That driver is so cut.

Dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature.

psst… hey kid! the first hit is free!

Carol of the Bells - Trans-Siberian Orchestra

It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you!

A lot of advertising is built around making consumers feel good for buying particular products, not convincing them to buy in the first place. Debate in this context would be useless because it’s more about confirmation bias than coercion.

Seriously, fuck Pearson. Garbage company.

Nice save, and a fantastic PSA.

Also I’m a big fan of sleeping on a problem as a path to a solution. I’m not sure how exactly that skill develops, but it’s definitely something that I’ve done a few times over the years.

What are you going to do with half a pirate flag?

3-2-1

3 copies, 2 onsite, 1 offsite.

Personally I think that every mistake is a teaching opportunity. In this context, rather than try to sweep the racism under the rug of history as quickly and quietly as possible, I think changes should be made but in a way that invites people (especially children) to ask questions about the background of the traditions and why those representations of persons of color are problematic and should be changed. Without this it just looks like an attempt to cover up and deny the existence of the past forms of discrimination, which especially does a disservice to people experiencing present forms of discrimination.

And also, maybe, dealing with these things should not be fast or easy.

Nothing about this is imaginary, because in some ways these problems haven’t changed much. There is value in spending time on it in the present.

All of that said, I am a white guy from North America, not a POC from the Netherlands, so my input is just an opinion.

the last twenty years or so there is a different battle going on between team “Dutch tradition” and team “kick out zwarte Piet”. Both of these last two teams are obnoxious, and would choose confrontation over dialogue every day of the week. This has resulted in a conflict with no end,

Social conflicts like this are never about solutions but about performance, for the sake of getting attention. Ending the conflict would end the attention.

where it would have been easy to phase out the blackface character with no fuss in a short time.

Hmm, by removing Piet and thus hiding the traditional racist representation of black people, or by whitewashing him?

There’s a pretty good Behind the Bastards episode on Stahlin. Basically he was an ultra-paranoid drunk that forced his cabinet members to get drunk with him on a regular basis, which pretty much ruined any potential for effective government in the USSR.

Russia has a strong-man fetish which even the Bolsheviks couldn’t overcome. For all the post-revolution ideology and communist rhetoric, they still just want a Tsar.

Teflon Don, even semen won’t stick to him.

Rush?

disclude

From Middle English discluden, from Latin disclūdō, disclūdere (“separate or keep apart”).

gimme some heat!

There are definitely at least 9 circles of emacs filled with tormented souls.

Please increase our user count so we can get more VC funding!

Perfect explanation.

Thank you, I try. It’s always tricky to keep network infrastructure explanations concise and readable - the Internet is such a complicated mess.

People like paying for convenience.

Well, I would simplify that to people like convenience. Infrastructure of any type is basically someone else solving convenience problems for you. People don’t really like paying, but they will if it’s the most convenient option.

Syncthing is doing this for you for free, I assume mostly because the developers wanted the infrastructure to work that way and didn’t want it to be dependent on DNS, and decided to make it available to users at large. It’s very convenient, but it also obscures a lot of the technical side of network services which can make learning harder.

This kind of thing shows why tech giants are giants and why selfhosted is a niche.

There’s also always the “why reinvent the wheel?” question, and consider that the guy who is selling wheels works on making wheels as a full-time occupation and has been doing so long enough to build a business on it, whereas you are a hobbyist. There are things that guy knows about wheelmaking that would take you ten years to learn, and he also has a properly equipped workshop for it - you have some YouTube videos, your garage and a handful of tools from Harbor Freight.

Sometimes there is good reason to do so (e.g. privacy from cloud service data gathering) but this is a real balancing act between cost (time and money, both up-front and long-term), risk (privacy exposure, data loss, failure tolerance), and convenience. If you’re going to do something yourself, you should have a specific answer to the question, and probably do a little cost-benefit checking.