Great tip! Might save someone some time troubleshooting that issue.

So to answer your question, while none of the Abrahamic religions officially worship a god with an exclusive female gender identity, their holy books technically do recognize at least one goddess, and that’s Asherah.

BONUS: her raisin cakes are still made in the Jewish tradition during Purim, though they are now triangular, contain various fillings, and are named after Haman, the villain of Esther’s story. They’re quite good.

Ah, I didn’t know about the incomplete timeline / mesh propagation issue. Sounds like a notable incentive.

Why do people tend to pile onto the same instance? Is there some benefit I’m missing?

Input sanitization typically handles this as a string that only allows characters supported by the data type specified by the table field in question. A permissive strategy might scrub the string of unexpected characters. A strict one might throw an error. The point, however, is to prevent the evaluation of inputs as anything other than their intended type, whether or not reserved characters are present.

OG

I understand the terror of watching this unfold from the outside, if only because many people I love on the inside are facing these new horrors directly. Some wouldn’t even call it new, just a more explicit and sweeping abandonment of our crumbling democratic sociopolitical facade.

Things don’t work that way.

But they do. When it comes to collective action, especially when so many are effectively kept in the dark, revolutions progress slowly then all at once. For example the French Revolution didn’t attain critical mass with the general populace until the treasury was literally empty and the government couldn’t pay its bills. Even then it took many bloody years to stabilize into its modern liberal democratic form.

By comparison, the intent of this new regime, while obvious to anyone paying attention, has only been truly manifest for a few breathless weeks. Though it takes time for the light to break through all the disinformation bubbles and dawn on the general populace, it is finally happening.

I too want it to happen more quickly, and feel every bit of urgency you do, but the truth is it takes people like you and me working together to mobilize others, because this is just one expression of a global crisis, with global roots, that can only be solved with global collective action. Blaming the oppressed and deceived people of democracies that fall is understandable, since everyone thinks “that couldn’t happen here” while it certainly can and has been for years. It’s self-defeating, however, because we can only win this fight together.

I hear you, and I agree there’s a lot more that needs to be done. I can say with some confidence that the average American doesn’t want any of this in the slightest, even if the average American isn’t as politically engaged as they need to be to truly understand the global implications.

The truth is that the average American is mostly thinking about immediate problems in their own life, like how to pay both their rent and their phone bill and still afford gas to get to the grocery store where many staples are increasingly expensive.

Even something as important as voting or protesting can feel like a privilege for the well-off when it’s the choice between that and working a shift to pay bills, and of course voting has been made deliberately difficult in most states. Voter registration isn’t automatic, for example. Likewise Election Day isn’t a National Holiday, so many people have to take off work if they don’t plan ahead to register, apply to vote absentee and meet deadlines for ballot mail-in.

Basically I’m just trying to encourage you to remember your neighbors are normal people who actually do value being good neighbors. They are oppressed and deceived, however, and a small portion of them are straight up brainwashed by a cult.

I hope, trust, and believe that when the chips fall, people in this country will answer the call to fight the global oppressors for themselves and others, because deep down they know that we’re all in this together. First they must lift their heads and see, a difficult process which I think has finally begun.

Me too. Uh oh.

And really, can one ever have too many rodents opining posthumously?

We’re definitely protesting. It may not make international news, but every day there are angry crowds outside government buildings or in the streets of our cities. The last I went to was this past Monday in NY and there were at least a few thousand of us. Personally I think we need more serious measures but protesting is a start.

Nice! Hadn’t heard of this project. The old chromebooks are easy to find in e-waste lots, mostly from schools. Hardware’s not ancient. Presumably optimized for web services. Just a lot of broken screens and keyboards.

But if you stack ‘em like server blades in a beowulf cluster you might have a decently power-efficient and scalable host for microservices, web apps, lemmy instances, whatever. With UPS for each node lol. Basically free.

I dunno, could be a fun class project for the kids to learn on with a minimal budget?

Everything related to consumer IoT is more expensive and/or difficult to implement as a local-only service.

But that doesn’t make any sense. Why would cloud access make anything cheaper?

Hmmmmm