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People outside the US, do you still consider America a democracy? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago

When was the US the last time a democracy?

You can vote democrats or republicans, which mostly get bankrolled by the same rich assholes. As a normal citizen of the US you have almost no influence at politics at all, because the media is controlled by rich people, the biggest internet platforms are controlled by rich people, elections are paid for by rich people, ...

The current situation is not a spontaneous, miraculous, magical result of Trump and his gang, it was years in the making by lobby groups, influential/rich/powerful people and neo liberal brainwashing of the masses.

Same holds true for most other western so called democracies.

1
Stability problems with a Raspberry Pi ZeroW2 (lemmy.zip)
 

Let me start with, that I am running Raspberry Pi servers since the first Raspberry Pi was released more than a decade ago. Only problems I ever had until now, where dying SD-Cards with the first generation of RPIs. Since them I only buy really big high quality SD-Cards and I have RPI(4) servers running 24/7 for years w/o any troubles.

For a new project, I am running a web service on a Raspberry Pi ZeroW2 with an Apache reverse proxy on the same machine. Memory usage, even under load, is a maximum of 100 MB. This RPIZW2 simply dies after a few days, and I have no idea how debug this problem.

More details of the RPIZW2:

  • Uses Raspbian configured via Ansible to be an exact replica of my RPI(4), only Apache and a webservice were added
  • Quality power supply (original RPI hardware) and literally plugged to the same electricity circuit as the RPI(4)
  • The webapp is just a 'hello, world' with the current time and my internet connection is not fast enough to be DOSed
  • Monitored memory usage etc. for several hours and found nothing out of the ordinary
  • fail2bann is active and running
  • SD-card has several unused GIGs of free space and is same brand/quality as the one in the RPI(4)

Anyone experienced something similar? Has anyone an idea how to approach debugging this problem?

I am not sure that there is a better place at Lemmy for this kind of question than here. I'll happily move this post to another place, if it is not appropriate here.

232
Ex-Amazon VP explains why rich a-holes with helicopters and personal assistants don't get why you hate your commute (boingboing.net)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
14 comments fedilink
 

Just to be clear: My main point of sharing this article is about how detached the life of rich people is.

I do not at all agree that most of them are “Not evil, just disconnected”, I am pretty sure (and know some of the privileged), who are actively evil, know exactly what they are doing and just don't give a shit.

42
MoAT - Museum of All Things (may.as)
 

IMHO a very cool project/idea, worth being promoted!

Why does it feel like evil is winning globally? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Thanks a lot!

Accuracy for the western world and for an academic who comes from the working class. Most people I work with are academics and see things different, because they could always afford a lawyer and/or had and have connections themselves. Their whole life and lived experience tells them another truth.

I feel sad, that I have to disagree with you on the honest signal, I see several problems here:

  • Define 'disinformation': There are obvious black-is-white lies, but most propaganda in the west is not 'disinformation', it is simply emphasizing the facts that favor your point of view. If you add another signal, you are just one more signal producing propaganda (although most probably I would be very happy with your propaganda)
  • Cryptography ... even IT people have trouble understanding this, and even worse: You cannot solve a social problem with technology
  • 'good people' - a handful philosophers in the west alone had a very thorough discourse about 'good' over the last centuries. The discussion is still going on. ;-)
  • One of the most important insights is, that it is harder for a group of people to agree than for a few to take power and enforce it. If this wouldn't be a human/social truth, our western societies wouldn't be such a shit show by now.

IMHO one of the roots of the problem is how humans are wired and how bigger societies develop in a sociological way. The best way we have found (so far) is democracy, and AFAIK especially democracy with a mostly even wealth distribution (see the northern countries of Europe). AFAIK it is a social rule, that as soon as a group gets bigger, subgroups will be built. It is a human rule that attractive people will be treated better than non attractive one, you will want to help your friends even when it comes at a cost for someone you don't even know or dislike.

My recipe would be a more even wealth distribution and a way to stop the wealthy force others to do labor for them. Thanks to police and military, I have the strong feeling, the ones with the guns and military will win.

p.s.: I recommend the following books if the topic interests you:

  • The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics
  • The Established and the Outsiders: A Sociological Enquiry into Community Problems
Why does it feel like evil is winning globally? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Thanks a lot for your kind words! :-)

I think it is pretty accurate of the system we have in Germany and perhaps in other western countries.

The problem is, one has to experience for oneself a lot of this things, to really understand them. By the time most people understand enough of the system, they probably have children/other liabilities which force them to play along. (Sadly I am not the exception.)

Life is short and ignorance is bliss.

Why does it feel like evil is winning globally? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (4 children)

Perhaps, because by now enough people feel a real impact on their life and fear for the ruling classes is not there anymore?

Just a few examples from direct, personal experience (I am German, so what I enumerate has a German/Euro perspective):

  • Constitutional state? Does not matter, as long as powerful/influential people can literally buy laws or prevent even discussion of laws in the parliament
    • Easy way to figure out who is favored by one law, is to check who has to prove something and how hard it is to prove
    • Best part about this is, people in power can always point out to the law and that 'we' agreed upon that law
  • Systematic discrimination against the worker class/people not owning things: Thing about laws, taxes, ....
  • Every media has an agenda and is propaganda (In the west, propaganda means mostly being selective about the information presented and how to build the narrative. Only idiots in the west will outright lie about things. It also means, who gets to talk in the media, where to position news (headlines ore somewhere else) etc. Media are owned by rich people or the state owned media are controlled by people with strong affinity to political parties
  • Corruption on all but the lowest levels, especially in the government (In Germany corruption on the lowest level is uncommon und has a high penalty, but go up the level a little bit and 'you scratch my back and I scratch yours')
  • Nepotism on all but the lowest levels (Worked in many different companies and the bigger the company the worse it gets. Working class kid does not get an intern position although it would technically be the best choice? No worries, some kid with the right parents and no clue will have that opportunity.
  • No feedback loops: In Germany, we have professional politics which have extremely good conditions for their pension, whose children do not visit public schools and who have private health care decide, what in their opinion is appropriate for most of the people in the country concerning this things...
  • No real political influence: We just had the clown-show of voting. Guess what, I can only vote between Nazis and non-Nazis. Can I vote for more taxes for the rich, a sane economic agenda which not benefits the rich, and full military support for the Ukraine? Sorry, I am out of luck. Of course I am free to build my own party. Let's see how successful that is without massive investment of money and good connections to the ruling classes to get positive media coverage.

Before the eastern block fell apart, at least in Europe/Germany, there was always the fear of the ruling class to experience another (French)revolution. Since this fear is gone, they literally have nothing to fear...

Is it possible to change anything about the situation? I am more than cynical by now:

  • Most everyone is struggling to keep their level of wealth/position in society, so the middle class fights hard to be a little bit better of then the lower class, don't even mention the upper middle class, which fights with nails and teeth for every little advantage and privilege they have
  • The higher you go in hierarchies, the more sycophants you'll discover, which don't mind selling out other humans for status/privileges, and there are even true believers, so brainwashed by neoliberal agenda, that they will fight for the privileges of rich folk they will never belong to
  • There is no way to organize enough people in real life to force any political change (especially not with an aging population)
  • The ruling class figured out for a long time in western world, that instead of fighting facts/the truth, they just have to generate more bullshit, discussions, alternative narratives and lean back, because people will discuss and not agree
  • Nearly all change to the status quo is opposed and fought by some group, which benefits from the status quo
  • Neoliberal propaganda and views are so ubiquitous and pervasive in our media, stories, etc., that a lot of people cannot even think about alternatives any more.

That's just for the western world, let's not start about the dictatorships/regimes supported by western governments with money, weapons and knowledge, where things are even more shitty.

1
Multi-Gen LRU is a game changer on my low memory netbook (lemmy.zip)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
0 comments fedilink
 

MGLRU.

On my low RAM/CPU netbook it is a game changer; thanks to ZRAM the netbook is perfect for browsing the internet/light work. When running my backups (creates big tarballs) or Ansible though, my desktop/applications would freeze/stutter noticeably. Enabling MGLRU simply solved the problem of freezes/stuttering, it feels like magic and besides ZRAM, I don't know of any other lever with this massive impact on desktop performance.

Just wanted to share this, for other users with low RAM/CPU hardware. I would assume the observed difference is less dramatic, once 8GB of RAM are available, but I would love to hear about other experiences.

I would also love to hear/learn about other levers with high impact to tweak for low RAM/CPU desktop devices. Anything else to tweak under /sys /proc which has impact on performance?

Why is there no yearly refreshed covid vaccination recommendation for adults (like from the WHO)? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I don't even know the German word, but can confirm, wood stoves are a thing in my neighborhood, as I am reminded every time I open my windows in winter time. ;-)

Why is there no yearly refreshed covid vaccination recommendation for adults (like from the WHO)? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Indeed, I have heard of spelling bees, but never thought about the reasons they exist in the US. Thanks for enlightening me! :-)

Why is there no yearly refreshed covid vaccination recommendation for adults (like from the WHO)? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thanks for the info concerning the pneumonia vaccine, I'll check with my family doctor next time I am there.

Yeah, we have the annually flu news-cycle, too. This year they claim it is worse for children, because the hospital beds for children are supposedly at their capacity, and also in my team at work nearly everyone was sick within the last 4 weeks.

Just a heads up: I learned it is 'flu' for the disease and 'flue' is like a device to let go of smoke. Sorry for spreading my bad English!

Why is there no yearly refreshed covid vaccination recommendation for adults (like from the WHO)? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Wow, nice! Do you have to pay for the shots or do you get them for free?

Sorry, 'flue' is just my incompetence at using the English language, it seems I also learned that it is 'shot' and not 'shoot'.

I have a super bad German accent when I speak English, and although I hope I have a descent understanding of the language, I couldn't write a sentence with correct spelling/grammar if my life depended on it.

Thanks a lot for chiming in!

Why is there no yearly refreshed covid vaccination recommendation for adults (like from the WHO)? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thanks a lot for the information! Damn, Canada really deserves its great reputation! :-)

Why is there no yearly refreshed covid vaccination recommendation for adults (like from the WHO)? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Nope, I am a total boring office worker and the company I work for is not related to health care.

If there is a yearly refreshed pneumonia vaccine, I never heard about it being offered in Germany. (If it is a one time thing, I would trust everyone open to it got it already.)

Exactly what you said is at the heart of my question: Is it an economic consideration to not recommend the covid yearly update shoot or a medical one.

To further elaborate: The flue shoots are provided for free and paid for from the public health care, so in Germany you can just visit a regular family doctor and get it for free, or the flue shoots are given out at universities etc. In summary, while you nearly have to make an effort in Germany to not get a yearly flue shoot, for covid shoots you even have to sign a paper to the doctor to not sue them for vaccination problems, unless you are in the vulnerable group (elderly, asthma etc.).

How does it work in Denmark, if you would ask your family doctor for a covid shoot, will they simply give you one, no questions asked?

Why is there no yearly refreshed covid vaccination recommendation for adults (like from the WHO)? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Thanks, one follow up question: In Germany (where I live), for flue vaccinations, it is kind of 'free for all', at my work place they even send doctors to vaccinate the employees (who are willing to take it).

This is the confusing point for me, as in Denmark, covid is treated like a flue by now. So why is there the difference between the recommendation between covid shoots and flue shoots?

Why is there no yearly refreshed covid vaccination recommendation for adults (like from the WHO)? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thanks for clarification, my question was indeed missing the point, that 2 vaccinations are recommended.

I am asking, because we have a wave right now and I see people, which most likely are vaccinated (or I know got their two shoots in the past), get sick for one or two weeks.

Please allow my follow up questions:

  • Flue shoots are kind of free for all in my country (Germany), even if people are vaccinated and they also get refreshed every so often by the real thing (right now we have a flue wave in children) - is there a reason why there is a difference between flue shoots and covid shoots?
  • From the individual point of view, is there any reason not to get a covid shoot, especially when the person already got vaccinated in the past?
  • Is the benefits of further vaccinations vs. the risks a monetary/effort evaluation or a medical one?
22
Why is there no yearly refreshed covid vaccination recommendation for adults (like from the WHO)? (lemmy.zip)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
23 comments fedilink
 

Title is question, but to clarify my assumptions:

  • Vaccination is a numbers game, and the odds are in your favor that the vaccination will protect you over you get a side effect or an allergic reaction/shock
  • An infection like covid/flue can damage your body long term, not even speaking of long covid etc.
  • To the best of my knowledge it has been shown that flue shoots lower the risk of dementia later in life, wouldn't it be a good enough guess that a covid shoot decreases risks for this too
  • Even if we only assume a covid vaccination is highly to reduce your sick days for only this year, isn't it a rationale tradeoff to get vaccinated, just to avoid 1-2 weeks sick?
  • Given the security of covid vaccinations, I feel like they have been scrutinized and tested extremely well and to the best of my knowledge it was checked that nothing of the vaccination remains in the body after a few weeks (for the argument that nobody knows the long term effects of RNA vaccination)

Again my question: Why doesn't the WHO or don't most countries recommend covid vaccinations for everyone? Are there any health/medical reasons? Are there financial reasons? Are there any countries/governments which recommend the covid vaccination for everyone and not only the 'vulnerable groups'?

Edit: Just to add, I am living in Germany and right now we have a big wave of children flue, where children even die in the hospitals and the children hospitals are near their limits. It seems common sense to just put flue/covid vaccination into every child/adult, to avoid situations like this.

25
Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. open BETA started on Steam (store.steampowered.com)
 

Fighting game players on lemmy might be interested in the open Beta of Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O.!

38
What games bring you 'in the zone' / provide a 'flow' experience for you? (lemmy.zip)
 

Some games bring me in the zone/give me flow like no others.

For example the following games do that for me:

  • Olli Olli
  • Contra (NES)
  • Dark Souls
  • Street Fighter II (SNES)
  • Street Fighter 3
  • Street Fighter 6
  • Like Dreamer
  • Choplifter HD
  • XCOM
  • Infested Planet
  • Tetris Effect

What games are providing you with flow experiences?

1
Debian 12 / Gnome / How to shutdown laptop after battery percentage crossed (lemmy.zip)
 

Hello Linux community,

I need some help with shutting down my laptop when the battery reaches a low percentage.

I am using Debian 12 with the GNOME desktop. WARNING: Minimal installation with self selected packages.

What I want to achieve is, that the laptop just does a 'halt -p' or shuts itself down when the battery is below 20%.

What I did so far:

  • Look into GNOME settings in the power settings area and I found nothing helpful
  • I edited /etc/Upower/UPower.conf with my settings and changed the CriticalPowerAction to PowerOff, ensured the upower daemon is running via systemctl status and rebooted. The result was that I get a warning popup message in GNOME when the battery load reaches 21%, but it does not shutdown the laptop at 20% or under 20%, although I get another pop up announcing that the laptop would be shutdown
  • I ensured laptop-mode-tools and gnome-power-manager settings are installed

Any help/pointers for further help would be highly appreciated.

18
Method of loci/memory palaces for memorizing professional knowledge or whole languages (lemmy.zip)
 

The method of loci (MOL)/memory palaces are a widely known mnemonic devices and enable memory artists impressive tasks (like memorizing several decks of cards, memorizing numbers etc.). Further MOL is featured in pop culture e.g. Sherlock Holmes, Hannibal Lector etc...

There is, to the best of my knowledge quite some research, which shows that MOL is working/useful for improved retention, especially when combined with spaced repetition.

It seems I have never seem real world examples of long term memory palaces/method of loci applications. It always seems like a short term crutch for cards, numbers, speeches, grocery lists, phone numbers, vocabulary or for test/exam preparation. For example it seems that in language learning, the MOL is for encoding some vocabulary and visiting it regularly, until it is committed to long term memory.

All examples I find in books about the method of loci are again only about having one location, a route of 10-N stations, and never about building/using mnemonic devices to organize bigger amounts of knowledge.

Are there any examples of people using the method of loci/memory palaces to organize for example their professional knowledge? Or of polyglots having/keeping memory palaces for language learning? Is there any research about long term usage of the method of loci?

41
Books about the elite / modern nepotism (lemmy.zip)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
9 comments fedilink
 

Can anyone recommend me books about the modern elite/modern nepotism and how it works?

I have experienced/observed modern nepotism several times in my life, to give you some examples:

  • person founds a so called start up with money from person relatives, which boils down to paying other people to do all the work w/o anything resembling a business plan in the first place. Start up is a total failure, person gets job as a specialist for building startups via divine intervention.
  • at several companies there is a level which people who do the work can reach, and above that level people from higher class get positions seemingly out of nowhere (unless they were childhood/study buddies of someone higher up) w/o any qualification/knowledge/experience to do this kind of work
  • from a certain level on (at least in IT where we have more than enough money for it) everything is politics; when discussing technical problems/solutions at that level, the first question is always who is the sponsor behind the initiative and if this comes from the wrong party, the technical merits are of no interest at all
  • a lot of positions even lower level in IT usually are distributed via nepotism/connections, I observed especially SCRUM masters and product owners are chosen for their family names/connections. (Two negative highlights: Product owner was literally boyfriend of company owner and another product owner was son of parent to which company wanted to sell their shit)
  • lower on the list but still annoying and experienced several times: Son of friend of boss/manager/team lead gets internship in company although better candidates are there and often the nepotism sons would never have gotten an internship on their own merits, but end up with fancy internship from known company on their CV.

I understand that when you deal with a group of people politics are always relevant and inherent to groups.

My question is literately, how does this all work and why is this so extremely widespread?

Anyone can recommend some books about this social systems which give some insights?

Further, when I see what is mounted on money/time/energy because of this nepotism or the current favorite ideas of the elite, how comes no companies (that I know of) interrupt the market with a company slightly less dysfunctional.

Are there historical examples how elites/nepotism was overthrown w/o a bloody revolution?

1
ZRAM configuration and other tweaks for potatoes running Linux (lemmy.zip)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
0 comments fedilink
 

I posted about ZRAM before, but because of my totally unscientific experiment, personal experience and the common question, which Linux to run on potatoes...

First, I tweaked ZRAM for my use-case(s) on my hardware, this settings might not be right for your use-cases or your hardware!

My hardware is a netbook with an Intel Celeron N4120 and 4G RAM (3.64G usable).

When I recently played around with ZRAM settings, it felt like the zstd algorithm made my netbook noticeable more sluggish. It never felt sluggish with lzo-rle or lz4.

In a totally unscientific way, I rebooted the computer several times (after a complete update of everything), executed my backup script several times, and measured the last 3 executions. (Didn't touch the netbook during the runs.) The bottleneck of the backup script should not be ZRAM, but it is some reproducible workload that I could execute and measure.

To my surprise, I could measure a performance difference for my backup scripts, lz4 was consistent fastest in real and sys time w/o tweaks to vm.page-cluster!

Changing the vm.page-cluster to 0 further enhanced the speed for lz4, but with this one toggle, all of a sudden zstd is as fast as lz4 in my benchmark and runs with a more consistent runtime.

Changing the vm.swapiness to 180 decreased the speed for lz4, to my surprise.

Obviously the benchmarks are not 100% clean, although the trend for my workload was clearly in favor of lz4/zstd.

To the best of my knowledge, I ended up with nearly the same tweaks that Google makes for ChromeOS:

  • zstd as algorithm (I think ChromeOS uses lzo-rle)

  • 2*ram as ram-size

  • vm.page-cluster = 0

  • Install/enable systemd-oomd

vm.page-cluster = 0 seems like a no-brainer when using ZRAM, on my netbook it is literally the switch for 'fast' mode.

In summary: ZRAM makes my netbook totally usable for everyday tasks, and with tweaking the above settings I run Gnome 3, VS Code and Firefox/Evolution w/o trouble. (Of course, Xfce4 on the same machine is still noticeable more performant.)

I wonder if we should recommend to people asking for a lightweight distribution for potatoes to check/tweak their ZRAM settings by default.

Anyway, I would be interested in experiences from other people:

  1. Any other tweaks on my ZRAM or sysctl for potatoes which made a measurable difference for you?
  2. Any other tips to improve quality of life on potatoe machines? (Besides switching to KDE, LXDE, Xfce, etc. ;-))
  3. Any idea why vm.swapiness didn't improve my measurements? To my understanding it should basically have cached more of my files in ZRAM, making the backup run faster. It even slowed the backup down, which I don't understand.

Edit:

  • zstd beats lz4 on my machine for my benchmark when vm.page-cluster=0!
1
Firefox enables user tracking (mstdn.social)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
0 comments fedilink
 

... I mean, WTF. Mozilla, you had one job ...

Edit:

Just to add a few remarks from the discussions below:

  1. As long as Firefox is sponsored by 'we are not a monopoly' Google, they can provide good things for users. Once advertisement becomes a real revenue stream for Mozilla, the Enshittification will start.
  2. For me it is crossing the line when your browser is spying on you and if 'we' accept it, Mozilla will walk down this path.
  3. This will only be an additional data point for companies spying on you, it will replace none of the existing methodologies. Learn about fingerprinting for example
  4. Mozilla needs to make money/find a business model, agreed. Selling you out to advertisement companies cannot be it.
  5. This is a very transparent attempt of Mozilla to be the man in the middle selling ads, despite the story they tell. At that point I can just use Chrome, Edge or Safari, at least Google has expertise and the money to protect my data and sadly Chrome is the most compatible browser (no fault of Mozilla/Firefox of course).
  6. Mozilla massively acts against the interests of their little remaining user base, which is another dumb move made by a leadership team earning millions while kicking out developers and makes me wonder what will be next.
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