It's kinda freaking me out that I now live in a nation where you can tell exactly how badly someone wants to destroy the last few things that are good about it by how loudly they proclaim their patriotism...
Alt text> Find the girl in an ASCII rain picture within a graphically difficult to see girl object by using shading of smaller ASCII characters or denser in some parts. The picture was generated from a real picture using picture to ASCII python script
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
Exactly, it is not about winning or losing. It is about using resources so that they can be replenished, at our expense and at the gain of the Industrial War Machine we call DOD.
Oh, car-shopping, you still suck just as hard as you did 15 years ago, but now there are contracts about who they will sell your driving behaviour and location to! My god, is a luddite revolution the only way we'll ever find privacy again? I just don't have the time or patience to hack a car...
@Blaise The telemetry it sends, right? You can opt out those from start using 3 methods for each branch.. and includes even a call. If there's an antenna break it although I do not recommend it.
@Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕ It would have to be at least on the scale of an antenna disconnect, because every major manufacturer has already been sued over data they sold which was from accounts who had "opted out"...
@Blaise I see, so if you attempt to block it you get sued or the operator and as such eliminate the possibility to disable that all. An e-Bicycle? We loose every day more of our privacy rights which is sad but reality.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but how are the Democrats going to know what to do if they don't have AIPAC giving them orders and writing their legislation for them?
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?
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!
Welp, that's it. Mastodon.cloud will be gone tomorrow. It was my very first home in open social media. It was a unique (and rather Japanese) experience, and now, after nearly 12 years, it will be over.
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.
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).
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.
@Zergling_man - fedicon 2026 @ C109 I choose what I see that interest me, not guaranteed their followers post stupid shit, for real. I deleted more posts then interactions. And If it was an interaction it mostly is unlike.
OK, I don't root for the bad guy, or anything, but this is still really bothering me. Why didn't Vechna just snag a boombox and play Kate Bush in the Upside-down?
To be clear, if Palantir is allowed to buy Flock, a private company will have every single American under 24-hour surveillance, and somehow that's OK...
I added the password for my password manager to my password manager, and set it for autofill. Now there's this hissing tear in the fabric of spacetime...
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.
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
Myshkin
in reply to Plan-A̵̛͈̬̥̿͋̓͛̕ • • •