constraints.
Some of the early cases are really interesting. You have the UK shocked to discover that human rights might apply in the colonies (Cyprus in particular). Note that the court did not uphold the complaint. They went the other way with a complaint against Greece under the colonels. Both were about whether derogation from the treaty was legitimate.

2025-12-15 10:57:05 GMT

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I think that it is easy to overplay the establishment's commitment to liberalism. One of the main motivations behind the ECHR was the 'threat' of communist parties coming to power in Western Europe. Having a supranational, quasi-constitutional mechanism to enforce liberalism was seen as a bulwark against a communist party coming to power and rewriting the national constitution. Now that the threat of communism is long gone, it doesn't seem odd to me that Europe's ruling classes are comfortable undoing protections against authoritarian governments.
This is not to disagree with David Allen Green. We need to stand up for the protection of rights. I also think that we need to acknowledge that the ruling class share the racism and authoritarianism of the far right. The threat they see from populism is its tendency to be isolationist or anti-Atlanticist and its tendency to be anti-austerity. Once, like Meloni or Farage, the far right comes into line on those two issues, the ruling class is more than happy to get behind them

2025-12-15 10:30:25 GMT

Proposal: change 'all cops are bastards' to 'all cops are scabs'.
#ACAB

2025-12-13 18:35:33 GMT

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do you have to declare your social media history? No. Do you have to justify your existence and humiliate yourself to get a shitty piece of paper? Yes. Why are people upset that the US has imposed this visa regime? Because it is hostile and humiliating. You are required to prove your worthiness by exposing intimate details of your life and then you are still liable to be treated as a threat. That is exactly the experience of the majority of the world when it comes to crossing borders and has been for many years

2025-12-13 17:44:15 GMT

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yes, but see my original post about the reality of what you have to do to get a visa. The decision maker has enormous discretion. Simply producing the documents they ask for is insufficient to get you a visa if you are African.
With the UK there is the further hurdle that even when you have the visa the border guard also has to satisfy herself that you are a genuine visitor. At a bare minimum you need a return ticket. If you are visiting a friend, they better be on standby to take a call. You are advised to travel with job contract, housing contract and other proof of your connections to the country where you live.

2025-12-13 11:43:58 GMT

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https://www.norway.no/contentassets/a7bc30faaf4144788590ef48e8a7c750/visachecklist2025.pdf

2025-12-13 09:14:11 GMT

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thank you. Just one more question: the files that I want on the server are ones that I want accessible through jellyfin. Should my jellyfin files be sitting under srv anyway? It feels like maybe it should not have access to my home folder

2025-12-13 08:41:34 GMT

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sorry, I just meant the official guidance that you find online for schengen visas. It was sloppy. I think that each embassy or subcontracted visa processing company issues has its own site.

2025-12-13 08:07:55 GMT

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that is what the website asks for. The reality is that you have to produce it in spades. If you can't produce extensive bank statements, a job contract, a housing contract, serious covering letter explaining exactly why you are visiting, what you are doing, who you know there, your full travel history, your life in the home country and why you are coming back, you ain't getting a visa.
I have friends resident in the UK, housed in stable housing and working who were refused a Schengen visa to go visit family in Norway. They had not given sufficient detail. The UK is worse

2025-12-13 07:57:16 GMT

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Sorry for the slow reply. I had to put my phone away yesterday. Thank you so much for this. I really appreciate it.
Is the idea simply that I create a directory '/srv/home' copy everything into it and then effectively point /home at /srv/home?

2025-12-13 07:49:33 GMT

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thank you so much. I was away from my phone yesterday, hence the slow reply. This is really comprehensive and helpful. I will study, implement and report back

2025-12-12 12:17:17 GMT

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that is helpful and explains why there is a need for gas powered turbines, even if they sit idle some of the time. I haven't been clear enough. My confusion is economic. Given that until upgrade there has to be gas, why do we have to pay every generator at the price of gas?

2025-12-12 12:13:41 GMT

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thank you

2025-12-12 12:09:33 GMT

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thank you. I will try. Is it likely that my home directory is not sitting under srv?

2025-12-12 11:43:57 GMT

You people are clever. Can you help? I recently set up a debian server on hetzner. I think that I made an error in creating the partitions because I appear to have run out of space on my home directory.
/dev/mapper/SERVERNAME--vg-root mounted at / has just 13G allocated to it and is full, whereas /dev/mapper/SERVERNAME--vg-srv mounted at /srv has basically the whole drive, 131G, and has 2.1MB on it. I get the impression that home directory is under the vg-root
If that is right, how can I expand the vg-root at the expense of vg-srv? If that is wrong, what do I need to do?
#Debian, #LVM, #HelpNeeded

2025-12-12 10:19:13 GMT

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so then I really don't understand why we can't adopt the ecotricity pricing scheme without upgrading the grid. Hopefully Rachel will explain

2025-12-12 09:10:09 GMT

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this is a genuine question because I don't understand why we can't make the shift now. I happily accept that we currently need gas generators because of reasons to do with the grid even if they sit idle a lot of the time. That presumably increases the price of gas generation way above the price of gas itself. You have to cover your running costs for when the turbine is not spinning. But why then is my bid price not just elevated to effectively subsidise my running? Why does the grid now have to pay everyone that subsidy?

2025-12-11 16:21:43 GMT

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this is my long-term plan, but for now I am moving around and don't have a raspberry pi.
I am very confused by DNS, but I found no IP which seemed to let me associate a name to my IP address. As long as I let apache2 through the firewall on ports 80 and 443, it seems capable of forwarding things to the jellyfin server. I have a feeling that this is really insecure, but I doubt that I can do much about that
Thank you

2025-12-11 11:09:57 GMT

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thank you so much

2025-12-11 10:45:00 GMT

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will search. Thank you

2025-12-11 09:37:47 GMT

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thank you. I will investigate

2025-12-11 09:01:03 GMT

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thank you. Where do I buy such a cheap domain name please?

2025-12-11 08:59:50 GMT

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this sounds exciting. Hell yeah

2025-12-11 08:58:55 GMT

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this is a brilliant insight and very important. I think that it generalises. None of us have thought very hard about everything. It would be impossible. We do have beliefs about a vast range of topics. That is not a bad thing. It is an important a part of understanding. Two things follow. 1. We forget that non experts don't have very solid, well thought out opinions. 2. We are easily misled and vastly wrong.
I have never thought very hard about vaccines. I am pretty certain that they are a good thing, safe and help others. I am sure that you could talk me out of that belief if you set your mind to it, or at least the safety bit. I have thought very hard about migration. You are not going to convince me that people's mobility should be restricted. There is much more of the former than the latter.
The upshot is that it is not just disinformation campaigns that work. You read opinion pieces and hear debates that portray some phenomenon as a problem and you just vaguely assume that there is an issue, even if you find yourself opposing the dominant position.
I do think that when you are an expert on something, you need to explain to the misguided why they are wrong, even when their position is offensive. My misguided vaccine scepticism or transphobia or racism isn't deep. I have just picked up on a cultural milieu and need help to learn

2025-12-11 08:29:30 GMT

despite being a tech incompetent, I decided that it would be fun to set up a jellyfin server on a rented server so that I could share films with friends. This is fine. I managed it. I have a question to which I think the answer is 'no':
Is there any way of connecting to the server over https without registering a domain name and pointing it at the server?
At the moment I just point my browser at IP-ADDRESS:PORT but of course there is no security certificate.
#Jellyfin, #HelpNeeded, #Infosec

2025-12-09 09:44:20 GMT

I find myself irritated by talk of EU tech sovereignty. This is in part because I hate the EU with a passion. That drown my friends in the Mediterranean and fund their torture in Libya. I think that it goes deeper.
What is needed is not EU tech, but tech that belongs to us, or at least the working class. I don't care if it is programmed in Chennai, Changdou, Cracow or California. In fact, ideally, it would have contributors from all of those places. 'We' are not competing with the US or China. We are trying to find a way of sharing the world with others and solving the problems that the human condition throws at us in our various specificities. We can only do that through collaboration across national boundaries.
#FOSS, #EUTechSovereignty, #Nationalism

2025-12-07 18:37:59 GMT

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Parr published more photographs from the IDEX arms fair than are in this article but I cannot find them online. They are some of the best of Parr's work in my opinion:
https://martinparr.com/2009/page/5/
#MartinParr

2025-12-07 18:17:03 GMT

I love Martin Parr's work. He can be deeply unkind, but generally only to subjects that deserve it. He is kind in the way he highlights our ludicrousness. His images are always funny. Now he is dead.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/dec/07/landmark-british-photographer-martin-parr-dies-aged-73
#MartinParr, #Photography

2025-12-07 10:31:25 GMT

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The origins of totalitarianism or the human condition

2025-12-07 10:23:56 GMT

The good people at Brighton's Jollof Cafe present 'Strictly Come Jollof'. I don't know quite what entails, food and dancing probably. It will be great. See you there
#Brighton, #JollofCafe, #Events, #Xmas, #Refugees, #Migration
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/115/677/748/767/722/927/original/c4f570043d8876b4.jpg

2025-12-05 22:53:15 GMT

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I don't know but you should

2025-12-05 20:33:36 GMT

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very wise my fri

2025-12-05 20:00:30 GMT

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I was getting worried that I had not seen a post from you for a while

2025-12-05 19:25:28 GMT

probably a nonsense thought but... if you look at the Civil Procedure Rules in the England and Wales, the whole thing is aiming at litigants settling their own dispute, on their own terms and in their preferred manner. The courts and law provide a backstop, a default for when the parties can't find a way to compromise.
The criminal law, on the other hand, insists that only the state can try, judge and condemn wrong doers. There is no space for individuals to settle their differences or the victim to decide on process and outcome.
You might think that this is because the law is entirely in the service of capital. Private law disputes are money disputes, contract and tort mostly. Capital both wants to be left alone and to have a sure and consistent regulatory framework. That is what the CPR does. Capital also needs protecting from the workers who it exploits. It mobilises the state to ensure that they are under control and its interests are protected. This is why the same freedom that capital wants for itself cannot be extended to the criminal law

2025-12-05 08:36:40 GMT

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and what, if anything, has brought about the release? Does it mean anything?

2025-12-04 21:14:54 GMT

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I will have your saffron. They look amazing

2025-12-03 18:38:50 GMT

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so, Nick Bano makes the argument in 'against landlords' that landlords were effectively abolished by the 1970s because tenants were given very strong rental rights. The proliferation in social housing was down to landlords being forced to sell their unprofitable housing. It was bought by owner occupiers or councils. The councils were well funded by central government to buy up the excess stock. I don't know if that counts as a 'market based solution', but he makes both a compelling theoretical and empirical case.

2025-12-03 14:24:49 GMT

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I agree that politeness is valuable. It shows a willingness to engage with your interlocutor. What I also think is that requiring politeness is a way of maintaining the status quo. This is true of all policing of speech. Somebody has to adjudicate. That means that they have power.

2025-12-02 09:43:55 GMT

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thank you

2025-12-02 09:30:00 GMT

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The other feature of the discussion that grinds my gears is the absence of the discussion of rent. The vast majority of the benefit bill is spent paying for housing. That is obviously directly proportional to the price of rent. It is just a subsidy to landlords. In turn that is a way to channel money to the middle classes. It is a way for the state to fund retirement in a huge number of cases.
My source is myself. I receive the highest rate of benefit possible, I think. Higher DLA and limited capacity for work supplements to UC. Over half of my income is to cover housing costs and I own my home. It pays my maintenance charge. It would be much higher if I had the full Local Housing Allowance. You want to bring down the benefit bill, bring down the cost of rent.

2025-12-02 09:13:23 GMT

The amazing Brighton based Jollof Cafe are having a Christmas dinner on Friday 19 December. You do not want to miss out
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/friday-night-jollof-cafe-festive-version-tickets-1974966306387
#Brighton, #Xmas, #Food, #Refugees, #Migration, #Events

2025-12-01 18:01:25 GMT

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I love FIP because there was some guy in Brighton who for years used to rebroadcast it from his garden. We all thought that we could pick it up from France. I think that he got busted in the end. I hope not. I wanted to help pay the fine, but I never saw a crowdfund. Maybe it is a Brighton urban legend and we could get it because there was a big enough antenna on the French coast

2025-12-01 10:05:32 GMT

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it would certainly be more enticing than a collection of engravings if you were hoping to lure people up to your room

2025-12-01 09:58:26 GMT

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the number of novelty telephones featuring cursed Disney characters is somewhat surprising

2025-11-30 21:19:54 GMT

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sorry, it is still 7-2 on aggregate