01HNNWZ0MV43FF

A little "How many people were soldiers in ancient Rome" type searches gave me these numbers...

16% of adult males in the Roman mid-republic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_army_of_the_mid-Republic...), call that 8% of adults of all genders.

Wikipedia says that there's about 1.34 million people in active duty in the US military, out of about 342 million people, 21.5% of which are under 18. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces)

I think that's 0.5%? Down from 8% in ancient Rome?

> Rather than take its standard 30 percent cut of in-app purchases through the Play Store, Google is lowering its cut to 20 percent

> Third-party app stores will be able to apply to the company's new "Registered App Stores" program to see if they meet "certain quality and safety benchmarks."

> users will still be able to sideload alternative app stores that aren't part of the program

I'll wait to hear how the F-Droid team responds

I searched for "Linux kernel limited to 8 cores" and found this

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38260935

> This article is clickbait and in no way has the kernel been hardcoded to a maximum of 8 cores.

So they're stepping a 286 very slowly and sorta... bit-banging the I/O pins on it?

Love it. No notes.

"Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!"

Stallman was kinda right. If you don't control the software, someone else does, and they'll want to control you.

I have thought about this problem, over the years, for hours, and never found any middle ground. A computer cannot serve two masters. So I put in extra effort to be the master.

Frightenin' all the dogs, on the Rocky Road to Dublin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Road_to_Dublin

A classic I only know because it was in the RDJ Sherlock Holmes movie.

The High Kings do a good version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QdbeM2JWYE

YouTube on TVs will often keep closed captioning on when switching accounts, then notice that CC is on and turn it off. Even though every account in the household always has CC turned on.

It's the privacy equivalent of "She was dressed skimpy in that part of town"

Blocking is laying in bed waiting for my paycheck before I can get up.

Multi-threading is handing off a simple task to someone else who will do it slower and need constant explanation, so that it looks like I'm less busy.

Single-threading is writing and sending an email before returning to my work.

Works fine on my end. The HTTPS URL gives a 301 permanent redirect to HTTP, and then I ordered some boner pills and put my social security number to confirm.

Finding good nodes is a thorny problem for human friendship, too!

> if ownership of a company was by law distributed among employees according to the amount of time and skill level they worked there.

Those are so hard to quantify that I think you'd really have better luck instituting UBI. Both in terms of encoding it into law and getting voter support.

I also want to say, as a market socialist who owns stock, owning stock in your own company is the least diverse investment you can make, except maybe buying a house and then living in it.

And if it's based on time at the company, do I keep the stock when I leave? Am I punished by losing stock if I'm fired? How much of the company is owned by former employees? A lot? None?

If I only own stock while I work there, and I can't sell it, then it's not worth much. It's just a profit-sharing bonus with extra steps.

> We see a battle of PR campaigns and whomever has the last post out remains in the media memory as the truth

You must find truth. Lies will find you.

You have to find good people. Bad people will find you.

Getting older is strange.

I never wanted to "grow out" of programming, but it feels like that's what I'm doing. I'm leaning into activism and real-life stuff, and programming is only a tool, which is sometimes useful and sometimes not.

I was always a "Love of the game" programmer. I went to a business incubator recently and saw two guys vibe-coding with Claude. One was using speech dictation. That's crazy to me. Programming should happen at a keyboard.

I have my excuses - Claude will eventually cost more. AI that runs on Someone Else's Computer is not free software, and it will never respect you. The keyboard is an elegant weapon from a more civilized age. These excuses are sort-of true and sort-of pointless.

Programming is a means to an end. I guess when the chips are down, most people program to make money, which means working for disgusting people who have so much money that they can change the course of history for the worse.

I programmed for fun, and that meant lots of programming. Now I want to program for justice, and that will mean less programming and more grass-touching.

If de-convolution works, is this just like a pinhole camera?

Graphene has been good to me, after I turned off the "Apps just updated" and "Apps are up to date already" notification spam

DeltaChat supposedly does that but I've never tried to interoperate it with email

> Sign in to GitHub to continue to Gist

That's new

Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20260213161600/https://gist.gith...

> I think the better path forward is more open, peaceful, extended discussion.

There is a good format for two people to have a discussion in good faith: https://yesnodebate.org/

I'll start - Do you think it is good that federal agents are ignoring due process?

I was told in a Know Your Rights training to carry copies of documents, so they can't steal / burn the originals.

Readers, whatever you're doing right now is what you would be doing during the rise of Nazi Germany... Be kind, be a good neighbor, don't talk to cops.

So I don't need root permission or kernel networking stuff setup.

(I do run Wireguard, it just feels like sometimes a VPN is a sledgehammer to solve a port forwarding problem)

"Award-winning journalist on Fox News" and the padlock with an American flag really sells it for me.

Maybe I should get in on this grift. Curl American Patriot Gold Marine Corps Never Forget 9/11 Edition for only $200. Loads _any_ URL.

> What is the most effective way to get rid of ants? To destroy their ability to use a pheromone trail. Perhaps we could just put advertising in it?

I'm taking this analogy for myself :)

> what kind of social system would afford long term substantial change?

In my experience over the last year, these things are true...

First, in-person interaction is strictly better than digital. You can meet lots of people digitally and talk to them in bed, but _interacting_ with a given person face-to-face means you can do any digital interaction, plus have very high-bandwidth communication, and also share papers. (I love paper. It's not obsolete if you know what a Pareto frontier is.) This is something that many people understand intuitively but it took me a while to quantify it.

Second, digital (text) communication affords bickering. In the best case, if I'm DMing a friend and we disagree about some political point, it will make the conversation awkward. If I'm in a big group chat, it can drag people into a dogpile. It's an emotional drain and nobody really likes it. And it doesn't happen nearly as much in person. Even with the exact same people. Even I am nicer and more patient in person. And being able to physically leave and see someone later is a nice option that digital spaces (even Signal) don't afford. They only understand permanent blocks and not just "Tell me your dumb take another time."

Third, you can just say "I'm trying to build community and make friends, can I introduce you to some people you might like?" and in the right context and framing, it can sort of work. I am still learning this skill.

Fourth, and I almost forgot - A _huge_ amount of nonverbal communication comes down to trust and respect, especially respecting other people's time. Did you call a 50-person meeting where 1 person is yammering about some bikeshed bullshit? Everyone hates that. Are you talking to someone one-on-one but they still won't give you a turn or ask you anything about yourself? They might be a good person but they're gonna be hard to get along with if they keep that up. Did you send someone a blog post that takes 5 minutes to read? And they didn't ask for it? They aren't gonna read it. I wouldn't read it. You would have more luck reading it out loud to them in person because it shows that you are both respecting each other's time. Otherwise you are assigning homework and asking their attention without paying your attention to them. I can't name a person who likes that.

NIMBYs

> you can simply choose one of many others

Not really. It's a network effect, like Facebook. Value scales quadratically with the number of users, because nobody wants to "have to check two apps".

We should buy out monopolies like the Chinese government does. If you corner the market, then you get a little payout and a "You beat capitalism! Play again?" prize. Other companies can still compete but the customers will get a nice state-funded high-quality option forever.

It actually says "L am retiring". Maybe a 419 scam kinda thing, the intentional typos.

> interlocking ars

OwO

Damn it. I wanted to use that name