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Uuuugh


Had to wait days to get the server back online because the replacement hard drive appears to have been DOA so I had to get a replacement replacement hard drive, but the original drive failed entirely before that got here...

So... finally back up and running.

(I do have a Raid-5 style setup under LVM, so thankfully that means no data was lost... but it wasn't in a great position to run it in the mean time. I plan to try and upgrade it to RAID-6 style soonish so I can safely run it deprecated... as well as a few other configuration changes that'll help performance and reliability)



Discussion of Israel/Palestine

Just recently had to break it down in a group because it's been flaring up, figured a post would be nice.

This may seem like a Jewish specific topic, but it is important for non-Jews to know as well.

Zionism vs Anti-Zionism.

First of all, if you're a non-Jew it's best to identify with neither as for non-Jews is almost always antisemitic. (And yes I mean both).

This is a one of the biggest bones of contention in the Jewish community and is absolutely a loud argument right now due to current events. Worse yet, it's generally so because of a mix of misunderstandings and extremism.

Zionism
Originally this was the belief that the only way Jews could find some stability and safety would be to form a Jewish state. Once the state was formed, this turned into rabid support for Israel. For the milder of them, it basically boils down to patriotism... for the extremes it's nationalism

The loudest and most well represented of Zionists, however, believe basically that any criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic, even by fellow Jews.
(How can this be antisemitic for non-jews? Short answer without derailing: Nazis are often Zionist)

Anti-Zionism
Originally this was opposition to the creation of modern Israel, though each person had their own wildly varying reasons.

After the creation, many Anti-Zionists became Zionists. For the rest it mostly transformed into minimizing and addressing the damages caused by the creation of the state (ie. the occupation of Palestine). Many do dream of the potential of dismantling the state, but don't see it as feasible because creating a new humanitarian crisis to solve another isn't an acceptable solution.

They're generally painted by Zionists as if they want to abruptly end the state without addressing the crisis it would cause. (As such even mild Zionists often believe Anti-Zionism to be inherently antisemitic)

(Non-Jews can criticize Israel, but being/identifying-as Anti-Zionist is pretty much reserved for Jews; the exception being victims of Israel)

#IsraelHamasWar #Israel #Zionism #AntiZionism #AntiZionismIsNotAntisemitism #Hamas #Judaism

in reply to Shiri Bailem

I would argue that if you believe that Israel should become a "state for all of its citizens" instead of "the state of the Jewish people", and include both Arabs and Jews as equal citizens, then you are an anti-Zionist. You don't need to call for the ethnic cleansing of Jews in Israel/Palestine to be an anti-Zionist. You just have to reject territorial expansionism, settler colonialism, and "Blood and Soil".

I consider myself anti-Zionist and believe the idea of an ethnonationalist settler colony to be absolutely ridiculous to me, regardless of where it is. I am also Jewish so there's that.

This entry was edited (6 months ago)

Shiri Bailem reshared this.

in reply to Shiri Bailem

Discussion of Israel/Palestine
@Shiri Bailem
I'm definitely an anti-zionist. Jews and Arabs and everyone else who calls that area of the globe home should be equally free to live their lives without oppression etc. Civilians don't belong in military prisons even if they are Palestinian. Etc, etc.


Nothing like making a small mistake that knocks all your servers offline for 10 hours... dear god that was slow...


Dear lord I can't win lately... NAS went down and I basically had to kick it to get it back up, likely related to a dead disk...

Here's the tally of my environment:
* 2 Proxmox servers
- 1 server failed, I need to send it in for a refund under the protection plan
- I bought a server to replace it already... that server came with a busted ram slot meaning it's already on degraded performance (need to refund it, but want to get a replacement before I send it off...)

  • 1 old desktop running as a NAS
  • 1 hard drive is throwing non-critical block errors, threatening to fail... I got the warranty exchange set up already but...
  • 1 hard drive failed entirely after setting up that warranty exchange and now I don't have the parity to spare a drive, so I need to spare drives before I can start exchanging drives (those drives should arrive on Saturday)

And in all of this... spending way too much money I really shouldn't be spending at all...

And before someone thinks I'm throwing around a few K here... everything I'm getting is renewed, which is probably part of the problem but I sure as hell can't afford new. (Proxmox servers are around $100 each, drives around $45 each)

Shannon Prickett reshared this.

in reply to Shiri Bailem

Oh, and the NAS going down is critical because those $100 boxes (a) don't have enough disk space for everything and (b) it's how I'm maintaining the ability to high(-ish) availability transfer between the two nodes (this saved me when the one proxmox system died).

Those are tiny form factor systems, but they have room for a second hard drive. I need to get a couple of hard drives to drop into them so they have better local storage, afterwards I can set them up as ZFS and use proxmox's features to sync the drives between the two nodes... that way they're not relying on the nas for anything that's not just large.



You want to know how to leave me completely dumbfounded?

Go on a christofascist rant in someone's comments, spout completely bullshit for _hours_ and then... practically out of nowhere... acknowledge your poor behavior and apologize.

... it's going to take me a looooooong time to process this.



Btw y'all, if you're not Christian then Matthew 6:5 is the best verse when dealing with Christians lol


You ever want to see how razor thin support and inclusivity is?

Tell people you're a Jew and hate "Happy Holidays" and "Season's Greetings" because they're faux inclusivity.

People come out of the woodwork that would normally say they're allies to tell you that the harms you experience aren't real, or that the fact that others like it means the harms you experience don't matter.

Let alone the people who don't remotely read said posts before replying...

#HappyHolidays

Unknown parent

Shiri Bailem
@Cass M šŸ‡ØšŸ‡¦ :mstdn: far less really, people get this way because they think they're being inclusive and nothing makes people defensive like "I appreciate the thought but you're not doing what you think you're doing"
Unknown parent

Shiri Bailem

@Cass M šŸ‡ØšŸ‡¦ :mstdn: oh wow I was out of sorts when I replied the first time, I completely blazed past calling out that "Judeo-Christian" is antisemitic:

foggyminds.com/display/c6ef095ā€¦


99% of the time "Judeo-Christian" is antisemitic. And yes, I will absolutely elaborate on this if asked.

Credit: @Rabbit Cohen

Screenshot of a Tweet from Rabbit Cohen @[url=https://mastodon.online/users/BathysphereHat]Rabbit Cohen[/url] reading: Abortion bans are not "Judeo-Christian". They are ChristoFascist. Get "Judeo" out of your mouth.

Edit because this blew up far more than I expected and multiple people have asked for me to elaborate, here's a copy of my elaboration with follow up questions encouraged:

It's a messy topic and it's late here (I'm a bit sleepy), so feel free to ask follow up questions.

The short version of it is that Judeo-Christian is almost always used in one of two harmful ways:

1) To try and give more credibility and weight to something that is purely Christian by claiming that it's part of Judaism as well when it's not (like the above example, because Judaism explicitly permits abortions)
2) To try and talk about broader groupings of related faiths while ignoring the many other Abrahamic faiths (the proper term, though that one more often hurts the lesser known groups, don't use it unless you also know it applies to groups like the BahĆ”Ź¼Ć­, which I'll admit even I know next to nothing about, but it's valid here because all I'm doing is naming their religious family)

Because many (cough most cough) teach a bastardized form of Judaism through the lens of Christianity, and because that's the only exposure many get to our faith... they get skewed harmful and hurtful ideas about us.

Some highlight examples:
* We don't have an established afterlife (we don't say there isn't one, we just have zero information on it if there is)
* We don't seek "eternal reward", the reward for our faith is being a better person than we were the day before
* We have forgiveness baked into our faith, and no it doesn't require animal sacrifice (it requires you to actually ask the person you wronged...)
* We thoroughly encourage arguing any topic with anyone (right time and place of course), and that includes picking a fight with God if you think they're wrong about something (you have a 99.9% chance of being wrong... but we commend the effort and every once in a while someone wins the argument)
* We have a rule, Pikuach Nefesh, roughly meaning that life is the highest commandment. Your well being takes precedence over your faith, if it would hurt you or others to be observant than you are exempt from that requirement. It's unacceptable to hurt others for your faith, and for yourself it's frowned upon
* We actively discourage conversion, it's allowed but it's not a trivial process. We don't want people to become Jews, we just want people to be better.




The biggest thing for me with some of the eat the rich posts I've seen lately, especially those talking about Taylor Swift, is basing judgement off of a net worth score.

(I'm no fan of Taylor Swift, I just know that she barely notched over and only on net worth... which is a junk number, basically a fancy guess how much them and everything they own would sell for, including things like song rights, likeness, etc)

I'll especially note that I don't think any artist really comes close to billionaire earnings without other businesses that are bigger than their art.

Useful reference:
* Highest Paid Actor (in a year) - Most years this floats just under $80 million, some rare extreme years see around $200 million
* Highest Paid Musician (in a year) - this jumps around alot but in 2022 it was $210 million and peaked in 2014 with Dr Dre at $620 million (next highest was Bruce Springsteen in 2021 for $435 million)

Important note not being a billionaire doesn't mean they can't be exploiting, just that billionaires are guaranteed to be intentionally exploiting.

In the case of artists, they have very little control over most of the things. Actors are contractors with little to no employees and no control over the pay of anyone else. Musicians are tied up in contracts and have a limited list of employees (ie. background dancers), and generally are just hiring venues (the venue provides almost all the workers, and they pretty much all suck of course).



The worst thing about subtitled anime... is that you occasionally forget that you can't understand them, get distracted by something else and then realize you didn't catch anything that happened over the past 5 minutes...


Got my anti-cistamines today! One order of tit-tacs and one order of antiboyotics!

#hrt #trans #transfemme

reshared this



(for those unfamiliar: Framework makes a modular upgradable open laptop design, their laptops have expansion bays that accept these cards which all use standard USB-C ports as their basis, so their USB-A expansion card can technically be used as a C-A adapter on other computers)



Oh God, I'm LOVING Scott Pilgrim: Takes Off!

It Is NOT What You Expect It Is!

Shannon Prickett reshared this.

in reply to ×Øאַף šŸŸ£

@raf šŸŸ£ My jaw hit the floor and never quite got off it the whole rest of the way.

I was half watching it while playing games, expecting a straight retelling with minor changes and more content... I was so confused at the end of episode 1!

in reply to Shiri Bailem

My initial expectation is it's going to be like the Matrix 4 movie with lots of callbacks but done so much better

But no spoilers! I'm checking this out!


in reply to Shiri Bailem

eu probably also had a hand in this. But like both companies suck and proprietary hell shouldnt even exist in the first place
in reply to :labrys-xf-p: HighPriestessTerra :labrys-xf-b: :xf_lesknife:

@:labrys-xf-p: HighPriestessTerra :labrys-xf-b: :xf_lesknife: maybe? I hadn't heard anything and the EU's pressure usually comes from other fronts.

I suspect it might be success on Google's counter-ploy add all the same features, and have it automatically translate iMessage's "such-and-such liked your message" to proper reactions... so iMessage users got stuck purely being the less featured bunch



I'm as much eat the rich as the next girl, but I do get tired people applying it casually to entertainers or artists...

It's not a score thing, it's not hit this number in net worth and suddenly you're on the dinner plat. It's based on the fact specifically on the abuses it takes to get there, entertainers being one of the few exceptions on multiple fronts.

Here's the thing about entertainers:
* they're typically not the ones responsible for paying the workers, outside of a small few, actors don't pay the film crew (they're paid by the same people as the crew), and singers/musicians don't pay the majority of the crew (they're paid for by the venue, those they do pay for are probably going to be better compensated for their expertise). The stories of actors donating parts of their salary to crew... that's legit charity as it's not their responsibilities (that responsibility falls on the producers and studio execs).
* they have wildly inflated net worth, because net worth of a performer is typically about how much money they can make, but not necessarily how much money they get.
* they have inconsistent pay
* often those numbers hide other expenses, if they have their own staff or equipment or resources or such... those costs come after the number you're being quoted typically (ie. a musician makes $500 mil on the tour? Their personal crew, tour bus, etc are all paid out from that). This is because a performer is an instance of them being their own business which means they have astronomical expenses under their name.

Of course this doesn't mean they can't be awful, it's not uncommon for them to start their own side businesses (considered a good plan because their stardom likely won't last forever), and it's in those businesses where they often become "The Rich".

#EatTheRich

in reply to Shiri Bailem

In any case, those "net worth" troll-bait websites are worthless. I got some flak from an idiot on mastodon a couple of months back who had seen my name on one and decided I was a millionaire. I looked it up and it was something like a 500% to 1000% over-estimate. (They pull those figures out of their ass: it's simple clickbait.)
in reply to Charlie Stross

@Charlie Stross it's entirely guesswork I agree, but I do think it's also a combination of people not knowing what net worth even is...

Like for you they'd be talking thinks like your "fair market value" if you were to sell off all rights to the laundry files.

Net worth includes a lot of ridiculous number... for the typical person it includes the estimated amounts they can get if they were to sell their car, their home, every single possession of any remote worth to them...

The "net" part of it is what the number is minus debts.

The guesswork of course is just them guessing what you could theoretically sell your whole life for and a guess of how much you owe in debts.

A lot of people think it means income or how much money someone has on hand.


in reply to Shiri Bailem

of course you play the waifu gamešŸ’€
This entry was edited (1 year ago)


Dear god can we stop with the false "this saying is actually longer", it's terrifying seeing constant historical revisionism even if it's something so minor...

We don't need to edit history to erase all the inconveniences of taking a quippy saying at face value, and this only encourages people to be awful around so very many very real social issues because the quippy line can be purposefully misread in some shitty way that's obviously incorrect... by pulling this constantly it just tells people they're in the right for their bad faith takes.



Hey, it's that time of year again where I remind you that "Happy Holidays" is *** NOT INCLUSIVE ***.

There is no special feature of this time of year that makes "happy holidays" inclusive. It's popular to cite how many holidays occur in winter/fall... but you find just as many in every season.

Happy holidays is purely a stand-in for Merry Christmas, and the whole effort of it is using a nod to minority religions (most commonly my faith) to throw Christmas in our faces while pretending to include us.

Channukah is our least important holiday, acknowledging it when you don't even know our other holidays, let alone what our most sacred holidays are... well, that tells you the whole story itself.

Let alone people don't know when it actually is and will most years be "celebrating" it weeks after it's over.

Holidays don't have to be lumped together, celebrate your holiday. Nobody is offended at you celebrating your holiday, only at it being forced on us.

And "Happy Holidays" only exists as a way to force it on us while pretending to include us.



I DIDN'T NEED PIXIE AND BRUTUS TO MAKE ME CRY THIS MORNING!


Been (re-?)watching Babylon 5, and I think it holds up remarkably well with a good story.

I'm into Season 3 and it's only been really dated by the intro, CG quality, aspect ratio, and the use of CRTs.

(questionable "re" because I think I watched only a handful of episodes as a kid)



Random recommendation post:

Kagi: kagi.com
"Premium" Search Engine, free tier to try it out and a small monthly fee to use it regularly. Absolutely better results than Google, no ads, and more privacy. I really do recommend it. (And for my family there is a family plan as well...)

Beeper: beeper.com
A universal chat platform, if you long for the old days of Trillian, GAIM/Pidgin, and the like. Days when you could use your own chat program and just talk to everyone across everything... well this is it again. It's a Matrix service (think open source equivalent to Messenger/Skype/Discord/etc) and bridges to all the other services. Currently it's free, but it's planned to be free + paid extra features.

This has made a world of difference in my experience talking and chatting with people, especially the short list of people who talk primarily on Discord rather than SMS or Messenger. Plus if you're on Beeper or another Matrix service, end-to-end encryption is the default for complete security (You can even use your own client if you like without losing that)

Cosmic Ray reshared this.




Ugh, when your server gets DOSed by activity updates.

Well, at least I was able to fix it via tuning it seems.



This is two years old but could easily be mistaken for current news.

Also a great summary of the whole situation and still entirely relevant.

youtu.be/INCXqWzH5vk?si=8fUbaEā€¦

#israel #israel-gaza #Israel-GazaWar #Palestine #palestine-israelConflict



Ooof, just watched the new episode of Dimension 20.

Dropout is genuinely super fantastic about content warnings on their content... but they fell a little short on this one, mostly because they did something new and extreme... and didn't realize that they needed stronger warnings.

And of course in the FB group there are a whole bunch of people going "It's not their fault you didn't read the content warnings" like douches.

#Dimension20


in reply to Shiri Bailem

Managing a food forest, helping others build sustainable housing, and making music. Maybe being a part of a small herd of goats for weed control purposes. Maybe a couple of corvid friends.


It's really wild coming into Baldur's Gate 3 after playing Solasta.

If you're not aware: Solasta is an unlicensed D&D 5e game that uses SRD content plus some of their own content to flesh it out some.

Interestingly enough, I'd absolutely say that Solasta is waaaaaay more faithful to D&D than BG3 is. And it's battle system is much better done, both between being more faithful and supporting things like proper flight and spider climb (as opposed to BG3 which doesn't have spider climb and implements flight as just a fancy long range jump basically).

It does a much better job of short rests vs long rests, let alone fast travel. Solasta doesn't have you warping back to camp mid dungeon, but instead you have to find a safe spot to camp in the dungeon if you want a long rest. And fast travel is done by accelerated movement rather than warping, so you can't use it to magically escape a dungeon.

That's not to say Solasta is outright better.

BG3 shines on drastically better story and voice acting, as well as making your dialogue choices really feel meaningful. I was never able to bond with my own characters really in Solasta like I can in BG3.

Oh, and BG3 feels like a complete package since so many races and classes in Solasta are behind DLC.

If someone told me they wanted to play BG3 specifically for the 5e combat and mechanics, I'd definitely point them to Solasta over BG.

#DungeonsAndDragons5e #DungeonsAndDragons #BaldursGate3 #BG3

šŸ¦Ams šŸ¦ reshared this.

in reply to Shiri Bailem

thank you for that. I am enjoying BG3, but my interest is primarily to see forgotten realms places brought to life. Trying to recapture that Skyrim Magnificent Vista buzz.
in reply to Lou Anders

@Lou Anders Yeah, BG3 is probably where you want to be and Solasta might be a fun diversion but nowhere near as meaty for that.


Injury, but it's only a cop and no visible injury; laughing at someone's pain and misfortune, but again it's a cop

Oh dear god, I watched Last Week Tonight and have been introduced to cop slide.

And I can't stop looping this one: youtube.com/shorts/_EqrIX6J92s

in reply to Shiri Bailem

Injury, but it's only a cop and no visible injury; laughing at someone's pain and misfortune, but again it's a cop
Police or not, who released such a slide?
Who approved it?
in reply to Raroun

Injury, but it's only a cop and no visible injury; laughing at someone's pain and misfortune, but again it's a cop
@Raroun In the US, those were entirely normal slides for the longest time. Those slides were the normal in my childhood and only sometime since then they started treating them as a hazard.


Gotta admit... I'm sold on Kagi.

The experience and quality has been fantastic using their free tier (100 free searches a month), enough that I decided to pay for it to keep using it.

Gist: it's a search engine that chose to rely on subscriptions instead of ads and data mining... and it shows in the quality of the search results. There isn't a whole page of them linking to other partner or owned services before you get any results. On top of that there's a crapload of customization and control of your experience (such as choosing what things it tries to automatically answer).

As mentioned, there's a free tier of 100 searches a month, that's actually good for most people to use for a week or two. No sensitive data needed, so I recommend giving it a try.

kagi.com/

reshared this

in reply to Shiri Bailem

Yeah the customization is really where Kagi shines. It's actually a *tool* designed to help you, instead of being designed to generate ad clicks.





Saw this and decided to share my commentary on it because it's extremely harmful:

Unfortunately nothing here is valid. They've solved the finger problem and it's pretty much only old models that show up there. People are bad at even as well (let alone the fact that real faces are asymmetrical). Purposeless or lack of intent is also common in human art (there are whole art styles around it). And lack of perspective often is because the real art it's emulating lacks perspective.

And those AI detection pages are very very inaccurate. They can't remotely tell you if it's actual AI work, just if they think there's a chance of it being AI work.

All of this, including the detection sites are causing problems for real people who get accused of their very real artwork being AI. People get shut out of communities and told that they need to entirely change their personal style if they want to be accepted because it's too "AI like".

And finally the comment about it taking an incredible amount of resources: it actually takes remarkably little. You can run these AI systems on a single desktop computer with a low to mid range graphics card. (One of the problems for these AI companies and one of the reasons they're so widespread is because it's so easy and cheap to run it yourself)

Note: I don't have the energy for an image description, if you reply with one I'll edit this post to include it.



Ooh, this is exciting. I'm eager to see what they decided on for free vs paid, especially what additional features they're going to offer on paid that they can't/won't offer before then?



Just a reminder:

Mastodon != ActivityPub != Fediverse

It's been driving me up the wall how often people act like Mastodon is a synonym for both AP and Fedi.

in reply to Velveteen

@Vel šŸ’½ @raf I think you just missed the edit to add /s before sending this, it was a joke sarcastic response
in reply to Velveteen

@Vel šŸ’½ @raf it takes a while for the edit to propogate. You sent 10 minutes after the edit, but it could be an hour from now before your instance gets the edit.
in reply to Velveteen

@Velveteen
Yea I was trying to pretend all those and Funkwhale didn't exist! The reply needed to be more over the top


Just giving a shout out to Fediseer.com for an interesting project (and the gui project available at fediseer.lemmings.world

If you're an instance admin I think it's worth checking out, setting up, and bookmarking for your moderation toolkit.

I don't endorse any sort of automated blocking off of said lists, but I do endorse having a database you can reference when deciding whether to defederate an instance, especially if people have filled in proof links.




Having a really low day... I could barely sleep last night, struggling with insomnia, ADHD, and pain.

Pain especially... it's finally starting to cool off a little and my chronic joint pain is through the roof, and I just got off a week of being sick with a cold.

I'm really depressed right now and feeling trapped. My car has been out of commission since February and my joint pain makes it hurt so much to walk places (and taking the bus still involves a significant amount of walking/standing)... so I've hardly left the house all year.

I hardly see anybody and I'm really lonely, if I didn't have my sibling living with me I don't know how I'd survive.

Please send some kind words to fight off the intrusive thoughts.

#disability #depression #ChronicPain

Jon_ThinksATYou reshared this.

in reply to Shiri Bailem

ugh no car is the wooorst feeling. I feel you I have the ADHD and the insomnia it comes with and it's no joke.

Sending big old hugs and I hope the weather gives you a break soon.

I've been staving off the season change doldrums I can feel coming by buying a bunch of lava lamps, but I can't recommend my methods they are always ill-advised. ā¤

in reply to Shiri Bailem

I relate too well to your pain and situation. Disability is enough challenge to occupy a person without also adding financial issues and social alienation. But they all come as a package I guess. If you are feeling that spiral down into your self and the all encompassing problem, I hope that you can redirect your attention and escape into somthing lighter. If you can pull focus to a more positive anything, it can help soften the misery. Here is a picture of frogs In a witches hat for tangentially related reasons:


I'm pretty sure even AI supporters can agree we really need to institute some sort of laws around mandatory labeling of AI generated content.

#ai

#ai
in reply to Calamity Caitlin

@Calamity Caitlin you mean 80% of the reason we need such a law? (the other 20% being rampant AI generated misinformation)
ā‡§