To me, one of the most interesting quotes from the article was:

“Our intel tells us that… one of the most important things we can do to hurt Palantir right now is disrupting their recruitment pipeline by hurting their brand image, to the point where even very apolitical recent college graduates [feel] that it’s social suicide.”

This really seems to me like exactly the kind of thing that a peaceful protest could accomplish that could really pay off!

It is not obvious to me, though, that the following tactic is super-effective at this:

After blocking the street outside Palantir’s unassuming redbrick office, and briefly making way for an ambulance, the crowd marched to a nondescript building nearby where organizers said the company was holding a developer conference to recruit new talent, slapping rhythmically on the windows and chanting “quit your jobs!”

This seemed to work in terms of shutting the event down:

Although Palantir did not confirm whether its event was disrupted, one visibly confused event worker did try to deliver equipment, only to find their intended recipients had vanished.

I suspect, though, that if the event were disrupted then the impression the people got at it was more along the lines of, “There are crazy people outside!” and less along the lines of, “I should really feel guilty about my life decisions.”

Having said that, it is not clear that a lower level of confrontation would have accomplished anything either, so who am I to say?

Thank you for linking to a source!

Sure, I am obviously not obligated to read the book, but what I was specifically responding to was the following remark:

Yeah isolating yourself from everyone you disagree with is awesome, truly nothing bad ever comes out of it.

which in turn was a response to the following:

Do you have to agree with everyone you give your money to? What sort of economy would that be?

Probably a pretty nice one, actually.

Ergo we should feel obligated to give money to people who we believe are actively harming the world?

Huh? What did he do?

I think that you may have mistaken this community for !linuxquestions@lemmy.world.

I only see a couple of the most recent posts, but the number 2K seems to indicate that there are a lot more that it just is not showing me.

By contrast, I felt like looking at pictures of galaxies right now, so I went over to https://astrodon.social/tags/galaxies, and behold–look at all of them! So easy!

In fact, maybe the lesson here is that I should just give up on Pixelfed and use Mastadon for discovering cool things to look at in my downtime.

I just go to the web site, e.g. https://lemmy.sdf.org/.

The thing that I don’t get is that it seems like this should be a solved problem, because I can visit any Mastadon instance and see the content there just fine. Rather, Pixelfed seems to have gone out of its way to construct an artificial wall that prevents people from doing this.

But what if I want to be on a small instance or even self-host? Then I cannot see any potentially appealing hashtags because I do not start with a large library of locally downloaded content.

Yeah, I have to say that Lemmy has been a pretty great experience so far! 😀

ONE OF US!

ONE OF US!

ONE OF US!

But if a hashtag has not made its way over to my instance, then it effectively does not exist to me. Even if I do see it show up and decide I want to see more content related to it, if said content has not ever made its way over to my instance then I am still left out. The great thing about being able about able to check out what is on other instances is that I am no longer restricted to whatever the people on my instance are interested in.

This a completely different experience from Lemmy, where I was immediately able to go to a bunch of different instances, look through their communities, and go: “I want to subscribe to this one, this one, and this one!”

People are not generally as self-reflective as you might think; when someone settles upon a core belief, they tend to stick with it for the rest of their lives, with any challenge to it being treated as a threat rather than as a potential opportunity for growth. You might think that when a core belief is completely wrong and leads to disastrous negative consequences that this might at be enough to lead someone to give it up, but strangely the mind does not actually work this way.

(I mean, I am not saying that these people are not also evil and/or oily snakes, but I think that there is value in observing the mental fallacies at work in others so that we can better spot them at work in ourselves, since our own mind is the one thing that we have at least some limited control over.)

Just like they say, you can modify the code and remove for free if you really want, they’re not forbidding you from doing so or anything

True, but I think you are discounting the risk that the actual god Anubis will take displeasure at such an act, potentially dooming one’s real life soul.

I created a script that I dropped into /etc/cron.hourly which does the following:

1. Use rsync to mirror my root partition to a btrfs partition on another hard drive (which only updates modified files).
2. Use btrfs subvolume snapshot to create a snapshot of that mirror (which only uses additional storage for modified files).
3. Moves “old” snapshots into a trash directory so I can delete them later if I want to save space.

It is as follows:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
import os
import pathlib
import shutil
import subprocess
import sys

import portalocker

DATETIME_FORMAT = '%Y-%m-%d-%H%M'
BACKUP_DIRECTORY = pathlib.Path('/backups/internal')
MIRROR_DIRECTORY = BACKUP_DIRECTORY / 'mirror'
SNAPSHOT_DIRECTORY = BACKUP_DIRECTORY / 'snapshots'
TRASH_DIRECTORY = BACKUP_DIRECTORY / 'trash'

EXCLUDED = [
    '/backups',
    '/dev',
    '/media',
    '/lost+found',
    '/mnt',
    '/nix',
    '/proc',
    '/run',
    '/sys',
    '/tmp',
    '/var',

    '/home/*/.cache',
    '/home/*/.local/share/flatpak',
    '/home/*/.local/share/Trash',
    '/home/*/.steam',
    '/home/*/Downloads',
    '/home/*/Trash',
]

OPTIONS = [
    '-avAXH',
    '--delete',
    '--delete-excluded',
    '--numeric-ids',
    '--relative',
    '--progress',
]

def execute(command, *options):
    print('>', command, *options)
    subprocess.run((command,) + options).check_returncode()

execute(
    '/usr/bin/mount',
    '-o', 'rw,remount',
    BACKUP_DIRECTORY,
)

try:
    with portalocker.Lock(os.path.join(BACKUP_DIRECTORY,'lock')):
        execute(
            '/usr/bin/rsync',
            '/',
            MIRROR_DIRECTORY,
            *(
                OPTIONS
                +
                [f'--exclude={excluded_path}' for excluded_path in EXCLUDED]
            )
        )

        execute(
            '/usr/bin/btrfs',
            'subvolume',
            'snapshot',
            '-r',
            MIRROR_DIRECTORY,
            SNAPSHOT_DIRECTORY / datetime.now().strftime(DATETIME_FORMAT),
        )

        snapshot_datetimes = sorted(
            (
                datetime.strptime(filename, DATETIME_FORMAT)
                for filename in os.listdir(SNAPSHOT_DIRECTORY)
            ),
        )

        # Keep the last 24 hours of snapshot_datetimes
        one_day_ago = datetime.now() - timedelta(days=1)
        while snapshot_datetimes and snapshot_datetimes[-1] >= one_day_ago:
            snapshot_datetimes.pop()

        # Helper function for selecting all of the snapshot_datetimes for a given day/month
        def prune_all_with(get_metric):
            this = get_metric(snapshot_datetimes[-1])
            snapshot_datetimes.pop()
            while snapshot_datetimes and get_metric(snapshot_datetimes[-1]) == this:
                snapshot = SNAPSHOT_DIRECTORY / snapshot_datetimes[-1].strftime(DATETIME_FORMAT)
                snapshot_datetimes.pop()
                execute('/usr/bin/btrfs', 'property', 'set', '-ts', snapshot, 'ro', 'false')
                shutil.move(snapshot, TRASH_DIRECTORY)

        # Keep daily snapshot_datetimes for the last month
        last_daily_to_keep = datetime.now().date() - timedelta(days=30)
        while snapshot_datetimes and snapshot_datetimes[-1].date() >= last_daily_to_keep:
            prune_all_with(lambda x: x.date())

        # Keep weekly snapshot_datetimes for the last three month
        last_weekly_to_keep = datetime.now().date() - timedelta(days=90)
        while snapshot_datetimes and snapshot_datetimes[-1].date() >= last_weekly_to_keep:
            prune_all_with(lambda x: x.date().isocalendar().week)

        # Keep monthly snapshot_datetimes forever
        while snapshot_datetimes:
            prune_all_with(lambda x: x.date().month)
except portalocker.AlreadyLocked:
    sys.exit('Backup already in progress.')
finally:
    execute(
        '/usr/bin/mount',
        '-o', 'ro,remount',
        BACKUP_DIRECTORY,
    )

I for one appreciate it when the AI let us know up front that we are conversing with a machine.

Wow, it is impressive the lengths people are willing to go to vandalize Musk’s property as a form of political protest!

I was a nerd, so I tried really really hard to prove logically that my religion was the correct one… and failed.

Also, as I understand it, the Book of Revelation essentially only barely squeaked its way into the Bible anyway under the belief that its author was the same John as the John that wrote the Gospel of John; if it had been believed to have been authored by anyone else then it would have been left out because it was hardly a unique representative of its genre.

Interesting! I had not even realized that this was a problem, though it makes sense now after your description. How realistically feasible is this type of approach, though, given that the manufactures can always just ignore the kernel’s request to reprogram them and continue to access the bus and memory directly?