BRICST’D’VE’MST

“Mom, not fair!”

You can’t even get on Reddit in China

Oh no, the horror!

Signal or other encryption

Weird, that’s how I kept in contact with my family when I was there.

It has nothing to do economic prosperity or anything like that

plugs ears LA LA LA LA LA

China is an authoritarian government who doesn’t want to lose control.

wet_fart_noise.flac

You’re both completely wrong. This is the narrative the five eyes and three letters need you to believe.

More important and more funded than domestic spying, US intelligence exists to facilitate regime change. The objective is to have both dragnet and targeted surveillance to obtain leverage (for strategic leverage, blackmail, or comms interception) over foreign political, social, and business leaders so they can maximize the unequal exchange between the US & developing countries.

Keeping Africa, South America, the Middle East, and South East Asia from developing through political and social instability not only prevents them from competing with US exports, but more importantly keeps their economies dependent on natural resource exports, which they need to sell for cheap because they are dependent on technology imports.

China as a manufacturing powerhouse threatens these unequal trade arrangements by supplying these undeveloped or developing countries with manufactured goods and technology, and thus is one of the primary targets of US covert regime change operations. (Also why you see news media crying bloody murder about China’s “dept trap diplomacy”). Much of this also applies to other developing powers that resist being imperialized or oppose US geopolitical goals like the USSR/Russia and Iran.

So purpose #1 of the great firewall is to prevent the US from controlling its social and technology sphere and using it to cause instability.

Purpose #2 is economic protectionism for China’s high tech sector. China knows that as long as it remains primarily industrial / low tech manufacturer, it will always be threatened by US intervention.

By moving to high tech, China can eliminate its reliance on Western technology imports, eliminate threat vectors for adversaries to slip in, and let other rising nations like Vietnam, Brazil, Malaysia, and Mexico take some of the heat off them by outsourcing its manufacturing there. China also gets to benefit by having cutting edge tech that will benefit its public health, increase education levels, strengthen its military, and form the basis of its post-industrial economy.

China “enforcing the official narrative” insofar as controlling public opinion is of far lower importance than denying the west avenues to destroy its society. China is incredibly diverse and a quick peek into Chinese social media reveals no shortage of western culture fetishizers, religious quacks, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, capitalist enthusiasts, shit talkers about political figures, and people pushing back on “the official narrative”. VPN usage is widespread. People read, share, and meme western news and social media.

Yes they censor posts, no they don’t do that great of a job at it…because the goal isn’t censorship, its about denying the West the ability to exploit discontent to destabilize the country.

See also:

• Tibet in the 50s & 60s (notice the gap here, when the US thought China would be a useful bludgeon against the Soviet Union & allies)
• Student protests in 1989
• Honk Kong in 2019
• Xinjiang when the US was in Afghanistan
• Taiwan tensions and weapons sales ramping up now

All of these being natural internal tensions exploited with great effort and to great effect by the US through mass media campaigns, radicalizing extremist and separatist groups, weapons transfers, and direct involvement in helping people commit violence.

And the US isn’t Russia buying $10 million worth of Facebook ads and running not farms, this is the most developed, most funded, and most sophisticated intelligence apparatus in history. One so large, people with an interest in politics and spying, cannot name all the publicly known agencies without missing 5-10.

You can quote me on this, if the US were to fall in the coming decades, the firewall would also fall within the year. Though, I suspect the US will just languish with internal infighting once the petrodollar loses reserve currency status and China takes the firewall down around 2035 once there aren’t powers posing a credible threat to its security.

bruh, I think I agree with most of your conclusions, but you gotta work on your delivery, as it definitely doesn’t serve your message well. I think you receive a lot more pushback because you use so many harshly negative words to describe people.

Just in this comment, you use:

• disease
• sewer
• “security” clowns
• pure snake oil
• disgusting sole developer
• minions
• witch hunt
• maliciously
• trained monkeys

which makes this comment sound more like a Donald Trump rally than a well-reasoned argument. It’s understandable given your history of conflict with members of the project, and I usually hate tone policing, but I think this word choice severely hurts your argument. Remember, most people here are just passerby and have no idea about the drama or your experiences with their community. Their first impression is gonna be you’re the flip-side to Micay.

I think your thesis is largely correct, that the project does a suspicious amount of shilling for big tech and Google and pushes a lot of anti-FOSS propaganda and has a toxic social media presence that silences good people geniunely asking questions or voicing opinion in good faith.

I don’t think it has improved that much. The current social team just repackages the same opinions and behavior with fewer meltdowns. I see the change as purely symbolic.

good cop, bad cop routine

hopefully with life rafts 🙏

It saves two keystrokes

I wonder what the total amount Israel and its affiliate groups spend on PR and influence campaigns. Birthright trips alone probably cost a fortune.

They plagiarized the plagiarism machine!

Your documentation on file system choice is either anecdotal or engineering-masters-thesis, seemingly no in-between

God, I feel this so much. All the benchmarks are such ass too.

I have also struggled with picking a disk layout + FS, and landed on using a single BTRFS partition with FDE.

For now, I’m happy. Unless there’s a new FS that definitively beats BTRFS on NVMe perf and supports copy-on-write and something that makes FDE as easy as subvolumes that definitively beats BTRFS on NVMe drives, I won’t even bother looking into it again.

I’ve considered moving to a RAID setup, but it seems like more trouble than it’s worth, since I do regular /home backups & NixOS keeps my entire system config in version control.

If I ever consider a different disk setup, I’m just going to fire up a clean distro install on a spare NVMe and benchmark my most common tasks myself.

NixOS has killed my decision paralysis for choosing distros and desktop env stuff since I can just enable whatever in my config, try it out, then revert if I don’t like it enough to switch.

Only thing I can’t trivially test is disk layouts, but with disko, it might be easy enough to create a custom NixOS installer that:

• auto-installs a disk layout & your config
• reboots
• runs your benchmarks
• writes the results to disk
• reboots into the live image, repeating this for a list of disk layouts.

USA 2024 values

I reallt like the approach taken in Rust’s borrow checker, where good, safe, and sometimes overbearing design choices are enforced by default, but you can explicitly declare exemptions. Makes identifying potential problem code blocks easy too.

Gotcha! I’ll have to look into it. I heard of it being used with Rust, which is probably the only lang I want to use for backend anymore. If it minimizes JS boilerplate, that’s a big win.

Part of the problem is choosing from those options (when you have a choice). Open-ended questions like that nuke my productivity when starting a project because I spend more time researching and weighing options than actually programming.

As time has gone on, I’ve increasingly become a fan of restricting how many ways devs can do something.

you just pick one and go with it.

Might be my ADHD, but I can never just do that. But I posit that excess choice hurts feature development pace by wasting effort on reinventing the wheel.

A good example is the Nix ecosystem:

Nix expression language provides almost no constraints, leaving users to do the same things in a bunch of ways, and preventing a clear notion of which way is generally best from arising…which makes upstream super conservative with implementing new features the community wants, because any decision might break one those things. Leaving us with a 5+ year old “experimental” feature + CLI used by 80% of users, but no consensus on an official implementation. So many simple upstream changes become a series of 3 competing community projects providing a solution for that feature, further preventing consensus.

The 15+ electron apps on my devices would like a word with you. I think I dislike JS more as a user than a dev because at least Typescript exists now.

Wait are people writing Go for frontend code now? Or do you mean just replacing the node back end with Go?

I’ve heard nothing but good things about HTMX. I might have to play around just to get a feel.

Every person I know who used JQuery seems to really miss it. My only impression of it is that it looks goofy. Similar for PHP, but my only experience with it is Nextcloud causing me nightmares.