It’s really easy to change your positions when there were never any principles behind it either way.

This is what I’m so desperate for people to understand: these are empty people. In terms of politics, they don’t have beliefs in the way you and I do. They have hollowed out that part of themselves. This is why debate or the introduction of new facts never changes their minds, because it never made up their mind in the first place. Such a change requires your positions to be propped up by genuine belief in what you think is the right thing, where that prop can be knocked over.

These people belong to a team, a clan, a cult, however you want to phrase it. The only thing that matters is that their side is in power and uses that power to act against those who aren’t. Any means to that end is valid to them. They’ll happily switch to whichever position is most convenient for them without missing a beat. They’re only justifying it to you to keep you busy and distracted, they never really believed a word they said. They just chose the words they thought would be most effective to win.

Oh yeah, I should probably expand on the context for that.

Palmer Luckey is an outright fascist (see: thread picture above defending illegal executive military autonomy without the explicitly necessary congressional approval) who currently owns a company called Anduril that specializes in weapons and surveillance. He is also notably a Game Boy enthusiast, and ran a Game Boy modding site way back called ModRetro. He took his blood money and started a new company with the same name that produces a Game Boy clone called the ModRetro Chromatic, which is admittedly quite good quality, and publishes indie games as physical cartridges. I’m including this information just to be fair; unlike Elon Musk, this guy isn’t a poser posturing because he thinks it will endear him to the nerd crowd or whatever. He has a legitimate history in the community long before he got big, he knows his stuff, and there’s no way ModRetro is profitable, so it’s likely a genuine passion project for him and a love letter to the console.

However, any good will or endearment that would otherwise generate is completely wasted because he just recently produced an Anduril-branded Chromatic made from the same material as his attack drones. And ModRetro’s main fanbase is almost exclusively comprised of fascist or fascist-adjacent soylent losers who simultaneously claim that this shouldn’t be political but also think it’s Dang Heckin’ Epic that he made a Game Boy out of the same military murder metal as his weapons. They’ve spent the last year saying we shouldn’t judge ModRetro just because it’s owned by an arms dealer, and then they go out and defend said owner blurring the lines and making weapons-branded soy toys for grown men. They sometimes leaked into Game Boy enthusiast spaces and get real steamin’ angry that everybody else hates them, so for the most part they stay in their echo chamber now.

I personally really hate this guy because he keeps dipping his fascist dick into things I’m really passionate about and causing significant community fracturing over it. First VR, then NixOS, then Game Boys and the indie homebrew scene for it. I basically have to see this guy and the aftermath of his handiwork every day.

Some sources for my claims about the typical fanboys of ModRetro:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModRetroChromatic/comments/1pomrd1/better_look_at_the_anduril_chromatic/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModRetroChromatic/comments/1nyadq9/can_people_stop_pretending/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModRetroChromatic/comments/1oub2eq/buying_a_chromatic_isnt_an_ethical_dilemma/

My main use case is using it to protect my exposed Home Assistant instance in a way that doesn’t require a VPN that family can screw up. I can just install the cert into the app for them and it Just Works. I also use it for my own Gotify notifications.

As a more general rule, I apply it to anything I want to expose but can’t easily protect using OIDC logins. I used to put more behind it, but I recently opened up my services to friends and family, so I moved to using Authentik as my primary defense for most things. mTLS was great when it was just me, I can easily install the cert into my own browser and all of my Android apps (except Firefox Android…) but friends and family just zone out when I explain why their new phone doesn’t connect, so I had to adjust my systems to compensate.

They’re either poorly explaining or poorly understanding a well-known link between fascism and the overindulgence in nostalgia for bygone times. But not the nostalgia of “I loved the games I played as a kid” or “I think the industry has gone downhill since then”, and instead the more general and politicized “society/everything was better back then, remember what (((they))) took from you”. You’ll often see nazis posting video edits of late 90s to early 00s home video footage with massively overdone VHS filters of white people smiling and shit. What they don’t tell you is that the people making these videos weren’t even born then, and that’s the central flaw of the nostalgia-fascism pipeline that usually gets left out: it’s the strongest on people who weren’t actually alive yet. These people have nostalgia for a time that they either weren’t around for or were too young to remember, because the actual emotion they’re engendering is the feeling that they missed out on the “good times”, not that the good times have come and gone.

There can be some overlap with retrogame crowd because that nazi-nostalgia can take many forms, but this is usually from the easily-discernable “games are WOKE now, why can’t games be non-political like Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid” types. It doesn’t work as well as a vehicle for political engagement because… you didn’t miss out. You can just go download the roms right now, easier than ever, and still enjoy it. If you put in a little effort to learn to set up shaders and run-ahead, you can arguably get a better experience than we did back then on the real systems. So this is mostly contained to a subsection of nasally-voiced overweight 30-something nerds who are mad at the world because they can’t get a girlfriend. To circle back to the original topic, you can actually find a lot of these people in the modretro subreddit soying out about how epic and based Palmer Luckey is for making the weapons-grade Game Boy that triggers the libs, because upsetting people they hate is the only thing still getting them through the day.

I’m a socialist and I agree with them.

The reality is that not everyone wants to own and maintain their current home, for a variety of reasons. So long as homes are commodified, which they effectively will be for the long-term forseeable future until we live in a true post-scarcity society, renting a home will be a necessary option that a functioning society must provide. Building housing is expensive in terms of labor and resources, and that labor must be compensated somehow, and not everyone will want or be able to front that entire cost. Or maybe they simply don’t want to settle down permanently where they are now, or even ever, and therefore homeownership would saddle themselves with unwanted debts and the trouble of selling the home when they do move.

The flaws we see in modern day landlords are largely a function of capitalism. Housing is a necessary resource for survival, but one that we’ve rendered artificially scarce through social and economic policy inflating the price, and then it gets bought up by the only people who can afford it and rented out to those who can’t. There’s nothing inherently wrong with, for example, a worker-owned cooperative leasing out housing and providing maintenance services at a fair price for those homes for people who don’t want to do it themselves. Ownership alone isn’t a job and such rentseeking would be forbidden in a sane and just society, but under a better system there would still be room for such a service that provides genuine value to society.

Looks like grafana to me

I guarantee you the time spent swapping AAs every few days will far outweigh the time you spend using a screw driver to replace this battery at the frequency it requires.

Yeah, but the AAs will still be around in 10 years. Until we standardize internal power cells and legally mandate companies use them, I don’t really care how user-serviceable it is, by the time it actually needs a swap most companies are done selling it anyways and just want you to buy the next thing instead. At best you can get a shady third-party knockoff. Valve is slightly better in this regard, but I don’t expect them to still sell batteries 10-15 years from now.

I think most people just use “user-serviceable” as a cope and never actually intend to service it, it just makes them feel better to think they can. They just throw it away and get a shiny new thing when it becomes slightly inconvenient.

I’ve been able to order replacement parts directly from them in the past. Would they not sell you a replacement battery? Is the Pro 3 less repairable?

I can get rechargeable AAs in packs of 4 just around the corner from my house and therefore always have a few spares on hand instead of special ordering a unique battery that only works in a single device on the planet and only is available for purchase as long as they allow it. But I guess we can just throw it away in a few years instead and buy whatever new product they want to sell, as long as it comes with a charging cradle of course.

This is a strange argument to me. I just don’t get it.

We have a universal, standardized, cheap power cell. To this day you can use the same type of power cell in any low power device since it was standardized, going all the way back to things made in 1947. We then made it reusable for hundreds or even thousands of uses a piece, and they still only cost a few bucks.

We then replaced it with millions of different single-purpose batteries that are only compatible with one thing each.

People keep trying to gaslight me into thinking this is somehow better.

but there’s still going to be a percentage of people who just use disposables.

Make them illegal, and I’m not kidding.

It’s definitely dried up a fair bit over the last couple of years. In January 2025 I got some recertified 12TB Ironwolfs for $140 each from GoHardDrive, and that was already a fair bit over what they historically had been. Same drives are now $200 on GoHardDrive, and $220 on Amazon. You can just get them new $250, so at that point I barely think it’s worth it to get recertified unless you’re really stretching a budget. I’m sure the businesses are very happy with the demand they got now, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that LTT and other Youtubers covering these sites really drove up demand and prices.

Also, the smaller drives are a lot harder to find recertified these days since enterprise users will usually go for much larger capacities, so yeah, for 4TB you’ll probably have to go for new. You could also just get a larger drive and only use 4TB of it, assuming this is going into some kind of array. Upgrade the other one at a later date, then just expand your pool!

“All governments are inherently authoritarian. […] I have no idea what this individual actually meant. That theyre mad they cant murder someone or theyre mad they cant vote for highly technical government positions that should be based on merit, not popularity.”

See, there it is. You’re trying to softball a political argument by pretending it’s an linguistic argument, and I have no respect for this level of cowardice and dishonesty, nor do I have the patience to beat around the bush looking for the real argument.

Next time, if you want to be taken seriously, just own it instead of bullshitting. Say what you believe and stand on your principles.

As a general rule I don’t engage in definition nitpicking arguments because they’re almost universally fartsniffing contests between people with too high opinions of themselves. That’s why Jordan Peterson does it all the time. There’s a lot of cool information to be gleaned from etymology and linguistics, unfortunately most people only engage with the topic to use as a shiv for some other political point they want to make but are too insecure to directly engage with.

You clearly know what meaning was intended to be conveyed by the word. So if you know what people mean when they say something, why pretend like you don’t? It’s dishonest.

Me when I’m up against Jordan Peterson in a Pretending To Not Understand Words Contest

Authentik has done the opposite of enshittification. As they’ve gotten more successful, they’ve taken enterprise features and moved them into the community edition. I’ve been extremely happy with Authentik so far and the dev has been nothing short of fantastic every time I’ve seen them interacting with the community.

Your example of Ubuntu being a good desktop is a web service run by Canonical that is relevant to maybe 1% of users, if not less?

Look, I’m happy that it works great for your use case. But this doesn’t matter to most users, and it’s also not even intrinsic to Ubuntu itself. OpenSUSE also has fantastic build services. Basically all major git services do too.

Reddit is mildly left of center as a whole. It is not leftist. You do not find many people there who are genuinely anti-capitalist, which is a prerequisite for any flavor of leftism.

The counter to low-quality “Ubuntu sux” posts is not low quality “nuh uh it’s actually super epic!!!” posts, but that’s all we ever get. I’ve seen this pattern for probably fifteen years now, and it’s exhausting. If you don’t care about the criticisms and want to keep using it, then keep using it. More power to you. I probably use things you think are garbage. Hell, Windows users think we both use garbage. I’m just tired of people desperate to justify their choices like they need to “prove” something to everyone who disagrees.

There are plenty of high quality takedowns of Ubuntu, but so rarely are there high quality defenses of it, generally because the criticisms are correct. Nobody ever talks about what makes Ubuntu good, not even Ubuntu users. Arch users will yap your ear off about ArchWiki and AUR. I’ll evangelize Nix to anybody who will listen as the future of advanced Linux management. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed fans will not shut up about rollbacks and bleeding edge software. Fedora users… well, Fedora users are usually busy out there actually doing productive things with their time instead of pointless internet squabbles.

But what is Ubuntu strong at? I genuinely have no idea. All I ever see Ubuntu users say is that it “sucks the least”, in some vague indescribable way. That it’s not as bad as everyone says, that Snaps are actually fine, etc. Always on the defensive. If Ubuntu is actually good, somebody needs to get out there and make a case for what it’s good at, besides being featured as the default instructions for running proprietary third-party software.

I don’t know why we’re still doing snap discourse in 2025. I’m going to be harsh and direct.

It has a proprietary server backend. This is objectively true. Theoretically you can build an open source backend, but nobody has completed a full implementation of it.

If you don’t care about that, you can use Ubuntu, nobody is stopping you. You don’t need other people’s approval. Which is good, because of the people who disapprove, you’re never going to get their approval until it’s actually open sourced. You’re not going to convince anybody here to stop caring that it’s proprietary. So just get over it and use your own operating system without airing your insecurities online about it.

Something you might want to look into is using mTLS, or client certificate authentication, on any external facing services that aren’t intended for anybody but yourself or close friends/family. Basically, it means nobody can even connect to your server without having a certificate that was pre-generated by you. On the server end, you just create the certificate, and on the client end, you install it to the device and select it when asked.

The viability of this depends on what applications you use, as support for it must be implemented by its developers. For anything only accessed via web browser, it’s perfect. All web browsers (except Firefox on mobile…) can handle mTLS certs. Lots of Android apps also support it. I use it for Nextcloud on Android (so Files, Tasks, Notes, Photos, RSS, and DAVx5 apps all work) and support works across the board there. It also works for Home Assistant and Gotify apps. It looks like Immich does indeed support it too. In my configuration, I only require it on external connections by having 443 on the router be forwarded to 444 on the server, so I can apply different settings easily without having to do any filtering.

As far as security and privacy goes, mTLS is virtually impenetrable so long as you protect the certificate and configure the proxy correctly, and similar in concept to using Wireguard. Nearly everything I publicly expose is protected via mTLS, with very rare exceptions like Navidrome due to lack of support in subsonic clients, and a couple other things that I actually want to be universally reachable.

I envy your life, as it feels like every year the browser assimilates and consumes more and more.