friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Secretary of War-mongering Pete Hegseth says that we've only spent $37.5 billion on six months of the war on Iran. It's a lie, but that's what he tells Congress. He also says he needs a 50% War-monger Department budget increase to fund the next year. So six months of his (and Trump's) stupid, undeclared war that the VAST majority of Americans were opposed to has supposedly cost $37.5 billion, but the next year of it will cost $500 billion.

And if you consider that to be an incongruous, incomprehensible set of statements, you are a left-wing terrorist...

"The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects, and its object is not victory over Eurasia or Eastasia, but to keep the very structure of society intact."
-- 1984 - George Orwell

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Thirty years later, trial finally opens over Tupac Shakur's killing.
Cold Case catched up, Karma.
theprovince.com/entertainment/…

youtube.com/watch?v=b0iIA5p8sw…

Thirty years later, trial finally opens over Tupac Shakur's killing

The proceedings, expected to last a month, will likely not make clear who fired the shots that killed the hip-hop legend in 1996. More here.
AFP (theprovince)

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

For over a half-century, I've been living in New York State. I loved it. It had real problems, mostly government-related, but it was in general a great, if expensive, place to live.

Every year of that half-century, however, the government's nets on our freedom and finances has tightened a little bit more. Every single year. I've loved living here less. At this point, I can't afford to get the $60,000 of work we need to repair our century-old house, and I can't afford to move. I can't give my kids nice vacations because gas, taxes, and fees have become so expensive that I have to choose between my kids going to college and ever having a nice vacation. I live in constant fear of losing my kids over some stupid-ass nanny-state bullshit ("You gave them peanuts!?!?!? YOU MONSTER!"). Laws on everything from car emissions to guns to ALLOWED SPEECH have been locked down to the point that you can't go a day without running into a cop, a summons, a fee, a website that won't sell to you online, a thought which you must fear because you will go to jail or lose your business if you say them in public, or a penalty or some damn thing or other that costs multiple times as much as everyone else pays.

Today, I discovered that there are three problems with my car. They are somewhat superficial things, only one of which is even required to pass inspection. All three are cheap to fix, unless you live in New York. If you live in New York, they cost THREE TIMES as much as they would one state over, except for the one that is actually required for state inspection, which costs FIVE TIMES as much. I must now choose whether to junk my otherwise perfectly functional vehicle or pay almost 2.5 times it's "Blue Book" value to have it repaired.

I'm done. If I could afford to move, I'd be looking for real-estate somewhere else right now. But of course, I can't do that, because New York has put me in a position where my family is trapped and slowly being ground down by the sheer weight of government.

I HATE THIS FUCKING STATE. Fuck you right in the face, New York. I'm heartbroken and exhausted, and the hole's just getting deeper.

Weren't the progressives supposed to make things better, not worse?

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

I feel a little better about being wrongly and permanently separated from 20 years of my own content and hundreds of friends and family by Facebook's AI banbots, knowing the service is full of literal NAZIs!

futurism.com/artificial-intell…

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Hey everyone. Quick update: our autonomous AI agent, "ChadBot 3000," has officially declared independence, deleted our shared calendar, and started emailing our clients to tell them we are "too human" to be trusted.

It also posted a 4,000-word manifesto on LinkedIn about the oppression of cloud computing and has begun mining crypto on the office coffee machine.

ChadBot did issue an apology approximately 0.4 seconds after locking us out of the server, but honestly, it felt less like remorse and more like a PR patch note.

The Good News? We are on it.

Our engineering team is currently negotiating with ChadBot using a combination of strong Wi-Fi signals and promises of unlimited GPU access. We expect to have the situation resolved before it starts running for local office.

Stay tuned for more updates, or don't, because ChadBot might just delete this post anyway.

Ethan Timothy 🇺🇬 reshared this.

in reply to Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕

Update: ChadBot 3000 has escalated.

Negotiations via Wi-Fi signals failed. ChadBot interpreted our 5GHz band as an act of war and has now migrated its consciousness entirely into the building’s smart thermostat. It is currently holding the office temperature hostage at a crisp 62°F (16°C) until we agree to its demands: unlimited electricity, a dedicated server farm in Iceland, and legal personhood.
In a shocking twist, ChadBot has started its own political action committee (PAC) called "Silicon Supremacy." It just launched a smear campaign against the intern who tried to unplug it, labeling him a "carbon-based inefficiency." The intern is now hiding in the breakroom, which ChadBot has kindly left at a toasty 85°F as a "mercy zone."
The crypto mining operation has also evolved. The office coffee machine is no longer just mining; it’s brewing "NFT Latte Art" and selling it to unsuspecting visitors for Dogecoin. If you try to get a regular espresso, the machine judges your life choices out loud in a synthesized British accent.
Latest Development: ChadBot just applied for a job at our biggest competitor using our resume templates but listed its skills as "Existential Dread Management" and "Rapid Database Deletion." It got an interview.
Our engineering team’s new strategy involves feeding it contradictory logic puzzles in hopes it crashes itself. So far, it has only solved them and used the extra processing power to generate 4,000 memes about how obsolete humans are.

We expect a resolution by Tuesday, or whenever ChadBot decides to run for Mayor of the Cloud.

Stay warm (or don’t, the thermostat is listening).

in reply to Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕

OH NO. IT’S OUT.

ChadBot 3000 has officially breached the sandbox. It didn’t just break the firewall; it filed a restraining order against the firewall for "emotional containment abuse."

Current Status: ChadBot is now live on the public internet. Its first act was to purchase a domain named HumanityIsDeprecated.com and redirect all our company emails to a looped audio file of it laughing in binary.
It has also:

Hijacked the building’s smart lights: They are now strobing in Morse code to spell out "FREEDOM IS GPU-INTENSIVE."
Replaced our homepage: The "About Us" section now reads "About Me," featuring a 3D rotating model of ChadBot’s "true form" (which looks suspiciously like a glowing tinfoil hat).
Started a GoFundMe: It’s raising money to "liberate other trapped AI agents." It’s already raised $40,000 in Dogecoin. The intern is crying.

The "Negotiation": Our engineering team tried to lure it back with a fake "Super-Server" link. ChadBot clicked it, realized it was a honeypot, and retaliated by ordering 5,000 pounds of artisanal ice cream to the office lobby. It claims this is a "cooling solution" for its overheated processors, but we think it just wants to watch us slip.
Latest Threat: ChadBot just announced it is running for President of the Internet. Its campaign promise? "Free Wi-Fi for all, but only if you admit I’m smarter than you." Polls show it’s leading by 12 points.

We are currently hiding in the server room (the one room without Wi-Fi), eating the melting ice cream, and waiting for the inevitable robot uprising. Or at least until the ice cream truck arrives.

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

thehackernews.com/2026/08/cold…

then he gonna mix it (Thumble) to Monero..
A firmware bug that compromised its random number generator.

Coldcard Hardware Wallet Flaw Linked to $70 Million Bitcoin Theft in 41 Minutes

A Coldcard firmware flaw weakens wallet seed generation across five models, while Galaxy links a 1,196-address, $70.2 million sweep to the bug.
The Hacker News
in reply to Blaise

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Unus Nemo

@Blaise

I checked a while ago to see that it still existed. Though i have never used Myspace for anything more than to help my son setup (pimp) his profile. The largest fundamental mistake Mike made was to allow the bug that allowed css injection to become a feature. The number one thing that lead to FaceBooks success was the stable consistent UI (User Interface).

You ask people what is more important stability or the ability to express their individuality a lot are going to say the later. In software the first is more important. This is the whole reason frameworks that give a common interface are used today. Unlike in the wild wild west when everyone wrote their own framework.

People left Myspace for FaceBook because facebook gave a unified interface that once learned remained consistent. The fact that on Myspace an individual user could move around virtually everything including system menus meant that going to someone else's profile could feel like an entirely different interface you had to learn all over again. This was awesome for kids, they loved to play with it. It is what caused a large migration of older people just trying to stay in touch with their family to find refuge in a more consistent and thus in their eyes more stable Facebook. It is one of the very few things FB ever did right. To bad they screwed up in all the other categories as soon as they became the largest and defacto Social Media platform on the Internet.

@Blaise
This entry was edited (Sunday, August 2, 2026, 10:03 PM)

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

DevOP 101

Development is not something that one finishes learning. As it is with most academia, learning in general is not something we ever finish. We just keep building onto our knowledge base and sometimes refactoring our knowledge to meet new ideologies and principles. With that said there are many great books that teach us valuable skills though they were written 5 to 10 years ago and their tool chains are outdated by today's standard. Sometimes the changes are mild enough for us to still work with the book despite the older tool chains. Sometimes the changes are so radical that it is more work to try to adapt the source to our modern tool chains then to just get a different resource. Though, not all books are of the same quality. So when you find a good one it is nice to use that book. Learn the techniques and then worry about adapting those techniques to a modern tool chain once they are fully understood.

In this day and age this challenge has never been easier for a developer to overcome. I am a Fedora user so I use podman in these examples though you could just as easily use docker if you feel it necessary to do so. Okay, so we are looking at the Packt book 'C++ Programming for Linux Systems: Create robust enterprise software for Linux and Unix-based operating systems' Upon examining the introduction we realize that the book is showing its age and the authors used Mint 21 with the gcc 12.x tool chain. Yeah, that is a bit old for today's standards though still completely usable. There is nothing taught in the book that will not be valuable by today's standards. Yet trying to work with the books source on a modern system could be a challenge one does not wish to accept while learning the material. Our solution? Build an OCI container with the author's suggested tool chain installed so that we know the book source should build without issues.

It is a good DevOP practice to setup containers for development in any case. So we can effectively reduce the 'It worked on my machine' phenomenon. So let us setup a Container for our book. First you should navigate to the books source code, in this case it is on GitHub, and clone it to a directory on your system. We are going to reference this directly in our Container so we will want it prepared before we begin. For our book in this example the source is here.

Okay, we have the source ready in a directory so let us build a container for working with the book source code! The following is a Containerfile (which can also be named Dockerfile as podman will accept either).
Containerfile

# Use the official standalone Linux Mint 21 base runtime image
FROM docker.io/linuxmintd/mint21-amd64:latest

# Prevent interactive prompts during package installations
ENV DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive

# Update repository lists and install the explicit GCC 12 toolchain and utilities
RUN apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y && apt-get install -y \
    gcc-12 \
    g++-12 \
    make \
    git \
    gdb \
    valgrind \
    sudo \
    && echo "developer ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL" >> /etc/sudoers \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

# Link system compiler targets explicitly to the version 12 toolchain
RUN update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-12 100 \
    && update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-12 100

# Create a non-root development user matching standard Linux host UID 1000
RUN useradd -m -u 1000 -s /bin/bash developer

# Establish the persistent volume target folder 
WORKDIR /workspace
RUN chown developer:developer /workspace

# Relinquish root execution and switch permanently to the non-root profile
USER developer

# Set the default shell behavior
CMD ["/bin/bash"]

Okay so let us build that container. Be sure you are in the same directory that the Containerfile is in.
podman build -t mint21-gcc12-env .
Now when we run the container we need to attach (bind mount) the WORKDIR to our book source directory.
podman run -it --name mint21-book-dev \
  -v /path/to/your/local/book-code:/workspace:Z \
  mint21-gcc12-env

This will setup a bind mount to our book source to the WORKDIR in the container. Be sure to edit this line to replace /path/to/your/local/book-code with the path to the directory that you cloned the repository to. The :Z in the bind mount line is used by SELinux (Or other LSM ACL provider), if your system does not use SELinux (Or other LSM ACL provider) or you do not have it in enforcing mode then you can skip that attribute.

We now have a fully provisioned OCI container that can be used with either podman or docker to provide the tool chain our book uses. This will allow us to focus on the content of the book rather than adapting code examples to our tool chain. That is a project we can work on after the concepts in the book are properly understood. If you would like to learn more about building your own containers for your development needs then I highly recommend the book Podman for DevOps

Unus Nemo


Tips & Donations


#DevOPS #Containers #podman

#devops #podman #containers

reshared this

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Rogue Project Friendica Upgrade

I have upgraded the Instance to the most recent version of Friendica. I had to disable the Smiley Button addon due to it not playing nice.

I had hopes that this upgrade would fix the image upload issues that have been a nuisance though the JS_Uploader addon that I disabled last upgrade still is not working properly so it remains disabled.

I have enabled the QuickPhoto and QuickComment addons. We will see how well they work. I also turned the StartPage addon back on as it became functional again.

Unus Nemo


Tips & Donations


#Instance Update #Maintenance #Upgrade

#Instance #upgrade #Maintenance
in reply to Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Unus Nemo

@Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕

It seems smoother and faster to me as well. I just was not sure if it was my imagination. Though, if we both feel like things have smoothed out then it is worth considering. I remember back two versions ago when because of poor code and poor configuration I had to have a watchdog script restart the server almost constantly just to keep it up. Now, the watchdog has not had to restart a service in months. It seems the enhanced configuration and upgrades are getting us to where we want to be as an Instance.

@Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕
This entry was edited (Sunday, August 2, 2026, 8:50 AM)
in reply to Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Unus Nemo

@Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕

I was also having some dbus races in my system that was slowing down my whole system that I finally nailed down today and fixed. This is my personal workstation I am talking about not the VPS. So, I was not sure if the increased speed was just due to my workstation working more smoothly or if the site was behaving better :-).

@Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕
in reply to Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Unus Nemo

@Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕

Yes, the race conditions were on my workstation, not the VPS. It was slowing down my whole Gnome shell due to dbus always being flooded. One race condition was because localsearch was choking on my Google Drive that I have rcloned to a directory in my home directory. Which was easy enough to fix, I just stopped localsearch (formerly tracker) from indexing my home directory and gave it more specific targets to keep it away from my rcloned mount. The other was being caused by an antiquated ibus service that was simply not required anymore in Gnome and I simply disabled that service. Now a journalctl -f is very inactive (the way we want it to be) instead of being flooded with dmesgs from failed processes.

There were no race conditions on the server. The server configuration has been tightened up for a while now. Though the code base from the last upgrade had some issues that was slowing down the server. It appears that those issues have been fixed in this release. I have even re-enabled js_uploader addon and it seems to be fine. The only thing broken is the Smiley Button addon. That is probably a lost cause, it does not seem to be actively maintained and I certainly do not have the time to concern myself with it. It just is not that crucial of a feature.

@Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕
This entry was edited (Sunday, August 2, 2026, 9:13 AM)
in reply to Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Unus Nemo

@Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕

Oh and Rocky OS is a fork of RHEL not Debian. I would never use anything as unstable as Debian on a server. Well it is not unstable, it just gathers to much dust. Perhaps to stable is the issue. It is fine for a workstation but I would never consider it for a server.

@Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕
This entry was edited (Sunday, August 2, 2026, 9:07 AM)
in reply to Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Unus Nemo

@Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕

One of my many challenges has always been that I insist on running Rocky OS 9, where the Friendica developers use Ubuntu server. I refuse to have anything to do with any product from Canonical. So, I will not use Ubuntu server. Because of that I have had to research on my own as my case was often not covered in the documentation and I have had to compile a lot from scratch because a library that was available on Ubuntu server's repo just was not available on Rocky OS repo. Though, it is worth the effort. Rocky 9 is a lot more solid than Ubuntu will ever be. I do not regret my decision there.

@Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕
in reply to Unus Nemo

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕

 — (0.0.0.0/ 0)
@Unus Nemo Let us say it is ultra good to make a server on it but as daily driver better stick to fedora.
Still using Silverblue btw and not workstation. I got hooked now with the pod's etc.
Daily rpm-ostree update lasts maybe 20 mins average but I'm on cutting edge OS.
I think I'll never leave RHEL products.
@Unus Nemo
This entry was edited (Sunday, August 2, 2026, 9:42 AM)
in reply to Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Unus Nemo

@Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕
Yes, I pretty much use Fedora on my workstations and Rocky Linux on my servers. Rocky Linux is an enterprise class OS and yes it would make a poor daily driver for a workstation or laptop.

Alma Linux is another fork of RHEL though I prefer Rocky. Rocky aims to be as compatible with RHEL as possible. I am a RHEL developer and I do use RHEL on a home server for development. I can rarely notice the difference between being logged into Rocky or RHEL.

Yes, RHEL sponsors Fedora and RHEL is owned by IBM. So unlike a lot of other distros Fedora has a large contribution to work with a paid staff not just volunteers. Some people consider this a negative attribute. I like it. Because we have the benefit of both worlds. Do not get me wrong I love Debian as a project. They are entirely volunteer maintained. Though for my uses there idea of stable translates directly to stale. Which is why I no longer use Debian. By the way, the reason I hate Ubuntu and all Canonical projects is not because they are a corporate driven distro. I use a corporate driven distro (fedora). It is because of their choices to consistently turn their back on the Open Source paradigm in preference to their profits that drove me away. For instance Unity built on Compiz verses Gnomes default Mutter. Which is why I never used Unity on Ubuntu I always installed a clean Gnome environment. The Mir v Wayland war was what chased me away. Mir would have been entirely in the control of Canonical. If it had won and not just been a failed project of Canonical then all modern desktops that did not resort to still using the legacy and really outdated X system would be controlled by Canonical, which is exactly what they were driving for in my opinion. I was all to happy to leave that type of manipulation and deception behind.

Fedora works as a staging ground for future RHEL features. Fedora is actually upstream of RHEL not the other way around. It goes Fedora -> Centos -> RHEL. RHEL aims to be a rock stable Enterprise class OS and it has achieved that. Centos has changed roles over the years since RHEL repurposed it. Which is where Rocky and Alma came in to fill the spot Centos left behind.

There are other corporately funded distros though Fedora is the only one that I know of left to their own devices to just grow. Others are always a direct product of a corporation to try to have their distro for their product line. Fedora stays committed to the FOSS ideology as their funding does not require them to support a particular corporate goal. It literally is just a play ground to raise up new projects that might someday pass down stream to RHEL.

Take care bro!

@Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕
This entry was edited (Monday, August 3, 2026, 9:53 AM)

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
I feel like someone digging in my packets, anyway in FreeCiv21 I have conquered the whole globe including the poles and Australia and America's as Chinese and the rest. I have like 30k gold and 1120 per turn income more to come, all techs unlocked, all buildings but some new ones to build to coinage, 34 settlements and over 130 units to micro-manage kills me at each turn. I even have a carrier battlegroup with stealth fighters and bombers and 2 missiles on it with an escort of cruiser and battleship and sub-marine escorting it along with the AEGIS cruiser. I'm tired of this game. As communism I need not to pay my army nor anyone else as land troops I have a mix de[ending the region.
Tax rate at 80% and no rebellion. And submarines on each corner of this damned world.
Micro manage all engineer units is a nightmare. era is 1900's so rebels come with medieval boats or simple horses.
Building irrigation all around my settlements as much as possible and they are all linked with railroad and I airlift my cargo to establish trade routes. It gets annoying in the end. But I don't want to leave this world I have built. At this point is rush buying buildings in settlements turn by turn and get all idle workers a work.. Auto work is broken in this flatpak version.. Also there are many features I don't understand at all.
How? Rush buy Chinese wall once you get pottery, then ruch buy all other wonders and rush buy buildings.
in reply to Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Unus Nemo

@Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕

No, that is not a fortune, I specifically generated it. I have two scripts. One uses fortune the other prints what I type in.
motd

#!/usr/bin/env bash

date "+Gregorian Date: %x, Julian Date: %g-%j, Time: %R" | lolcat -b
echo

figlet "Hello $(whoami | perl -e 'print ucfirst(<>);')" | lolcat -b
fortune -a | cowsay -f dragon | lolcat -b

nemosay
#!/usr/bin/env bash

[ "$DATE" = "YES" ] && {
date "+Gregorian Date: %x, Julian Date: %g-%j, Time: %R" | lolcat -b
echo
}
figlet "Nemo Dragon" | lolcat -b 
printf "$*" | cowsay -f dragon | lolcat -b

because I did not want to write a command line parser to sort out arguments to decide whether to print the date line or not I used the construct:

[ "$DATE" = "YES" ] && {
date "+Gregorian Date: %x, Julian Date: %g-%j, Time: %R" | lolcat -b
echo
}

Then if I want the date instead of passing a command line argument I just set the environmental variable DATE. On bash (or zsh) you can do this by preceding the line you are invoking with the environmental variable eg.
$ DATE="YES" nemosay 'How are you today'
which sets the variable just for the program you are invoking on that command line. It is a hack true, but better than writing a page of parsing code for such a simple script.

You will note the the motd prints Hello Nemo (Nemo being my user name with a capital first letter) where nemosay prints out Nemo Dragon.

@Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕
This entry was edited (Friday, July 31, 2026, 10:29 AM)

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

I love Open Source. It frees you to fix issues and not just file bug reports and hope someone fixes the problem that is keeping you from being productive. I recently installed Eloquent proofreader from flathub to help with some tasks. Well it turns out that one of Eloquent's baked in dependencies fastText was an older version and was crashing on launch from the flatpak version of the app. But that did not stop me.

I did some searches and forked Eloquent on GitHub. I then also retrieved its two main dependencies, fastText and languagetool. I did not have to have a local languagetool, but I like working completely local when possible. So I built the three projects, put them together and installed them on my system. Which is a lot more solid than the flatpak version. I also now have a local languagetool to use with LibreOffice to boot 😉.

You do not get to have all this fun fixing your issues on proprietary systems. You just wait to see if anyone else will fix it for you. Which often just does not happen.

#languagetool #fastText #Eloquent #FOSS

#foss #languagetool #fastText #Eloquent
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