Denys Nykula

I understand your position, despite disagreeing with it, as it was once mine as well. Would you mind answering two questions on a related, but different topic, closer to OP? First, when a more authoritarian party comes to rule in your country, are you confident they’ll keep conscription more-or-less volunteer, or will one of the first things they do, besides stripping minority rights, be making refusal punishable, canceling alternative service options, widening the recruitment age range and making most people with disabilities not “serious” enough serve as well? Second, since the war on Europe has been ongoing for twelve years, why wait until your country is invaded, and not go here to help defend so that it doesn’t get to the point when your state or a neighboring state of yours is invaded?

The existing protections for minorities, if we trace them to Stonewall and the Civil rights movement, are won by minorities organizing self-defense and causing enough ruckus when discriminated that the state starts worrying about its monopoly on violence. Then, when the state, against the discrimination by which the minorities have successfully organized, has a cultural and economic hegemony, the won rights slowly “trickle down” to some (but not all) of its allies, but are quickly rolled back at a whim when their leadership changes if there’s no functioning self-defense remaining and widely supported.

It’s very important not to disband the self-defense after any concession, and to organize it even, especially, when achieved peacefully. I’m from an Eastern European country where LGBT people don’t currently have self-defense, instead trusting the police and NGOs who started promising them protection because European integration requires that. Their promise is an utter lie; there are hundreds of attacks by boneheads (who are not the masses, but rather an extension of the state’s arm of violence) every year and the police does next to nothing, with the NGOs urging the attacked people and their friends to limit themselves to petitioning their representatives, who also do nothing.

What I’m trying to say is, the minorities have to protect themselves whether the state exists or not, and where the state exists, the defense has largely to be targeted against the state discrimination, the police violence, and the religious and press propaganda supported by the state. Once a group is able to protect themselves and their friends, it starts being respected by the majority of the people, so the despotism of the masses is not a threat, unlike the states, who have illegalized and then starved or otherwise killed minorities en masse numerous times. There are states where the situation is at the moment better, but that’s in such contrast to what states in general have done in the past that I can’t help but realize that the protections are temporary and under threat of a rollback at any moment.

I strongly agree about an unmatched level of cooperation being urgently needed for feats like slowing down climate change, but disagree that states are the type of organization required to even imagine it. Every state in history is exactly that, an armed actor, a gang who has militarily forced its way through enough territory to do protection racket over entire peoples. Gangs might introduce democratic elements (parliament, constitution) for efficiency and to calm down those people whom they don’t yet have the potential to repress. Gangs might recruit local population to sustain their numbers or provide skills and knowledge. Gangs might provide a few socially welcome policies in the territories they control, as long as they’re in charge of the provision and haven’t found a way to survive while avoiding them altogether. Gangs might call a truce and maintain it for many years while they’re fighting a bigger, more powerful gang. Some gangs have sold away a part of their weapons and instead rely on protection from neighbor gangs with more impressive arsenals. They’re still gangs, self-sustaining machines of violence, organized armed actors deontologically doomed to set the world on fire, precisely because if one armed actor decides to do good, other armed actors will eat him alive.

Having a centralized, easy-to-leak database of everyone in the country with stigmatized diagnoses is overall a scary thing that privacy advocates should keep fighting against, in places where it still hasn’t been implemented.

I’m hypothetically in favor of abolishing war machines as well, but this can only be achieved if workers organize internationally to overthrow their and every other state everywhere in the world simultaneously. States are literally war machines funded by taxes; everything else they do is done to the extent it helps pacify the people who’d otherwise organize themselves and rise against borders, conscription and being governed rather than governing ourselves. I also understand that fighting against states will probably be comparable to a war in terms of bloodiness and chaos, and will have to repeat whenever a new gang appears and tries to become a state.

My experience is that people who say they’ll definitely enlist and who shame others for being “cowards”, well, mostly haven’t enlisted (too young, too sick, too activist, not AMAB, emigrated at first opportunity) since shit hit the fan. I haven’t enlisted because I have chronic health issues; this didn’t stop cops from distrusting my documents, detaining me and trying to forcefully enlist me. I’m supposed to go through the military medical commision every year but I don’t trust them (only did it once), there’s lots of neglect and abuse happening during the actual war; if I go through it again and this time they disregard my diagnoses, I’ll face prison. I respect those who enlist though, and donated my enlisted friends money for equipment when I had a better salary; I also closed my civilian black-day deposit and lent the military money for a year (the profit covers a part of what I have to pay the lawyer who’ll try to object to my illegal detention and fine).

With reviews mentioned, what will be the PieFed stance about using LLM “agents” for the reviews themselves? Do the reasons that apply to contributions also apply to maintenance work, or how do they differ? Interested in reading developer and community opinions.

If there’s a need to introduce students to virtual DOM, I’d choose a library that doesn’t require language extensions or editor plugins, but allows to easily code with just the syntax of JS itself: properties as Plain Old JavaScript Objects, map/reduce with arrow functions, ternary operator, variables as usual, components as functions. Adding Mithril to existing WordPress websites for making dynamic parts such as calculators or quizzes was quite straightforward. On the other hand, its API is somewhat less convenient than what React offers.

Chimera uses udev and elogind, almost unavoidable on desktops. One is a major part of systemd, the other is a fork of another major part of systemd backporting updates from systemd upstream. Trying new distros is good, just let’s not mislead ourselves, apart from switching to the BSDs altogether, boycotting systemd is only possible at the moment when building an embedded system or a server.

Probably like this: a threat actor [for authoritarians pushing ID laws and locked-in hardware], just not in a way that any of us [computing freedom enthusiasts] would consider as being a real theat [for the people].

I remember the shared storage location functionality in the Password Store app but I no longer see it in any versions released since last year. That’s why I had to switch to Termux. Also a control freak, just a different kind 😅

Sorry but this is propaganda slop. When Kyiv cops ignored my disability documents and detained me last week with 7 other randomly kidnapped men in a room with bloody walls, no toilet and not enough place for us all go sleep, the military “merchants” who began the supposed medical commision the next morning instead of doctors explicitly shouted at us that infantry is all that we’ll ever see, that war isn’t about any of these high-tech positions and we’ll be running around and shooting guns like soldiers are supposed to.

It seems the disagreement boils down to what position is far-left and what is moderate. It’s worth remembering that there was far-left opposition (against Russian nationalism in particular) to Bolsheviks inside the party, whom they purged in early years, labeling them bourgeois, and tried hard to suppress them from reappearing. The Bolsheviks also got popular by paying lip service to a much different agenda than they implemented, becoming in practice extremely conservative and repressing worker self-government attempts. So I wouldn’t call them far-left, a term that I’d reserve for anarchists and council communists.

The quote made me optimistic. It’s a shame that clients followed their own observation about straight-to-the-point websites loading fast and being easy to read, with a degrading remark about the simplicity of such websites. I realize that the point of a web developer job has always been something different than making good websites (as a whole, it’s closer to first making something nice and then trashing it with your own hands), but that’s a dreadful realization.

Are there mechanisms for fully automatic synchronization on every file change and every initialization in the Android and console apps for password-store out of the box these days? Using Syncthing with password-store at the moment to get a user experience as close to that as possible. Had to switch from the Android app to Termux and the CLI because the app no longer supports usage with Syncthing.

Yay to the arrow brush! Feels weird to draw arrows beginning with the end, but I’m very glad to see this feature as a GIMP built-in now. Should make annotating screenshots much more convenient.

It’d be cool if your app was installable from F-Droid, for which the sources have to be somewhere under a free license. I most likely won’t be able to contribute code but would indeed like to look through the sources, and maybe help with translation if the code supports internationalization.

Do some parts of go-notes have proprietary sources? I can’t find the source for the native Android client in the repo or instructions on how to download and build it from elsewhere.

Does fare-free also mean tracking-free, or is there still a requirement for a smart card or a phone, with fines for those not carrying one? In Kyiv, the fare tracking application collects history forever, without a retention policy and with a requirement for confirming every cash payment with a full name and phone number, which means municipal IT employees can see where any phone owner was going at any hour today, last month or five years ago. I really hope somewhere in the world systems like these are going away rather than proliferate, actively supported both by municipal government and by local transit rider organization insisting that cash should be banned and riders should start paying a bigger percentage of the fare while taxes go somewhere else.

UK rappers such as Skepta and Stormzy accustomed me to technique, wordplay, sometimes uplifting and other times deadly serious but lively lyrics, and catchy beats. They move me, they inspire me to play with rhymes and samples. Right-wing “AI” prompting seems to take everything fun away from rap music and channel the art form straight into /dev/null. Their character is speaking of a downfall for UK culture when he’s the downfall.