𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

I mean, someday I’ll get a new TV, and I’d just been assuming I’d leave it disconnected… but I hadn’t thought about the nagware, and that would definitely be an issue.

I think you have four issues:

1. How to do it, with the security. Honestly, I think with Trump it’d be easier than with other presidents, because he’s a fucking moron who doesn’t listen to experts
2. How to get away. I think this may be the most difficult part, since you have to flee the country and make your way somewhere relatively safe
3. How to prove to Iran it was you
4. How to enjoy your gains, with what would be probably the largest manhunt on the planet likely through to your death

DB Cooper proved 2 and 4 are not impossible, although technology, forensics, and surveillance have drastically changed since Cooper, and I subscribe to the theory that he didn’t survive to spend the money - not only surviving the jump into dense forest, but then trekking out of deep wilderness to civilization were both challenging obstacles. Anyone who’s been through a parachuting course knows the last place you want to land is into a bunch of pine trees (Ok, water can be pretty bad too, but still).

I digress. Assuming you can pull off 1 and 2, and assuming Iran’s not just going to ghost you, 3 is sincerely a difficult problem. How do you contact the right people in Iran? How do you prove it was you, without the support of US intelligence? Maybe some GoPro footage, routed through a scope? Would that be enough?

But I’d be most worried about 4. I can’t imagine enjoying life constantly looking over my shoulder, and even then, there’s no defense from a sword missile once they’ve ID’d you. So you’re going to, what, hide in Iran for the rest of your life? Depending on your race, your options could be limited merely by how much you stick out - a rich white guy living like a king in Papua New Guinea. Maybe try to buy a new identity and continue living in the US, hoping the IRS doesn’t take an interest in you?

It might be accomplished by a terrorist group, planned and tracked hand-in-hand with Iran for verification, via a disposable fanatic and with funds going to the group upon completion. But I think if they could pull that off, they would have already. Terrorist groups tend to be a sledgehammer, rather than a scalpel: effective against unprotected soft targets, impotent against hardened ones.

I think of someone gets Trump, it won’t be for a bounty; it’ll be for ideological reasons, and they won’t expect to survive it. Heck, with the Patriot Act, I wouldn’t want to survive it, b/c they may just decide to torture you for the rest of your natural life and Americans signed away their rights to due process after 9/11. It’ll be another Thomas Crooks, only a better sniper, or some novel approach like some tech coming out of the innovations being developed during the invasion of Ukraine. If I were the Secret Service, that’s what I’d be terrified of. There are some intensely smart, innovative people in Ukraine figuring out fantastical ways of eliminating people, and I think we, the general public, are seeing only the most mundane, oldest examples of what they’re using.

Hmm. Just curious: did you try creating a tar pit subnet for it, which it could connect to but not escape from?

You duplicated Bluesky’s entry for Nostr. Could you address nostr’s weaknesses? Keeping in mind that as long as you don’t federate with the main Nostr nodes, you won’t be swamped with the CryptoBros - its biggest downside.

Good question. Maybe:

1. Windows fanbois upset at the suggestion that Windows is starting to lose the game
2. People in general objecting to the idea that single-digit install numbers is “conquering.”
3. Greybeards upset at a trivial misuse of compute power (games) is evidently more influential than truly worthy uses, like interpreting ctrl-alt-shift-n and running some Lisp to indent some text.
4. You’ve made powerful enemies…

I’m just guessing. I have no idea; I upvoted your comment.

It’s been years since I’ve shopped for a TV, but… can’t you just not connect it to the internet? I have a little microPC running Linux connected to our TV; it’s smarter than any other TV I’ve seen, but the TV itself is stupid.

Why can’t someone just get a smart TV and just never let it get online?

I mean, sure, if I had my 'druthers, I wouldn’t be paying for features I don’t use, but if it’s literally impossible to buy dumb TVs, what’s the issue?

I guess? Protocol vs connector always throws me a little.

TBF, I will say I’ve never been born by HDCP. I’m not sure I’d recognize it. Then again, I don’t try to copy video from over a display cable; it just seems like adding an unnecessary middleman. But I oppose it in principle.

I was going to ask, but I just looked it up: it looks as if USB-4 has enough bandwidth to drive dual 4k monitors at 120Hz (and docks exist that support this).

That’s one I hadn’t encountered. At those distances I start contemplating wireless solutions.

Got myself a nice outdoor POE camera, a bunch of appropriate CAT and power adapter… and then realized that since the previous owners had put in a sheet-rock ceiling (not complaining; drop ceilings make me fell like I’m living in a warehouse), I had no easy way to run the ethernet all the way crosswise across the house from where the switch was to where I wanted the camera. I’d been thinking since the utility room wasn’t finished I’d figure a way to thread it with a flashlight and a “step 3: ???”. The moral is that running long wires is not my favorite thing.

Also, the DRM baked into the specification is such bullshit.

That’s the one thing they have absolutely no interest in getting rid of. They’ll change everything about the spec, including the connector, but that part’s staying in.

Is DVI completely out of the picture? I hate the connector, but I’ve had a lot of issues with DP, mainly around Linux support and multi-monitor setups.

I was kinda hoping USB-C/4/Thunderbolt would step into this space and normalize chaining and small connectors, but all of those monitors are stupidly expensive.

Thanks for the answers!

I used to do side installs, usually into /opt, which worked well, except when it didn’t. Usually when other things, like Python, expected stuff to live in a certain place and not somewhere unexpected, like /opt. But then, installing stuff manually would sometimes interfere with package manager files, which always ended up taking time and being a pain. I think that’s why I like pacman so much; making packages are trivial, and then all of the file management, clean uninstalls that don’t leave artifacts behind, conflict checks (if not resolution)… all of that stuff that was at times a PITA with autoconf/make install became non-issues.

I need to look at xpbs. I mean, I’m happy with Arch, but Void seems to be a little leaner, and Arch is fully onboard the systemd train, with Artix being am example of how hard it is to climb out of the avalanche.

I’ve thought about Void. And LFS. And I submitted some packages for Alpine, although I’m not running it anywhere except as container bases.

Last time I really strayed from the Arch ranch was Artix, and that was TBH pretty painful on a day-to-day basis.

I’d like something like Arch but with less systemd. ChimeraOS looks promising, once it stabilizes. But how’s Void treating you? How’s xbps? I’m pretty in love with pacman; rolling release is a must, but IME you really only realize how good or bad a package manager is after it’s too late, and you’ve been using it long enough to hit your first dependency hell/upgrade issue. After years of hell with RPM and deb, pacman was a godsend.

runit isn’t my favorite initd alternative (dinit ftw, at the moment), but it beats systemd and I don’t have a huge amount of experience with it. Do you like it?

Critical to me is being able to easily toss together package manager recipes for stuff that isn’t in the official repo; I really believe in keeping systems clean by only installing through the package manager. Pacman packages are stupid simple to write and easy to work with, and yay makes things even better. How’s xbps in this area?

EFS boot is easy? Stuff like btrfs boot partitions and snapper support easily available? No idiocy like trying to force users onto Wayland prematurely?

I’m running EndeavorOS on three computers (2 desktops, one laptop). My wife uses the laptop, but TBH I admin it. She’s aware it’s Linux, but not much more than that.

Anyway, does that count for 3 (per boxen), or 2 (per person)?

Also, it’s running my MIL’s desktop that just streams classical 24/7, and she uses to check her bank account once a week. So that’s 4? 4 more EndeavorOS installs, ah, ah, aaahh!

humans are supposed to eat vegetables and fruit

Hmmm hmmm. Along with meat, because humans are omnivores.

If you choose to live a different lifestyle, for ethics or sustainability, then that’s your choice. But don’t go making up biological, science-sounding falsehoods. Our closest evolutionary cousins are omnivores, just like ourselves.

I’d like to see herbstluftwm ported to Wayland, so I can do an apples-to-apples comparison, and be ready to switch should I ever need to. It’d also be nice if, when I did try Wayland, there wasn’t something completely borked about it that causes me to switch back within a day.

While I’m wishing for impossible things, for Linus to admit he was wrong, and that there next major release will be a proper microkernel, where module crashes don’t force reboots and zombie processes can be cleaned out.

There is a project to standardize (and document) the API, called OpenSubsonic. It includes extensions, but the main value is that it tries to consistently document expected behavior. It’s an uphill battle, because the Subsonic API is a schizophrenic mess, and no two servers interpret API responses the same way, but it’s still a decent project. I contribute to a client, and we try to adhere to the OpenSubsonic documentation.

My only criticism about the API is that it’s focused on streaming, which means we can’t consolidate server control (e.g. mpd) and streaming, which would make writing versatile clients easier, but still.

Tempo is a fantastic client, BTW, and has largely replaced my local offline client use.

Don’t forget the music! There are some fantastic German artists, regardless of your tastes. The bonus to music is that it’s easy to listen to passively, and when you reference song lyrics and listen to songs you like repeatedly, you find yourself picking up more and more.

Nina Hagan. Fantastischen Vier. Die Ärzte. Rammstein. Die Toten Hosen. Falco! (Although his Austrian accent can make things challenging).

As for films, if you can find copies of the German broadcast of the old TV series “Planet of the Apes,” it’s the best. The (military) gorillas all have this harsh, hochdeutsche accent, and the (scientist) monkeys all get soft, Sachsisch accents. It’s wonderful.

I guess you could also ask what’s the reason for working at a suicide hotline? Seems similar enough in many cases.

They aren’t similar, though, are they? OP’s hypothetical is that someone came for help, got some advice about care, and said “no.” In the hotline case, someone’s actively reaching out for help. They start the same, but in the case of your hotline, the caller can hang up at any time and pull the trigger; you can’t trap them on the phone.