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Mark Twain: The loud little handful will shout for war. The pulpit will warily and cautiously protest at first...The great mass of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes, and will try to make out why there should be a war, and they will say earnestly and indignantly: "It is unjust and dishonorable and there is no need for war." Then the few will shout even louder...Before long you will see a curious thing: anti-war speakers will be stoned from the platform, and free speech will be strangled by hordes of furious men who still agree with the speakers but dare not admit it ... Next, statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception. wordsmith.social/protestation/…



Danny Schechter: Like blackbirds in flight, packs of reporters darken the sky, moving in swarms at the same speed and in predictable trajectory. When one lands, they all land. When one leaves, they all leave. The programmers and channel controllers from all the stations are part of the same well-paid elite, steeped in the same values, committed to the mission of maximizing audience share and profits. They are chosen for their ability to play the game and not challenge the audience with too many controversial ideas or critical perspectives. It's no surprise that they circulate easily within the commanding heights of media power, moving from company to company and job to job. A kind of group think corporate consensus, steeped in market logic and deeply inbred by an un-brave news culture, breeds conscience-free conformity and self-censorship. This makes frightening sense in a globalized economy where consumerism is more desired than active citizenship, where power is increasingly concentrated and the public is increasingly unwelcome in a public discourse defined by the powerful. If your goal is to numb people and drive them away from active participation, then TV as"weapon of mass distraction"and wall to wall entertainment makes sense. Shut up and shop is the now the message, one that makes sense to advertiser dominated media outlets... wordsmith.social/protestation/…


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

It Is NOT What You Expect It Is!

Shannon Prickett reshared this.

in reply to ראַף 🟣

@raf 🟣 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.



Short Planned Maintenance Tonight


My apologies if this is inconvenient, I opted to do it on shorter notice without a set hour because (a) there's not a lot of activity on the server and (b) I'm really impatient.

I'm doing a hardware upgrade that requires rebooting the network storage backend which will bring down everything for a short time. It should take well under 30 minutes to do the hardware swap and most of the downtime is just going to be the database starting back up (which often takes in the range of another 30 minutes).

As part of this I'll also be deploying some software updates that require a reboot to take effect.



WTF?


I honestly haven't the foggiest idea how this happened, but apparently the DNS settings got changed a few days ago on the servers with absolutely no explanation (and to junk nonsense settings for some reason). I'm going to keep an eye on them to make sure they don't change again.

Additionally I think that created a cascade that caused the other problems.

Any posts you've made over the past 2-3 days haven't been sent to other servers, but will start sending now.

As far as the other problems, I think when that happened it caused so many processes to lag and take way longer and more resources than usual as any time it tried to contact another server it timed out on the dns request.



DOS Overload


There's been some recent outages of the server, the root cause I've tracked down to the server getting overloaded with requests (mostly updates from other servers). Those updates have been coming in faster than the server can process them and preventing other requests from coming through.

I've made some tweaks that I believe have resolved it, fingers crossed.

Technical explanation:

The servers ran out of php-fpm threads to handle requests. It was configured with static count of 30 each (60 total). They were definitely impacted significantly by memory leaks which kept the count low.

I've changed it from static to ondemand and increased the count to 100 each, I'll probably go in and increase it again since it's still pegged at that limit almost constantly. But thankfully running on-demand seems to be keeping the memory usage per thread drastically lower.

Where the static assignment of 30 was eating up 8GB of ram, 100 on-demand threads is only taking up 1.3GB.

I'm going to increase it until it's either hitting memory constraints or it's no longer constantly at full capacity.

in reply to Server News

There's definitely some sort of time and code problem involved as it hit again this morning even with the previous changes, though this time it only impacted updates (making posts/comments/likes, getting new posts). I think reading was unaffected because those operations are faster and require significantly less memory.

For whatever reason, sometime around midnight the server gets hit with a bunch of requests that all seem to lock up, eating up large quantities of memory and then won't exit. (With on-demand the threads exit after 10s of being idle, there was over 100 threads running continuously from midnight until I killed them around 9am). Likewise there was a very massive flood of updates from other servers corresponding to that, so I think it might just be a bunch of large servers sending bulk updates or some such.

New tuning to handle that: I put firmer time limits into PHP to prevent threads from running forever, there's two options for setting max times and the first was getting ignored (I think friendica overrode it? the second should override that and kill any threads going too long)

In addition to that, I set up a rate limiter to the inbox endpoint (where other servers send updates to), this should help keep that from overloading the server (majority of the time it'll just be slowing them down by a second or two unless the server is overloaded, at which point the rate limit should help get it accessible for users)