baltakatei

Nvidia: I have altered the deal, pray I do not alter it further.

Amazon Prime is meant to invoke the sunk cost fallacy in your mind. Why shop around when you’ve already sunk over 100 USD per year into “free” shipping? This mental bias towards shopping with Amazon is the cost and is part of an overall anti-competitive strategy. See “The making of Amazon Prime, the internet’s most successful and devastating membership program”. Jeff Bezos has been explicitly anti-competitive on this point:

“I want to draw a moat around our best customers.”

You don’t leave a moated walled garden unless the Lord who maintains the moat permits you. And even then, they’ll strip you of your DRM’d digital goods (TV shows, movies, audiobooks, ebooks) as soon as you cross the drawbridge. The strongest supporters of Amazon are the ones who have thousands of USD of such digital goods locked up with them since they can’t leave without being stripped of things they bought.

And for some reason some software developers decided to base their MMORPG company there.

Ultimately, the quality of your work is a function of you and your resources. Corruption and miscommunication plague all management systems. Corrupt management siphons resources away from otherwise good work. Government bureaucracy is another layer of management like any other. Customers are not just consumers but working people like you.

Hang in there.

“shunned” by their church

Take that as a compliment and move on.

Being shunned in Amish culture is VERY aggressive. You’re basically cut off from the community and family. You can’t get rides, you have to eat alone, etc. It’s pretty fucked up.

Mormons also have versions of this that are notoriously fucked up. Stay in line or lose contact with everyone you love.

(Comment by squaresinger removed by mod: “reason: Part of a white nationalist cult, defending said cult”. Comment summary: A Mormon clarifies that excommunication doesn’t ban attending church activities, but tensions arise when ex-members aggressively try to convert others away from the faith, citing their ex-Mormon returned missionary best friend as an example of someone who isnʼt hostile towards Mormon Church members.)

I also was raised in the Church, served a mission, but left (you can too)!, despite Church roadblocks. To illustrate why I left, let me provide you with what my self-righteous past self would have written for an audience of priesthood holders regarding the apostasy of a best friend:

Your best friend knew the truth, got their endowment, yet apostatized anyway. Better that your best friend had never been born (D&C 76:32). You shouldn’t associate with them because Satan will find a way to weaken your testimony through your sympathy for them. Instead, unfaithful such as your friend should be cast out from your community as salt that has lost its flavor (Matthew 5:14; see the 1838-06-17 Salt Sermon). Since they committed the unpardonable sin of denying the Holy Ghost, the best case scenario for building the Kingdom of God is that they don’t corrupt anyone else or die early (side note: killing an apostate in order to save their soul even from an Unpardonable Sin was a loophole called “Blood Atonement which was used by the Danites to justify murdering enemies of the Church; the idea being that Christ couldn’t spill their own blood to atone for someone who denied the Holy Ghost but someone could atone for their own sins by being their own blood sacrifice; the requirement to physically spill blood in order to effect the ritual is a plausible explanation for why Utah still permits capital punishment by firing squad). Better to dedicate your time and efforts towards sharing the Gospel with people who haven’t had a chance to properly hear it in this Second Estate than with someone who heard it, lived it, yet rejected it.

The above text would not be found out of place in a Sunday talk, especially one given by an Area Authority, although many in the congregation would likely feel uncomfortable. Church leadership would likely minimize such discomfort by restricting such fierce and arguably cruel teachings to private Priesthood Sessions of unbroadcasted Stake Conferences or missionary Zone Conferences. If it makes you feel uncomfortable, I hope you reconsider your membership to an organization in which such cruel and inhumane talk is considered acceptable.

• Edit(2023-10-10T20:05+00): Include context.
• Edit(2023-10-10T20:13+00): Remove some context that was removed by mod. Summarize the offending comment for context.
• Edit(2023-10-10T20:29+00): Add statement explaining the example of cult rhetoric is meant to explain the cruelty, not to promote it.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

The Seattle police officer in the video didn’t hit the woman with his cruiser. One of the people in his police union did, of which he is vice-president.

The lander and rover has until September 4th until it loses sunlight and therefore power (it doesn’t have an RTG).

Trump Indicted in Georgia. Prosecutors Accuse Trump of ‘Criminal Enterprise’ to Overturn Election (gift article) (consider sharing other articles here).

I imagine more people would use Tor if they could get paid to provide bandwidth (like Orchid as described on FLOSS Weekly 633).

And a girl.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

I’ll believe it when it doesn’t crash and burn like the last one.

Check back here on 2023-08-23, then.

ISROʼs last lunar exploration mission was in 2019 and called Chandrayaan-2. The lunar orbiter succeeded. The lunar lander, named Vikram, failed, crashing onto the lunar surface. Vikram contained a lunar rover named Pragyan.

Here is Scott Manleyʼs review of the Vikram failure.

Here is a New York Times gift article link about today’s (2023-07-14) launch.

Here are animations of the planned orbits (Videos (1,2) by Phoenix777 / 🅭🅯🄎 4.0):

Maybe try out FreedomBox? freedombox is a Debian package which automatically sets up apache2, firewalld, fail2ban and Letʼs Encrypt. It also automatically adds pre-canned configuration files for applications you install with it (e.g. Mediawiki, WordPress, Matrix, Postfix/Dovecot). The theoretical goal of FreedomBox is to allow anyone to set up a webserver and administer it via a webUI. So, although I would say itʼs not quite there yet for command-line-illiterate users, I have found the software useful as a turnkey server to see what makes certain web applications tick, albeït in mostly vanilla form.

For example, after installing a new app like WordPress, you could examine what exactly the FreedomBox scripts changed in the /etc/apache2/ or /etc/fail2ban/ configuration files.

fgallery

TL;DR: fgallery is a dumb static web gallery generator: EXAMPLE, SETUP.

There’s fgallery which is a small Debian package that takes an input directory (e.g. photo-dir) and creates a static website in a new directory (e.g. my-gallery).

$ fgallery photo-dir my-gallery

Description

From the Debian package details page.

static HTML+JavaScript photo album generator

“fgallery” is a static photo gallery generator with no frills that has a stylish, minimalist look. “fgallery” shows your photos, and nothing else.

There is no server-side processing, only static generation. The resulting gallery can be uploaded anywhere without additional requirements and works with any modern browser.

Among all the Debian packages similar to this one, this seems the most recently maintained (version 1.9.1 came out 2022-12-31). It is licensed GPLv2+ so the source code is available.

Upload to a web server

After running fgallery as described above, upload my-gallery to your static web page directory (e.g. /var/www/html/ with a typical apache2 setup) and open the index.html through a web browser.

Here’s an example gallery I made just now (setup procedure).

( Photo by Baltakatei / 🅭🅯🄎 4.0 )

Viewing locally with a browser

To view the gallery locally without uploading to a web server (e.g. a Digital Ocean droplet) or static content hosting service (e.g. AWS S3), you can do so with your own web browser. However, because the fgallery webpage uses Javascript and since modern browsers refuse to render Javascript in HTML pages at local file system addresses (e.g. file:///) due to same-origin policy, the easiest solution is to make a simple webserver via python3:

$ python3 -m http.server -d ./my-gallery

Then, you can visit the my-gallery/index.html file via a local http:// address at http://localhost:8000/.

Summary

fgallery lacks many complex features (no image database, no metadata editing, no dynamic server processes for editing images, etc.). However, I’d argue its lack of features is the main feature. It just takes a directory of photos and spits out a directory you can plug into your hosting service. Updating the the gallery is just a matter of running the same $ fgallery photo-dir my-gallery command again and re-uploading.

Edit(2023-07-07T12:05+00): Clarify python3 commend.

TL;DR: fgallery is a dumb static web gallery generator: EXAMPLE, SETUP.