Start with a portable hard drive which only has one job “store a copy of your critical data”.

• move the drive as infrequently as possible, especially when it’s turned on.
• only ever write to it when you do your periodic backup.
• only plug it in when you need to read from or write to it.

It’s a paranoid set of rules, but if this data is critical, this is a good idea. Even better is to have an additional copy of that data in cloud storage.

As far as operating system, you absolutely can use a Linux machine, but learning a new system risks you accidentally deleting data so be careful. Linux has ways of reading windows-formatted hard drives, so as much as I prefer Linux, I would say don’t try new things on the machine which hold critical data.

Fair enough, I also would have expected tailscale to set itself as the default route when those options are enabled.

What are your route & dns settings? I don’t remember if tailscale forces all DNS queries to go via it’s tunnel, but I remember that the mullvad client uses DNS hijacking to make sure the device uses the wireguard tunnel.

In the short (next couple lifetimes) term, the US will continue receding from different geopolitical arenas, followed by some political jostling to change that region’s power balance.

As the empire shrinks, the politics of scarcity will become more pervasive, entrenching clientelism and mistrust in an already fairly low-trust society.

It’s not a hot take to say that mask-off fascism is on the menu given how fascism-shaped the US is, but given how autocanibalistic this particular right wing wave is, I have no idea what to expect.

Don’t know whether the new boss will be the same as the old boss; while India and China don’t seem particularly empire-inclined, few countries do until they’re the one with the biggest stick. Both have been drumming up nationalism internally for the last decade, so if they can’t defuse it safely they’ll point it at each other, to everybody’s detriment.

I recommend starting with basic operations, like:

• putting installed files in the right directory structure.
• integrity checking.
• archiving and compressing.

Decide whether your package manager is source-based, or if you’re going to make some kind of binary distribution mechanism. Either way, you’re going to need a process for configuring, compiling and installing packages from source.

I do recommend looking at how Pacman, & apt approach all this. There are also likely books on this topic.

Also recommend playing around with buildroot; not because it is a comprehensive package manager, but because it’s inner workings are very transparent.

I regularly think about two phases I’ve heard:

• “The smarter you are, the better you get at rationalising bad decisions”
• “advertising/propaganda works best when you are certain it doesn’t work on you.”

I feel like they remind me that when it comes to making choices & being duped, intelligence is mostly irrelevant.

My belief is that on an individual level, the counter to propaganda is both free time to ruminate on what we believe, and a strong network of people we trust who are willing to challenge us on the things we say and do. Two things which an atomized and overworked society looses at all levels.

Regarding the solution: does 1.4 work fine once you’re in the OS?

Is this on a fresh install, or have you installed a Wayland DE on an existing distro? If so, you may be missing some packages. What DE are you using for both X and Wayland?

I’m surprised wlr-randr is missing a display that xrandr can see, they should be looking at the same place for the display info. If you hunt through dmesg do you see any errors related to “EDID”?

It’s important to remember that the actions of the working class are primarily derived from their class interests, not because individuals are dicks. Humanizing even shitty individuals is an important part of persuading people away from thinking in terms of individual people and more about the dialectics of class.

Buy a second hand laptop or computer. Lots of companies sell off their tech shit after 3 years, and they have at least a good decade of use in them.

Look at what models are super popular second hand like ThinkPads; you’ll be able to find replacement parts pretty easily.

Absolutely, the fact that every time you interact with a person it could be on the worst day of their lives, but for you it’s just Tuesday is a massive contributor to mental health issues. Being unable to talk about it makes things much worse, and while the ethos like ‘killology’ and similar might cops less traumatized by their jobs it is definitely for the worse.

The amount of othering I hear from cops who talk about the people they interact with in their jobs… Well let’s just say I’ve never heard a cop talk about their job and go “boy am I glad that person is on the force”, and it definitely seems like at least partly a coping mechanism.

I think there are a few reasons, firstly while conservatives put many issues within society under a mental health umbrella, they simultaneously make no efforts to fix this problem and in fact actively make it worse since poor housing access, wealth inequality, healthcare access, food access etc are all major factors for pretty much all mental health issues. There are only a few explanations I can come up with for this:

1. ‘mental health’ is a smokescreen; it’s an umbrella so vague and monumental an issue that it gets put in the “I can’t affect this problem, so there is no point in worrying” basket.

2. People with mental health issues are so othered to them that their solution to people with mental health issues is “a cop with a gun”.

As for cop’s mental health, that’s a bit easier:

• I can’t speak for other countries, but where I’m from if a cop gets diagnosed with pretty much any acronym they risk getting their gun taken off them which directly restricts the jobs they can take and their career advancement. Where I’m from won’t even take on a recruit if they’ve been diagnosed with something. This means cops are terrified of taking any work provided therapy.

• pretty much all police orgs have a really bad machismo problem, which is one thing that keeps men from seeking mental healthcare in general.

• police tend not to require much formal education to start training and tend to pay better than other jobs with the same starting requirement (moral hazard pay), this can lead to the ‘golden handcuffs’ situation of not wanting to jeopardize this career because you’ll have to start at the bottom for a career which pays worse.

• it’s very common for society to see police as ‘essential workers’, which puts it under the umbrella of “we can make your work conditions terrible”; things like shift-work with really unpredictable hours tends to isolate people from their friends and family, making mental health worse and makes them more reliant on their job for their support network.

Reforming the police a tolerable institution seems impossible to me, but a decent start would be disarming them and making sure they are not the people who respond to mental health calls. Problem is that this requires a large part of the population to accept that you can’t simply shoot your problems, even if you hire a goon in blue to do it.

Regarding the US and their gun ownership: yeah, disarming cops is a lot more complicated and probably involves training them about de-escalation and the peelians. It also requires setting up some aptitude requirements, since basics like “time, distance & cover” are regularly forgone in favour of “warrior cop”, and currently there is a very strong pipeline from “that kid who tortures animals” to “corporal”.

I was halfway through a message about return path impedance, but remembered the pico is a carrier board with its ground built in it’s USB connector, and the switches are hardly going to care.

My bad, you’ll be fine 👍

If you can reasonably have the entire bottom layer be connected to ground without the top layer being too crowded, 2 layers could work.

Wires to the underside components? Can you solder them to thru-holes on the underside of the PCB instead?

You can put the MCU and other circuitry on the underside, but perhaps use at least a 3-layer PCB so you can run an internal ground plane under the power components.

Is this keyboard a one-off or are you doing production runs? Try to keep all the SMD components on the same side if you can.

If you’re using the pico rather than a bare RP2040, you’ll have a much harder time putting anything on the underside though.

The past is definitely not a guide for how to achieve a future society or how that society should look, but it does remind us that a society without a state can exist.

It’s not the hard part, but when we’re told that thoughts of a stateless society are fantastical it’s good to remember that it has been done before.

Oof, not a fan of that. Calling it a ‘big tent’ is just a cop out for not vetting who you find.

If you don’t want to do the due diligence that’s fine, give your money to existing funds who are willing to do it for you.

What’s this about them funding Nazis? Can somebody fill me in?

I use NixOS, but it is not for learning how Linux works; realistically it’s for when you already know how Linux typically works, so you can understand when it breaks some of those norms.

If you want to learn how containers etc work, use straight-up Debian.

I really don’t recommend arch for a server. On a desktop absolutely but what I want for a server is to be able to let it sit for 6 months, then update it and not have everything break; arch works best with frequent update hygiene.

I used nushell for a good 6 months, it was nice having structured data, but the syntax difference to bash which I use for my day job was just too jarring to stick with.

Fish was (for me) the right balance of nice syntactic sugar and being able to reasonably expect a bash idiom will work.