JasSmith

@JasSmith@sh.itjust.works

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Half-a-million members sign up to new left-wing party founded in Britain⁩ ⁨⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
I like it in theory but there have been no real world examples of it actually working. There are only supplementary implementations which exist next to representative democracy. One of the most cited reasons that it could not work is the mental and decision load expected of an average elected representative. They make many decisions each day, big and small. When agreeing on a Bill, they might read tens of thousands of words, negotiate with hundreds of other representatives, and make dozens of various deals to achieve their preferred outcome. In a direct democracy system, either those bills would be split into 10,000 constituent parts, and each would be voted on by the public; or there would be 10,000 ombibus bills proposed by citizens, each with subtle variations, and the public would be expected to vote on them. Or both of those scenarios, at the same time.

The outcome seems painfully clear to me: in both of those scenarios, 98% of the public would check out. That’s far too many words to read, far too many meetings to hold, far too much information to process and on which to provide reasonable judgement. The legislature would be controlled by a hyper connected and independently wealthy 2% who would lobby for their preferred bill using their fortunes and connections.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Half-a-million members sign up to new left-wing party founded in Britain⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I’m not so sure. Humans are incredibly diverse by nature. We have evolved to inhabit every ecological niche in existence, and then we invented many more. We can’t get a population to agree that the sky is blue or that water is wet or the Earth is round or that vaccines are safe. There is always at least 10% who disagree on any subject. When you map each 10% group as a Venn diagram, it covers everyone in the population on some issue, big or small. In terms of governance, this means that any direction chosen will be opposed by a relatively large minority. There are only two options here and it is absolutely binary: majority rule, or minority rule. History has taught us that minority rule is horrific. It tends to create massive inequality, death, suffering, and eventually revolution. Democracy is the solution presented for majority rule, and I am intimately aware of the phrase “tyranny by the majority.” In fact I would categorise democracy as exactly that. Despite that, it is better than the alternatives.

So I think we are evolutionary bound to a best case scenario in which the majority chooses a generally agreed upon direction, while a loud minority gets really angry. Democracy ensures that that loud minority doesn’t get violent because they’re given a seat at the table and a voice, even if they don’t get their way this time.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Half-a-million members sign up to new left-wing party founded in Britain⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
It’s far from perfect but it’s better than everything else humanity has attempted.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Half-a-million members sign up to new left-wing party founded in Britain⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

Cap immigration at 2% a year. It’s very clear to me that immigration in recent decades has been far too high. It has undermined the labor market, the housing market, and it may undermine national cohesion.

Honestly, any party which achieves only this will win the next four elections. 95% of the Kingdom wants lower immigration. I’ve never seen an issue this unifying in politics in my entire life. You can’t get 95% of the country to agree on anything. Except this.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Half-a-million members sign up to new left-wing party founded in Britain⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
The Green Party wants to significantly liberalise immigration to the UK. This is at a time when 95% of the Kingdom wants lower immigration. For this reason (and many more), the Greens are currently polling at 9%. They reason they don’t get much airtime is because their policies are unpopular and people don’t like them.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Starting out with Selfhosting⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I would build a cheap PC based on a G series Intel CPU. The G7400 is cheap and will handle anything you want to transcode, plus won’t get bottlenecked with IO and other processes you might want to run later like the Arr stack. You probably don’t need more than 8GB of RAM. This will give you lots of flexibility to choose the right OS which suits you, which software you want, upgrades, and especially HDDs down the road (if you get a case with HDD slots). I started small and ended up with 15 disks over the years.

Unraid ($250) is one option but it’s expensive and buggy. TrueNAS is a very popular ZFS based solution which is free. Windows is also a surprisingly good option. It’s your lowest effort option by far. You can replicate Unraid functionality with SnapRAID and DrivePool ($50).
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Starting out with Selfhosting⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
ChatGPT can be surprisingly useful when tackling the endless bugs and weird and unexpected differences on each Linux distro. I think you’re missing out. It shaves off 30-40% of the time it takes me to arrive at the right solution. It’s obviously not omniscient, but it provides a lot of ideas which I had not considered. Usually one of those paths works.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After laying off 9,000 employees , Microsoft records $27.2 billion profit in latest quarter⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
In a capitalist system, that is what they are supposed to do. They are even compelled by law to maximise their return to investors. You are attacking them for stating a fact, believing that by merely uttering the fact, they are endorsing it.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After laying off 9,000 employees , Microsoft records $27.2 billion profit in latest quarter⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I don’t think Microsoft has cared about people pirating Windows for decades. They still permit people to use the MAS. It’s like two seconds to activate Windows for free forever now.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After laying off 9,000 employees , Microsoft records $27.2 billion profit in latest quarter⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
They massively over-hired and over-acquired during covid. Demand spiked and they started poaching every studio and developer they could find. These layoffs were likely always the plan for when demand dropped again, and when they needed to streamline and consolidate the studios they purchased.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After laying off 9,000 employees , Microsoft records $27.2 billion profit in latest quarter⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
-10 downvotes for stating a fact.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Why the hell did we ever drop it?’: Labor should push for new carbon tax, ex-Treasury head says⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Well, making necessities more expensive is difficult to sell no matter how it’s packaged. Like it or not, oil is used in everything from transporting food, to growing food, to medicine and supplements, to commuting for work, to home insulation and building, to iPhones and computers. Making those things more expensive, no matter the righteousness of the intention, hurts especially the working classes and the poor. Targeted subsidies to compensate them for their loss is impossible to fairly calibrate, and usually results in even greater political turmoil.

Carbon taxes can work if the country is wealthy and can afford the productivity loss (and the citizens are willing to give up that economic progress and wealth). For a nation like the UK, with massive economic problems, a growing underclass, astronomically high housing costs, and spiraling costs for necessities like food, a carbon tax is nothing other than a direct attack on the poor and political suicide.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I worked at an escort agency. This is how it changed my attitude to sex⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
A transaction (like selling sex) requires two parties. If you make one side illegal, the act itself is illegal. The only distinguishing factor is who gets punished. Sex work can’t exist without people buying it, so sex work is illegal. Sweden has chosen not to prosecute people who sell sex.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I worked at an escort agency. This is how it changed my attitude to sex⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Which makes it illegal. If you prosecute either the customer or supplier of a good or service, you have made it illegal.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I worked at an escort agency. This is how it changed my attitude to sex⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
While I agree, people don’t often think of countries like Sweden as very backwards.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG now ask for donations when you buy games⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
I’ll allow it. I like what they’re doing over there. No DRM. Download everything. Game preservation. I wish they had done a better job with Galaxy but it looks like Microsoft is about to do their own store aggregator now so maybe that’s moot.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨how are my fellow peeps hosting your music collection these days?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Plexamp is mind blowingly good. Great UX. Perfect legibility. No discovery/ads up in your face. Just you listening to your music how you like it. Streaming is ROCK SOLID. Downloads work flawlessly. It just relies on proper metadata in Plex.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Plex has paywalled my server!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
FYI you can definitely watch while your network is offline. You just net to tell it that you’re happy with that (it’s not activated by default for security reasons).
- In your Plex server settings, go to Network, enable “Show Advanced”.
- Near the bottom, find the textbox that says List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth
- In this field, enter the local IP address of any Plex client(s) you want to keep using if your internet (or the Plex cloud) is down.
- A example: 192.168.0.50
- Save the setting, done.
#Important thing to be aware of:

What this setting does is tell your local Plex server to simply give any Plex client that connects from that specific IP full admin access to your Plex server, ignoring any account restrictions. This means that if you have things in place to restrict access to some libraries (kids blocked from 18+ movies etc) those restrictions will have no effect. Also if you have the option set to allow file deletion, then any client from that IP could also delete items. And they could of course change any settings in your Plex server. So your kids can watch anything on your server, if you have a guest in your network and they browse to the Plex web interface, they can mess with things.

Because of that I would recommend to limit the amount of IP’s you enter in that field to the absolute bare minimum. For example, only whitelist the “main living room device” plus one device you to admin the server, such as a laptop.

If you want to whitelist multiple devices, this is a example:
```
192.168.0.50,192.168.0.77,192.168.0.80
```
If you want to whitelist a entire network, these would be examples:
```
192.168.0.0/24 (this means 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.0.255)

192.168.0.0/16 (this means 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255)
```
And of course those involved network devices should use static IPs in your home network.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Plex has paywalled my server!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Ditto. There is a crowd on Lemmy who seem to get angry whenever people are happy to pay for software and I do not understand it. Surely we want developers to be paid for their hard work? Don’t we want them to able to comfortably live?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Majority of Australians think China will be world’s most powerful country by 2035, poll finds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
I agree that authoritarian governments have more latitude than democracies. The CCP displaced up to two million people when it built the The Three Gorges Dam. There was no recourse. No ability to object. People who had lived on the land for generations were simply told to leave. Some were lucky to be given meagre government apartments to live in elsewhere, but that was it. It’s much easier to build large infrastructure projects when you don’t have to worry about pesky things like property laws, health and safety, and human rights.

If your argument is that authoritarianism will win over democracy in the long term, it’s an interesting debate. Most of human history was some form of authoritarianism. Some form of might makes right. There have been small democratic experiements in history (see Greece), but modern democracy is a relatively new experiment. I hope it succeeds, because I like it a lot more than the alternatives.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK | Fewer than half of young men believe abortion should be legal, poll finds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Telling people what not to do is far less effective than giving them positive and aspirational advice. Jordan Peterson literally told boys to clean their room and he became outrageously popular overnight. How sick is our culture when boys are so starved for wholesome masculine guidance that they’ll cling to the first man who gives them healthy paternal advice like “clean your room”? Something people on the left in particular do not understand about this issue is that telling boys to be more like girls doesn’t work. They need to be told it’s normal and healthy to be aggressive and competitive and physical, as long as it’s done in a way which doesn’t hurt people. Masculinity isn’t evil. Anyone who calls it “toxic” should be admonished and derided. We need Aragorn like figures in the real world to show boys what healthy masculinity looks like.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Majority of Australians think China will be world’s most powerful country by 2035, poll finds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
This is an excellent question. I think the major question mark hanging over this projection is the role that automation will play in the future. Both in terms of physical production, and in terms of white collar or office work. One could argue that economies which are best positioned to take advantage of automation might feel the impact of a declining workforce less, but then those same societies run the risk of high unemployment and low domestic economic demand for products and services. The balance is crucial and economies are generally slow to pivot.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK | Fewer than half of young men believe abortion should be legal, poll finds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
I don’t think framing their issues in terms of women’s issues is helpful. “But what about men” is just a unhelpful when dealing with issues for women. Feminism did great things to advance the interests of women, and it required coordination and struggle over many decades against a system which wasn’t receptive to their needs. Now, each year, the U.S. spends close to $8B on women’s initiatives spanning many areas from healthcare to education. If you’re suggesting men need their own movement, perhaps you’re right. Perhaps what we’re seeing is the early formation of that. Messy, uncoordinated, and immature, as are all early movements.

In the mean time, I don’t think “be better” is a resonant message. It was rightly dismissed when people said it to women in the 1960s and it should be dismissed now. These issues are structural and require structural solutions. I think a big part of this is economic. Men are taught from a young age (by men and women) that unless they make a lot of money, they’re worthless. Society is offering fewer and fewer opportunities for men in traditionally blue collar industries to thrive. If we offer few opportunities and call them worthless for not succeeding, this is a recipe for societal instability.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK | Fewer than half of young men believe abortion should be legal, poll finds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
I don’t think young men are genetically predisposed to this. They are the product of the society in which they grow up. They’re seeking help because no one else is there to help.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Majority of Australians think China will be world’s most powerful country by 2035, poll finds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
There was a moment around the year 2000 when this might have been the case but China’s demographics and unwillingness to permit meaningful immigration will see a decline of 20-25% of their working age population over the next 30 years due to a plummeting fertility rate. This phenomenon isn’t unique to China, but China is one of the hardest hit for many reasons. A decline of hundreds of millions of workers is going to destroy their economy - especially with such a large elderly population set to retire. There is no chance they fully transition to a services based economy by then. Not even close. They still have hundreds of millions of citizens living subsistence farming lifestyles.

Now compound this with all of the structural issues like command and control policies which destroy whole industries because the dictator in charge has a mood swing, a property bubble from which they will never recover, an economy built on unnecessary public spending, and an educational system which continues to emphasise blind obedience over individualism, and I think it very difficult to believe China becomes the most “powerful” country by 2035.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK | Fewer than half of young men believe abortion should be legal, poll finds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Warren Farrell has been warning the world for 20 years that neglecting and marginalising young men is going to result in generations of angry men who have checked out of society and will turn to criminality. By every available metric from suicide to educational outcomes, boys and young men are suffering enormously. Drowning people do terrible things. Lashing out at society in the ballot box is going to be the least of our issues soon.

Despite this, I predict society will continue to blame them for their failures, marginalise them, mock them, and pretend that they’re privileged. This is going to get worse until people are ready to have a serious society-wide discussion about how we can help young men succeed in the modern world.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3090: Sail Physics⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Well that doesn’t look right but I’m not a boat physicist so I’ll just accept it at face value.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Netflix will show generative AI ads midway through streams in 2026⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
I’m convinced there’s almost nothing they could do to lose net subscribers.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The YouTube Alternative Nobody's Talking About ! Peertube⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

Ironically, I think Fediverse suffers from a high amount of tech expertise and not enough project managers, lol.

I 1,000% agree. FOSS projects are dominated by skilled developers who have to work under the direction of managers in their day jobs and FUCKING HATE IT. They dream about breaking the shackles of idiotic managers who are suppressing their talent and creativity, so they work on FOSS projects. Only to learn that developers without clear direction is like herding angry cats at a Metallica concert. The end result is a patchwork of features each developer would personally like, but normal people hate.

I am probably biased here because I am one of those managers. The reason we don’t work on FOSS projects is because 1) they don’t want us working on them, and 2) we fucking hate our jobs as-is, and don’t want to spend one more minute than necessary herding angry cats.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The YouTube Alternative Nobody's Talking About ! Peertube⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

Lots of people have opinions, not many people want to organize their thoughts into, eg. an effective advertising campaign, a github pull request, or basically anything other than meaningless musing.

This is the nature of free work. Any donation of time is sparse and intermittent. People have bills to pay. The best and brightest want to be paid well for their time. This requires a business model of some kind, and monetising that work. This is antithetical to FOSS projects, and is the reason they will almost always be inferior to projects with large budgets with teams of UX designers. /obligatory COME AT ME BRO