LOL. That was hilarious… and depressing. Turns out, when you look at politics and history through the lenses of software development, it becomes a lot funnier to read.

Before clicking, I already knew this would lead to NextDNS. Turns out, my experiences were quite similar. Sadly, my beloved RPI is just sitting idle these days. Maybe I’m just a bad admin, and that caused my problems. Probably…

Anyway, I really prefer to use SAAS for this purpose. You could use any DNS you like, doesn’t have to be this one. If you’re the kind of pi admin who has the time and energy, running your own pi-hole is still probably the best option though.

The current version of Constitution doesn’t support installing Monarchy. You would need to fork Constitution, and release a new version that does. Then, you would need to uninstall Democracy, JusticeSystem, and a long list of other packages. Then, you can install your custom version of Constitution and Monarchy.

Doing so is not recommended, since severe stability issues have been reported by many countries that have tried it. If you break your country, you can keep the pieces.

Message in a bottle is the way to go.

If hackers don’t know where the bottle is floating, they can’t read the message. It’s also completely disconnected from the Internet, further enhancing the already robust security. This protocol also supports all encryption methods you can fit inside the bottle. There’s no central authority, no servers, no licenses, and no EULAs to accept without reading.

The only bottlenecks are bandwidth, packet loss, and the physical dimensions of the glass container.

We are one step closer to building the AI that can determine which one is cuter: a specific photo of a kitten or one of a puppy. Just imagine what you could do with such technology!

Violence motivated by some sort of political thought process.

I religious violence political? Probably. The line between the two is incredibly blurry.

What about violence caused by mental illness? No. The action probably has delusional thinking behind it, which differs from the other examples, but the line is once again very blurry.

There are religious people who believe it is their religious duty to hurt other people and bring about a political change in the world. Peer pressure, cognitive biases and even delusions can be involved, which further muddies the water.

Extreme cases are clearly in one category or another, but between them we have plenty of unclear cases and a very wide gray area. Humans love to categorize things in black and white terms, but life rarely fits in these binary definitions.

Think of definitions as a flimsy cardboard box with many holes here and there. Think of life as a huge angry octopus you’re trying to force into this tiny box. As soon as you manage to close the lid, 3 tentacles have found some holes here and there. You poke those tentacles back in, but that just forces the lid open again. The octopus is sort of, maybe, partially in the box, kinda, but not really. Eh, close enough.

The US was lucky that Afghanistan didn’t drain all of their money and power. It was already a total disaster, but it could have been even worse.

Let me guess, it was the jungle. I recall from history class, that China is protected by a massive jungle on one side, which has kept potential invaders from trying that direction. Maybe the same is true for Vietnam as well.

It works the other way around too. A place with fewer restrictions becomes a dumping ground for products that don’t meet modern standards.

Here’s an example. When the EU announced the Restriction of Hazardous Substances directive (RoHS), you couldn’t sell electronics that contain lead. However, you could still manufacture them and ship them to China. This means that you could also manufacture energy intensive electric junk in EU and other countries and sell all of it in USA.

Don’t know about the other countries,but Afghanistan is a bit special. Many invaders have tried, and failed. I guess the mountainous terrain doesn’t make it any easier. Seems to me that nobody is capable of conquering Afghanistan. When you hear about another empire trying their luck, you know it’s going to drain their power.

This is already top comedy. How much funnier can it get?

Pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

I’m happy with my For Loops. They’re just great!

This is the way. Subscribe to the stuff you care about, and ignore the rest. Browsing “all” from time to time should be enough as long as you sort by top of the week or something like that.

This way, you’re in charge. You get to control how much you get exposed to potentially harmful stuff.

Sand and dust usually has really hard particles that will scratch most materials out there. Have you considered using rotten tomatoes instead?

When something breaks, it’s going to cost you more than you paid for the whole car. Cost of ownership is an important factor in the long run.

Speak for yourself. Here in the NULL island, we’re all born on January 1st, 1970.

That is a good point. So, in this case, the non-citizen would be like a tourist. They have some rights too, don’t they?

But wouldn’t that also work the other way around? If so, any white supremacist or government agency could commit any atrocity and not get convicted, because the victim wasn’t protected by any laws.

There are so many more things to do. Nowadays, we’re just barely doing what really needs to be done. Pretty much everything else gets ignored.

The horse analogy is actually pretty good. Back in the horsy days, you would not travel to the nearest city unless it was really important. You would rely on the products and services you had in your town. If something wasn’t available, tough luck. If it was super important, you might undertake the journey to the nearest city where you could buy that one thing.

Nowadays though, you totally can drive 20 minutes to get stuff done. Even better than that, logistics don’t depend on horses any more, so you can have obscure stuff shipped to your home, no problem.

This applies to all sorts of things too. Once AI is ready to take on more tasks… some really creepy and nasty stuff will probably happen, but it might almost be worth it. I think it should be possible to do many tasks that simply get ignored today.

Like, who will pick up the trash today? Nobody. The trash guy will show up on Thursday, so deal with it. Who will organize the warehouse? Nobody. It’s not a complete disaster just yet. We can manage for the time being. We’ll fix it when production is about to stop because we can’t find stuff in the warehouse any more. Examples like this can be found everywhere.