But therein also lies the difference. And I say this not to deride your absolutely necessary call for action, but to offer a measure of hope; Nazi Germany was smart enough to maintain good relationships with the rest of the world until they were ready to start pressing ahead with their plans full speed. Trump’s government has the same goals, but fails to even clear the disastrously low bar of competence set by the Nazis. Where the Nazis built international relations, Trump is tearing them down. Where the Nazis used borrowed money and borrowed time to build up their economy, Trump is destroying what little domestic production America had in his hamfisted attempts to make more.

The Nazis got away with it for so long because, ultimately, they were popular, and they were - seemingly - making Germany better. Trump has entirely failed to replicate their success in this regard. Nothing on the scale of the No Kings protests ever happened in Nazi Germany.

The American people can win this. It is not too late to reclaim your country.

I mean, that’s exactly what makes it so “mid” to my mind. It’s not an atrocious disaster like Gollum. It’s not appalling bad, or even moderately bad. It’s just mid. The shooting isn’t dreadful, just dull. The map, the movement, the exploration… None of it is exactly bad, but none of it left any kind of impression on me. Like you said, it scratches that “running around and collecting stuff” itch, the numbers go up, you unlock new powers, etc. But it all just kind of passes straight through you and at the end you’re left with “Well, that sure did kill a few hours.”

Horizon: Zero Dawn suffers from all the usual modern open world hallmarks, the map littered with things to collect, the towers, the grinding to level up abilities, etc, etc. But the story is an absolute banger, and even a lot of the random collectible junk is full of little moments of deeply moving storytelling. I remember collecting every single one of the vantage points because I absolutely needed to hear all of the short story you unlock by doing it. It has zero relevance to the plot, but it’s just a great piece of writing. In comparison Ghost Wire is just, sort of… There.

Honestly, none that are all that great. I tried Kodi in various forms, LibreElec, OSMC, MythTV, Steam Big Picture, and KDE TV (or whatever its called), but you’re just never going to get a great experience with stuff like Netflix and YouTube on Linux.

In the end, I bought myself an Nvidia Shield, switched out the launcher for one without ads, installed Smart Tube Next for ad-free YouTube, and I couldn’t be happier with the results. I’ve got my apps for Nebula and Dropout. I’ve got Kodi and Jellyfin for my home library. It has barely any power consumption, it boots fast, it runs a huge variety of emulators, the included remote works great (plus there’s a remote app for your phone that controls the entire system), and the wife acceptance factor is exceptional.

I’m really big on self-hosting and building all my own stuff; I use lots of repurposed hardware salvaged from companies I and my friends work at and I try to avoid off the shelf products. But I’m genuinely kicking myself for not buying a Shield sooner. It really is the best TV solution for a self hoster.

Ghost Wire: Tokyo.

It sells itself on cool aesthetics, but the moment you get past that you realise it’s just a very, very generic open world shooter with incredibly bland and boring shooting layered over an impressively faithful recreation of Shinjuku. And even the aesthetics wear thin very quickly, being largely just a whole lot of “Hey I know that anime” level stuff cribbed from Japanese culture. The game is mostly just running around a map collecting stuff.

Meanwhile in Hong Kong…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuenyeung

I’m here to say Portal as well, specifically because, once you really look for it, you realise that about 90% of the game is tutorial. Like, seriously, basically everything leading up to “The cake is a lie” is teaching you the skills you need for the final sequence. It’s a massive tutorial followed by one level of actual game, and it’s beautiful, precisely because you don’t even notice that the tutorial hasn’t ended.

It is vitally important to understand that throughout the “potato famine” Ireland was a major exporter of food to the rest of the UK.

Irish farmers were growing all kinds of crops. Grains, carrots, cabbage, lettuce, etc, etc. All of these were sold to pay for the oppressive rents that they were forced to pay to English landlords who had stolen all of their land.

The potatoes the Irish grew were for subsistence, because all of the rest of their crops went to market. Even when the potato crops failed, there was more than enough food for everyone in Ireland, if the English would simply suspend rent collection for a short while, until the crop failures had passed.

Many motions to do so were put before parliament. All of them were rejected.

The Irish famine was not caused by a disease. It was caused by the intentional cruelty of the English.

Yes, the underlying model is the same as Tailscale, Zerotier and Netmaker (also worth checking out, btw). Clients connect to a central host (which can be self-hosted) and use that to exchange information on addresses and open ports, then form direct connections to each other.

We’ve implemented netbird at my company, we’re pretty happy with it overall.

The main drawback is that it has no way of handling multiple different accounts on the same machine, and they don’t seem to have any plans for ever really solving that. As long as you can live with that, it’s a good solution.

Support is a mixed bag. Mostly just a slack server, kind of lacking in what I’d call enterprise level support. But development seems to be moving at a rapid pace, and they’re definitely in that “Small but eager” stage where everything happens quickly. I’ve reported bugs and had them fixed the same day.

Everything is open source. Backend, clients, the whole bag. So if they ever try to enshittify, you can just take your ball and leave.

Also, the security tools are really cool. Instead of writing out firewall rules by hand like Tailscale, they have a really nice, really simple GUI for setting up all your ACLs. I found it very intuitive.

“Capitalism is when pay money for things. I am very smart.”

Jesus Christ, I am begging people to actually learn what capitalism is before writing takes likes this.

What unholy AI bullshit is that cover image? If your butthole looks like that you’re problems aren’t in the future, they’re right now.

Airsonic or Navidrome server, plus one of the various Subsonic apps. I like Substreamer or Dsub but there are plenty of other options.

Will everyone here please read the article and learn that they’re using a completely different definition of “populism” to the one you’re imagining, before you start commenting?

Thanks for the detailed answer. I’ll give it a look.

How does this compare to something like Appsmith or Budibase?

Still one of the greatest burns I have ever seen in my life.

Well put. We’re in agreement on all of this, and understanding why Trump is so obsessed with tariffs helps to explain why he is so thoroughly confused about what exactly his tariffs are supposed to achieve. They are, simultaneously, a means of raising government income, a means of repatriating manufacturing, and a means of forcing other countries into more favourable trade terms (any careful examination shows that each of these objectives instantly nullifies the other two; it literally cannot be the case that more than one of these is true). The reason he’s so confused is because he starts with the use of tariffs as his desired outcome and then post-hoc justifies it with whatever reason he’s been given most recently. He wants to force other people to the table, yes, but he also wants to bring manufacturing back, and he also wants to cut taxes and replace them with tariffs, because really he just wants tariffs to be a thing that he does, that succeeds by some definition. The actual definition of success is irrelevant.

A person raising their voice is doing more than a person who chooses to stay silent. Why would you direct your anger at the former rather than the latter?

This idea that anyone “not doing enough” needs to shut up and sit down is exactly the kind of toxic bullshit that fascists want you to consume. They want you to feel that everything has to either be some huge world changing gesture, or it’s just not worth it. Life isn’t like that. Real resistance isn’t about blowing up the Death Star, it’s about thousands, millions of tiny acts of defiance that build upon each other. Every time someone says “this is wrong” someone else is inspired to agree. Every time someone shows up to a protest, someone else is inspired to show up the next time. You don’t change regimes in a day, and you don’t build movements out of nothing. They accumulate, millions of tiny choices gathering together into a vast whole.

Resistance starts in the mind. Fascists want you to think the way you’re thinking, because if you can’t even get to the point of giving a shit about what they’re doing, you’ll never ever get to the point of actually doing something about it.

Refusing to comply really can be as simple as just choosing to call out their evil, every single time. It’s a starting point. It’s easy and trite to say that big trees grow from small acorns, but much harder to really understand what that means, to take into your heart the idea that every single word or act of defiance matters, that enough drops really do make an ocean.

I’m not asking you to plan a revolution. I’m just asking you to give a shit. Because the people telling you to stop giving a shit are the ones who want to do terrible things to your country, and they need your passivity in order to succeed.

Trump is dead serious about the tariffs. He’s been dead serious about tariffs for pretty much his entire adult life. This obsession goes back decades. Yes, people are opportunisticly using the chaos to profit, but the chaos is not the plan, just a side effect of Trump’s total inability to plan.