Good fucking riddance. (No offense cool innocent Russian people.)

Good. Let it stay that fucking way.

Raise your hand if you want to read the suspect’s manifesto!

One doesn’t have to go far to find a boot-licking class traitor who thinks if they run the rat race well enough they’ll get a piece of cheese.

But to be fair to the McDonalds worker, the cash reward is designed to do just that.

That’s fucking crazy. Anyone notice how AI has only made everything shittier?

“Freedom” is a concept, it’s neither something unique to America nor is it reliant on any document.

You are either free to express yourself without persecution, or you are not.
The press are either free to publish without persecution, or they are not.

You see, there’s this thing called the Theory of Forms. You probably wouldn’t get it.

Before we get to the changes, we want to remind everyone that we are not a (US) free speech instance.

I’ve never understood this concept. There is no such thing as “(US) free speech”. Threats, coercion and blackmail obviously notwithstanding, you’re either free to express yourself, or you are not. Of course I understand that right of free expression isn’t something that applies to many European people, and there may be pros and cons to that, but nevertheless there is no middle ground on free speech–you’re either free or you aren’t.

But regardless of that, this is your own private community and you’re well within your rights to moderate it however the hell you want, “free speech” really doesn’t come into it at all. That’s one of the main benefits to federation.

Try out a mesh network VPN like tailscale (others are available, but i haven’t tried them).

Tailscale is basically just a simple but powerful wireguard manager that does all of the work of setting up a mesh network for you, and it works amazingly well in my experience. The free account is good for I think 3 users and 100 devices on a network and has been the perfect thing to expose my home server to my various devices no matter where I am.

I like it so much after having used it for the last few months that I just spent way too much money upgrading my server… but that’s another thing entirely. lol

These guys smell like CEOs, and we all know what happens to CEOs.

This is a slippery slope argument.

The “problem” re TikTok is that they are a Chinese company with ties to the Chinese government who have managed to get a closed source black box app on millions of Americans phones that servers as about the most perfect avenue for social/political manipulation as any adversary could dream of.

The solution to that problem that was offered to TikTok more than a year ago was to simply sell to an American company (and thus a company that could in theory be held somewhat accountable, but probably not if we’re being honest) for doing bad things here in the USA. ByteDance would have made billions of dollars selling the American version of TikTok, but they knowingly chose the other option, which was to face a ban at the end of this year.

FWIW, American companies cannot operator or sell product in China without going through a Chinese company, and social media platforms like Facebook are banned in China, so in my opinion some degree of reciprocity here is at least warranted.

TikTok could have sold to an American company (read: a company that we can hold legally accountable for bad things that their product does) and made billions of dollars in the process. They chose not to, for some reason, and thus knowingly opted to face a ban in the United States. Those were the options and they knew it.

As I understand it American companies doing business in China almost always have to go through a Chinese company in order to operate legally and make products available to the Chinese market. Platforms like Facebook are already banned in China and must be accessed through a VPN because they don’t play ball with the Chinese regime, so why should it not be reciprocal?

Until TikTok is being managed and operated by a company that can be held legally accountable here in America, they are nothing but a security threat and a backdoor for the Chinese government into every cell phone of every person who is dumb enough to install that shit. Is that what the people want to hear? Probably not, but it’s the truth.

I wouldn’t install TikTok on my phone any sooner than I’d install RedStarOS on my PC, because the implications of using a proprietary, closed source application with ties to the Chinese regime should be fucking obvious to anyone with bare minimum technical knowledge. Likewise, I wouldn’t blame a Chinese person for being skeptical of Microsoft Windows or X.com for their close relationship with the American government. To think otherwise is just not smart.

From China’s perspective, Facebook probably IS a “national security risk”, which is why it is already banned over there.

For American to do business and sell products in China, they almost always have to go through a Chinese company. I’m sure that’s part capitalism and part accountability theater, but it’s just a fact. So why is it such an outrage for America to ask TikTok to do the same?

It’s not “censorship” to ban a product like TikTok any more than it’s censorship to ban any other product. TikTok had the opportunity to sell to an American company (the same way all products on the Chinese market are forced to go through Chinese companies) and, for reasons that only they can explain, they chose not to do that. They would have made billions of dollars selling, but perhaps money isn’t their primary concern…

At any rate, we absolutely need to have a separate conversation about all social media in terms of privacy and data rights (though it’ll never happen under Republicans), but that doesn’t mean TikTok is free to continue being a completely opaque and unaccountable backdoor to the Chinese government.

I really don’t understand why people even want that when great alternatives like Bazzite exist.

I don’t even run SteamOS on my Deck anymore, so I can’t imagine running it on another PC.

Mark my words: generative “AI” is the tech bubble of all tech bubbles.

It’s an infinite supply of “content” in a world of finite demand. While fast, it is incredibly inefficient at creating anything, often including things with dubious quality at best. And finally, there seems to be very little consumer interest in paid-for, commercial generative AI services. A niche group of people are happy to use generative AI while it’s available for free, but once companies start charging for access to services and datasets, the number of people who are interested in paying for it will obviously be significantly smaller.

Last I checked there was more than a TRILLION dollars of investment into generative AI across the US economy, with practically zero evidence of genuinely profitable business models that could ever lead to any return on investment. The entire thing is a giant money pit, and I don’t see any way in which someone doesn’t get left holding the $1,000,000,000,000 generative AI bag.

Of course Israel has done wrong things, as have the Palestinians. This is a war that has been going on for ~80 years in a part of the world that has been fought over and ruled by dozens of empires over the last 3000 years.

Both sides of this conflict are guilty of terrible shit, but none of that is worth holding American secular democracy hostage.

Religion has been used for millennia as a mechanism for authoritarian control.

Like I said, I support free thought and speech. Be religious if you must buy into a cult of mass delusion. But true freedom means freedom from religious law in a secular and democratic society.

Says a guy who wholehearted supports genocidal Islamist terrorists. October 7th massacre? Now that’s inspiring!

“Stupid uninformed people didn’t vote.”

Oh really?

• Did throwing the election to Trump and the Republicans do anything to help save Palestine or end the war?
• How would you describe what happened on October 7th, 2023?
• Are you willing to concede that the Palestinians also have had agency and culpability in the events that have lead up to today?
• Do you accept that calls for “Palestine to be free, from the river to the sea”, as well much of the historical rhetoric of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, has been openly calling for genocide against Israeli Jews?
• Would you be willing to acknowledge that both Israelis and Palestinians have some loose historical claim to the Levant based on the tribal lineage of their people going back >3000 years?
• Would you describe Islam as a “religion of peace” even though it was spread almost entire through violent conquest going back to ~600AD?
• Do you believe in a two-state solution?
• Do you believe that America has a duty to the protection and support of its own people over any duty to solve the problems of the rest of the world?