I can place a pretty hefty bet that this thought has not visited Elmos head.

US will not succeed in spinning this as something positive if they help Russia occupy part of Europe

On that you’re correct. But what they can at least try to do is make Ukraine look bad or difficult/subborn/whatever after rejecting their “peace offer”.

It’s not that much about choosing a side. Europe has been sleeping on their defences for decaes and should US just pull all their hardware and troops back home tomorrow there’s no immediately available replacements on that. And that’s a sad state for the whole continent. So it’s not about honest opinion but, as everything between countries is, a political question on how badly some countries depend on US defences.

I have no doubt that should US side with Russians it would be widely condemned in global west, but I don’t think global south or China really give a damn. But Europe almost as a whole need to get their shit together really fast and so far, even if the movement seems to be into the right direction, it’s been really slow to show up any actual results.

Well, that is also a possibility, but the end result doesn’t change. Either way it’s possible to spin that so Ukraine would look bad. In the normal sensible world that wouldn’t fly, but with the global circus we’re experiencing it seems like anything goes.

Putin is willing to make a deal with Trump in which he cedes invaded land that he doesn’t actually control?

That might work for him, at least until Russia can build up a few new tanks and artillery units. More likely they make all kinds of outrageous claims and when Ukraine (rightfully) rejects them Russia can claim that Ukraine doesn’t want peace.

Or the fools hope option: Cracks in Russia start to show. Money is tight, there’s no workforce, no resources to cover up any kind of losses on the battlefield and so on, so they’re starting to push on whatever peace treaty they can before the whole country collapses.

I don’t think there’s one at least in official repositories. But if you’re missing libc6 one might argue that your system is not in any functional state anyways.

I have absolutely zero experience on pacman, but I could argue the very same with dpkg/apt with the same arguments. The Debian kind, not the abomination Ubuntu ships with today.

as far as i know apt and dnf have no equivalent easy redo all

It’s similarily possible (dpkg --get-selections, some sed/cut/awk wizardry to cut unnecessary stuff from the output, xargs to apt install --reinstall on that and you should be good to go, maybe there’s even a simpler way to achieve that) with Debian.

But that’s just me. I’ve been with Debian for quite a while. Potato was released 2000, but I think I got my hands on it 2001/2002 and I’ve been a happy user since. And even if I’ve worked with pretty much any major distribution (RHEL, CentOS, SuSe, Ubuntu and even Slackware back in the day) around I still prefer Debian because that’s what I know and learned over the years on how to fix things if something goes sideways.

I still have a fools hope that generals and other high ranking military people have their feet firmly on the ground, as their whole training, career and often identity necessities. And, at least on my belief, that also means that they won’t lead their military across the ocean to get their ass handed over.

I’m quite confident that US military could defeat their Chinese counterpart on a level field, but fighting across the ocean is a logistical nightmare and even if they could get their boots on the ground against Chinese holding anything there would be nearly impossible and it would have an astronomical price tag. USA might be able to pull that off, but in the long term it would just be another Vietnam, but with far more severe consequences locally.

So, yes, I assume that generals would disobey. And any competent replacement would disobey too. Replacing them with someone who don’t know what they’re doing would just be a disaster for the US of A. It might still happen, but at that point they’d look like the “second strongest army in the world” which is being destroyed on a field in Ukraine and there would be no hope for anyone in the Europe (or maybe globally) who would like to do any meaningful business with the US, so they’d just dig their own grave. pretty much like what Russia is doing right now.

You are of course not wrong with that. But also I tend to believe that high ranking military personnel are pretty practical and rational on their decision making. Getting US military boots on the ground in China would be bigger than Vietnam war scale of operations even to the US army and it would have immense effects on both US army and the country as a whole. The operation would practically mean moving a smaller European country quite literally across the ocean even without any warfare and when the receiving coast is armed to teeth and willing to fight for their land it’s way more difficult.

And for what? Absolutely destroying on whatever respect and trust is left globally? Because there’s no way in hell US army would conquer and keep the whole China. Maybe expand Hong Kong or Taiwan a bit and gain a relatively small area of land for material imports? It just doesn’t make any kind of sense at all.

9/11 retaliaton at least made some sense as US was willing to punish someone for the tradegy and Iraq wars had resources they could actually hold and gain from but with China there’s just no way for US to make any profitable scenario out of open warfare. Anything they might gain from that would be diminishingly small compared to the military effort and expenses they would need to get anything out of that fight.

And that’s what I’m pretty much counting on. No matter how patriotic the generals might be, attacking China just doesn’t make any sense and it doesn’t have any arguments for it beyond the rambling of a demented leader they have. I refuse to believe that the biggest military and logistics might in the world would do that stupid things just because one man said so.

will Americans stop him before he starts more wars?

A really good question. Politically it seems like it’s not going to happen, but I still have (at least naive) hope that the actual US mlitary would not respond on commands should the cheeto order active military operations against China. That would make absolutely no sense in so many ways, no matter how you spin it around, that I’d expect the boots on the ground would just say ‘fuck off’.

But I also tought that the orange clown wouldn’t have a chance on elections either, so we’ll see. And also, I’m across the pond from US, so my information is mostly from European media outlets and social media around here, so take that with suitable grain of salt. I just rather not see the reality where US is fighting China and Europe is left to deal with Russia. Not because we couldn’t handle that, but because that would be just bat shit crazy situation in my lifetime.

The real question is how much US GDP is relying on Chinese materials and products. I honestly have no idea, but I’m sure that it’s more than zero.

And any meaningful investment in to the US, unless you already have manufacturing there, doesn’t seem like a smart move. Tariffs (and policies in general) might change radically before the ink is dry on newspapers reporting latest changes.

I’ve been writing a small powershell script at work lately and as vscode now offers their AI bundled in I just tried it out of curiosity. It does a half decent job. Nothing I couldn’t write on my own, but on a simple script it saved some time as I’m a long term linux guy and just getting my toes wet with powershell so I need to dig up proper functions and syntax pretty often.

But it also created a script which would have broken syntax and errors in it, so it still needed manual tweaking, but as long as you know what you’re doing it can be useful. And also potentially dump your company data to some learning database.

Latest versions of maxim are still pretty useful weapons. Not on the field, or drawn with a horse, but if you have a ton of ammunition and mount one in a bunker where you can use water cooling it’s still pretty powerful.

500-850 shots per minute (depending on model) with 7.62mm and with proper cooling you can just keep the trigger pulled and wreak havoc until you ran out of ammunition. Obviously it’s still old, heavy and big, but if you don’t have to carry it around it’s still decent hardware.

Is my current set up secure, assuming strong passwords were used for everything?

Network security is a complicated beast to manage. If general public can access your services over the internet, that’s a threat you need to mitigate. Strong passwords is a good start on that, but it doesn’t take into account if there’s a flaw or bug on the service you’re running. Also if you have external users, they might reuse their passwords and leak for those might cause a threat too, specially if there’s privilege escalation bugs on the software you’re running.

And so on, it’s a too wide field to cover in a short comment here, but when you’re building your stuff, and what is maybe the most disticntive feature on a good professional between a not so good one, is to think ahead and prepare for every imaginable scenario where something goes wrong. Every time you add a way to access your network, no matter how minuscle, think what happens if that way gets compromised and what it might mean on the very worst case.

Maybe you want to add another access point to your network since your terrace isn’t properly covered. That’s nice to have, but now everyone around 100 meters around your house/apartment might have access to your stuff if they can break your wifi security. Maybe you set up a reverse proxy or tailscale on the stack. Now the whole internet can at least probe your stuff and try to find vulnerabilities, try to use stolen credentials and even try to social engineer their way into your stuff. Or maybe you made an mistake and left something open that shouldn’t be.

I’m not trying to scare you off out of anything. Go ahead and play with your stuff, break things, learn how to fix them, have fun while doing it. Just remember to think ahead about worst case scenarios, weigh their risks, think ahead and then go on. Learn about DNAT, reverse proxies, VPN and network layers and whatever you come across on your adventure but keep in mind that shit will hit the fan at some point. And learn to accept that, learn from your mistakes and do better next time.

In case you’re not aware: Back in the day Ubuntu took off because Debian was maybe a bit too strict on their approach on being stable and rock solid for quite a few of different architectures. There was a time when you could just edit few files and migrate a running system from Debian to Ubuntu, just with way more up-to-date software packages and that’s about the time frame I moved from Debian to Ubuntu too. For quite a few years it was pretty smooth, updates just worked, software versions were up to date and the general experience was more polished than what you could get from Debian at the time.

But that ship has sailed. Ubuntu changes stuff so frequently that the package maintainers can just barely keep up, snapcraft is a steaming pile of shit in my opinion and the stability is faint ghost on what it used to be. Maybe becuse it’s not that compatible with Debian anymore and thus can’t benefit from the original source, maybe for some other reason.

Whatever the case might be, running ubuntu gives you an ubuntu experience, which is very much not the same than debian experience. If you want more streamlined distribution I’d recommend Mint (Debian edition), if you want the rock solid system but with less refined experience where you might need to tweak thing or two manually then go with Debian.

And, mostly for the nitpicking commenters, I know, I grossly simplified things around and cut some corners. I know it’s not as black and white comparison. This is just my generic experience over quite a few years with Linux on Desktop.

Like anyone who could think critically or even have slightest media literacy, but…

Hope he doesn’t change his mind and/or get overruled by then. Stable and predictable global markets are sooooo boring.

Edit: oh… it took 5 hours since I originally commented.

The option to run one cable to the monitor, or reversely charge your laptop with one docking cable.

USB-C docks can already do this. Obviously with less power and it’s not perfect by any means, but we don’t need another technology for this. And sure, it’s two cables, one from wall outlet to integrated dock/monitor and usb-c from dock to laptop, but no matter the technology you still need something to plug in to wall outlet.

Hetzner provides managed web hosting too. For emails I think you need to look for some other provider.

And what exactly would that be? Essentially everything has insurance.

Here’s a list of one type of that kind of disasters where, despite of insurance, various kinds of environmental damage has been left behind which may or may not completely heal, or at least it takes a long, long time.

Here’s a pretty public different kind of disaster which I guarantee was not 100% covered by insurance either. Here’s another. I’m not building a comprehensive list, there’s just too many and their impacts vary wildly.

Then there’s the waste management in poorer countries which also cause immeasurable damage to the environment all the time by using a nearby river as a sewage for everything. Here’s one example which made into the headlines back then. And here’s a list of similar examples.

“they replaced nuclear with coal”

Go read yourself:

A 2020 study found that lost nuclear electricity production has been replaced primarily by coal-fired production and net electricity imports. The social cost of this shift from nuclear to coal is approximately €3 to €8 billion annually, mostly from the eleven hundred additional deaths associated with exposure to the local air pollution emitted when burning fossil fuels.

And remember that the pollution which kills people just because breathing smoke and ash is bad, it’s also radioactive.

Let’s not see which one’s marginally worse but instead maybe just push something that’s actually good for the planet?

That would be really nice. We just don’t have the alternatives ready to go for that just yet. Here in Finland, on a good day, renewables produce more than nuclear, but those are exceptions. Feel free to look up the data in finngrid service. There’s currently over 7000MW worth of turbines around but it’s pretty common to have even less than 200MW of wind power in the grid and that unreliability needs to be stabilized with something else.