NaibofTabr

Seriously, fuck Pearson. Garbage company.

Nice save, and a fantastic PSA.

Also I’m a big fan of sleeping on a problem as a path to a solution. I’m not sure how exactly that skill develops, but it’s definitely something that I’ve done a few times over the years.

“Why don’t people like our user surveillance systems? they’re so impressively good at invading your privacy!”

God, this story’s a tragedy:

Four years after Barco was born, his family entered the US with asylum, and were later given lawful permanent resident status.

Barco came to the US with his family at 4 years old.

Barco enlisted in the army at 17 and served two tours in Iraq. Barco was injured by an improvised explosive device during one of his deployments, and received a Purple Heart for his service in combat.

He joined the Army young, possibly as a path to citizenship (very common, and it’s basically supposed to be automatic if you complete a 4-year enlistment), ended up in combat in Iraq and got caught in an IED.

During his military career, Barco had filled out paperwork for citizenship, but his application was never processed for an unknown reason, despite his submitting it. His legal team says his former commander attests to helping him complete and submit the application.

Something went wrong with his citizenship paperwork, maybe it just sat on a desk forever waiting for some officer to sign it.

In October 2009, Barco was sentenced to 52 years after being convicted of firing a gun at a house party in Colorado Springs. He was suffering from PTSD. One of the bullets he fired hit a 19-year-old woman in the leg.

Barco is 39, he was born in 1986, therefore he enlisted 2003-04 at the age of 17. If he did a standard enlistment tour (4 years active duty, 4 years reserve) he would have still been in his reserve duty time in 2009 and should have access to military medical services, but… it can be hard to get real care for PTSD while you’re still in. Either his command wasn’t taking care of him or he wasn’t taking care of himself or both. When the shooting incident happened the Army just washed its hands of him, having failed to give him the citizenship he earned or provide adequate care.

Barco was released on parole this January after serving 15 years due to good behavior.

Maybe Barco had access to counseling in prison, maybe he just had time to think.

Upon release, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detained Barco and took him to a detention center in Colorado.

Barco joined the military two years after September 11. He got out of prison into a very different country, one that doesn’t care about his service. He’s just another number for ICE’s quota, an easy one because he’s already in custody.

In September, an immigration judge denied Barco’s relief appeals, which included an application for asylum, and ordered for the veteran’s removal from the US without specifying a date.

[…]

Most families know at a minimum where their loved ones will be deported to when they are facing a removal order, but Jose’s family has been kept in the dark about his whereabouts and his destination at every stage of this process.

Finally, after using him up and abusing him, the state throws him away carelessly.

What a disgusting abdication of state responsibility.

He’s on third.

Maybe?

Yes.

well… fuck.

Most biodegradable polymers are water-permeable (water intrusion is how bacteria get inside the material to break it down). Anything water-permeable is not appropriate for medical use, even as a wrapper for something else, because you can’t guarantee that the thing inside is sterile.

There’s several big tradeoffs there.

Glass is heavy compared to plastic, and also bulkier. A truck full of product in glass containers will carry substantially less product volume than if it were plastic containers. In order to distribute the equivalent amount of product, more trucks will have to make more trips. When you scale this up to national distribution you’re talking about hundreds more trucks on the road, thousands more trips per year, which is going to have an environmental impact.

Glass is fragile compared to plastic. Some accounting is already done for product loss due to breakage during distribution, but plastic containers are fairly durable (part of the problem of course). If you switch to glass the loss percentage goes up, which again means you have to make more trips to distribute the same amount of product, so compounding the environmental impact.

What percentage of single use plastic is used for storing liquids? I would imagine it’s a minority, with things like plastic bags making up the majority.

Plastic bottles are the most common type of container for fluids and make up a huge portion of plastic waste. Drinks, cooking oil and vinegar, cosmetics, personal hygiene products, cleaning products, motor oil, paints, medical products… and that’s just the common consumer stuff. Plastic bags are a big part too but liquid bottles are certainly not a minority.

Plus very acidic liquids like soda may not be bio-active enough to cause this to break down, depending on what the process is.

You also have to be concerned about the outside of the container. Will it be washed as part of the production/handling process? Will sweat and bacteria from human hands cause it to start breaking down? It will be packed in a box for shipping, then unpacked at a store, then picked up and looked at by who knows how many people before being purchased, then it has to stay in one piece until the product it contains is used up. A bottle of toilet cleaner or shampoo or laundry detergent might be handled hundreds of times, and its lifespan from production to final disposal might be a year or more.

Perfect explanation.

Thank you, I try. It’s always tricky to keep network infrastructure explanations concise and readable - the Internet is such a complicated mess.

People like paying for convenience.

Well, I would simplify that to people like convenience. Infrastructure of any type is basically someone else solving convenience problems for you. People don’t really like paying, but they will if it’s the most convenient option.

Syncthing is doing this for you for free, I assume mostly because the developers wanted the infrastructure to work that way and didn’t want it to be dependent on DNS, and decided to make it available to users at large. It’s very convenient, but it also obscures a lot of the technical side of network services which can make learning harder.

This kind of thing shows why tech giants are giants and why selfhosted is a niche.

There’s also always the “why reinvent the wheel?” question, and consider that the guy who is selling wheels works on making wheels as a full-time occupation and has been doing so long enough to build a business on it, whereas you are a hobbyist. There are things that guy knows about wheelmaking that would take you ten years to learn, and he also has a properly equipped workshop for it - you have some YouTube videos, your garage and a handful of tools from Harbor Freight.

Sometimes there is good reason to do so (e.g. privacy from cloud service data gathering) but this is a real balancing act between cost (time and money, both up-front and long-term), risk (privacy exposure, data loss, failure tolerance), and convenience. If you’re going to do something yourself, you should have a specific answer to the question, and probably do a little cost-benefit checking.

But if I’m reading the materials correctly, I’ll need to set up a domain and pay some upfront costs to make my library accessible outside my home.

Why is that?

So when your mobile device is on the public internet it can’t reach directly into your private home network. The IP addresses of the servers on your private network are not routable outside of it, so your mobile device can’t talk to them directly. From the perspective of the public internet, the only piece of your private network that is visible is your ISP gateway device.

When you try to reach your Syncthing service from the public internet, none of the routers know where your private Syncthing instance is or how to reach it. To solve this, the Syncthing developers provide discovery servers on the public internet which contain the directions for the Syncthing app on your device to find your Syncthing service on your private network (assuming you have registered your Syncthing server with the discovery service).

This is a whole level of network infrastructure that is just being done for you to make using Syncthing more convenient. It saves you from having to deal with the details of network routing across network boundaries.

Funkwhale does not provide an equivalent service. To reach your Funkwhale service on your private network from the public internet you have to solve the cross-boundary routing problem for yourself. The most reliable way to do this is to use the DNS infrastructure that already exists on the public internet, which means getting a domain name and linking it to your ISP gateway address.

If your ISP gateway had a static address you could skip this and configure whatever app accesses your Funkwhale service to always point to your ISP gateway address, but residential IP addresses are typically dynamic, so you can’t rely on it being the same long-term. Setting up DynamicDNS solves this problem by updating a DNS record any time your ISP gateway address changes.

There are several DynDNS providers listed at the bottom of that last article, some of which provide domain names. Some of them are free services (like afraid.org) but those typically have some strings attached (afraid.org requires you to log in regularly to confirm that your address is still active, otherwise it will be disabled).

Uh huh, nice wearable oven. casts heat metal

going postal

Even if it’s just Earth, if we assume there is a degree of randomness in species assignment then you’ve got decent odds of reincarnating as an ant:

We conservatively estimate total abundance of ground-dwelling ants at over 3 × 10¹⁵ and estimate the number of all ants on Earth to be almost 20 × 10¹⁵ individuals. 1

And of course, massively high odds of being a bacteria. There are probably ~40 trillion bacteria living just in your body right now:

They estimate that the range of bacterial cells goes from about 30 to 50 trillion in each individual. 2

Right, that would be the kind of “collective action” that I mentioned… it doesn’t have anything to do with preventing nations from going to war with each other… the UN doesn’t have that kind of authority and never did.

Oh yes, I’m aware. I still think it’s funny enough to share with players who haven’t heard it before.

This might seem callous, but… the purpose of the UN was never to prevent wars from happening. The UN is an international forum, it is not a world government. The purpose is to create a space for nations to talk to each other, and to organize collective action on issues that the majority of members agree on. The UN was not intended to override the sovereignty of member nations - if it was, nations wouldn’t join in the first place.

He should’ve been imprisoned when he refused to return all the classified documents they found at Mar-a-Lago. That should’ve been the end of it right then and there. There are people in cells at Leavenworth for much lesser security violations.