nykula

The stance of Code Pink is to let invaders conquer people, so they can label it “peace”. Because dictatorships are “not our enemy” - what Code Pink website says. You conveniently try not to see you’re talking down to an actual person from the invaded country whose defense Code Pink is campaigning to defund. What helps people here (Ukrainians are people in your eyes, right?) are many things, but I’ll name three: bringing manufacturing back to Europe to reduce the dependency on Chinese imports (that fund the invasion), sending us weapons to defend ourselves from Russia (who’ve already committed genocide here before, are trying it again right now, and will gladly continue doing it if they win), and fighting for worker rights internationally (not by defunding our defense in the short term).

Promoting a laissez-faire imperialist-appeaser agenda isn’t anti-war in any meaningful sense. The head of codepink has 47 million dollars of assets: https://pdf.guidestar.org/PDF_Images/2022/841/618/2022-841618483-202343209349101304-F.pdf - in local currency she’d be a billionaire twice. If you ask me, the road to international peace would start with a worldwide worker revolution, overthrowing people like her who dictate poor peoples to give up fights against an oil rig trying to conquer us and force us to go conquer somebody else, just so that she looks good in the media. The only difference I see between her and the likes of Trump’s donors is that she currently has less money and targets a different audience in social media. Behavior is the same.

Easy, here’s a short list of codepink calls to disarm Ukraine just in their recent publications. If you read just a little about their “activism”, you know about their positions very well.

“we urge President Biden and Congress to stop the flow of weapons to Ukraine” https://www.codepink.org/stop_war_in_ukraine

“Push for… not more weapons to Ukraine.” https://www.codepink.org/push_for_negotiations_not_more_weapons_to_ukraine

“Washington warhawks are in meltdown mode over the idea of pausing weapons to Ukraine” https://www.facebook.com/codepinkalert/videos/ukraine-weapons-halt3mov/628512656715821/

“U.S. taxpayers will shell out for thousands of tons of weapons and millions of Ukrainians will die” https://codepink.substack.com/p/the-growing-chorus-for-peace-in-ukraine

“the war in Ukraine, which… the U.S. and NATO then chose to prolong” https://codepink.substack.com/p/ukrainian-neutrality-is-still-the

“We cannot call for peace in Ukraine while simultaneously supplying that country with advanced rocket systems and missiles” https://medium.com/@codepink/the-missing-peace-in-13-5-billion-of-military-aid-to-ukraine-a0d46ee0e8f1

Reading reviews on Google Maps in private browsing mode also got blocked for me.

Unsure about offline-first, but yes, local-first, for which a LAN is enough and no cloud is needed, is very much what I’d rather we depended on more, instead of what’s considered professional and an industry standard. Organizations requiring SaaS (as in, a network of 20 computers simultaneously becoming unable to open an app because the Internet went down) in a country experiencing war and blackouts is an additional source of stress. Free software requiring containers and gigabytes of dependencies is also suboptimal, we should aim to simplify native packaging for GNU/Linux and BSD distributions.

Another thing, programmer visions of what would suffice in bad situations are often very Western, anglophone. Software, including operating systems, eschewing localization in a quest for a lightweight footprint are not accessible or are outright unusable for the majority of the people in the world. Please take care to make your software possible to translate, including documentation. Best if the focus is on tutorials and handbooks; manpages are less of a priority.

Among organizers, I see CodePink, those whose definition of peace is to disarm a country being invaded. Once the Cubans grow more strength to protect themselves against imperialism (any camp), folks like these will be quick to throw them under the bus.

To fellow Ukrainians who haven’t realized this yet: migrants are not “they”, it’s our friends and family, and making any migration means-tested and bureaucratic is bullshit that will make “illegals” out of random people, out of you, and cause great suffering. Let’s build international solidarity with migrants and refugees from all countries, in all countries.

Yes, I tried multiple popular SSR frameworks and use one at work. As a hobby, I’ve been making my own SSR framework that is much more minimal, based on Preact, Valibot, Vite, node:sqlite, URLPattern, gettext.js and a few companion libraries. (But components look more like old-school Mithril than React because no JSX extension, just standard JS.) I want its node_modules to stay below 200 MB and to pick such dependencies that the apps built with it can be included in Debian repositories and potentially FreedomBox. Hopefully I’ll be ready to make a fedi post about it next month.

JavaScript has been my favorite language for a decade. Still, I try to make websites server-rendered so that they can be read if my code fails to load or execute. For example, there are power outages in Ukrainian cities for most of the day because of the war. When there’s no power, there’s still 4G for a while but it switches to economic mode and slows down to a crawl. The websites of the monopolist energy company require a lot of JavaScript. It often fails to load for me during the outage. It’s also not keyboard-accessible because of how its JS is implemented (I won’t image I’d do better, they have a team while I’m a solo programmer, but I try and they don’t). For me to see when there will be electricity at what place and plan where to go study and work, I have to rent a VPS, scrape their website and show me a static table that doesn’t require JS to load. Some code to see what I mean: https://codeberg.org/nykula/powerup

Yes, setting up YunoHost on a new Debian VPS was a couple of commands, and having it install Synapse and Element was a few clicks in the UI plus a lot of waiting.

However. I thought of Element as an alternative to Slack or Telegram the way OP thinks of it as an alternative to Discord. I was wrong. Element competes with IRC. This is the only platform from which I’ve seen actual groups of people (FOSS projects) switch to Matrix. I think Matrix focuses on different usage needs than Discord, and trying it with willing Discord users will be an interesting exercise in seeing what perspectives they bring and what issues that raise, but the solution to their problem will be somewhere outside Matrix, and it will be in somewhat distant future, not with the current state of FOSS tools.

It doesn’t seem any money that the sudo developer had received was redirected to systemd, even though systemd has its own sudo called run0, with interesting features such as limiting the amount of memory or CPU a command it runs can use. His employer supported sudo as his side project while he was employed to work on something else. The funding from big tech is instead going to the Rust rewrite, sudo-rs and other projects of its community.