Opinion: The idea that the USA is making foreign policy decisions on the basis of Trump seeing that ad and being offended by it is absurd, and nobody should believe it. He’s stupid, but he’s not that stupid.

I don’t know about the other guy but it definitely looks like Moomin is going over that cliff.

That was the problem all along: The management was out of alignment.

There is much confusion about such things. “Increased surveillance” is how many people understood the worst part of C-2, but it was much worse than just that. The stuff that remains (presumably; I haven’t read the new bills) could also be described as increased surveillance but isn’t the same thing as the completely over-the-top ill-considered lunge in the direction of “lawful access” that was in the original.

Yeah by “do whatever you like” I mean install MO2, edit the registry, run dyndolod, mess around with system dlls, whatever. One thing I’ve just learned about that might be useful: https://github.com/SulfurNitride/NaK

The “immutable” thing shouldn’t be a problem I’d think. Games installed through e.g. steam aren’t affected by that — it just does its own thing creating a wine prefix for the game somewhere in your home directory. You should be free to do whatever you like in there.

Thank Goodness You’re Here was good for a few laughs.

Did you really manage to haul an ice box all the way up there? That’s impressive.

Arriving at the astral plane with the Amulet of Yendor.

If half the world is failing in precisely the same ways at this time, it’s all the more valuable to publish the words of an artist who’s able to point it out.

When people sense that power is beyond challenge, they redirect their energy into trivial disputes. And those trivialities, collectively, are enough to erode a society’s very foundations of justice.

This is more true than usual in more places than just Germany.

If that thought seems novel to you, your homework for this weekend is to watch a few Jackie Chan movies.

“What’s up?” It’s the direction in space opposite to the local gravitational field, why are you asking me?

“The Plant-Based Sector” aka most of agriculture. Rather than worrying about how to target vegans, how to target meat-eaters, and how “woke” you should be, wouldn’t a better image to project be one of having the main goal of producing things that are appealing to people who like to eat food?

The cost estimate for Accessory Dwelling Unit 01 in Ontario is 250k

Huh. Based on estimates I happened to see 20 years ago you could’ve built three rather nice houses each one twice that size for less money then. Maybe the rate of inflation has been a wee bit under-reported over the years?

I was in a big multi-user unisex bathroom type of situation for the first time in my life the other day, in a shopping centre. I thought nothing of it until a couple members of the opposite sex walked in while I was there, and decades of training made me think for a moment that someone was in the wrong place. That feeling must be why it’s such a big political issue. Took me at least ten seconds to get over it.

date -r reports current date instead of date specified by reference file

Seems like it was not simply a “difference compared to GNU coreutils” — it was just giving completely the wrong date.

Reading more carefully I see that the real reason is "the /run directory is created as a tmpfs filesystem specifically for run-time files by systemd-tmpfiles.

I forgot that systemd had been allowed to take over /tmp and /run.

Why on earth would the permissions on /var/lock be something for systemd to decide?

Generate Random Numbers

I prefer to generate random words (mostly for generating passwords):

alias randword='head -$[$SRANDOM % `wc -l /usr/share/dict/words | cut -f1 -d" "`] /usr/share/dict/words | tail -1'