I mean, a shotgun is going to be the best for home defense; even a double barrel carriage gun would be comfortably light.

But your point is on the nose: this isn’t for home defense, it’s for insurrection, and unless OP plans on training as a sniper, bolt action is a poor choice. Heck, a lever guide gun would be better.

But, as little as I like ARs, for the purpose they’re looking to fill, some AR 5.56 is probably best. ARs come in all flavors, but .223 is cheap and plentiful, and you look at Creedmore or Blackout, or other exotic calibers if you know what you’re looking for and you already know 5.56 isn’t it.

The PS90 is a great suggestion! Good weight distribution, nice, compact rifle.

Fair warning, though: it’s expensive. The guns themselves are not cheap, and the ammo is relatively expensive and can be hard to source. OTOH, if OP goes down that road they can get a handgun that shoots the same ammo.

P90s are even harder to source; you need both SBR and full auto licenses, and they’re even more expensive.

If OP has time and money, absolutely. Otherwise, it’s more an enthusiast’s gun in the US.

I’m a vet and developed a dislike for the AR15 platform, but this is a solid recommendation. All things considered, it’s easy to source, and ammo is plentiful.

Yes. It’s always the bandwidth that’s the main bottleneck, whether CPU-Memory, IPC, or the network.

Screw quantum computers; what we need is quantum entangled memory sharing at a distance. Imagine! Even if only within a single computer, all memory could could be L1 cache.

There is a reason why they do this.

Of course. It also prevents people from getting all improvements that aren’t security. It’s especially bad for software engineers who are developing applications that need on a non-security big fix or new feature. It’s fine if all you need is a box that’s going to run the same version of some software, sitting forgotten in a closet that gets walled in some day. IMO, it’s a crappy system for anything else.

You swapped PKBUILD and APKBUILD 🙃

I did! I’ve been trying to update packages in both, recently. The similarities are utterly frustrating, as they’re almost identical; the biggest difference between Alpine and Arch is the package process. If they were the same format - and they’re honestly so close it’s absurd - it’d make packager’s lives easier.

I may have mentioned I haven’t yet started Void, but I expect it to be similarly frustrating: so very, very similar.

I’m starting to think something like a yay that installs into $HOME.

Homebrew, in theory, could do this. But they insist on creating a separate user and installing to that user’s home directory

Yeah, I got to thinking about this more after I posted, and it’s a horrible idea. It’d guarantee system updates break user installs, and the only way it couldn’t were if system installs knew about user installs and also updated those, which would defeat the whole purpose.

So you end up back with containers, or AppImages, Snap, or Flatpack. Although, of all of these, AppImages and podman are the most sane, since Snap and Flatpack are designed to manage system-level software, which isn’t much of am issue.

It all drives me back to the realization that the best solution is statically compiled binaries, as produced by Go, Rust, Zig, Nim, V. I’d include C, but the temptation to dynamically link is so ingrained in C - I rarely see really statically linked C projects.

Back in the day, there was a distributed cluster OS called Mosix. Even back then I had several spare computers lying about, and the idea of being able to chain them all together and have one virtual computer that would automatically distribute processing without special coding was enticing. It turned out to not work very well unless you did specially code for it, or clustered the computers very tightly with fiber; it just wasn’t worth it.

But when I see piles of compute like this, a part of my still wants to network them all together and run … well, whatever fills the shoes of OpenMosix these days, if anything does.

Hey! Take some land away from the natives, create a new country, settle the Palestinians there and then keep them supplied with weapons to fight wars against the displaced people who want their land back.

What could go wrong?

I believe that chaos monkeys will go down in computing history as being one of the century’s greatest innovations in testing.

Or, just use apps from F-Droid. You don’t have to go totally Luddite to not use monitized software.

Using analog technology is fine. But it’s not the only alternative to paying for apps or becoming a product yourself. There’s a vast amount of OSS, free software for Android.

If you’re using Apple, you’re fucked, and, yeah, going analog is the only real option unless you can switch to Android - preferably a de-Googled phone. There are some nice options, at least one which isn’t available in the US.

Jesus christ. You’d have thought they’d have learned not to trust that goon after seeing what he did with Ukraine.

Mom’s always been a bit different since then… I can’t quite put my finger on it. She started parting her hair on the other side, for one thing.

Anyway, it was a weird experience.

Uncle Sxan story time!

A couple of years ago, I read a book series which meant a lot to me at the time. I hand-wrote a letter of thanks to the author, thanking her for providing an optimistic, yet not condescending or saccharin, story. The author is well established, and has been writing for many years. She responded with a nice (hand written) note which, nonetheless, started “luckily, I’m one of the few people left who can read cursive.” Which felt like a low-key criticism, TBH.

I do. Not. Care. If younger generations let cursive die, the world will be a lesser place. Mark my words! Beware the Ides of March!

This is so wrong in so many ways, from the misspelling of “you’re,” to the Overbury misquote about beauty being skin deep.

Hmmm. That’s canon, and everything I can find confirms it, but I can’t find a source that ignores anything but the original movie; all of the Original Timeline incorporates information from the sequels.

I need to go watch the original again. I still remember that, within the movie, Reese - the only source of information about the future war - says they were winning until Skynet became self-aware, implying that humans stopped winning. Can you find a quote where Reese says they’d defeated Skynet, or were about to? The quotes I found imply otherwise.

To be clear: I’m not debating canon. You’re right - when including all the movies, in the Original Timeline the humans destroy SkyNet. What I said, and still believe, is that in isolation in the first movie Reese does not say humans were winning the Future War, nor had they beaten SkyNet.

It was too hammy. The entire T-800 arc was pandering. The T-1000 concept was interesting, and there were good scenes, but I felt it followed the Star Wars trend of increasingly pandering to younger crowds.

Fair enough. I’m this case, you use the downvote how it should be used: to mark something as “not interesting”, as opposed to “I disagree with the content.”

I need to come up with something catchy that I can attach to all my posts, like “Carthago delenda est.”

My Toilet. It’s where I meditate and read the holy scriptures.

I’ve never seen this before, but it makes so much sense.

Who originated it?

I’d like to call out that authoritarianism can exist in all forms. Unless you literally define “Left” as “Anarchism.” And even under Anarchism, strong men will crop up; the oxymoronic fact of anarchism is that it’s the best environment under which cults of personality to prosper. You could easily have an authoritarian regime where you’re sent to a Correction Camp if you use someone’s preferred pronouns incorrectly, or decide you want to take a ride your fossil-fuel motorcycle. I think it’s always an important fact to recognize that authoritarianism can arise in nearly every system.

I agree.

On the other hand, as a software author, your options are: spend a lot of time maintaining packages for Arch, Alpine, Void, Nix, Gentoo, Gobo, RPM, Debian, and however many other distro package managers; or wait for someone else to do it, which will often be “never”.

The non-rolling distros can take a year to update a package, even if they decide to include it.

Honestly, it’s a mess, and I think we’re in that awkward state Linux was in when everyone seemed to collectively realize sysv init sucks, and you saw dinit, runit, OpenRC, s6, systemd, upstart, and initng popping up - although, many of these were started after systemd; it’s just for illustration. Most distributions settled on systemd, for better or worse. Now we see something similar: the profusion of package managers really is a Problem, and people are trying to address it with solutions like Snap, AppImages, and Flatpack.

As a software developer, I’d like to see distros standardize on a package manager, but on the other hand, I really dislike systemd and feel as if everyone settling on the wrong package manager (cough Snap) would be worse than the current chaos. I don’t know if they’re mutually exclusive objectives.

For my money, I’d go with pacman. It’s easy to write PKGBUILDs and to get packages into AUR, but requires users to intentionally use AUR. I wish it had a better migration process (AUR packages promoted to community, for instance). It’s fairly trivial for a distribution to “pin” releases so that users aren’t using a rolling upgrade.

Alpine’s is also good nice, and they have a really decent, clearly defined migration path from testing to community; but the barrier for entry to get packages in is harder, and clearly requires much more work by a community of volunteers, and it can occasionally be frustrating for everyone: for us contributors who only interact with the process a couple of time a year, it’s easy to forget how they require things to be run, causing more work for reviewers; and sometimes an MR will just languish until someone has time to review it. There are some real heroes over there doing some heavy lifting.

I’m about to go on a journey for contribution to Void, which I expect to be similar to Alpine.

Redhat and deb? All I can do is build packages for them and host them myself, and hope users can figure out how to find and install stuff without it being in The Official Repos.

Oh, Nix. I tried, but the package definitions are a nightmare and just being enough of Nix on your computer to where you can test and submit builds takes GB of disk space. I actively dislike working with Nix. GUIX is nearly as bad. I used to like Lisp - it’s certainly an interesting and educational tool - but I’ve really started to object to more and more as I encounter it in projects like Nyxt and GUIX, where you’re forced to use it if you want to do any customization.

But this is the world of OSS: you either labor in obscurity; or you self-promote your software - which I hate: if I wanted to do marketing, I’d be in marketing. Or you hope enough users in enough distributions volunteer to manage packages for their distros that people can get to it. And you still have to address the issue of making it easy for people to use your software. curl <URL> | sh is, frankly, a really elegant, easy solution for software developers… of only it weren’t for the fact that the world is full of shitty, unethical people forcing us to distrust each other.

It’s all sub-optimal, and needs a solution. I’m not convinced the various containerizations are the right direction; does “rg” really need to be run in a container? Maybe it makes sense for big suites with a lot of dependencies, like Gimp, but even so, what’s the solution for the vast majority of OSS software which are just little CLI or TUI tools?

Distributions aren’t going to standardize on Arch’s APKBUILD, or Alpine’s almost identical but just slightly different enough to not be compatible PKGBUILD; and Snap, AppImage, and Flatpack don’t seem to be gaining broad traction. I’m starting to think something like a yay that installs into $HOME. Most systems are single user, anyway; something that leverages Arch’s huge package repository(s), but can be used by any user regardless of distribution. I know Nix can be used like this, but then, it’s Nix, so I’d rather not.

Honestly? This looks like a troll. A clever one, because they’re using the same inability to use the English language correctly, avoiding all punctuation, so that they blend in and don’t just get banned.

I’d like to see more content like this in that community: “show me the steps to avoid this, and evidence it’s worked for you.” It might, just might, save some more perceptive people from going too far down that road.

I mean, we mock these people, but I can’t be the only one who’d rather see them come back to a more rational, realistic world-view. I know it sounds as if I’m arguing for conformity, but arguing against insanity is more arguing for sanity than for conformity.