Despair is useless

I tried to get this up and running back on my K6-2, unfortunately I couldn’t work out how to get the X server running with my 3Dlabs FireGL Pro card at the time.

My general opinion on China over the past few years have evolved to “OK they aren’t perfect, but at least they seem to be trying, instead of actively making everything worse.”

This. People exercised their consciences.

Reminiscent of Ulysses 31

The same thing that is powering most other political figures, all of which can be termed “Populists”

People are angry about a number of things. The wealth gap is very large, they are constantly told that the reason they aren’t doing well in life is because of their own failings, whilst they watch elites with political access get away with things they can only dream of. They’re being told immigrants and/or AI’s are coming for their jobs. They’re being told they can’t have what their parents or the wealthy had because Climate Change, or because inflation.

This generates a great deal of friction, which in turn pushes people to radicalize their beliefs. You can’t continue to sell a liberal, centrist viewpoint of the world when it simply isn’t working for them. They might cotton on to “dumb” ideas, but this does not mean that they are stupid. It means that they are angry. This is is demonstrative of a deeper problem that is being very deliberately ignored or papered over, because those in power have a vested interest in keeping the gravy train running for as long as possible. The sheer scale of the problems we now have to deal with are exceeding the kinds of moves and actions most Western politicians have learned over the years, so we aren’t getting appropriate results out of our political apparatus.

In times such as these, many people will look to the past for ideas on how to deal with their current situation. They sometimes come back with bad ones, sometimes they come back with good ones, and the pre-existing power structure will do everything it can to resist both of them, because to change is tantamount to completely losing grip on power for many of the people invested in the way things are. They cannot adapt, and once gone they will never get it back.

So we have a kind of a worst-case situation with a maladaptive leadership, extreme public resentment and actual natural/physical catastrophes forming a kind of crucible that this civilization needs to endure.

The trumps/erdogans/farages/orbans/lukashenkos/putins/meleis of this world are symptoms of these issues.

Or in NYC, a mold-infested roach hotel where someone probably drowned during the flooding a few years back.

At least we have Bitwig for music production now (if you can work out how to use it… I still haven’t had the time :-/ )

Really wish we’d get some nice, fast RISC-V base boards with a nice amount of flash memory paired with a cool round LCD display…keep patrolling CNX for the parts but they don’t seem to be quite there yet.

I managed to migrate all mine to libvirt when I dumped esxi. They dropped support for the old opteron I was running at the time, so I couldn’t upgrade to v7. Welp, Fedora Server does just as well and I’ve been moving the VM hosted services into containers anyway.

Ofc… well, we’ll see what IBM does with RedHat. Probably something like this eventually. They simply can’t help themselves.

No, most people would not.

Most people would share, or hit a point and think “OK, that’s enough for anything I really want personally… I’m gonna try and help out now…”

Nobody in their right mind should want a world where they are privately wealthy, but publically impoverished.
Because then, you have no security.
Someone will always be gunning for you.
You can stave it off by layering brute force, and laws, but there is no such thing as 100% secure. Eventually something will make it through, and wreak havoc. And because all you now care about, over everything, is whatever paltry “wealth” you’ve managed to secure, the catastrophe is magnified orders of magnitude. You have no real friends or community to turn to, nobody who would support you if you didn’t have the most, and the rules didn’t make you “king” because of it.

It’s a sickness.

… can’t just whup 'em…