The problem for law enforcement (assuming theres an incentive to even catch it, which currently for the US there is not), is a lot of this influence stuff is domestic. Well funded right wing think tanks notably those around the heratige foundation (The motherfuckers behind project 2025 which is largely the blueprint for a lot of the current insanity) and the koch network, putting serious finances into disinfo campaigns. Theres not a lot that can be done about that because the first amendment doesnt just protect your right to speak truth to power, but also your right to lie through your teeth on behalf of despots and use shady techniques to land your lie. And in fact, somewhat mysteriously, with companies being given quasi-personhood and money the status of speech, this appears to even extend as far as doing some pretty corrupt shit, to get there.

As an Australian I kind of miss... 2 years ago?... when the ritual of waking up didn't involve turning on the news to see what terrifying madness the americans have inflicted on themselves in the preceding day.

Unfortuantely a lot of things have to go right at the same time to get a situation where you guys can be finally done with trump after november. And well. "lots of things going right at the same time" hasn't seemed like a thing the US does for quite some time now.

Thats literally who "Epstein class" is refering to. The billionares and tech bros. Many of whom are in the files (Though Musks entry is very amusing, with him pleading to be allowed to visit because of GIRLS and being basically told 'lol no')

That's it.

Bah. I want a nuclear hand grenade. It'd be a hell of a way to shutup that stupid neighbor who keeps complaining to my landlord about my drinking.

The job posting was created to itemize the exact skillset this developer had, and the exact job duties this developer did

The oldest trick in the book. I learned quickly not to bother applying for jobs at universities with overly specific job requirements, because these are almost always just designed to hire a specific graduate to continue previously unpaid research whilst getting around public service (australian universities are usually govt owned) laws that require new jobs be advertised. Its a technical workaround that *probably* borders on corruption, but gets ignored because academia has an obvious interest in letting graduates continue the research they did for their PhD into post-doc.

An example would be that I applied for a job once at a local university doing computational genomics. It was an unusually specific set of requirements and I thought "Im probably the only person in the southern hemisphere with this specific set of skills!" aaaaand didnt get it, and found out later on from a collegue the job went to a postdoc and was intended to let them continue their PhD. I could have thrown a fit, but it'd be hard to prove and I dont actually want to deprive some poor kid of their promised job when I had about 5 other offers on the table anyway.

Well except half the streaming services are rotten with ads these days.

Its exceptionally painful in election season too. Just ugh.

Nornally I can nuke most of it via ad-blockers, But that stupid 70" samsung TV, no such luck.

(Hey, hackers, how about jailbreaking these things. Be nice to have an alternative to loungeroom spyware again)

Never underestimate the insanity and abject incompetence of windows sysadmins when given power over infrastructure.

The fact that the companies doing this the most seem to be the ones with the biggest revenues is a pretty good clue this is only about increasing stock dividends (and thus C-Suite bonuses)

You know, contrary to what your leftist paranoia tells you, rich people are not psychopaths, don't project your own faults onto everyone else.

Let me guess, you not only yell at people for jokes, you also yell at people for being upset at jokes.

A lawyer friend of mine uses a little fleet of small Qwens for paperwork and general office bureaucracy (He's not prepared to let them anywhere near actual lawyering for obvious reasons*) in his one man practice, and they work shockingly well. And I'm not being colorful when I say "bureaucracy" , these things are *really* bureaucratic. They've internally come up with procedures for everything including procedures for coming up with procedures. They run off a 512gb M4 mac studio and can be a little slow, but it means he gets to run it all offline airgapping them away from doing something stupid that might expose his clients data to the internet.

*He did experiment with using them to create mock trials to battletest legal arguments, and the result WAS impressive, but not impressive enough to use as part of regular legal practice and its still ia use that could anger the gods should they screw up and cite a fake case or something, so that was more for experimental purpose, though he's convinced it'd be a pretty lethal way of filtering out bad legal arguments if he monte-carloed the mock trials to figure out what sort of arguments a prosecutor could use against his own arguments.

Eh, I'm sure it'll be fine. No need to be alarmist, like they were about Trump.

Well yeah about that.....

The problem conservatism has, and has always had, was that its always been primarily defined by "we oppose the new thing!" sentiments. That might be fine when "the new thing" is actively obnoxious, and neither leftism nor liberalism certainly isn't without some deep flaws, but it doesn't leave itself with a solid set of coherent first principles to build on.

Hence why you get paleoconservatives, who want religious control over life and a heavy government control over culture (aka speech) as well as supporting raising taxes in the form of tariffs and in bed with right-libertarians who want government control over economics to be dismantled and for the govt to get out of peoples lives, despite the fact they agree on *very* little except "liberals bad".

Which brings me to my point: Python should be frozen as is. No more development. Tinkering with it just because some people want to contribute and get visibility in open source is not a good cost/benefit outcome for humanity.

Because that worked well for Perl right? Nothing like stagnation to secure the firmament.

I had an idea a while back of launching an org called "Hostile Fork" that basically gets these hostile de-FOSSings and relaunches them from the last known FOSS commit, stripping out all the anti user shit (user limits for "community" versions etc), de-branding them and trying to find new maintainers. This was in response to almost every non relational database I used succumbing to management bullshit and going closed source, or using the GPL as shareware by locking important functions behind "license checks" (motherfuckers if you put that license check in GPL code I *am* entitled to remove it). Im still bitter about ArangoDB

In the end, I have neither the time resources to put into it, or the money/legal resources to defend it. But I still think it'd be a great idea.

Element Pro is not Open Source.

Actually its AGPL.

But like almost all AGPL software, its actually just GPL flavored shareware. There is an "enterprise" version that costs $$$

I still maintain AGPL was the worst mistake the FSF ever made.

But in theory theres nothing stopping someone from forking the AGPL version and adding the missing "enterprise" features and hacking out shitty limitations.