What I want to see is people telling these ICE agents the truth.

Point out Trump’s failing health, and that he might not even live long enough to finish his term. Show them that he has attacked anybody who could be his successor so the MAGA movement will collapse as soon as he’s gone.

Let them know that they will be prosecuted like the guards for Hitler’s concentration camps. Just following orders won’t be any excuse. Even if they manage to avoid prison time, the fact they worked for ICE means that when Trump’s out of office, nobody will ever hire them again. It doesn’t matter if they were just doing it to feed their families, being a former ICE member will be seen like being a former member of the Gestapo, a mark of shame for their families for decades to come.

Tell them that hiding their faces isn’t enough. Ask them if they fully trust every other ICE agent, or if ICE might have been infiltrated by protesters. Point out that their fellow agents have already screwed up and left behind lists of ICE agents when they’ve had to leave a place in a hurry. Tell them that with modern cameras it’s just a matter of time before an unusual mole or the edges of a tattoo are enough to identify them.

Then tell them that there’s only one way to salvage their reputations and their future career prospects, and that’s to become whistle blowers.

Why wouldn’t they?

I think I’ve had it happen once over something like a decade of using them. From what I remember it was because I was running something in the terminal that ignored the signals it was sent, so the laptop didn’t properly go to sleep. Of course, the program ended up failing because a lot of the things it depended on did suspend themselves and that caused major breakage.

Luckily I noticed a whining sound (fans at maximum speed) from my backpack before anything too bad happened.

Whoosh.

Yeah, I mean, that’s the only part of farming that actually seems interesting to me. It’s not that it makes me want to do it, but I’m curious about tractors using GPS to sow seeds then plow a field. But, John Deere tractors seem even more enshittified than most tech right now.

But, that also emphasizes your other point. To make farming less labour intensive and require less expertise, you can now buy really expensive farming equipment with the latest tech that makes certain aspects of farming easier. But, that equipment is extremely expensive.

Farm work used to be done by slaves. In the US, once slaves were freed, many continued to be farmers because that’s all they knew how to do, and it wasn’t a job that anybody else wanted to do. Now farming has diverged in 2 directions, on one end there’s the (white) farm owner, or upper tier farm worker who owns million-dollar pieces of equipment with all kinds of modern tech. On the other end there are farm workers, who are often illegal immigrants, or at least immigrants on very restricted visas who work the toughest jobs for almost no money. And, both jobs suck.

The suck of the farm worker’s job is obvious. Back breaking labour in terrible weather for almost no pay. It’s a job that nobody with any options would choose to do.

The farm owner’s job sucks too. You’re at the mercy of the weather, and that weather is only getting more unpredictable as the climate changes. You have to invest in extremely expensive equipment just to have a chance, so you might have millions of dollars in assets (harvesters, livestock, land) but your average cashflow is only in the low 6 figures, and in bad years it can be negative. You don’t own your own seeds, you “own” your tractor, but need John Deere’s approval for your own repairs, and you’re kind-of tied to the land.

She doesn’t use facebook, just conspiracy forums.

Not in the slightest.

But, where I used to super interested in cutting-edge tech stuff, I’m now extremely jaded. I used to actively seek out news on new tech companies / projects because it genuinely felt like there were a lot of problems out there to be solved, and tech was solving those problems. These days it seems like tech often is the problem, and it’s never going to be solved because they have the DMCA, Section 230, trillions of dollars, and the entire apparatus of the state ensuring that their shitty tech keeps getting in your way.

The thing is, I still like tech. I can’t imagine living in a world without it. Whenever I see these memes about people wanting to become farmers it amazes me, because farming sucks. I don’t like the great outdoors, the indoors is far greater. I can appreciate non-digital tech. An internal combustion engine is a really cool gadget, for example. And, I’m happy to do my own bike maintenance. But, real world things are greasy, loud, and inelegant. It amazes me when people claim to like record players instead of good quality digital media. It’s amazing how record players work, but they’re still terrible, outdated things that objectively produce a less accurate sound than a good digital file. I still prefer technology, preferably digital technology. I just don’t like the stuff that makes up 95% of the Internet these days.

It sounds like you really feel the same way, because:

get a dumb phone

That’s tech.

a CD player

Also tech.

check out books, movies, music, and games

I’m pretty sure any movies and music you check out from the library in 2025 will be digital, that’s tech.

Have you found ways to reconnect with technology?

If you don’t like it, don’t reconnect. Become a farmer or a fisherman or whatever makes you happy. But, I’m not going to join you. I may be veering a lot more towards DIY tech, and offline things than I used to. But, to get me to abandon technology you’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.

My ultra-religious mother “heard from someone” that AI “is the devil” so she wouldn’t use it. That’s great. Unfortunately, it made her really scared of everything. She was super anxious because AI was in the news all the time.

I really don’t want her to use AI, because she already has such a hard time distinguishing fantasy from reality. But, I still had to try to explain to her that LLMs are just fancy auto-complete, and how often they get things wrong to reduce her stress level. I hope she continues not to use them, but now I hope she just shakes her head and sighs when someone else uses one, instead of thinking they’re letting evil into their bodies.

My guess is that this was necessary because the AI companies already downloaded the offline versions of Wikipedia. But, they think they can one-up their competition by having “fresher data” so they either hammer the download servers and download the 25 GB full offline version multiple times a day, just in case it changed. Or, they might crawl and scrape Wikipedia so they get the data before it makes it into the daily offline version, or something.

It wouldn’t be hard for Wikipedia to provide them a feed of the changes going to the Wikipedia database so they get the data as fresh as it can possibly be. Plus, doing this most likely reduces the antisocial behaviours that the AI companies would otherwise engage in to get their fresh data. Win, win. Even if it sucks to give these AI companies a win.

Um… it does what?

Anyhow, not only is AI scraping (not scrubbing, that’s something completely different) Wikipedia, the Wikipedia licenses allow the AI companies to use the materials. Wikipedia content is licensed CC BY-SA or GFDL. So, while Wikipedia could try to block the scrapers, they can’t block the companies from using the content as long as they comply with those (very open) licenses. And, really, this is part of how I want Wikipedia to be used. Not necessarily to train up chatbots, but I want it to be a freely available, freely usable source of knowledge for the world. I like it that it isn’t knowledge that’s hidden behind some firewall. And, if chatbots are going to be trained on the contents of the Internet, at least we know that some of the training data will be good, factual knowledge, not memes, lies, propaganda, etc.

So, while I’m not happy with anything where data is being sold to the AI companies, in this case I’ll try to get over my knee-jerk reaction and see it as a good thing. Wikipedia gets paid for something that was already freely available, and maybe the jazzed-up autocomplete will more frequently autocomplete from a good source.

If there’s more than one, is the plural Dollars General?

Reddit existed long before Digg died, and was so much better before the Digg refugees streamed in.

Apple laptops are typically extremely good when it comes to sleep and suspend.

A major advantage of having a very small range of hardware you have to support is that it’s pretty easy to test all possible combinations and make sure they work well together. As far as I’m concerned, Apple has been, and probably always will be the undisputed champion of doing this right.

Unfortunately, even if they didn’t succeed, it would be horrible for everybody involved, especially the invaded country. Trump is definitely the type who would wipe Winnipeg off the map if some Winnipegger killed someone important.

Yeah. Let’s say this extremely unlikely thing does happen. There’s some kind of false flag attack, like a person wearing a Canadian flag does a suicide bomber attack on the US congress or something. An event that riles up Americans enough that there’s enough support for an invasion of Canada that Trump could get away with it.

Now imagine the result of invading a country where almost none of the locals want you there, and all of the locals can pass for Americans. European countries might be too cowardly to actually send their armies against the US for doing that. But, they would almost certainly find a way to fund and train Canadian freedom fighters. The Canadian / American border is completely indefensible. It’s simply too big to ever be properly guarded.

So, you’d have Canadians slipping into the US easily, they’d be trained and armed by Europeans, Australians, Japanese, Koreans, and all the other former US allies. And, once in the states they’d have no problem finding support networks to help them attack American targets.

Just because Trump would be insane to try this doesn’t mean he wouldn’t do it. With their massive propaganda networks in place, they might get a fair number of Americans to support it, at least at first. But, the most they could ever hope for is a Pyrrhic victory.

I’ll say what I just said on a similar thread: if the internet goes down tomorrow, mesh will mean very little compared to ham radio.

For what purpose? Hanging out with friends? Watching porn? Getting vital information around?

AFAIK, ham is really mostly geared towards synchronous voice communication, whereas most of the Internet is asynchronous communication in a variety of forms: text, voice, video, etc. In an emergency, synchronous voice is pretty important. But, for day-to-day life, asynchronous dominates most people’s usage of things.

So, if the Internet goes down tomorrow and you need to know why, what happened, etc. your best bet is probably not ham radio but normal TV and radio broadcasts, not rumours being spread by other random people using ham radio. If you live in a country where a complete overnight shut down of the internet, and complete stopping of all news broadcasts is possible, then ham might be useful for the first few days / hours to figure out what’s going on. But, in the longer term, ham isn’t really a replacement for the Internet. For that you’d want asynchronous sharing of various kinds of data, which is more a mesh network, not ham radio.

Government officials are really scared of changing the status quo. They’re really afraid that if they get rid of anti-circumvention laws, that they’ll become a pariah state. In the past that probably would have been true. The US would have thrown its weight around, and Europe would have fallen in line and boycotted whoever it was. Many countries also have a lot of Hollywood productions made there. The major Hollywood studios care about anti-circumvention because they think it guarantees their profits. So, if these countries scaled back anti-circumvention, Hollywood would probably throw a fit and cut them off too. Even if the economic impact of getting rid of anti-circumvention were a huge positive, Hollywood has a big cultural impact worldwide.

I’d like to see it happen, but I think the most likely scenario is that a country that already doesn’t fully respect US copyright laws, like Switzerland or Singapore, might take an additional step and stop respecting anti-circumvention.

This is why lawyers advise clients to use a PIN instead of face ID or fingerprints

That’s because cops don’t need a warrant if you use a face or fingerprints, but they do if you use a PIN. What you’re talking about is for protection against casual, warrantless searches.

What I’m talking about is a subpoena where you’re required to present evidence. The fact that it’s encrypted is irrelevant. If the data is subject to a subpoena it doesn’t matter if you store it encrypted or unencrypted, you’re still required to present it to the court.

If you keep you stuff updated

Keeping stuff updated is a chore, and it can take hours out of your week, often when you don’t expect it or don’t have time. When that’s someone’s full time job and they’re updating it for hundreds, thousands or millions or people, there’s a better chance they do it right, and a much better chance that they do it in a timely fashion.

I am not your lawyer and this is not legal advice for you or anyone who reads this.

I hope you’re not anybody’s lawyer, with your lack of knowledge of the law. Did you graduate from Dunning-Kruger law school?

Communication that can’t be shut down: Matrix, Mastodon, email servers you control

Uh, those can all be shut down. You may control the server but you don’t control the datacenter the email server lives in, unless you’re hosting out of your house, which is a bad idea. You also don’t control the pipes to and from these servers. There have been many plans over the years requiring that ISPs ban users who are accused of copyright infringement. And, even if you don’t infringe copyrights, we all know about how the DMCA can be weaponized against people who have done nothing wrong.

File storage that can’t be subpoenaed: Nextcloud, Syncthing

Sorry, your own file storage can be subpoenaed, you just don’t have a lawyer on call to help you through the process. If you think “haha, I’ll just delete the data”, you can be in much worse trouble. AFAIK in some cases the judge / jury are allowed to assume that evidence that you deleted was incriminating.

I self-host things and think it’s a good idea. But, don’t go overboard with how good it is. It’s still vulnerable to government and corporate actions. in many cases you’re more vulnerable because you’re on your own, you probably don’t have a lawyer on retainer, etc.

It doesn’t matter if the excuse is plausible. People who want to show their loyalty can do it by claiming to believe the unbelievable thing.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. – Frank Wilhoit

By claiming to believe the lie, you also lay a claim to being part of the in-group so the rules (like telling the truth about things) don’t apply to you. Of course, the truth is that 99.9% of the people who think of themselves as part of the in-group were never part of it, and will eventually be treated the same as the people who they’re trying to trample on.