NaibofTabr

XKCD #612 “Estimation”

Hmm, but you have to install and run the Python environment for that. AWK is typically present on *NIX systems already. Python seem alike overkill for basic text processing tasks.

Nobody said anything about serfdom.

Communities shouldn’t be able to fail like so.

Communities are always able to fail like so. A division between members can absolutely fracture any kind of social cooperation.

Your average stand-alone commune doesn’t get that much bigger than a family-farm.

This isn’t a commune, it’s a compound. Or a live/work arrangement. Or just a cult, depending on how “we’re all family here” they are.

I wouldn’t encourage too deep an integration between artisans and single communes. Everyone in the commune should know how to make their commune work and who do go to outside the commune when specific tools or expertise are needed beyond their commune’s residents.

This isn’t a commune, it’s just a town, or a village.

The whole concept of a commune is self-supporting, self-sustaining and to at least some degree self-contained. Also, frequently, self-absorbed.

No one person in a commune should be irreplacable or capable of taking the whole thing down

The smaller the group is the more inevitable this is. At a very small size (less than 20 people), where the group is dependent on itself for food production, then just the loss of basic labor might ruin the group’s ability to provide for itself.

in a way that prevents residents from being able to just up and leave.

If everyone just up and leaves, what was even the point of forming a commune? Again, what you’re talking about is just a town. A primarily agrarian town maybe, but still just a town.

Well it’s less about how you would react individually, and more about how the commune as a whole would deal with the internal division.

In small interdependent groups, social breakdowns can cause the entire community to fail, because every member is an essential part of how the community supports itself and there are no backups for any skill set.

The bus factor problem applies if people start refusing to work with each other.

I think the real problem isn’t with the pragmatic aspects of scaling, but with sociocultural and interpersonal issues.

What do you do in a small commune when you eventually have 2 people who can’t stand each other, but haven’t committed any offenses that would justify removing one of them, and neither is willing to voluntarily give up the home they’ve built and leave? And what happens when that problem begins to spread?

Typically they either are started by cults, turn into cults, get co-opted by cults, or collapse under their own weight.

Careful not to cut yourself with that edge, lord.

Looks like your textures didn’t load properly. You gotta shut down the road and restart it.

Ah yes, every time someone points out how bad Mao was as an authoritarian dictator, that’s “piling on”, even when it’s only one person.

What does Nanjing have to do with a comment about Mao?

How are “Western nations” relevant to this conversation at all?

I hope you stretch before you jump into these mental gymnastics, you might strain something.

Decrease the surplus population?

Solved the housing crisis by lowering demand! It’s cheaper and easier!

Actual Budget is an open-source envelope-style budgeting tool similar to YNAB. It has a self-hostable syncing service so that you can manage your budget across multiple devices.

The reason you might want to do this is that it’s probably easier to do full account review sitting at your computer, but you might want to track expenses/receipts on your smartphone while you’re away from home.

Arch often seems to ignore the fundamental rule:

don’t break userspace

Linus is in the right. Arch developers are frequently in the wrong.

Would this mini pc be a good homeserver

For what purpose?

The Tragedy of systemd

Encrypting the connection is good, it means that no one should be able capture the data and read it - but my concern is more about the holes in the network boundary you have to create to establish the connection.

My point of view is, that’s not something you want happening automatically, unless you manually configured it to do that yourself and you know exactly how it works, what it connects to and how it authenticates (and preferably have some kind of inbound/outbound traffic monitoring for that connection).

Ah, just one question - is your current Syncthing use internal to your home network, or does it sync remotely?

Because if you’re just having your mobile devices sync files when they get on your home wifi, it’s reasonably safe for that to be fire-and-forget, but if you’re syncing from public networks into private that really should require some more specific configuration and active control.

My main reasons are sailing the high seas

If this is the goal, then you need to concern yourself with your network first and the computer/server second. You need as much operational control over your home network as you can manage, you need to put this traffic in a separate tunnel from all of your normal network traffic and have it pop up on the public network from a different location. You need to own the modem that links you to your provider’s network, and the router that is the entry/exit point for your network. You need to segregate the thing doing the sailing on its own network segment that doesn’t have direct access to any of your other devices. You can not use the combo modem/router gateway device provided by your ISP. You need to plan your internal network intentionally and understand how, when, and why each device transmits on the network. You should understand your firewall configuration (on your network boundary, not on your PC). You should also get PiHole up and running and start dropping unwanted inbound and outbound traffic.

OpSec first.

For individual projects the way this usually works is one of the larger companies that rely on the project hires the developer as an employee to maintain the codebase full-time and help integrate it with their internal processes.

Larger projects might form their own company and sell integration & support to other companies (e.g. Red Hat, Bitwarden).

Otherwise you’re basically dependent on donations or government grants.

There’s a Wikipedia article on this subject: Business models for open-source software

And there’s various industry opinions:

Demystifying the Open Source Business Model: A Comprehensive Explanation

How to build a successful business model around open source software

Open Source Business Models (UNICEF course)

I think monetization is easier for user-facing software though, which a lot of this material is written around, and harder for projects like libraries.

Is the entire neighborhood a cornfield?

That seems… impractical.

VPNs as a technology might not be illegal but circumventing the firewall certainly is.

Unless you are very vocal and high profile person no one will black bag you in a country of billion people, lol.

This is a bit of a misunderstanding about how things work in an authoritarian system. Sure, you might fly under the radar for awhile, but if you call attention to yourself (say, by getting caught trying to bypass the government firewall) and you are not high-profile, then it is very low-effort to make you disappear. Few will notice, and those that do will stay silent out of fear.

If you are more high-profile you still get black-bagged, you just get released after, with your behavior suitably modified.

Naomi Wu no longer uploads to YouTube.