Adorable rats were much needed.

That’s a great suggestion, thank you. I’ve been meaning to get back to training in a martial art for a while now but injuries over the years have made Sambo not a likely get. I’ll keep this in my pocket for after full recovery. :)

Braces, yup. Fortunately they are waterproof so, might be an option.

Currently waiting on the appointment. Just impatient.

I recommend the edX CS50x course. It’s a bit more general about computer science than your ask but, it’s free, an actual Harvard/MIT course, and covers algos, data structures, and programming in C, Python, and JS (last I checked).

Oh that makes more sense. I probably took you too literally.

Without the chroot, that’s how shared webhosting works but it can be hundreds or thousands of sites, depending on resource usage and server capacity.

I intend to. I refuse to die in old age, wasting my life working to support shareholders. Have a good few decades left to even be close to that though and I hate it.

I maintained a CEPH cluster a few years back. I can verify that speeds under 10GbE will cause a lot of weird issues. Ideally, you’ll even want a dedicated 10GbE purely for CEPH to do its automatic maintenance stuff and not impact storage clients.

The PGs is a separate issue. Each PG is like a disk partition. There’s some funky math and guidelines to calculate the ideal number for each pool, based upon disks, OSDs, capacity, replicas, etc. Basically, more PGs means that there are more (but smaller) places for CEPH to store data. This means that balancing over a larger number of nodes and drives is easier. It also means that there’s more metadata to track. So, really, it’s a bit of a balancing act.

Had to take some time away, so, sorry about not getting back to you earlier. It may, perhaps, be that I was unintentional “putting words in drag’s mouth”. My interpretation of it had been grief and despair over losing people and at the prospect of losing more, together with the realization that civil rights look to be going backwards about a century.

When it comes to violence/non-violence, non-violence is my way, wherever possible. I feel strongly that every human being is important (yes, a bit anthropocentric). However, I am also privileged as fuck, being a cis/het white guy. I’m not about to tell those facing violent repression that they wrong for returning the favor to their oppressors and those who are collaborating. Historically, non-violence has primarily succeeded where the alternative was violence and stable societal change has generally only occurred where non-violence was also in the picture.

I think a lot of people don’t understand just how bad the situation is. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that literal fascists have been have the reigns to all branches of US government. They have long stated the desire to rollback every positive change since and including the New Deal.

Since they now have majorities on both chambers of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the executive branch, they have been granted unfettered power over lifetime judicial appointments. And, since they continually act in bad faith and so much of the system is built upon the assumption of people acting on good faith, there are no barriers to their goals. Unconstitutional? The Roberts Court has continually shown that they don’t care about the Constitution except for where they can leverage it to have power over others.

The BEST case scenario among those that are likely is a rollback of all environmental, civil, and labor protections to the state at the turn of the 20th century, making the positive motion that we have had since then, the outlier in that the country was tending towards more justice. That’s over and no non-violent protest alone will be bringing it back.

I love waffles and I’m an artisan maple syrup maker.

That’s pretty awesome. “Tree to bottle”? That is, are you doing the whole process from managing trees, through to tapping, and concentrating? My grandfather was in the rubber industry, so, I find this stuff incredibly interesting.

Yum. Berries on Belgian waffles are also my favorite. Definitely miss all of the varieties from growing up in the PNW.

Waffles with maple syrup.

Yup. I blocked the instance after being on the receiving end of such a frivolous ban, together with bad faith modding, and having people jump down my throat a few too many times over miscommunication interpreted the worst possible ways to justify “dunking” so that they can look cool to people on the Internet.

What the admin did wrong was to let those comms exist in the first place. Not only can such behavior have deeper effects on those of us who are ND but, by allowing the comms, they helped to cultivate a toxic culture on the instance that is at the root of much of the inter-instance drama. They’ve been celebrating and rewarding dehumanizing and deriding others, which motivates others to create situations, whether through behaving poorly or tailoring context so that they too can be celebrated and part of the in-group.

It’s more the non-voters that it needed to sink in with but it’s too late for that.

Ah yes. Like LGBTQ+ people?

Culpability for what?

Maybe handing all three branches of a nuclear power to literal fascists?

Maybe the party leadership will finally pull their heads out of their asses after this, but I won’t hold my breath. They’ll probably pick someone like Joe Manchin to run in 2028…

You really don’t grasp what has has transpired here do you? You think that those of us who have been ringing the alarms are just overreacting and it’s going to be business as usual?

Dr. King was a firm believer in non-violence, true. His non-violence was counter-balanced by MalcomX and the Black Panthers. The powers in charge had to choose.

Drag was not stating that people should go out and murder their neighbors. Drag was saying that, in resistance to fascists that want to murder LGBTQ+ people, moderates and centrists have proven again that they are not allies to the oppressed (like Dr. King stated just over 60 years ago) and will likely be among those collaborating with the oppressors in order to maintain a new status quo.

While I don’t agree with violence in most cases, I’m not trans and what we’re seeing is not most cases - it’s not even The South under Jim Crow. It is much, much worse. I don’t see the country isn’t coming back from this, even if they implement only a fraction of what they have stated that they want - the courts are not correctable through any political action in the lifetime of anyone currently living. The highest court in the country that can override all others has signaled that they would like to revisit decisions allowing same-sex and inter-racial marriage as well as transforming the presidential office into a kingship.

LGBTQ+ people who want to live are going to have no choice but to use violence to defend themselves. Because, as drag pointed out, they have been betrayed by both moderates/centrists AND far-left anti-electoralists/accelerationists who were overjoyed to sacrifice them for their political ends. Neither can be counted on as allies.

LGBTQ+ people are already dying because of this election: https://www.thetrevorproject.org/blog/the-trevor-project-shares-post-election-day-crisis-contact-volume-data/

Tell me how else I am supposed to interpret this, please.

I’d recommend reading Dr. King’s letter from Birmingham Jail. Drag is coming to terms with the fact that Dr. King was right but his statement also applies to the plight of all marginalized people.

In addition, once they’re in power, fascists do not voluntarily leave while they are still alive. I’m not personally calling for violence but, non-voters have helped to remove the ballot box as a tool for any meaningful change for anyone currently living or coming generations. The courts are gone along with any hope of free and fair elections. That’s something that you need to understand. A lot of people are in complete denial of that and will remain so as the pressure ramps up.

People who remain moderates and centrists are going to be those who inform on their trans and immigrant neighbors in order to try to keep out of the line of fire and keep pretending that everything is “normal”.

The entire US government has just been handed over to open fascists that state that they want to erase LGBTQ+ and non-christian people from the country. The US system wasn’t parliamentary, where there can be snap elections, etc. The president nominates candidates for lifetime appointments to the courts. The legislature confirms them.

Even if the fascists don’t do what they say they want to, the courts are gone for at least a generation. They are now there to rubber stamp anything that a theofascist wants. The US Supreme Court has already signaled that they may take up the right to marry people of different ethnic backgrounds and have already decided that a president is a king.

So, yeah. The most optimistic scenarios in the US are ones where trans people, LGBTQ+, and ethnic minorities are oppressed, and the people have no political power as the courts will just overrule any outcome that they don’t want.

Things are going to get ugly, likely very quickly.

I still have hope that we will have a democracy in 4 years.

This is what people, both libs and “teach the dems” non-voters don’t seem to be getting: that’s not how facism works. Even if it were the case, at minimum, the courts are captured for the rest of anyone currently living’s life. That’s done.