- The Lord of the Rings. It is the secret gateway for us nerds to get into literature and poetry (do not skip the poems!). Read all the reference materials like The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, J.R.R.'s letters, the books his son Christopher edited and published, etc. If the poems seem weird or don't make sense, research why they are worded and structured the way they are.
- The Master and Margarita. Obscure and very unique. Make sure to get a good translation (if you don't know Russian) that has some annotations to explain the "inside" jokes/references
It's 'obscure' in the sense that something like To Kill a Mockingbird is 'obscure' (The only reason I know it is due to the prevalence of US pop-culture and it being referenced there). Sure everybody in the US probably knows about it and many read it in school, but outside of the US it's pretty rare to meet someone who has read it. I'd be willing to bet a lot more people in Europe have read The Master and Maragrita than To Kill a Mockingbird for example.
Agreed. It comes up a million times on HN and has an enormous amount of ratings on Goodreads, #3 in Russian lit behind only 1 book of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/117833.The_Master_and_Ma.... It is widely popular in the English-speaking world; not obscure.
Which is why I think this whole thing is really dumb. You know what would be actually useful for requiring in cars that wouldn't otherwise be included? A NOAA weather radio mode in the car, along with the option to have it automatically alert me when it detects an alert. In a disaster I'll be listening to that, not trying to hunt down an AM radio station I haven't willingly listened to in decades.
I lived in and have returned to visit former Yugoslavian countries over the past 25 years and until just now had not come across these spomeniks. I'm glad I was able to learn the true stories about some of them at the same time. Overall I'm pretty disappointed in the weird vibe of the article. This statement was particularly confusing:
"Yet not only in Croatia, but in France, the USA, Britain, real, open fascism – fences, walls, racial laws, deportations, camps – is once again mainstream."
Deportation camps are once again mainstream in these countries?? Are they? And "once again" as if they ever were mainstream? Did I miss something?
That kind of makes me doubt everything else said in the article. Overall the article seemed to be very anti fascist (great!) and pro post WWII communist (not great) even seemingly celebrating Yugoslavia's defeat of the Allies?
Anyway, I would love to see more simple explanation of each spomenik like this article gives for some of them (artist, purpose of the monument, dates, etc.). Anyone know where to find that?
This all depends on what is meant by “fascism” and “mainstream.” The author seems to have viewed immigration restrictions as fascist.
It seems like it would be better to discuss immigration policy and enforcement directly (when someone wants to do that) rather than having meta-discussions about what category it belongs in.
And yes, I am aware that in Croatia there was actual Fascism complete with camps and everything around WWII times. And yes those other countries in the list also rounded up groups of people into camps at the same time period, but I would not have called what the US, Britain, and France did Fascist or mainstream back then, and I'm not aware of anything like it today.
The way I interpreted that sentence is not that fascism was established and flourishing back in 2016 when this was written, but rather that the fascist ideals and concepts were being openly pushed without (enough) sanction by the mainstream.
The reason why I interpret it that way is simple: when fascists are actually in power, there's no such thing as "mainstream" anymore. Authoritarian rule means that there's only one correct way of thinking and behaving, and everything else is a crime or heresy or "evil", depending on the specific flavor of authoritarianism. "Mainstream", on the other hand, implies that there are other views and that they can be discussed.
> Authoritarian mean there’s only one correct way of thinking and behaving, and everything else is a crime or heresy or “evil”, depending on the specific flavor of Authoritarianism.
Oh wait, that sounds exactly the like the United States. If you don’t believe what 95% of the “mainstream” media is pushing you’re labeled all sorts of things. The biggest on is conspiracy theorist, when all it take is ~ 6-9 months before the conspiracy theorists are proven correct. Let’s not get into how often the terms racist, fascist, and nazi are thrown around when people of opposing views disagree. Somehow it’s almost always the one side slandering, due to lack of argument.
In Croatia there arent any camps and the country is very peaceful. However there are plenty of neo-Nazis, especially amongst football supporters and even some political groups (part of the government). There are also some people that the government is too affraid to touch, given their war veteran status and public popularity. In the article bellow is a photo of one such person, called Marko Skejo. The picture tells a thousand words
And there are a lot of people that write crap about Croatia around the Web just like you. There are neo-nazis even in Russia....so what we should do about that?! Get a grip.
Dude Croatia is a member of the EU. Do you really want to compare it to Russia? In Split there are Nazi murals that the government is too afraid to touch. This guy who tries his best to look like Hitler gathers dozens of idiots in Split every year to mark the commemoration of founding of the Croatian Nazi state and no one dares to do anything about it. I love Croatia, but this is a real problem
But Croatia is not a runaway wayward EU member, it has to comply with EU standards and EU laws. I mentioned Russia because Hitler wanted to annihilate "Slavic race" and Russian state and even there you have people glorifying Nazism.
You've been downvoted in your root comment because people latch onto that neo-nazi definition but missing forest from the trees. The far right over here is powerful, organized and very vocal. The football matches are just a social overpressure valve so the fans are constantly fighting between themselves instead of taking to the streets to protest the political/economical issues. And the government likes it that way.
The U.S. is absolutely creating deportation camps, and there's a national zeal for evicting people here. It's, unfortunately, bipartisan.
The conditions in U.S. camps are dire, children sleeping on bloody straw, smeared with feces. Families separated. Food, water, and shelter inadequate to sustain life in the deserts where these camps are.
In Britain, the attitude is similar pro deportation, but the refugees aren't put into camps as far as I know. However, the buildings that they are in have been subject to attacks and arson.
The "once again" probably refers to both the historical mainstream opinion that Japanese migrants should be moved to concentration camps within the U.S., and of course the mainstream beliefs in Nazi Germany.
(Note, I'm not trying to draw any parallels between any of these camps. Please don't infer that I'm calling anyone nazis except the nazis. These examples can all exist and be over the threshold of "cruel" without needing to be compared to one another.)
> The U.S. is absolutely creating deportation camps, and there's a national zeal for evicting people here. It's, unfortunately, bipartisan.
I believe the point the comment was making is that no reasonable person would call the existence of walls or fences, or the deportation of illegal/undocumented immigrants fascist (even those who believe that free migration is a human right), or that "racial laws" are mainstream (except maybe in affirmative action, but it benefits PoC so the author of the article most likely wouldn't consider it a racial law).
The deported people are still human and deserve basic dignity. If we are going to deport children, throwing them into a concrete cell with bloody straw and feces is absolutely roses to inhumane levels.
I doubt that I'd consider them reasonable, unless your "fasiscm spectrum" goes from 0 to 100 and it's "somewhere". Then yes, _everything_ is on that spectrum, it's just that a lot of things are < 10 and some things are > 90 and if you say "well, they're on the spectrum towards fascism therefore they are fascist", I wouldn't label you reasonable.
And if you think that deportations are > 90, you have no idea what fascism is.
You've conveniently sidestepped the mass incarceration portion there (the US has stunningly high incarceration rates even ignoring immigration-related cases).
The "who" also matters when it comes to deportation. If we were just deporting folks who overstayed their visa, versus a policy of deporting refugees who took great risks to even reach the country, or folks who were raised (and sometimes even born!) in the US... I'd have more sympathy for the anti-immigration crowd.
Are they though? Last time I played with them I had to create/edit two text files instead of one (service file and timer file), figure out if I needed to enable and start them both, figure out what to do if I want to temporarily disable the timer (systemctl stop? disable?), etc.
Which is much easier than fiddling around with crontab, in my experience.
Yes, you need a systemd service file and a systemd timer file. Creating both is a matter of ~30m. Then, you do `systemctl start` and you're good... As a great benefit, you can see the status of each timer, which is great for debugging quick problems, like permission issues/runtime errors/... when setting the timer up.
Well, it takes 30m the first time, when learning from scratch. When learning the arcane cron entry system, I'd guess it takes even longer than 30m, unless you have a simple time in mind (like "every minute" or something similar - "every second Monday" is definitely more complex to reason about in cron). Again, comparing not knowing systemd timer vs not knowing cron.
Sure, not saying you can just sit down and do it straight away. But the additional complexity of systemd, I think, makes it even more daunting. It’s much like how modern frontend has a million components. I understand there are or were reasons for all of it, but not everyone needs it, and it’s intimidating to a newcomer.
In comparison, cron (and *nix tooling in general) asks you to learn a small bit of that tool’s syntax, and that’s it. You can add complexity if you’d like – read the man pages – but for the most part, you can be productive very quickly.
That’s true. But once you get it set up, you can check the status, see when it last ran, when it will run next, the logs from the last run, if it failed last time, why, etc. You can stop it, start it, restart it, disable it.
Simeone just needs to write some CLI for making really simple timers.
Don't forget one of the best reasons timers are great: they won't cause long-running jobs to overlap. I can't tell you how many systems I've had to unbreak because a job took too long and spiraled out of control.
Yeah, it is almost at feature parity. The following bloat is not needed at all:
1. Ensure commands are ran after you close the terminal you just opened.
2. Trigger actions when the process did fail (OnFailure=)
3. ensure the scheduling job survives system restarts
4. have proper scheduling, and handling of missed schedule doe to downtime (eg. for notebooks)
5. run the process in cgoups, under other user's context, or in a chroot, etc.
6. apply randomized jitter to the schedule to avoid crating overload and cascading failures resulting from that
7. Timing out tasks
8. Handle service dependencies...
just to name few from the top of my head...
cron is great, and systemd timers are also good, and even more refined solution to the task scheduling problem. Your propsal does not solve even the basics (configurable schedule). As other comment notes your script is more like the watch command.
Yeah. You get as a bonus a lot of generic tools that work with systemd like journald and other systemd-family utilities. This allows you to log, group jobs, investigate failures, all with better ergonomics and easily transform it into production-grade automation, if necessary.
There's really no reason to use cron today if you have systemd.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. “A lot of other generic tools?” You mean like how every *nix tool works for crons, because they’re text files, and *nix tooling operates on text files?
There’s a huge reason to use cron: it’s dead simple, doesn’t require a ton of complexity around it to function, and the syntax hasn’t changed in decades.
No, I don't mean like how every *nix tool works. I mean tools that are specifically designed to work with the data generated and stored by systemd. To give some examples: stdout from the process ran by systemd is automatically collected, timestamped, rotated and interactively paged by journald. journald in turn allows various filtering of the stored logs. On top of this, systemd can be configured to aggregate logs over networks of computers. It has exporters into popular log databases that allow for easy integration with other data collection tools.
In a sense, you could say that Unix shell, or other tools like pipes or redirects constitute an interface that allows generic cooperation between tools written without knowledge of the other tools. So, you aren't too far off. However, the tradeoff here is that with very few very generic tools you must give up more complex things. Eg. you have to concede that everything is a string. When you can confine the interfaces to a smaller group of tools, you can take better advantage of the data they communicate (eg. compared to passing data through pipes, where you have to serialize to string and parse from string data that isn't inherently a string, you can work with structured data with many useful types).
> There’s a huge reason to use cron: it’s dead simple
systemd timers are still simpler. I.e. cron isn't complicated, but it has too many tools all over the place, many arbitrary conventions, its failures are difficult to diagnose. And it's OK. It was written at the time nobody even thought about systemd, so, they had to do some of that work themselves. Today, it's just an anachronism ;)
+100 if I could. Reasons why I generally don't cron:
* I don't want to rewrite log or dependency management
* I *really* don't want to troubleshoot when it fails to function, presumably the work was important
* I barely want to set the job up at all! What service is deficient to beget this babysitting?
Most of my automated jobs do work that depends on other things. Services, mounts, or even the novel idea of a functional network. Things managed and exposed by the manager, systemd.
Go forth and recreate 'After=' and 'Requires=' for your cronjob and make it equally visible and robust, if you want, I guess. A command pipeline of all the right things and intimate knowledge/trust in their return codes will do. I'll go do something more productive or at least rewarding.
Embrace the two files, template them and never mind it again. I promise it can be worth it. I'd argue the Unix Philosophy is paradoxical, if not simply just argued in uncooperative/unproductive ways. Idealistic and impractical if lived truly.
Doing 'one thing' and doing it well actually requires doing the thing and telling others how it went... so really it's two things conflated, if not more! Enter 'systemd does too much': it's for our benefit, truly.
It's not a complete endorsement, of course. There are plenty of things I think are underdeveloped or out of bounds: spare the sniping
Pit me against some legacy holdout. Give us both a set of services and complex work to do in a real-world, representative, environment. I don't care what it is.
I guarantee my setup using "timers" will be delivered earlier and prove to be more robust; it's already been written and battle tested. It's ready as soon as I can SSH or clone my repository.
I just hear a bunch of self-selecting [read: made up] surface level complaints. Why is anyone editing these jobs so much to care if it's one file or two? Why not zero? Around two decades after 'cron' the concept of 'Configuration Management' was established.
What's more, interfacing to disable/stop on the regular isn't required with dependencies or relationships defined; the result is implicit. I didn't even mention 'PartOf=' or 'OnFailure=', more settings that allow for handling external influence.
The system will work for you, let it. I've soared through the ranks with this one simple trick: adaptation. The work isn't as unique as it is presented.
Just renewed my license for the first time. That means I've had it 10 years. Problems for me:
It's either really hard or really expensive to do basic stuff. Want to get on a repeater and chat? Great, a $20 baofeng radio can do it, but you have to get on the Internet to find the repeater frequency, offset, and tones, and then figure out how to program those into the radio. That either involves tedious button pushing on the radio, or getting a special cable, getting Chirp figured out and working with your laptop and radio and cable, and then figuring out the weird Chirp UI. You finally do all that, and then realize (as others have pointed out) that the conversations on the repeaters are lame.
And then the radio is portable, but you can't charge it with a USB cable like everything else, or put in regular AA batteries. You take it camping and it dies after a day.
Again, this is the most basic ham radio thing to do, lowest level of license required. It's not fun hacking, it's just annoying and discouraging.
The alternative radios to baofeng are literally 10 times the price or more, and it's not clear to me that they make any of that any easier. Gear for HF (longer range) is a hundred times the price or more. I haven't even wanted to go there.
Why isn't there a handheld radio that runs android and has a USB C data/charging port? Connecting to nearby repeaters based on GPS location could be automatic! You'd have all the young hams talking on the repeaters and things would start happening. That would be a radio that would actually be worth a license and a few hundred dollars
The USB-C charging is listed as 'for emergencies only'. I believe the battery is dual-cell and the USB-C port only charges one side which can damage the cell iirc.
It is a really fun, very cheap radio. Use egzumer's firmware and play around with it if you want. Just don't transmit out of the band it's spec'd for from factory. It will spray all over the place.
I just checked it out. It seems it only solves one of the problems I listed. You can charge it with USB-C (not program it or anything else, just charge it).
i think i have a UV-something, but in general quansheng are far superior to baofeng vis a vis reliability, clarity and volume, and durability. When i'm in a machine room working on a repeater i want to be able to hear the radio, even if it falls 16'. on the antenna.
THe only radio i own that's built more like a tank than my oldest quansheng is a motorola from the late 90s (VHF, NFM)
I'm sorry but you are just wrong. Radio is about communicating, and if the only people to communicate with are boring, then what can you really do? And ham radio has way less reach than the Internet, and requires a license, so the pool of people is way, way smaller. You can't compare the two.
Ham radio is about whatever you want it to be. It can be about designing and building your own radio then seeing if you can make a contact with it. Same can be said about designing and building your own antennas.
It can be about designing your own digital protocol or software to decode other published digital modes. It can be about attempting to make a contact at the lowest power output with the lowest noise floor at the farthest distance possible for any given situation.
None of these things really require talking to anyone about anything. All that's required is someone to respond with their callsign, location and signal report. 99% of what I've done with ham radio over the last 20 years is mostly just that. Tinkering with radios, antennas, and different digital modes, not sitting and chatting with people.
Maybe you find that all boring too, which is fine, but the hobby is what you make it.
> if the only people to communicate with are boring
I keep reading this refrain in this thread. Which, when you think about it, means it can't possibly be true. There seem to be more than enough people who think everyone else in ham radio is a bunch of grumpy old farts, so how come this evidently large-enough group people are never on the air to balance it?
Or is it just more fashionable to complain than to actually get involved (with good faith) in the community?
I have a HAM license, I got encouraged by friends from our local Hackerspace to get it. Since getting it, I used my right to TX maybe twice. Those friends, they're not boring. I still have no first clue what they're finding interesting about all this.
My brain simply cannot wrap itself around it. I'd dare say, the boring farts are boring farts because being a boring fart is literally all you're allowed to. Can't have a longer conversation about anything interesting, because the frequencies are for general use, not expert discussion on $thing. Half of interesting topics are legally or culturally prohibited. Can't do anything actually fun with the radio, either, as that too is illegal.
What is there to do on air? CW sounds cool, but I don't have a peer group it would impress, so: boring. Other than that, fox hunting and chewing rags. I can't see anything else to do there. General chit-chat and whining about equipment and the weather seems to be the common ground, but that is exactly how you become a boring old fart.
EDIT: sure, I'm allowed to build and operate my own transceiver. But why would I, if hardly anything interesting to do with it is covered by the license? SDRs are way more fun anyway.
i have rag-chewed on both HF and repeaters (and simplex VHF/UHF) for hours at a time. It's fun, but to me the hobby was a lot more interesting when there were other people using fldigi and such. everyone now is using JT's software and i find automated stuff like that "boring" to participate in, in the general sense. It is extremely useful and powerful as a tool to help detect "skip", the ability and positioning of your antenna, the efficiency of your choking and transmission lines (run wspr at 200mW, say).
With that said you can do all of that with fldigi or RTTY or even just using the morse function on most radios thanks to online sdr receivers. but talking to oneself is also "boring" after a bit.
If anyone has a ticket but doesn't really "get" the hobby, go to a field day. The official ARRL field day just passed june 12th or something, but there is a quasi-official winter field day in a few months, It's a 3 day thing, if you want it to be, but noon on saturday till noon on sunday the goal is to make as many confirmed contacts on any bands you can using whatever modes you want. The scoring isn't simple "1 contact = 1 point", you get more points if you're off-grid, or low power, or "outdoors", for instance.
If you've ever been the person that "fixed the LAN" at a LAN party, you might just get a kick out of the entire thing, and it's usually bankrolled by a local club, so if they have a decent number of members you even get good food and a great location.
Our club gets the Sheriff's dept command post truck every field day, and half the people operate out of it, and the other half out of a building somewhere nearby (the rules say all of your antennas and transmitters that score have to be within an explicit radius).
> I still have no first clue what they're finding interesting about all this.
Did you ask them? I'm primarily a casual contester and POTA hunter. Most non-amateurs (and quite a few amateurs) find that boring.
> CW sounds cool, but I don't have a peer group it would impress, so: boring.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but does an activity have to impress a peer (or any) group to not be boring? Amateur radio as a whole is unimpressive to many (most?) people, but why should that stop you?
Because they only briefly flirt with ham radio? When you account for time on air rather than total number of connectors, it’s probably still all boring people.
Correct, this is the problem. See my other comment here about the difficulty of just getting on a repeater. If you get past that initial obstacle and get on a repeater, just to find that it's not interesting, you don't stay long.
People don't understand that the free market system is essentially a law of physics. You saying that a producer/seller of a limited good (in this case, space in a concert venue) cannot choose their own price is true, like it's also true that a person can't decide whether gravity pulls them down or not. You explained it pretty well yourself, the effect of supply and demand is unavoidable
I wonder though does it have to be limited. Like imagine I could make enough apples to fully satisfy the market demand for apples and I’m also willing to sell to anyone.
I want to sell those apples for $1 each. There’s plenty of apples to satisfy the demand. But let’s say that the market would bear a higher price, people would love to buy apples for $1 but due to a love of apples would be willing to pay up to $5.
In that scenario, the arbitrage opportunity still exists. Apple scalpers knowing that people would be willing to pay up to $5 would want to buy up lots of cheap apples and make the $4 profit that I’m leaving on the table for themselves.
And there’s just nothing we can do about it. I think we’d say that when the equilibrium price of $5 is met that the market is efficient but it’s a market where the producer of the good can fully satisfy the demand of the market for $X and yet the consumers have to pay $5X and this arbitragers get $4X.
If you are able to perfectly meet demand why would anyone pay more than your price? What service or improvement are the arbitragers providing above and beyond what you are providing that incentivizes people to pay more than your price?
"A devoted fan will have no issue to wake up a 6am and try to buy a ticket."
Oh really? What if they are at work at 6am? So take a day off work? You just greatly increased the dollar cost of the ticket, which is exactly the thing you are trying not to do. And even if they take the day off to click at 6am they aren't guaranteed to get a ticket because of everyone else clicking at 6am. There's always a cost
"Enthusiasts present AI as a magic wand that can solve humanity’s biggest problems. In the meantime, it uses an exponential amount of energy to make everything the same."
- The Lord of the Rings. It is the secret gateway for us nerds to get into literature and poetry (do not skip the poems!). Read all the reference materials like The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, J.R.R.'s letters, the books his son Christopher edited and published, etc. If the poems seem weird or don't make sense, research why they are worded and structured the way they are.
- The Master and Margarita. Obscure and very unique. Make sure to get a good translation (if you don't know Russian) that has some annotations to explain the "inside" jokes/references