Solar Bear

  • 0 Posts
  • 89 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Solar Bear@slrpnk.nettoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlOn prison abolition
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    17 days ago

    I don’t follow. We regularly refer to polio as being “eradicated”, even though there have still been documented (but exceptionally rare) cases of polio transmission even in western countries over the last couple decades. That actually sounds like a perfectly apt comparison for the goals of prison abolition, just not in the way you intended.


  • Solar Bear@slrpnk.nettoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlOn prison abolition
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    17 days ago

    In short, prison abolition isn’t about abolishing prisons?

    Bad name choice in my opinion, as it immediately makes me think: what a dumb idea.

    This is kind of like saying being anti-war is a dumb idea because there will surely always be wars fought in defense. Being anti-war isn’t necessarily being an absolute pacifist. It’s about opposing war and striving towards a future where war is a relic of the past. Everybody understands this, but struggles to apply the same logic to other topics.

    Striving for intentionally utopian and impossible ideals is a great idea, actually, as long as you recognize it for what it is. I’m a prison abolitionist. Ultimately what I strive for is a society that doesn’t need prisons. I don’t know if total prison abolition is possible, but worst case scenario, we get as close as possible. What’s so bad about that?

    Similarly, I’m a communist, in the classical anarchist sense: abolition of state, class, and money. Are these things possible? Maybe not. In fact, probably not, at least not in any timeframe where humanity will be recognizable to us, as it would require true peace between all people and absolute post-scarcity in every way available to everyone. But worse case scenario, we get as close as possible.

    Ultimately, adopting a utopian ideal is a recognition that the struggle to do better never ends. We’re never “done”. There’s no end of history. Even if we do somehow achieve it, it must be maintained.




  • Use lemmy.ml how you want to use it, and if you want to participate in other political leanings, go to a different instance. No one is really stopping you, and that’s the whole idea of the fediverse. And there really isn’t any value lost, because this isn’t a “choose one and only one” situation. You’ve got all of the fediverse at your fingertips.

    Until you make the mistake of replying with the wrong kind of comment to the wrong sub, and get banned from the entire instance and lose the ability to post on many of the largest subs on this side of the fediverse. Or maybe they just see you out and about and decide to ban you on sight because they don’t like what you said. There’s nothing stopping that.

    Admin overreach and abuse is a major issue for the fediverse because it affects more than just the user in question. Admins of large instances get to decide who has access to the users and communities on their instances, and very often the users of the instance aren’t even aware of the actions taken on their behalf. Mastodon recently implemented a notification for when blocks and defederation remove your follows or followers, and this is a great first step. Users deserve to know when they are impacted by decisions such as these.

    I love the fediverse and want to see it thrive, so we need to stop putting our heads in the sand on this issue. It’s always discussed as if it’s an issue with a few problematic instances rather than the systemic issue in need of a solution that is is. Admins need the tools to protect their instances from real abuse, but we need to balance that with the right of the users to know what’s going on and not be unfairly deprived of the social aspect of this social media experiment, especially without knowing.




  • Criticizing people’s past and current actions relating to the subject and bringing up their direct history relavent to the subject is not a personal attack, nor is it out of line to point out he does his to advance his political agenda within the project, which is why he got banned in the first place. All of this directly relates to the subject at hand.

    You know what doesn’t relate to the subject at hand? Your random little “sjw gender terrorists” comment. But it does make it rather clear why you want to obfuscate the facts about Srid’s history with the project, subsequent ban, and continued amplification of drama and general shit-stirring ever since.




  • You should know that the guy you cited in the second link, Srid, is a well-known right-wing shit-stirrer who is banned from basically all NixOS spaces because he cannot peacefully coexist. He literally gets up day after day with the seemingly sole purpose of fueling drama and causing problems. Don’t take his opinion at face value, he wants to see the project burn down and this colors his interpretation of events.

    NixOS is going through a rocky moment for sure, but there’s no indication it will implode currently.



  • Hard disagree. Everything you learn on Arch is transferable because Arch is vanilla almost to a fault. The deep understandings of components I learned from Arch have helped me more times than I can count. It’s only non-transferable if you view each command as an arcane spell to be cast in that specific situation. I’ve fixed so many issues over the years using this knowledge, and it’s literally what landed me my current job and promotions.

    Arch is why I know how encryption and TPM works at a deeper level, which helped me find and fix the issue a Windows Dell PC was having that kept tripping into Bitlocker recovery. Knowledge of Grub and kernel parameters that I learned from Arch’s install process is why I was able to effortlessly break into a vendor’s DNS server whose root password was lost by the previous sysadmin before me when everybody else was panicking. Hell, it even helps in installing other distros, because advanced disk partitioning is a hot mess on a lot of distro GUI installers, so intimate knowledge of what I actually need helps me work around their failings. Plus all the countless other times that knowledge has helped me solve little problems instantly, because I knew how it worked from implementing it manually. When my coworkers falter because the GUI fails them and they know nothing else, I simply fix it with a command.

    If you use Arch and actually make the effort to learn, not just copy and paste commands from the wiki, you will objectively learn a lot about how Linux works. If you seek a career in Linux, there’s nothing I can recommend more than transitioning to using Arch (not Garuda, not Manjaro, Arch) full-time on your daily driver computer.

    Anyways, after about a decade I’ve recently switched to NixOS. Now there’s a distro where the skills you learn can’t be transferred out, but the knowledge I gained from Arch absolutely transferred in and gave me a head start.



  • Your response is “why are you doing X, you should do Y”

    Because they’re right, you shouldn’t do X. I know that’s not a satisfying answer for most people to hear, but it’s often one people need to hear.

    If the process must run as root, then giving a user direct and unauthenticated control over it is a security vulnerability. You’ve created a quick workaround for your issue, and to be clear it is unlikely to realistically cause you problems individually, but on a larger scale that becomes a massive issue. A better solution is required rather than recommend everybody create a hole in their security like yours in order to do this thing.

    If this is something that unprivileged users reasonably want to control, then this control should be possible unprivileged, or at least with limited privilege, not by simply granting permanent total control of a root service.

    This is ultimately an upstream issue more than anything else.