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Joined 6 days ago
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Cake day: March 8th, 2025

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  • What’s stopping the downloaded script from wiping my home directory? If you use this, how can you feel comfortable?

    You’re not wrong, but there’s an element of trust in anything like this and it’s all about your comfort level. How can you truly trust any code you didn’t write and complie yourself. Actually, how do you trust the compiler.

    And let’s be honest, even if you trust my code implicitly (Hey, I’m a bofh, what could go wrong?) then that simply means that you’re trusting me not to do anything malicious to your system.

    Even if your trust is well-placed in that regard, I don’t need to be malicious to wipe your system or introduce a configuation error that makes you vulnerable to others, it’s perfectly possible to do all that by just being incompetent. Or even being a normally competent person who was just having a bad day while writing the script you’re running now. Ooops.




  • I don’t think all Americans are ignorant / facist / etc. But the last election shows that enough are and enough of the rest are at best apathetic about it…

    Just like I don’t think all my fellow Brits are dumb, but Brexit and the rise of our own “poundshop Trump” idiots like Farage shows that enough of my fellow countrymen have the same issues.

    And we’re far from alone.

    Maybe an even better idea than thinking “some people are dumb” is to work out why there’s such a large number of people out there apparently totally disenfranchised by traditional politics in their own country to the point where extremism becomes attractive. Understanding people probably starts with stopping lumping them together as “dumb”…


  • I’m one of the many recent immigrants from reddit so I guess that’s my start to alternatives.

    I don’t think I can walk away from many of the American tech services I use, but what I have done is reviewed what I use, change what I can and walk away from what I can. I’ve curtailed my optional spend on American companies, goods, and services. We can all do that at least.






  • I don’t ’get these people’ either. But clearly, popularist politicians everywhere do get them. All their lives they’ve heard promises from the ‘traditional’ left and right wing parties that have made little impact on their daily lives that they can see. They’re still in a terrible job, still hearing the media rattling on about how terrible things are, etc.

    So they’re ripe for the taking when someone comes along, tells them that the promises they heard from others are trash, that this new person knows who or what is really to blame, and luckily. It’s a group that’s easy to scapegoat and ‘other’.