Right? I wish we had the Great Firewall ffs.

If it weren’t in a US jurisdiction this would matter to me, but since it is it’s irrelevant. US law basically makes privacy on any server within the US an illusion. Because they can issue a gag and log order to the server operator and you’d never know as they’d be legally barred from speaking on it.

Well kind of. But it’s more like touch DIFFERENT grass. Like whereever you live I bet there’s a river or creak or lake or whatever within a 30 minute drive. Go there. Check it out. Sit next to it for a minute. Let yourself be an ape for a minute. It’s what we are. Just follow your whims. See a cool rock? Go check that shit out.

Agreed if you read through the forum posts of the founder a lot of it is him bending over backwards to justify this very thing. But I figured most people wouldn’t be as convinced by the technical aspect, and I’m not qualified enough on it to like fully break it down myself either so just didn’t speak on it.

I do think that it seems a bit worse than just an extra layer tho. It is literally moving your actual Identifying data (payment info and IP) into the hands of a US based company and out of the hands of Mullvad. It is protecting you from Mullvad, and exposing you to the massive fucking Five Eyes surveillance state, and US jurisdiction which is one of the most draconian in the world in regards to digital privacy.

Is this just a money grab? Maybe. Does the founder believe in what he’s doing? Maybe. But does this also look exactly like what I would expect a US Government backed Honey Pot service to look like? Yes.

Also, if you don’t trust Mullvad, use TOR.

Step outside of your routine. Drive 20 minutes down the road on a whim and go to the park. Go for a walk. Break the monotony of life in small ways all throughout the day/week. Less screen time too.

I wanted to gauge like how much people read outside the main ML theory. I have dozens of books like this physically on my bookshelf myself. But I’ve never heard like an ML mention the Art of War when recomending things to read. So was curious what people thought about it. One reason I find it interesting is modern China actually does incorporate a lot of Sun Tzu and Confucian style thinking into how they do things and it works quite well for them, but it’s not something I see highlighted often.

I’ve used Newegg but never heard of B&H what is that? Newegg is good for PC parts but not really for other things. Like RV electronics for example. Altho you can find some of that on other sites too. I do try to diversify when I can and not support the monopoly. One of the main issues I’ve found is just shipping. Even if you can find something somewhere else sometimes it’ll take a month to get there, or it’s out of stock, or something like that. Especially more recently. I even had something happen one time where I tried to buy from LattePanda on their site and my bank BLOCKED the transaction and wouldn’t let me buy from them directly because they were an “untrusted” vendor lol. But I was allowed to buy the exact same thing 2nd hand from Amazon.

How could I know the answer to my question when my question was what other peoples opinions on the topic were?

Say’s who? The community is supposed to just organically resist this? There’s no organizational structure? Because that would be a government.

Well I’m not just talking about critiquing them. Some do deserve it, but I think they also just have a lot of useful information regarding strategy, mindfulness, and tactics that transcends ideology.

Well there’s a walmart that has electronics stuff but at that point you may as well just buy from Amazon anyway lmao

Specify how what I described is different than what you’d do then. What mechanisms or institutions would you put in place to prevent step 3?

Mine said “has 2 adults” and I was trying to figure out why because I’m very much by myself, and I realized it is because my mother sends things to my address with her amazon account sometimes. So it thinks she lives here.

Honestly I wish I didn’t. I don’t have a google account. Don’t have any Meta accounts. Don’t have accounts for basically anything I’m not functionally REQUIRED to have (banking for example). But Amazon is hard to avoid. I do a lot of buying in person, but in person shopping is just horrible these days. You need to find something specific and you are screwed. I do try to find other places online to get something when I can but a lot of times I just have to fall back to amazon. Maybe part of it is just the area I’m in though. Tons of the more specialty stores here have closed down. We don’t even have an electronics store anymore after Best Buy closed.

The term authoritarianism is utterly meaningless because all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The state is fundamentally an instrument that’s used by the ruling class to maintain its dominance. The whole notion that political systems can be neatly categorized into authoritarian or democratic binaries is deeply infantile.

The reality is that every government derives its authority from its monopoly on legal violence. The ability to enforce laws, suppress dissent, and maintain order is derived from control over police, military, and judicial systems. Whether a government is labelled authoritarian or democratic, the fundamental basis of its power lies here. Therefore, the only meaningful questions to ask are which class interests it represents, and to what extent can it be held accountable to them.

I honestly think we should have a bot where anytime someone says the word authoritarian it just spits this out at them.

The Latitude 7400 (Non 2-in-one version) is genuinely an amazing laptop if you underclock the CPU a bit so it doesn’t sound like a jet engine. I run Debian on it and the thing gets 12 hours of battery life, and does everything I need. Build quality is pretty good too. I got it for like 200$ refurbished.

Here: https://okular.kde.org/

Okular

Red Star OS

Step 1: Abolish Government

Step 2: Establish absolutely no institutional infrastucture to ensure nobody else makes a new government. Because that would be authoritatian.

Step 3: Someone makes another government by establishing a monopoly on violence.

Step 4: Abolish Government… wait what?