One idea to always go back to is:

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

• Carl Sagan

This can be tough to evaluate sometimes, but it’s a good general idea.

Does the claim sit outside the natural world as currently understood by scientific theory?
If yes, then there’s going to need to be a lot of evidence. If not, the level of evidence is lower.

Does the claim involve a low probability event?
If yes, then more evidence is needed of that event.

Does the claimant have a stake in the claim?
For example, does the person get money, fame or other stuff by getting people to believe the claim? If so, more evidence should be required.

What type of evidence would you expect to see, if the claim were correct?
When things exist, they tend to leave evidence of their existence. Bones, ruins, written records, etc. If someone says something exists, or used to exist, but they should have archeological/anthropological evidence to back it up.

Sure, it’s always going to be a bit subjective as to what requires proof. And for a lot of low stakes things, there’s no point in going after it. If someone claims to be from Pitcairn, then what’s the point of questioning it? Just say, “huh, cool” and move on. If someone is trying to convince you that an historical figure existed, and that should effect how you see the world, maybe ask for as bit more evidence.

NextCloud running in docker on my server. I can then sync folders from both my desktop and phone.

Game: Quest for Glory I: So you want to be a Hero
Book: Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett
TV Show: Babylon 5
Movie: Spaceballs

All fairly old, but still some of all time favorites.

Perhaps a bit on the campy side, the opening theme song of the original Highlander was always one of my favorites:
Princes of the Universe by Queen.

Honor is a social construct which is used to promote “pro-social” behavior. It can be useful in the absence of or in concert with other systems of social control (e.g. laws, religion). Of course, “pro-social” is very much a construct of what the creating society considers to be positive. This can include acting in ways which we, in our current social constructs, would consider “anti-social”. Honor ends up getting idolized in media because it often includes an element of self-discipline and self-sacrifice and is usually associated with warrior cultures. Though, it also tends to be conservative and resist changing as social mores change. This has led to some famous consequences as honor based systems tried to cling to social constructs which were no longer tenable. For example, the Satsuma Rebellion saw the existing feudal class seek to maintain it’s grip on power in then face of a changing society.

Ultimately, any system of honor would need to be taught to new adherents. It’s no different from a religion or legal system in that regard. No one comes out of the womb fully indoctrinated to a system of honor. So no, it isn’t really self-explanatory. Like any social construct, you would need to define the system and how it interacts with the society in which is was created. Otherwise, it’s just naming a system for social control and hoping no one notices that it’s a hollow shell.

You can’t convince me printer software/drivers/firmware doesn’t have an agenda.

Yes well, but they are coded by pure evil incarnate. Otherwise known as HP.

Software is not political, it’s just code executing on a machine and doesn’t care what you believe.
There is a lot of politics surrounding software.

Politics is the tool we use, as a society, to decide how we’re going to run said society. There will be areas of politics where different factions will adopt different attitudes about different bits of software. So, some software will be politicized. But, the software itself is only political in so far as we are having political discussions around it, the software itself doesn’t care.

I use Dark Reader on my work laptop was well. We had a conference call with a vendor and I was sharing my screen while talking with their team about our usage of their product and one of them stopped me and asked about the UI looking strange. I said, “oh ya, I use Dark Reader because you don’t have a native dark mode. You do lose points for that.” They had a native dark mode a couple months later.

I’ve come to the conclusion that UI designers hate their customers’ retinas.

Pretty standard stuff here:

• UBlock Origin
• No Script - Yes, I run both UBO and NoScript, they have slightly different use cases
• Dark Reader
• FireFox Multi-Account Containers
• Redirector - Great for automagically changing links
• KeePassXC-Browser - For password manager integration
• Rested - For monkeying with REST APIs
• User-Agent Switcher and Manager - Why yes, I am the browser you are looking for
• Video DownloadHelper - Because sometimes, you need stuff available offline
   
  In terms of actually recommending extensions to others. I’d recommend most of the above, excepting NoScript. If you are using UBO, then the use case for NoScript is a very narrow one where you want selective whitelisting of javascript while visiting a site. UBO’s blacklisting approach works for most cases and UBO’s whitelisting feature is lacking the granularity of NoScript.

Raw cashews. Very specifically the raw ones. They are a bit hard to find, but they have a really great flavor.

It’s important to get offline and go touch grass from time to time. If you are getting your view of the world through FaceBook or Twitter, you’re getting a very warped view of the world. People are pretty horrible online. This was well recognized 20 years ago:

I use my domain for two purposes:

1. I host my own NextCloud instance, so that I don’t have to put my data on someone else’s computer.
2. I have a blog (WordPress) with less that a dozen posts. Just random stuff that interested me and I got myself to actually write up.

The goal of any military is to build and maintain a technological edge over potential adversaries. Because of that, a lot of basic research happens in and around military organizations.

You mentioned the internet as one such technology and it’s a great example. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) started a project to build a communications network which would be resilient in the event of a nuclear war. Their work created ARPANet. And for a long time, it was really just intended as a US DoD thing and no one really considered its potential uses for the civilian world. It wasn’t until it was opened up to the civilian sector that its potential to change the world was recognized.

Many other technologies follow this trajectory. There is a need in the military and research is done to fulfill that need. If that research is successful, new technology can be created and may eventually move into the civilian market and be very useful. Though, as part of that technology transfer there is always pushback from the military that opening up that technology may reduce or eliminate the technological edge the military holds over potential adversaries.

An example of this would be the Global Positioning System (GPS). GPS was supposed to be a way for the military to be more accurate in the stuff it blew up. When they began opening GPS up for civilian use, there was the worry that adversaries would use GPS against US forces. And so, part of the initial opening up involved intentional inaccuracy in the GPS signal for civilian use. Over time, this has been removed; however, the US DoD does maintain the ability to introduce inaccuracies if considered tactically necessary.

you’d think some five or 6 star general would go “Yeah nah we don’t need this shit, waste of tax money just stick with what works”

So, this actually does happen. In 2013, the US Army famously said tanks, but no more tanks. And Congress overrode that request. At the same time, just “sticking with what works” is a tough thing to know ahead of time. Prior to WWII, air power was considered more of a niche thing. Useful for reconnaissance and not much else. And then the Luftwaffe adopted dive bomb tactics and started wrecking shit from the air. By the end of WWII aircraft had reworked a lot of military doctrine. For example, WWII navies were built around battleships. And then the Japanese rather definitively proved what air craft carriers were capable of (see: Pearl Harbor). Navies are now built around air craft carriers and battleships are largely museum pieces. But, this only happens when militaries are willing and funded to try new things out. Not everything works and that means a lot of money expended on failed projects. But, sometimes it pays off and a military is able to create or extend a technological edge.

So, why does the the bleeding edge tech seem to always come out of the military? It’s because they often have the reasons and resources to do the research. As much as it sucks, the world is still a dangerous place. And so, militaries the world over will always be looking to push the boundaries on technology. And they will also be the first recipients of said technology and will guard it jealously to prevent losing the technological edge it gives them. Yes, the world would be far better off, if humanity was not hanging from a cross of iron. But, thanks to assholes like Putin, here we hang.

Humans are pretty terrible and we’ll find any excuse to justify our terribleness. One of the parts of the French Revolution was the Dechristianization of France. While this may sound like a good thing, which should lead people to live their lives based on reason, it also led to violence against priests. And the lack of religion did nothing to stop the Reign of Terror. In short, it was less an atheist utopia and more just humans finding different excuses to be terrible to one an other.

Similarly, the Soviet Union was founded on the Marxist principal that “religion is the opiate of the masses”. This meant that the Soviet Union was officially athiest. However, unlike some of the French Revolutionary governments, the USSR largely tolerated religious practices. At the same time, the officially a theist state got up to a lot of horrible stuff.

At the same time, there is an argument to be made that Christianity helped reign in some of the worst excesses of monarchs during the Middle Ages. It’s important to remember that people really believed this stuff. Kings really did think about their immortal soul and what they would be forced to answer for on “judgement day”. Fear is a powerful motivator and it may be that, for all their terrible selfishness, some monarchs may have been led to moderate the worst of it based on that fear.

All that said, I’m not sure how much differently history would have played out, without religion. As I led with, humans are pretty terrible. Many wars may have had a religious veneer, to get the people to go along with them, but they were more often about power, control and ego than religious conviction. Religion provides a convenient excuse to define “the other”. The othering of people creates a permission structure where we will not only tolerate, but often gleefully engage in, truly horrible acts against “the other”. And it doesn’t require religion to do it. Take a look around the Lemmyverse and you’ll find videos of Russian soldiers being blown apart by drone dropped munitions. And the comment sections will be talking about how “they deserve it” or making jokes and light of another human being ripped apart. And these comments will be defended because of the horrible actions of the Russian Government and some Russian soldiers. Russian soldiers have been placed firmly in “the other” and so we can celebrate their horrible deaths, and be cheered on for it in many corners of Lemmy. No religion required.

So ya. I’m not a fan of religion, nor am I religious myself. But, I have no illusions that religion has a lock on people being terrible to each other. It has absolutely been involved in making it happen throughout history. But, I am skeptical of the idea that history without it wouldn’t have been just as filled with humans doing terrible things to each other. Human nature tends towards tribalism and the creation of “in groups” and “out groups”. With those in the former more than willing to do anything and everything to the latter.

I had dabbled with Linux before, both at home and work. Stood up a server running Ubuntu LTS at home for serving my personal website and Nextcloud. But, gaming kept my main machine on Win10. Then I got a Steam Deck and it opened my eyes to how well games "just worked’ on Linux. I installed Arch on a USB drive and booted off that for a month or so and again, games “just worked”. I finally formatted my main drive and migrated my Arch install to it about a week ago.

I’m so glad that I won’t be running Windows Privacy Invasion Goes to 11.

Holy Misleading Headline, Batman…
The actual first sentence of the article:

Since 2019, the U.S. Department of Defense has been asking for a waiver from legislation barring it from doing business with companies reliant on telecommunications equipment manufactured by Huawei.

Emphasis added. This isn’t the DoD saying “we need to use Huawei hardware”, it’s the DoD saying “a fuck-ton of companies we do business with use Huawei hardware.” And that’s because Huawei hardware is cheap and businesses like cheap. While I do think the DoD has some leverage in contracts to say, “welcome to the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), you cannot use anything manufactured by Huawei in infrastructure which is within scope”. If the text of the law says that the DoD can’t do business with companies who use Huawei hardware at all, then that’s going to be very limiting.

I actually didn’t know that about the game, I just linked to the articled to provide details. Given the time the game was written, I suspect it was to make the music a bit more complicated. Game “Music” at the time could leave something to be desired. I played a lot of games with just a PC Speaker, which means that all of the sounds were mostly just different beeps. However, we also didn’t know any better at the time and just enjoyed it for what it was.

I’ll throw out one from my youth that I think would be really good to see updated:
Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic. It was a very early space RPG which was way ahead of it’s time. Something like the recent Heat Signature kinda reminds me of it, though it lacks the scope and depth of combat.

It’s down to the expected use case.
If you have some reason to want portability, like you travel for work or expect to want to game at a place other than you home, then a laptop is likely the right choice.
If you only expect to game at home and don’t have a need to constantly move your system around, a desktop is usually a better “bang for the buck”.

Personally, I don’t travel and don’t have a need to move my gaming rig around. I also like having the ability to upgrade in a piecemeal fashion. So, I have a desktop. This particular PC of Theseus has been going for a decade and a half now and shows no sign of stopping.

By combining Mozilla’s scale and trusted reputation with Anonym’s cutting-edge technology…

Ya, that reputation is taking a big hit right now.