Man I loved OTW! I need to get back into it.

I rarely used Google bc I apparently have a masochistic desire to make things harder than they need to be, I mostly just looked at all the man pages (type man command name here) and it usually brings up a helpful manual that has it’s own controls to navigate with. Helpful to know that ‘Q’ is the key you want to press to leave the man page and go back to the terminal. It took me a few tries to learn that. But seriously, I had fun just getting lost in all the features and options in each page for awhile even if it wasn’t the fastest way to complete the levels. Man pages are mostly dry and sometimes funny but they will get you through a lot of Bandit without using google IMO.

Source?

TBF, google throws up captchas & ‘suspicious activity detected’ at the drop of a hat these days. One of our clients is a SMB that runs off Google SaaS, and recently implemented a 3rd party, device based SSO that is supposed to sync with Google auth. We’ve has nothing but issues, VPN or no, adblockers or no, and stupid captcha pages all the time. Youtube as a google product sucks now bc embedded videos randomly flag across all browsers and make you sign in to watch an embedded video on someone else’s webpage. I understand (though disagree) with google flagging something like known mullvad vpn IPs or something but a corporate vpn? A company approved ad blocking extension allow-listed in GOOGLE ADMIN? GTFO. Just a mess.

I think franchisees have a lot of leeway as to how things are run, down to some of the suppliers. It makes sense to me that it varies by location. The downside is that if I’m used to it being bad (which I am) then it taints every other location for me. I don’t know whether McDs or Sonic is going to be ok versus awful and I pay the same either way so if I have literally any other choice I’m not going to gamble on it.

I really want to enjoy Mastodon, I truly do. But my experience has been that it is a living doom spiral by 95% of posting users on there. I learn a lot, but it also drags me towards a highly negative thought pattern and mini-existential crises. I still occasionally review it for the information, but it’s like watching an episode of “This is Us” knowing that I’m going to cry multiple times by opening this pandora’s box. Lemmy has been a lot more varied. Still deeply disturbing news, some weirdness from the .ml crowd, but overall I’m much happier here even if it’s bc my feeds sandwich disturbing news with memes for the dumb caveman brain that’s using this site.

Anything over the web I think it’s anyone’s guess without more proof. But after the Moore County Power attack in 2022 I’m never going to fully rule out bad actors in the states.

Because there’s no native sync for feeds between NetNewsWire and FreshRSS. iOS and Windows developers don’t develop useful apps for both platforms for free.

IMO the precedent needs to be a proportion or percentage based item, not an arbitrary number. Something big enough to massively hurt, like 30% of this or last years’ post tax profits will be fined and Alphabet and all subsidiaries will be deemed ineligible for any tax waivers, deductions, or credits for a number of years to be determined by a jury, no less than 1 no greater than 100.

From personal & anecdotal experience, I think exposing kids (and adults) to a life of wide variance helps inoculate from echo chambers. My parents dragged me to my grandparents’ place in the countryside one weekend a month or more where cell service didn’t exist and internet was dial up. It got annoying at times and I don’t think it was perfect but spending so much time playing in the woods helped get my energy out, fostered a different kind of creativity, and often made me get out of my own head. Whatever was going on at school, drama via texting, or me just raging bc I sucked at video games didn’t seem so important when I was so far away. One of the most valuable parts of the Army was the people, the opportunity to truly meet and learn to work with people you wouldn’t have otherwise. Even in public school, you tend to stick to your clique and at its most diverse you’re really only meeting people you live in the area with. But the Army was different; the US is a freaking huge country with a ton of different subcultures. I learned a lot at an early age just by asking people where they grew up and what it was like. It introduced nuance and spoke against stereotypes in a way a lot of people need, and that diversity of experience helped a younger me appreciate that things aren’t always what they seem.

It’s easy, as a young man especially, to be in one place doing one thing and get really worked up about something, and echo chambers work towards that in many ways. It helps to physically move to somewhere else and burn off some energy. I find it much easier to reframe things when my physical environment is changing and I don’t have such a huge pile of energy to act as fuel to the online flame wars. It helps to know in the back of my mind, however worked up I get, that “I’m angry now, but there is a place I can go where none of you losers matter and however big and loud and frustrating you are here, you are so small and quiet and barely existent when I go to that place.” And if I can go somewhere else and have those loud, dumb, frustrating things shut up, then maybe they’re not that loud or intimidating or big or even frustrating at all. At least not big enough for me to spend so much time thinking about it.

TL;DR: In the short term, moving around (physical motion/travel) helps. In the long term, moving around (longer term trips and travel to new places & experiences) helps.

Why is the question in the title phrased that way? Its couched so many times I had a hard time understanding if I was browsing lemmy or a furniture store.

Lame jokes aside, this is an important question to ask but I think that some of your assumptions aren’t totally true. You’re on the right track in that you see that there are other traditions that may believe or uphold one thing or the other, but assuming the bible says one thing or another is not that helpful. If I asked multiple people what they thought about Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King Jr., Simon Bolivar, or John Lennon, I’m just going to get different answers. Heck, I would get different ideas of those people just by reading different biographies. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t a single set of facts that we’re all working with, but that our experiences and knowledge (or what we know so far) are going to shape our perspective on anything and everything. As we learn more and experience more, our perspective may change as well.

Book, chapter, verse only gets you so far; the understanding of context and references and hyperlinks that the bible makes between the books are important to understanding why something is written there. The books that make up the bible were written at different times to different people going through different things, not to us, today. That doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant to us, but that we’re not going to understand it as well if we’re ignorant of that. If I flew to Japan and expected everyone to speak my language and adapt to my mannerisms it would be pretty rude and I would not have a productive experience. The books that make up the bible act as a singular work that points to everything that Jesus of Nazareth did. “A unifying story that leads to Jesus,” to borrow a phrase from The Bible Project. The bible is not a golden list of rules handed down from on high. It is a series of writings from different people in vastly different circumstances all inspired by the God of Abraham, Israel, and Jacob. There are laws and there is advice, but it is ultimately a work to tell about the story of a God who spends a long time with all humanity to show them a better way to live, ultimately in becoming like we are to exemplify it Himself. What that means to you is up to you. To many people who don’t seem to ‘be going the whole way,’ consider that to them they are going the whole way, it just may not look like it according to your tradition or perspective. They may very well be working out their faith and are doing their best. Ask them why they do or believe certain things, give them the benefit of the doubt, come to your own conclusions. The bible is huge and varied and at times reassuring and other confusing. It’s fine. This wasn’t written to or or for or about me, maybe I can’t relate to some things, but that doesn’t mean I can’t still try to learn something from it.

I grew up in a very conservative, fundamental, protestant tradition. In some ways, it was unhelpful. In other ways, I’m glad I had it as a foundation. Learning and experiencing more as I grew helped me let go of a lot of unhelpful notions (i.e. the bible is a set of rules, there is only one right way to be a christian, everything is to and about me, etc.). Heck, it helped to just travel and learn more beyond the eurocentric idea that all that Christianity has ever been is catholics and protestants; to learn about Ethiopian orthodoxy, St. Thomas’ churches in west India, various early churches, and more. It helps to give people the benefit of the doubt. Be curious, not judgmental. When you see someone worshipping in a different way, ask yourself why, ask them why. Don’t assume them to be heretics on the spot. Life in general is more productive and interesting that way.

Sorry to rant, here’s a meme for your dopameme.

Asus has some pretty jank DDNS and remote access defaults, and they like to push their suite of mobile apps for managing that crap. If SoHo users aren’t limiting device connections to trusted endpoints then maybe that’s how these routers are being compromised? It’s not manufacturer specific but Asus is the majority according to the article.

ASUS will charge you an arm an a leg for a ‘premium’ consumer router but will not handle VLAN traffic appropriately. And if you are betting on Open-WRT to save your bacon it’s not a great bet.