blobjim [he/him]

I quoted their Block the Bombs Act position, which the best progressives in Congress like Jayapal and Tlaib are supporting as recently as a day ago https://www.facebook.com/RepJayapal/videos/the-american-people-do-not-want-the-us-government-to-continue-using-taxpayer-dol/860051216542538/ (not that it’s a bad thing, but Block the Bombs obviously won’t get passed and doesn’t use strong enough language).

I’m saying, if weapons to Israel become secret, that will only move the narrative to the right. Progressives might start calling for transparency instead of sticking with Block the Bombs.

This is the line of the Congressional Progressive Caucus https://progressives.house.gov/2025/9/progressive-caucus-endorses-block-the-bombs-act

Following a vote of its membership, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) endorsed the Block the Bombs Act, which prohibits the United States transfer of weapons that the Israeli military has used in its bombardment of Gaza until human rights violations cease

You can basically guarantee that any elected politician in this country appends weasel-words to any good-sounding policy they promote.

If the weapons transfers become secret, they’ll stop talking about Block the Bombs and start talking about how they need to be more transparent.

Make sure embedded video is selected (Tools > Preferences > “All” (bottom left) > Video > “Embeded video”)

Also are you using a distro package or the VLC Flatpak app?

Can’t wait for progressive politicians to change their platform from “conditioning military aid to Israel” to “making military aid to Israel more transparent”.

what even is there to say

There is at least already a userspace PCIe API. And USB and so on.

It’s frustrating that there isn’t much of an effort to turn Linux into more of a microkernel. Instead the kernel just keeps getting bigger with even more subsystems and modules that can be exploited.

ah I guess that’s exactly what a backdoor is. I read the headline and thought security vulnerability or privilege escalation.

How is this a backdoor if it requires being able to install custom PAM modules???

It’s such a well know piece of software now, I can’t believe that’s even an issue. The other definition of the word probably has a fraction of the people who know about it.

This is like the weirdest inter-national hostility in the world to me. As far as I know, there is absolutely no reason for Japan to have a hostile stance towards Russia other than because Japan is a US vassal, and that the Japanese Empire got its butt kicked by the Red Army (but that seems like it wouldn’t that much of an effect in 2026, even if the Japanese govt still clings to that kind of stuff).

Nobody is forking systemd, especially over something like this. People have no idea how much work it is to maintain software like this.

This change is mostly in the userdb code which is a sub-component of systemd that stores user records. It isn’t in the PID1 process. But I could see an argument for having it be part of the desktop environment in GNOME or something like that instead.

It’s wild that Raúl Castro is still involved at that level. He was there on the Granma in 1956. Bless him.

Non-US-aligned countries ought to stop even participating in UN votes. Some departments of the UN are still useful, the ones that do actual on-the-ground work funded by a budget. But the whole debate and voting part of it is often just an annoying way for the US and its pets to brow-beat countries in the smarmiest way.

Windows does plenty of things better. Like having a stable device driver API, so you can install third-party drivers really easily. And there’s only one Windows compared to many Linux distros, so there’s no need to compile software specifically for many separate Linux distros. Not as much of an issue with things like Flatpak. Windows also uses software library APIs for most operating system features, compared to the patchwork of file descriptors and file systems and sockets and all the other nonsense that makes up the interfaces used by Linux applications. The documentation is also in one place for Windows (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/). WIth Linux, you have to do research just to figure out what APIs are available. If Linux had as uniform of an API as Windows does, there would be even more software for it. The main reason there is more Linux software these days is because Linux is open source.

It’s built on top of Devuan which is a fork of Debian which uses Linux.

Apparently Devuan is “Debian without systemd”. 🤡🤡🤡

I would stay away! systemd provides so many well-designed APIs that are helpful for server management.

Also most projects that promote not using systemd are weird ideologues at this point.