Mmm, feel that nice astroturf.

How you gonna teach English without being able to teach nouns words which describe people, places or things?

FTFY, you dirty n-word user you.

There’s plenty of fraud, waste and abuse. It’s just conveniently called “contracting”, so money can be shoved out the door to private companies which do half the work at twice the price and end up delivering shoddy results. The reason DOGE didn’t find anything was that they weren’t looking at the contracting companies and instead were looking at the agencies themselves and the employees working for them. I won’t say that some of those agencies aren’t a complete waste of money (see: TSA, ICE, DOGE); but, DOGE was hyper-focused on agencies which actually do useful stuff (e.g.: SSA, NOAA).

Theoretically, browsers could even stop from the JS engine from being started for the site in the first place.

The NoScript extension is basically this. Most of the client side stuff is off by default and you can enable it per-domain. It breaks a whole lot of websites, but often in ways where the main content of a website is still readable. Over time, you can build up a list of “allow by default” domains and most of the web you care about works. Though, you may have to spend a moment or two sorting out permissions when you visit a new site.

If you care about your privacy, don’t use products from a company whose entire business model is built on invading your privacy.

If you repeat a lie enough times, eventually you start to believe it. Others might also start believing it. Get enough people fully wrapped up in your lies and now you have a cult. Your cult followers will happily swallow any lie you tell them and defend it, often to the point of torture and death. This is pretty much where we are with MAGA, it’s a cult of personality and it’s followers will happily slurp up anything which dribbles out of Trump.

I’m curious to see if the cult outlives its original prophet. Once Trump kicks it, does the cult undergo a transition to a full blown religion? Or, does it fizzle out without it’s original charismatic leader?

That actually sounds like a reasonable response. Driving assist means that a human is supposed to be attentive to take control. If the system detects a situation where it’s unable to make a good decision, dumping that decision on the human in control seems like the closest they have to a “fail safe” option. Of course, there should probably also be an understanding that people are stupid and will almost certainly have stopped paying attention a long time ago. So, maybe a “human take the wheel” followed by a “slam the brakes” if no input is detected in 2-3 seconds. While an emergency stop isn’t always the right choice, it probably beats leaving a several ton metal object hurtling along uncontrolled in nearly every circumstance.

First thing that comes to mind is spending a week camping on the shores of Lake Mead many years ago. Didn’t shower for a week, though one could argue that being scoured by lake water when you either go flying off an inner-tube or make a mistake while water skiing, does a fine job of taking the dirt off.

That’s the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. And for as much as it is a foundational document of the US, it’s also not a legal document.

Violence is always a bad option. Sometimes however, it’s the least bad of the bad options. And knowing when that point has been reached is incredibly hard, and often misjudged.

Reminds me of the tech site from long ago, Experts Exchange. Their website was originally expertsexchange[.]com, and it showed in in google searches fairly regularly (they actually had some reasonable content at the start). Eventually, they added a hyphen.

Not a specific word or phrase, but Google Dorking is useful for limiting down search results. Just the basics of putting things in double quotes (e.g. “Find this exact text”) and negating words/phrases (e.g. -NotThis) can go a long way in refining search results. The “filetype:” modifier is much less useful than it was a decade or two ago, as SEO assholes have gotten wise to it and so include tags to show up on results using it. The “site:” keyword can be really handy, when you are pretty sure what you want is on a specific site/domain. Or, if you are trawling a website for specific information. You can also negate the “site:” keyword. So, you can add something like “-site:expertsexchange.com” to a search and get rid of useless advertising sites.

It’s a good thing the American people would never elect a demented narcissist to the office of The President.

Fuck.

No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it.

While I’m all for fresh ideas, one of the advantages to sticking with well known naming is that folks will often look for those things and might end up missing the community, if the name isn’t obvious and easily searchable. While “LFG” does imply that one is looking for a group, rather than maybe just a single other person, it also has a very long history in gaming and is a well known acronym. I suspect a lot of folks are going to specifically look for that acronym when starting their search. So, I’d argue with sticking with that classic.

That said, it is your community and you should build the identity you want to build. So, don’t let some old curmudgeon like me push you away from doing something that interests you.

do any of you hate how self-hosting services like photo- or document-management systems, or even a simple rss tool, forces you to sort your stuff out, and put your decades old files in order?!

What is this “sort” thing you speak of? I don’t sort anything, I have NextCloud syncing my entire photos, videos and documents folders and they are just as messy as ever. Granted, I do go through my photos and videos once a year and dump them in a folder named for the year they were taken. Occasionally, I’ll go hog wild and try to sort some of a year’s photos/videos into folders named after events. Though, that hasn’t happened in a number of years. I setup NextCloud so I could have everything synced to my own server and just forget, not have to deal with labeling my data.

As for bookmarks. I already keep those in folders; but, I don’t sync those. I use my desktop far more than I use my phone for web browsing. And the types of things I use my phone for (mostly recipes), I just keep bookmarked there.

The first issue with running a coin miner is using company resources for your own profit. Your own system, using your own electricity, go for it. Running it on a company owned laptop, while at a company building, burning electricity the company is paying for. Ya, that starts to get uncomfortably close to fraud or theft. There is also that whole, “running unauthorized software on a company system, doing who knows what else in the background.” There is a very real possibility that the coin miner has unknown vulnerabilities which could allow remote code execution; or, just outright be malicious and contain a remote access trojan. Maybe he was smart enough to audit all the code it was using and be very sure that’s not the case. More likely, he just grabbed a random implementation of XMRIG, put his wallet in the config file and ran it. Either way, he also made a point of refusing to remove it, so we escalated up to management. With the recent ransomware outbreak having been in the multi-million dollar (possibly low tens of millions) damage range, refusing to remove unauthorized software went over about as well as a lead balloon. There may have been other factors at play; but, the unauthorized software and being a dick about removing it was what got him out the door.

If you spin it up, fucking own it. When you’re done with it, shut it down. I have long lost count of the number of times I’ve reached out to a team to ask about the coin miner they are running on some random EC2 instance only to find out that some jackass spun it up for a test, gave it a public IP, set the VPC to allow any inbound traffic, installed all kinds of random crap and then never updated it. Nor did it get shutdown when the test ended. So, a year and a half later, when the software was woefully out of date, someone hacked it and spun up a coin miner. Oh, and the jackass who set it up didn’t bother to enable logging or security monitoring. But, they sure as hell needed the ability to spin stuff up on their own. Because working with IT to get it done right would be too hard for their fragile little ego.

You joke, but I’ve actually been responsible for a coder getting shown the door for running a coin miner on his work laptop.

In his defense, cyber security at that company was crap for a long time. After a ransomware outbreak, they started paying attention and brought some folks like myself in to start digging out. This guy missed the easy out of, “hey that’s not mine!” The logs we had were spotty enough that we would have just nuked the laptop and moved on. But no, he had to fight us and insist that he should be allowed to run a coin miner on his work laptop. Management was not amused.

Same. I had gotten the paid version because the dev deserved something for such a great app. RIF died and I did a hard cutover to Lemmy. Deleted my Reddit account and probably caused some confusion for the cordcutters subreddit. I had a post which was part of the sidebar for about a decade.