I mean… everyone contributing all those super useful posts that everyone thinks are the only authoritative sources of information on the internet are doing exactly that.

Every time you provide some tech support or a bit of advice? You are providing reddit shareholders’ money.

People tried that.

reddit corporate will remove those mods and ask which other mods want to be super duper awesome and be able to say they moderate another N thousand users per day for zero pay. And people leap at that.

Until the users leave, nothing will happen. In a fucked way, reddit corporate are doing everyone a favor by removing the spineless “We are going to go silent for 24 hours with no real demands or bargaining power” idiocy.

They’ve done a lot to neuter that.

Not sure on the technicals but lots of rate limiting to prevent PDS from being able to get everything and outright shenanigans to make posts not appear in the old view which also prevents PDS from deleting them. Not to mention un-deleting comments after a while (even if you use the option to edit before deleting).

So run it early and run it often. And then just delete the account for the rest.

Also we literally have a presidential candidate with far too high of a chance of winning advocating for it. A period of ultraviolence against the people he doesn’t like to scare everyone else from doing anything for the entire year.

My understanding is a lot of those were just wrappers for mobi files to add even more drm, but I haven’t looked super closely.

I dunno. I used to be super hardcore about ripping every book and putting it in my calibre library. Then I eventually realized that… mostly I don’t care. There are very few books I am going to re-read and the majority of those were so good that I either want the hardcover to put on a shelf or don’t mind buying again from a vendor that gives the author a better percentage.

I mean… someone with basic literacy might key in on a way that actually can cause damage to an occupying force. And the reality that the US has so much surveillance that hit and run tactics fundamentally won’t work.

Unlike some people, I am not going to talk about becoming a domestic terrorist on message boards because… I wish that were obvious. But I have yet to see anything suggesting how all the assault rifles people NEED to fight against tyranny are going to do… anything against even the militarized police force, let alone the national guard or the army. Its just people being pissy and larping that they are Patrick Swayze and are going to scream “WILDCATS” while heroically defeating an entire army through the power of their after school NRA classes.

Doesn’t even really let you do that.

A “DRM Free” kindle ebook still basically requires a physical kindle (or shenanigans with apps) to even access the raw file of. If you just go to your content library to try and download it to transfer via USB you get told to pound sand and buy a kindle. That might change if you have a physical kindle registered to your account (I currently read exclusively via my phone and my onyx boox) but… yeah.

And yeah, as long as it is in The Cloud, amazon can do whatever they want. I am not aware of having any books removed from my account but I do recall having the option to “upgrade” an ebook to a newer version in the case of publisher screw ups.

Of course you don’t. Did anyone think otherwise?

Kindles have always slotted in as somewhere between the mass market paperbacks and trade paperbacks. Cheap books you read once or twice and then likely never again. If you do get in the mood to read it again? mobi files hold up a lot better than pulp designed to decay in order months but MMPBs always had a tendency to be lost forever just like amazon has a tendency to fuck with your library.

So… your assault rifle exists just to pop Mrs O’Coppy in the face and not much else?

And Vietnam and Afghanistan ARE great examples.

The Vietcong basically only stood a chance because they were entrenched in a low visibility jungle that negated most of the advantages the other side had. And Afghanistan? The Brave Men And Women Of The Mujahideen ™ were getting slaughtered until they were given stinger missiles to counter soviet air superiority (wonder who gave them those…). And the more recent conflict was more about IEDs than any form of stand up combat.

Also: If you are at the point where you have no hope of progress and just want to bleed an occupying force dry? Assault rifles are bulky. What you want is a high velocity pistol round that you can conceal and unload point blank on. Also you want to roll back time ten or twenty years and get rid of all those cameras that will immediately trace you back to the neighborhood you are hiding out in.

Only in the most stupid and overextended of positions.

Everywhere else? It was modern ATGMs that halted their advances and evened the battlefield enough that borderline WW1 levels of (en)trench(ed) warfare became viable.

Yes. Defend the country. Fight for the country.

Don’t pretend that having a tacticool gun is going to accomplish anything. Whoever controls the military controls the country. No amount of firearms stashed throughout the house are going to change that because the cops will literally drive a tank through your house and shoot you and your family’s corpses.

What are your guns going to do against a fucking tank? Or grenade launchers? Or just a generally much more equipped militarized police force who will call the national guard in (who have even more fire power) like the little bitches they are?

Getting way too real but those movies are actually well worth watching. No, not the first one where Ethan Hawke and Lena Heady are rich white upper middle class people who are betrayed by their neighbors because they didn’t own enough guns. Like… every other Purge movie

The reality is what we already see. The Holy Second Amendment is supposed to let people defend thmselves but it results in rich (predominantly white) people owning forty ARs and heavy body armor whereas lower class ethnic folk MIGHT have a pistol for self defense. And when shit hits the fan? Fat white kids cross state lines to mow down some protesters with their assault rifles.

And every movie (except the god awful first one) addresses this. Bubba Gump’s convenience store lost their purge insurance so he is forced to try and defend his livelihood. Hispanic women are openly told they will be raped when the clock hits 6 (?). Impoverished black neighborhoods have klan members bussed in to murder them all (its cool though because Y’lan Noel goes John Wick on the nazis). Totally Not Hilary Clinton gets the biggest target ever painted on her head on purge night (its cool though. Frank Grillo is mostly only a dumbfuck that Chris Evans will never talk to again but damned if he isn’t an awesome white guy with a pistol). And the rest of the rich white fucks just hang out in panic rooms with the poors they bought the rights to torture and murder.

Because that is the reality. Privilege is everything. If you have enough money you can avoid the consequences of anything. Whether it is the decades of horror because people were too busy looking at Marisa Tomei’s ta-tas to realize she should not be allowed to write legislature, the fucking idiocy of wanting a heavily armed populace, or just driving drunk and running over a few kids in a car.

We live in a world where everything you do or say on the internet is potentially part of someone else’s training data. Lemmy is already a shitshow for that but you can bet that “ooh, piracy board” is fair game for everyone because nobody would be dumb enough to sue about that.

If someone wants to delete a comment for ANY reason, they are more than welcome to.

If y9ou are close enough to a system of importance that you can spray it, you are close enough to compromise it in countless other ways.

This is just one of many physical access attacks. Just like “you could take a hammer to it”

Like, I know people want to think this is some Ocean’s Eleven heist waiting to happen. It isn’t. This is only viable if you can drench an area with helium (which means you can already gas everyone you care about) or you have such close physical access that there are so many other things you could do. At best it is an episode of Burn Notice where Michael has to rapidly improvise an escape where his CIA handler of the week already refused to give him something much more useful.

If you are close enough to spray a device you are close enough to just steal it. Or spray the owner.

If you are in a position where you can dump random gases into the air supply to the degree it impacts these devices then they are likely compromised in other ways as well.

And doing so in a way that is going to accomplish almost nothing while antagonizing and alienating the people who would let him otherwise get positive legislature passed.

Yeah. Keychrons are kind of a clusterfuck because they release like five limited runs every month. But… basically all of those are the same feature sets but might have slightly different internals based on whatever they bought in bulk the previous month. It DOES make figuring out what to buy kind of annoying but… logitech and razer have been doing that for years anyway.

Keyboard wise? At this point, prices have dropped enough that there is no real reason to go to one of the major manufacturers for anything that isn’t disposable. And basically “all” of the smaller batch mechanical keyboards are dependent on QMK or VIA to some degree which means you can customize them on any machine that can run chrome.

For the logitech price point/build quality? Unless you know why you don’t want one, you can’t go wrong with a Keychron (https://www.keychron.com/). The price and build quality isn’t “the best” but it is very much on par with the logitechs and razers of the world and they are perfect for someone who just wants “a keyboard that works” or someone who wants to learn what they ACTUALLY want out of a keyboard.

Mouse wise? There are an increasing number of “third parties” but… they basically all suck unless you are going to go crazy and mod them. And while I think the firmware matters less in these cases, there are an increasing number of qmk/via mice but… they mostly feel “cheap” or like they are just proving the viability. I have a friend with a ploopy but even he doesn’t really recommend it. So… you are still more or less suck with logitech and razer and the like for that. But hopefully as those companies lock their hardware down more it will lead to something in between “here is a cheap no name ergonomic mouse” and “here is a five hundred dollar mouse”.