Anyone who knows enough about Wireguard, iproute2 tools, iptables/nftables, etc (firewall-marking certain packets based on criteria, then directing them through alternate route-tables based on that) can hand-roll split-tunneling, internal point-to-point tunnels/meshes, etc. For (most) people who want to achieve this in a less painful/fragile way, from what I’ve understood it seems Tailscale just does exactly this under the hood in a less arduous and more intuitive way for users, while also providing a static internet-facing ingress point when needed. Headscale exists for those wanting that but with their own static ingress (self-hosted at their own IP) instead of Tailscale’s.

Very well said. I will make a concerted effort to inject “hypernormalization” into my speech more often going forward. For decades I’ve been saying to friends that the reductionist obsession with “normal” (whatever the hell that means) is a cancer to modern society.

In particular it already sounds creepy when you replace usage with its verb-form, e.g. changing “all my friends are normal” to “all my friends have been normalized”. It’s common practise to use a re-encoder to normalize a “background” playlist of songs to the same dB threshold so no single song sticks out and distracts us from what we are trying to focus on while listening. Similarly, authorities of an authoritarian ilk try to normalize populations so none of them stick out and distract from the primary focus (centralization of power and money). Hypernormalization involves taking that to its logical conclusion, telling the vast majority of people “stay in your lane” - meaning “shut up and consume, and when we tell you what to buy you buy it”, AKA be “normal(ized)”).

Just a heads-up to anyone who - like me - thought this was about Radicle and got confused about mentions of caldav/cardav/LDAP… Radicale != Radicle

Although I agree with the implied sentiment that “the Perfect is the enemy of the Good Enough” (especially for low-profile personal web-presence) and that naval-gazing about protocols can become a counterproductive rabbit-hole, sometimes it can also be risky to oversimplify in the other direction without at least parenthesizing the caveats too. For example this “HTTP/1.1 must die” site points out how desync attacks make HTTP/1.1 robustness a bit of a game of Whack-a-Mole. For certain sites (even some personal sites) this can occasionally matter.

The URL includes “-lets-learn-everything-” so I guess that is it.

I hadn’t even heard of the underlying protocol NNCP yet, and it seems to solve out of the box several things I was trying to do in some of my own hobby-projects. I’d been battling with automating and integrating Tor/I2P, Openssl, Tox, GPG, Wireguard, etc. If NNCP lives up to the hype it will be a big shortcut, when I next get time to work on stuff :-)

Thanks, that’s good to know, but for raw-writing a bootable image to a device do you (or anyone reading) know if there are also straightforward powershell commands for mapping devices at the block level? (as opposed to mounting at filesystem level)

The article at the end mentions they suggest dd as alternative for MacOS (due to Unix user space). It seems the balena -> rufus decision is about the easiest-onramp Mac+Win-portable option, for those uncomfortable dropping to low-level device-writing CLI tools in their current system.

Side-note: Last time I was on a friend’s Windows I installed dd simply enough both as mingw-w64 (native compiled) and under Cygwin. So for Windows users who are comfortable using dd it only requires a minor step. When I once used WSL devices were accessible too, but that was WSL1 (containerized), whereas WSL2 (virtualized) probably makes device-mapping complex(?) enough to not be worth it there.

If you haven’t already seen the talk recently given at the Chaos Computer Club’s “Hacker Hotel” named “How Thermonuclear fusion works, free energy without waste”, I highly recommend it. https://libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-ff152736-e38872dd7aed088e

So you confirm that we agree our most recent comments don’t constitute a constructive discourse (we agree for our own differing reasons, but that’s beside the point). So rather than itemising the hows and whys of disagreeing with your latest comment I will instead just wish you well and say goodbye. If you reply and don’t hear back from me, please know that is not out of concession or rudeness on my part, just that at some a discussion needs to stop (especially when all agree it is not constructive).

Thanks. Had heard the name but didn’t really know “what they do” in that sense. Will check them out.

…cruelty is state policy in China.

That is a very causatively specific thing you are claiming I said, which I didn’t. Again.

Your comments are frustrating to me because they’re born out of ignorance. You have not spent the time to actually understand how Chinese system works

…if you bothered to learn a bit of history you’d see that…

I urge you to actually spend the time to learn about China instead of regurgitating demagogy.

That’s making quite a few assumptions and accusations about someone you’ve never met and know nothing about. Have you genuinely considered that many of those assumptions and accusations might be wrong? And no, I won’t (and shouldn’t) fall into the same “courtier’s reply” trap by itemising first-hand experiences, interactions, etc here because A) that would be inappropriate and should be irrelevant to a healthy discussion-focused dialogue - free of such “appeal to authority” logical fallacies, B) as stated before it is clear you keep arguing past what I’m actually saying - to how you reinterpret what I am saying, and C) after working through your false assumptions, false accusations, ad hominems, and misreading it seems you didn’t actually say anything else for me to reply to.

I made statements about various global systems of government, in general, and when you redirected and contextualised every statement to being consistently only about China, at first I did you the debater’s courtesy of addressing that, but unfortunately that courtesy has a limit, especially when you don’t reciprocate. As much as people displaying Said’s concept of Orientalism irreparably bias and taint global-context discussions, Occidentalism is also harmful for the same reason. Both of them often veer discussions into two-sided, one-dimensional (and often zero-sum) arguments to be “won”, rather than multivariable, multidimensional, fallibilistic and constructive debates. I have only been here for the latter but you are either only able or only willing to participate in the prior, so I say again it makes sense to just agree to disagree and move on. Anything else is just browbeating.

Lastly, I would have thought those ad hominems alone should be delete-worthy due to rule 1, no?

For others who, like me, haven’t yet heard what the 50501 Movement is, here you go

At least on that day he was.

I think a good tool against this could be to have an international nonprofit organization of investigative journalists, OSINT experts, and detectives (and experts in seeing through AI abuse and other fraudulent media behaviour, and as soon as they build reputation they would need damn good lawyers too). They would act as a fast-response crack-team to look under the covers every time any powers-that-be launch a news cycle chaos-offensive (which sadly these days is “all the time”). Not just as a side-hustle or section of a general publication, but as its own non-profit-beholden organisation dedicated to that task.

They would follow the timings and run contextual pattern recognition on all the big/fishy “look over here” announcements (or character hit-pieces attacking the credibility of people sharing uncomfortable or explosive information). Their explicit goal though would be surfacing the most promising other stories that are being buried, combine and tug on those threads to discover what kind of meta-stories and deeper narratives are being lost in the “manufactured mainstream” noise, and provide announcements/advice/guidance to other journalists and reporters on what to do next with those. They would need to all be highly experienced and disciplined expert investigators of impeccable integrity to provide adequate mental-vaccination against risks of sliding into conspiracy-hypothesising tin-hat territory due to the nature of the work.

In addition to the obligatory website for people to discover and learn about them, they could provide a non-paywalled RSS stream of their findings, tongue-in-cheek naming it “While you were out”, maybe with a sister podcast discussing their findings called “Excuse me, I think you dropped this”.

This little exchange felt so wholesome in a deliberately counterintuitive way. :-D

I agree. I suspect the internet will retrospectively eventually even be looked at as an “information revolution” on par with the industrial one. I know that sounds like an enormous claim but there is a long road yet, so I don’t think it will turn out to sound so crazy. Each revolution (and its increase in power) comes along with responsibilities and potential dark sides, though. I think similarly to how the industrial revolution opened the door to industrial war, we are already seeing the pain brought by various (distributed, automated) information war techniques. I love how we live in an age now where a person with internet access and enough tenacity can eventually learn almost anything, and contribute back, but at the same time I worry deeply about the rolling waves of belligerence, disinformation & selective amnesia coercion, gatekeeping, and fraud that have come with it. I hope humanity can get those under some degree of control soon.

Your claim that Chinese government is a bad actor…

Although that uses many of the same words I used in that sentence it is a fundamentally different sentence from what I said.

Secondly, when I make my point (“my moral code does not allow me to accept that certain means, especially those based on cruelty, can be justified by any number of material results measured by any metrics”) you keep rebutting it by pointing me back to those very result-metrics. It means I feel we are just talking past each other in a failed dialogue on that point, meaning the only constructive response is to just “agree to disagree” on baselines regarding it.

Thirdly,

Meanwhile, idealists in the west have been preaching kindness while allowing the dictatorship of capital rule over every aspect of their lives.

On this point I agree with you entirely. Fundamentalist Capitalism (especially the end-stage variants we are seeing in some places, and the inevitable Disaster Capitalism facilitated by certain politicians) is an absolute cancer. Just as much as Fundamentalist Utilitarianism is a cancer. It seems you keep trying to use that as a gotcha, for some ideological banner I am not even waving.

I suspect my comments are frustrating you (?) because, on the one hand you are championing a political system and inherently accepting that its expediencies are acceptable, whereas I am arguing from a moral standpoint which explicitly considers many of those expediencies to be unacceptable, irrespective of the political ends. You have made many strident criticisms of many political systems and governments, many of which i concur with. I just also include the Chinese government in those criticisms along with the others.

You dismissed my moral standpoint with:

…all nice and good, but it’s ultimately meaningless while…

Conversely, I think all governmental implementations which think they can get away with sidestepping those moral baselines in the name of expedience are destined for corruption and collapse, while leaving a trail of cruelty in their wake. Not just one governmental implementation, all of them. That is why I think the presently constructive action is to accept that our respective “lines in the sand of acceptability” on these issues are different, and just agree to disagree on those points.

I think two productive things I can say in reply to your comment are:

1. Your post was about governments and rich people, yet your replies are here referring to the people and the societies. In the spirit of your post, and your reply-comment singling out China, I was replying about the Chinese government (both the things they do, and the things they normalise and accept from bad actors in society), just like I was talking about for the US, Russian, UK, and European governments in my previous comment. A lot of that comes from my empathy for Chinese people, culture, and society - quite the opposite of what it seems you interpreted.

2. I think a key to remaining in touch with our core, shared humanity is remembering that some methodological means can never be justified by any material ends, and to keep revisiting what our own personal moral code says about where that line is. Importantly, I don’t reserve that opinion for any subset of political/religious/whatever systems or subset of countries, and have particular distrust for fundamentalist (unquestioning) implementations of any and all of them. Hence, to quote the last (and clearly not by any interpretation “rule breaking”) sentence from my comment:

Kindness and humaneness is not measured in GDP and hot-button topic popularity polls

I respectfully but firmly disagree regarding three words used here: racist, tropes, parroting. I would have been willing to clarify and defend why (and why I can partially do so from lived-experience), while also empathising about how one part of what I wrote might be possible to misinterpret without that clarification. The comment has since been removed though, so it wouldn’t be productive now. I still feel it important to say that a now-invisible comment of mine being called out as something is in my opinion not that thing (so readers don’t just assume it was without hesitation), while respecting your right to claim as such, especially before seeing any followup clarifications.