Well I can’t speak to what its like in places I’ve never been.

without telling me you’re from the US.

I… mentioned the US in my comment?

Also I would heavily advocate for Debian Testing if you need a rolling release distro. It is less vetted than stable but is still more vetted than many other rolling release options and you can just stay on testing as versions change while getting features pretty fast compared to stable.

Oh for sure I just wouldn’t want anyone having my face scan personally. I’d love to have a law passed that designated biometric data as personal property requiring a warrant or explicit consent to collect.

Also something new people don’t realize is that Mint is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian. If you can’t solve your issue by searching for mint you can usually find a solution meant for Ubuntu or Debian that will work.

Some of them they don’t even ask anymore. When you enter the US at certain ports of entry now they scan everyone as you walk up and they won’t even ask to see your passport because they know who you are and will just wave you through. Because that’s not fucking creepy at all.

Sadly if you want to travel these days face scans are unavoidable. I still avoid them for commercial services, but yeah. Fly to europe or any major US city and you are going to be made to submit to a face scan to get through security.

So what does “1.5mil$ in CPU/GPU time” mean then? It doesn’t make sense. That’s not a standardized unit of time. Are we talking tokens like with AI? Whatever SpaceX’s going rate is to use their servers? Some other commercial service? That’s why I don’t like it being used like this. It would be like me saying I am donating 1.5 million dollars of “food” to the homless. Like that’s great right, but what the fuck do I mean by food? I could be giving them rice and beans, caviar, or anything in between. Meal vouchers to mcdonalds, or working with soup kitchens. It’s just vague.

I hate the phrase “X$ in compute” so much. What does that even mean? It could mean a 1.5 million dollar value worth of donated time on one of their servers, or it could mean a hardware donation, or it could be a cash donation that is earmarked for server upgrades/chip purchases. Ever since AI took off it’s become such a common turn of phrase to use “compute” like this. As if the amount of money spent tells you anything useful about the amount of things they can “compute” now. Costs are so variable and spread out across many different areas that it changes day by day, and by which vendor you use, or what part of the world you are in, or all kinds of other things.

Maybe I’m just behind the times and it has some specific meaning now I’m not aware of. Either way it annoys me.

Right? I wish we had the Great Firewall ffs.

If it weren’t in a US jurisdiction this would matter to me, but since it is it’s irrelevant. US law basically makes privacy on any server within the US an illusion. Because they can issue a gag and log order to the server operator and you’d never know as they’d be legally barred from speaking on it.

Agreed if you read through the forum posts of the founder a lot of it is him bending over backwards to justify this very thing. But I figured most people wouldn’t be as convinced by the technical aspect, and I’m not qualified enough on it to like fully break it down myself either so just didn’t speak on it.

I do think that it seems a bit worse than just an extra layer tho. It is literally moving your actual Identifying data (payment info and IP) into the hands of a US based company and out of the hands of Mullvad. It is protecting you from Mullvad, and exposing you to the massive fucking Five Eyes surveillance state, and US jurisdiction which is one of the most draconian in the world in regards to digital privacy.

Is this just a money grab? Maybe. Does the founder believe in what he’s doing? Maybe. But does this also look exactly like what I would expect a US Government backed Honey Pot service to look like? Yes.

Also, if you don’t trust Mullvad, use TOR.

Say’s who? The community is supposed to just organically resist this? There’s no organizational structure? Because that would be a government.

Specify how what I described is different than what you’d do then. What mechanisms or institutions would you put in place to prevent step 3?

The term authoritarianism is utterly meaningless because all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The state is fundamentally an instrument that’s used by the ruling class to maintain its dominance. The whole notion that political systems can be neatly categorized into authoritarian or democratic binaries is deeply infantile.

The reality is that every government derives its authority from its monopoly on legal violence. The ability to enforce laws, suppress dissent, and maintain order is derived from control over police, military, and judicial systems. Whether a government is labelled authoritarian or democratic, the fundamental basis of its power lies here. Therefore, the only meaningful questions to ask are which class interests it represents, and to what extent can it be held accountable to them.

I honestly think we should have a bot where anytime someone says the word authoritarian it just spits this out at them.

The Latitude 7400 (Non 2-in-one version) is genuinely an amazing laptop if you underclock the CPU a bit so it doesn’t sound like a jet engine. I run Debian on it and the thing gets 12 hours of battery life, and does everything I need. Build quality is pretty good too. I got it for like 200$ refurbished.

Red Star OS

Step 1: Abolish Government

Step 2: Establish absolutely no institutional infrastucture to ensure nobody else makes a new government. Because that would be authoritatian.

Step 3: Someone makes another government by establishing a monopoly on violence.

Step 4: Abolish Government… wait what?

What do you actually know about soviet housing? I’ve done significant academic research on the topic. It’s not just a simple “they built a certain type of building”. The reason they all look so similar is that their construction method was pre-fab concrete panels. It was a revolutionary technology at the time, and allowed them to solve their housing crisis. They were called “Khrushchyovka” after whom you can guess. He made it his mission to solve the Soviet Housing crisis when he took over and was largely successful.

You have to keep in mind the historical context. The people moving into these buildings were coming from a pre-industrial society where they commonly had so electricity, dirt floors, and no insulation. These were a significant upgrade from the pre-USSR constructions. They started construction in the 1940s, and really took off in the 50s.

I think the main takeaways from them shouldn’t be “We should build these exact things”. and I don’t think that’s what people who support them are advocating for. I think what they are trying to point out is that if you standardize production, and use economies of scale, it is entirely possible to build tons of housing quickly and cheaply. And considering the way housing prices look these days I’d expect that to be an idea anyone can get behind.

If you are interested here is an article about how modern China is using similar practices: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/17/10695

Finally! I can download more RAM!