Fail2ban config can get fairly involved in my experience. I’m probably not doing it the right way, as I wrote a bunch of web server ban rules — anyone trying to access wpadmin gets banned, for instance (I don’t use WordPress, and if I did, it wouldn’t be accessible from my public facing reverse proxy).

I just skimmed my nginx logs and looked for anything funky and put that in a ban rule, basically.

Judging by the camera angle, OP may have been today years old when they learned this as well (I learned it well into my 30s, too).

Windows is just as hard as linux, harder even with all the layers of obscurity.

With Windows, there is 1 current version of Windows (11), 1 “almost current” (10), 1 “outdated but you’ll maybe see it” (8.x) and only a few “you’ll probably only see this in obscure situations” versions. Linux has as many “parent” distros/package management systems (apt, rpm, pacman, etc.). This definitely complicates things, as each distro family does things slightly differently.

And we haven’t even touched the window manager/DE choices, of which there are a ton (as opposed to Windows). “Combinatorical explosion” maybe isn’t the right phrase, but you get the idea — Debian with i3wm is wildly different from Fedora Plasma.

This is all a good thing though, as Linux users tend to like the choice and flexibility — but it does mean that the “right way” to do something on Linux is very dependent on your particular setup, which isn’t the case with Windows.

(I have used Linux for the last 20+ years, and it’s definitely my preferred setup, and am lucky enough that I rarely use Windows for work, and never for personal use.)

And many folks have headless setups — raspberry pis, home servers, VPSs, etc. It’s kinda overkill to install a desktop environment on a headless box if the only reason you need it is so you can VNC into it for a simple task that could be done over ssh.

The Taco Bell meme afaik isn’t about food poisoning at all, it’s that it’s a lot of oil-rich beans, which can have a certain effect.

Regarding food poisoning, I think you’re right that it’s worse in the USA, but the EU is not without food poisoning. My suspicion is that the media attention is different in part because food in Europe tends to come from smaller farms, whereas in the USA it tends to come from larger farms (is my understanding). So, an outbreak at a farm in the USA is bad because it potentially affects a huge number of people, whereas in the EU it may be a smaller farm with less of an impact (so any individual outbreak is less impactful). Just a guess, and it’s in my opinion good to strive for lots of small farms rather than a few big ones.

For some (most?) of us, we don’t have ssh access open to the world, so everything is over a VPN. So I can just use NFS over WireGuard which afaik is fairly secure, if you trust your endpoints, and works great over the Internet.

On linux you can"t install or uninstall anything if you are not root

That’s not true at all. You generally can’t use your distribution’s package manager to install or uninstall without elevated privileges. But you can download packages, or executables with their own installer, and unpack/install under your home directory. Or, you can compile from source, and if you ./configure’d it properly make install will put it under your home.

Standard Linux distributions don’t place restrictions on what you can and cannot execute; if it needs permissions for device access of course you’ll need to sort that out.

Yeah, without being a policy junkie I think a reasonable step would be to have Prop 13 only apply to primary residence — investment real estate would be subject to a “wealth tax,” but folks wouldn’t get priced out of their primary home due to gentrification.

Right, that’s a huge downside for sure.

Property tax is on the one hand a wealth tax, which sounds like a great idea; but on the other hand, it’s a wealth tax that disproportionately affects people with the bulk of their assets tied up in real estate — which often means middle class homeowners.

So while you can certainly look at prop 13 as “good” in that folks don’t get priced out of their existing homes, it of course gets used to the advantage of rent seekers, etc.

It’s…complicated.

California disagrees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

Property tax is assessed when there’s a sale, and otherwise changes very slowly. It’s a controversial measure.

Seriously, it is the lowest-latency and highest-bandwidth communication method we have, when used appropriately.

Yes, but your wine futures would be worthless, what with his unlimited water-to-wine abilities.

Yeah, I think the issue is that the other racist, xenophobic, antivax, generally incompetent policy choices are actually kind of what he campaigned on.

The tarrifs — even though he campaigned on them — are antithetical to his promise of lowering cost of living expenses.

That said, it’s the WSJ editorial page — their coverage of the Second Coming of Jesus would be its impact on your 401(k), so this type of coverage (and not e.g., social justice) is their bread and butter.

No, but I think it’s good when someone with credibility among certain people reiterate something, even if it adds nothing of value to you and me.

Democratic and left-of-center politicians (or “liberal elite economists”) can say this until they’re blue in the face but Trumpers will dismiss it as I dunno, woke butthurtism or something. But when someone like Buffet says it, at least they (maybe) have to think a little bit before coming up with some mental gymnastics to dismiss him. And maybe along the way they’ll question, if only a little bit, the sanity of Trump’s policies.

If you exclude blocked instances, you’re a lot higher than #5…

awk(1)ward

FTFY

Pick your favorite tech company, pick a small team with a “nerdy” engineering mandate, and I’m confident you’ll find the academic, geeky science and engineering types you’re talking about.

They probably aren’t very vocal though, because 1) there’s a huge PR/marketing budget which is responsible for being the face of the company, and 2) well…these are nerdy STEM folks who probably like their job because they get very well compensated to be nerdy STEM types, and not because they’re fanboys/girls.

Verizon will tell you to fuck right off and will never unlock your device.

Will never unlock their device.

Not at all in this case though! Or rather, it depends on your perspective.

“Why doesn’t electricity leak out the outlet?” is a good question, if you know nothing about electricity.

“Why doesn’t electricity leak out the outlet?” is a little stupid, if you know a little about electricity.

“Why doesn’t electricity leak out the outlet?” is a great question if you know a bit more about electricity (because it does leak out, it’s just that 50/60Hz doesn’t couple to freespace well unless you have a colossal antenna).

As to this question, light in moving media: https://preprints.opticaopen.org/articles/preprint/Fizeau_Experiment_Investigating_the_Speed_of_Light_in_Moving_Media/25441108?file=45147313

50kW class laser.

Another source claims 1um wavelength with individual 1.5kW lasers in a hex pattern — unclear if it’s a phased array (would be awesome) or just trained on the same target (source mentions they are “combined using a mirror” so probably the latter).

Sounds like maybe high power YAG?