[–] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Personal experience with the Christian-cult: mentally-ill individuals who refuse medical help corralled by narcissistic abusers. Being mentally-ill they make disastrous life-decisions creating hell-on-earth for their progeny. You people are clowns. My disdain for you can not be overstated. Your pastas are narcissists. Stop re-reading the same book that's been repeatedly translated through the eons into different languages--with more edits than any Wikipedia article--hoping you'll find an esoteric cure to soothe your self-loathing. You won't. Leave your cult. Find medical help.

From the outside it appears these people are walking contradictions: they're the most hateful people you'll meet, yet they preach goodness to all men. Once religion was decoupled from the state it became a voluntary institution. The cults of Christianity attract self-loathing individuals who feel they need an external structure to keep them in line. That's why you find so many pedophiles in these cults. They're mentally ill.

Cults should be taxed. Doomsday-cults with a sole focus on expansion (like the cults of Christianity) should be disbanded by force. Healthcare is a human right. States should be providing appropriate care for the mentally-ill. Education is a human right too and cults are a road-block in the state's pursuit of a universal education.

A daily reminder for Australian comrades: Sanitarium is the for profit arm of a doomsday-cult. Do not fund them through the purchase of their products. Do not buy Weet-Bix(TM), Up & Go(TM), etc.. Advocate for cults to be taxed.

Cults have flourished here. They're dangerous and degenerative to society. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/feb/13/the-family-great-white-brotherhood-australia-melbourne-cult-anne-hamilton-byrne

From their flock are selected the most deranged for political office. From their financing we get absolute mongrels in politics, like the insipid Scott Morrison: holder of every privilege, but never accountable. Shirking every responsibility placed on him. He would not hold a hose if you were on fire. He'd watch you burn; he'd do everything to not do anything whilst sending thoughts and prayers; he'd then go on a holiday and bill the tax-payer for it and removed that people didn't want to shake his hand.

It's time to put a stop to all these demented cults. Never entertain them. The Catholic cult drains our coffers. Tell them to fuck off.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago

    I've been interested in tracking my own sleep too. I wonder how useful these commercial products are in producing data that is correct. They come from technology companies who primarily want to collect data, as much data as possible. They're not at all interested in providing their users with an honest interpretation of anything. A lot of them probably don't even have the expertise to interpret whatever they've gathered.

    I've been involved in sleep studies in the past and none of them involved using a smart-watch or other commercial wearable. They used electrodes (?) that were stuck to my body and fed into a computer. What data was being collected and how to properly interpret that data is beyond me.

    Making a DIY device is probably feasible, but again, I wouldn't have a clue on how to interpret the data gathered. I don't think it'd be too complicated though.

    Tools built specifically to monitor one signal are probably better than a generalized thing, such as a smartwatch, from a company that produces surveillance equipment for marketing purposes.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    You glossed over the fact that it came from Israel's intelligence-community. Its design is woeful--that's the protocol, regardless of client or server implementation. The project reeks of a state-backed program to get ahead of the increasing desire for encryption in everyday communications. Yet encryption has always been an after thought within that program. All those bridges to funnel different protocols into the program.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    I think the most optimal way of doing this would be a self-made shell script that expresses your preferences. You could then run it from whatever live-environment you choose and the result would be a familiar setup. The /home directory being on a separate partition from the rest is useful for preserving large-quantities of user-data.

    I've been impressed with the capacity of microSD cards. The idea of mounting /home to a microSD card and having a materially-portable home has been a novelty I've so far resisted.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago*

    I used to think I had aphantasia, but after starting ADHD medications I've found my ability to recall visually has improved. I now can walk-through a place visually, though not at all clearly. My ability of recall has improved in every domain overall. Prior I only had access to abstractions, mainly relationships. Recalling words to describe those relationships could be difficult, even if I knew the word. The recall function would just fail, causing great difficulty communicating verbally.

    I would hasten to add that I don't definitely have the condition named ADHD--there is no definitive diagnostic tool and doctors have expressed concerns of autism. I've been subjected to traumatic brain injuries too, with one leaving me temporally blind. This leaves me doubtful of being a natural example of a developed ADHD human (one not intentionally harmed and allowed to develop optimally), but of a human that has received multiple traumatic brain injuries expressing qualities of a ADHD inflicted human.

    I'm aware of a condition informally named sledhead: a condition that occurs in bobsled operators (drivers?) that induces depression and often leads to suicide. I have a pet-theory that the vibrations in motor-vehicles do cause minor brain injuries as those found in the more extreme environment of bobsled racing, only differing in scale. I wouldn't be surprised if time-spent inside motor-vehicles--especially poorly maintained ones that exhibit more intense-vibrations--correlates with poorer health outcomes overall.

    It would be of interest to me if anyone were aware of research that describes links between mental-imagery, autism, brain-damage, ADHD and stimulants. It's my impression that aphantasia is an expression of a deficiency in the human-brain.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 week ago* (2 children)

    I'm confused. You write as if privacy and convenience are somehow related. They're not. They're completely independent of one another as are rabbits and trains. You're regurgitating corporate-propaganda: software-companies steal your resources (time, money, electricity, bandwidth, data, etc.) and retort they do so for your convenience when confronted. That's a lie. It just so happens it's easier to steal when your software has a monopoly and vendors actively prohibit and deter any alternative software.

    You don't get a choice of what software is on your computer when you buy it from the retailer. The fact is you've been conditioned and only know how to use proprietary-software that's become a standard via lobbying and exclusive contracts between software-vendors and OEMs. That has fuck all to do with convenience.

    The fact that Google and Apple have a near duopoly over software distribution on mobile-computers (i.e. I want to use my bank's app and that's only distributed via Google's PlayStore(TM) or whatever Apple's thing(TM) is called) is a national-governance issue not a mater of convenience.

    Neither Google nor Apple are doing charitable works here. I'll brush over the details to paint a picture: any financial transaction that occurs within an 'app' distributed by those platforms results in a demand from the distributor for a percentage of that sum. How that general thrust affects banking 'apps' I'm not sure and I would hope there's caveats for essential infrastructure like banking. Probably not; regulation is nonexistent for software-companies.

    I don't bank with banks that limit their clients to an 'app' distributed solely by Google or Apple. That behaviour has nothing to do with convenience and everything to do with economics, politics, self-determination and self-respect. I consider it abuse to the user to run non-libre software.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

    Consider environments where the need to monitor time is invariable, yet smartphones are prohibited on grounds of security, safety or for some other reason. It's an industry norm to prohibit smartphones in warehouses, a common place of employment throughout industrialized-nations. I'm sure you could think of others if pressed.

    From your comment I think you're referring to wrist-watches. My understanding of the wrist-watches' popularity is that it was a remnant of the war economy. The military needed personnel to keep track of time; pilots in particular needed wrist-watches for navigation. After the war those factories that mass produced for national militaries still existed and found a bludgeoning middle-class market to sell their gluts: the fashion wrist-watch. The population were conditioned to wear them during war and that behaviour carried on after. I think a similar thing happened with belts too.

    It's rather amusing to consider that pocket-watches have now made a comeback, only they've changed form and now offer other functions. Nearly everyone has a pocket-watch; it's rectangular rather than circular in shape now. Certainly bigger than they used to be. ;)

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  • [–] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    I'll pull from Wikipedia's article on Google's reCAPTCHA: "...reCAPTCHA provides little security against bots and is primarily a tool to track user data, and has cost society an estimated 819 million hours of unpaid human labor." The point I want to emphasize is "unpaid human labor". The article reads as middle-class whinge that pines for when products were whole and finalized. It's not honest. It hides behind cutesy metaphors, because it's not cognizant of the real underlying relationships that would turn it into a critique of capitalism. That software copyright became a vehicle for capitalists to hijack property ownership so that the consumer could never own their computers. They're your computers, but they run their software: you do as the computer tells you to do. Capitalists want more unpaid labor and capital. Pay up piggy. Stop squealing.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

    I concur. From a historical-perspective, rooted in colonialism, drug use was prohibited due to the effect it had on labour's compliance, even if the use was an indigenous cultural phenomenon. Rather, it made life more difficult for those charged with its administration.

    I think the OP is mistaking the propaganda for reality. People generally aren't thinking about others in any significant way. They just don't want to deal with an inconvenience so brush it aside by falling back on the propagandized version of reality that is given by the government and corporations. It's the safe answer and the institutionally accepted answer. Anything else requires conflict and Deborah just wanted to buy coffee and get to her appointment on time, not debate with unhearing television screens, radios, strangers, law-enforcement-drones or a consortium of suited executives. The homeless man was begging on the street due to drugs and a lack of will-power. More importantly to Deborah, he was in her way and was assaulting her senses and cognition. Let the police lock him away.

    Homelessness has been increasing here in Australia due to well-understood mechanisms. Those mechanisms have been operating for decades and intellectuals and observers have made critique before. They continue to do so. The issue only gets worse, because it's by design. It's the political class' blueprint and things are working as they should be.

    The council would rather pay to have infrastructure torn up, such as the removal of public benches from public property, because the homeless sleep on them and that is unsightly. The fact that the cost would have tripled to have it installed, removed and (presumably) re-installed once the homeless issue was resolved isn't true, because there is no resolutions to hinder the advance of homelessness.

    Drugs are a class issue. The labourer is not to indulge in them. The other classes are free to do so within a limit. The demands of industrial society have influenced what that limit is, but there is a clear distinction between the classes. When a lawyer indulges in cocaine and it's made into a public-spectacle the media report about the immense stress placed on lawyers. When the labourer makes a drug-induced public-spectacle the media report on the moral failings of the labouring class and how they must be better controlled.

    None of it is coherent and the ruling class don't care. If you're interested in the intersection of drugs and morality, especially if your background is from a Catholic or Christian cult, I'd snarkily implore you to read their histories and the documented drug use of these cults that underpin Western-democratic morality codes. There's a reason the Bible is like a fever-dream of a druggie, because it is one. The needs of capitalism, of regimented time-controlled labour, now prohibits such use and the priest class pivot to create a narrative of why it is so, even if their documented legacy shows them to be lieing dogs.

    Drugs are an inseparable part of the human experience. Have fun; look after each other and listen to your elders' advice. I'd caution that the cultural ceremonies that had implemented recreational drug use have been obliterated from living memory for some social groups and we now find ourselves in societies that mass-produce novel drugs. It's uncharted territory in one sense.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    I was unaware of this. As far as I can understand this is a design for admins who manage fleets and virtual machines, so it's not surprising it comes from Lennart and systemd. However, even openbsd has /etc/machine-id. Over in bsd land it seems to come from dbus. Is the file a systemd design or a dbus design? Is it something users should be concerned about... probably, but all of computing is a nightmare. Just another fire to add to the fire pit.

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    I'm looking for sites that host open data. It'd be nice if they were collaborative projects too, like a site that tracks prices of domestic-groceries that's updated by users. By "open" I don't mean monetarily-free, but rather data that is free from restrictive-licenses. A website that hosts free data, uploaded by its users, with the agreement that all data uploaded then belongs to the entity that hosts it is something I am not looking for. OpenStreetMap is a good example of what I'm looking for, I think... I'm under the impression the data uploaded by the user still belongs to the user. I may be mistaken though.

    A cursory search found this website: https://library.bu.edu/bizdata/free-data . I haven't gone through the links on that page yet, but in case I can't find what I'm looking for there I thought I'd also ask users here.

    Originally I wanted to find a repository of currency-conversion prices, but then I began to wonder about libre data repositories in general.

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