I mostly agree with you, so we’re probably not really doing much in this discussion. I’m trying not to be pedantic, but as my name will tell you, I find that to be a challenge lol.

I agree wrt how to regulate.
If disallow the govt from broad indiscriminate surveillance and disallow the govt from circumventing that rule by subcontracting it to private entities, then these companies and products that perform the mass surveillance would naturally become unprofitable and collapse. I would argue that such a product would be by its nature political, because it’s only practical use case was the furtherance of a political goal.

Cameras aren’t political, but the use of cameras for mass govt-level surveillance is political. So a system that does so (like the ones sold to the govt) is a political software product.

To me where it gets tricky is when private entities grow to government-sized proportions, and begin to use these same tools for similar purposes. I think that is also a problem, but it becomes harder to frame it.

So this is why I’m trying to avoid using the term fascist, because it means something specific but nobody can really agree what that thing is. For the purposes of this discussion, I’d prefer to say “authoritarian”.

I wouldn’t call traffic cameras invasive because they’re only at (some) intersections. But it’s still kind of borderline.
A private citizen recording people in public and the government doing so are fundamentally different. I think that having the government subcontract away that responsibility to maintain privacy is an abdication of that responsibility and is an intentional act to move towards authoritarian on the part of the govt. Now if the private company intends to help the government do that, is immaterial; that is the only major use case for their product, so it is functionally a tool with an authoritarian purpose.

Is it such a dichotomy in reality? No.
But we need to be exceptionally careful when we see these gray areas

Like the fascist LLM example I gave, or a training simulator that is hard-coded to only present fascist ideology.

Right. That’s what we’re talking about.
But I think the bar is a little lower. I think it’s enough to be primarily useful for (eg) fascist goals. If it happens to have minor non-fascist uses, I don’t think that materially changes anything.
I don’t think that Lemmy is primarily useful for furthering tankie goals.

I think that privacy invading surveillance systems are primarily useful for furthering authoritarian goals, by intention or not. There are some nice alternative uses, but I think that the use case of primary importance is in service to authoritarianism, which makes it authoritarian software.

Just because a product has a plausibly deniable use case doesn’t really mean that it’s not functionally political.

If someone creates a super invasive surveillance system and initially uses it for a seemingly benign purpose, that doesn’t mean the intention all along wasn’t more nefarious, especially if the system was practically irresistible for power structures and it’s use directly lead to authoritarianism. Like giving someone their first hit for free.

In a case like that, I would discount the benign use as a red herring, and say that the software is functionally political.

The extension of the argument I’m making (and maybe them kinda?) is that it’s functionally the same as if the software were political.

You can make software that nearly exclusively benefits a particular political belief for family of beliefs.

So even if it’s not actually technically political, it can be functionally political, at which point the argument is splitting hairs.

It does, but it doesn’t handle encryption at rest. Everyone needs to be aware that the immich admin can see their photos on the disk.

You don’t even need reasonably powerful hardware, I do it on my raspberry Pi 5. It just takes a little longer, which isn’t usually a problem except for the first time you import your library.

The other person deleted their comment so I can’t really know what the argument was, but I would like to make a distinction:

While tools cannot be political themselves, tools can lend themselves to specific political purposes.

A tank cannot itself be fascist, but it can make fascism more viable. Surveillance software cannot be political, but it is easily abused by fascists to destroy political opposition.

What matters is the harm and benefits. Is the harm caused by the tool justified by it’s benefits? Or are the primary use cases for the tool to prop up fascism?
(I suspect that “authoritarianism” would be a better term to use here, but I’m continuing the theme of the thread)

Nextcloud is like Google drive, immich is like Google photos.
You’d typically prefer to look at your photo albums in Google photos instead of Google drive.

I’m running it on in docker and I’ve connected it to my NAS mounted as a network drive. I set it up a few months ago, do it’s better since then.

Don’t even worry about the hardware, I’ve got it set up on a raspberry Pi 5. It’ll take a while to do all the classification on your existing library, but new photos get classified fast enough. You’re unlikely to need to do a smart search immediately after you’ve taken the pic.

For clarity, I’m not on Windows (obv, raspberry Pi), and I’m not using docker directly; I’m running HAOS on my pi, and I’m using the immich add-on. I know it uses docker, but I can’t tell you the exact command to run.

They’re looking for local access network access only

I was just testing it out lol.
There is also a graph plugin for an obsidian-like view, but it’s kinda janky.

There is a beta AI plugin too, which (as much as I hate AI) is something I may try. The power of NotebookML is just too much, I wanna be able to ask it shit about my D&D campaign notes.

I was going to switch to trillium next, but in the end I decided not because it relies on a database even more than Joplin does.

I’m in the process of giving Silver Bullet a try. It seems to be pretty well designed. I don’t really like that folders are just cosmetic and not useful for navigation, but I like that it is open source, that the documents are saved in the file system, and that it’s self-hosted instead of synced.

This is basically what CI/CD pipelines do.

Compile the code, run tests, run static analysis. If results pass, submit the code. If results fail, reject it with an explanation.

Idk the details of how you’d implement this for a class, without letting everyone see eachother’s completed work, but I’m sure it could be done.

It does.
But I mean you asked

I mean does anyone go for power line adapters as their first choice when straight up ethernet is an option?

And when someone “no, because…” and you keep replying with inane responses that sound like arguments but don’t actually say anything.

A recreation of the thread:
OP: power line adapters gave me network problems
A: nobody prefers power adapters
B: right, but it’s still the best option for some
A: people would prefer Ethernet
B: yes, but that’s not feasible for some
A: why are you replying if you agree?
B: ask yourself that. Do we agree or not?

Read the thread, and then ask yourself the question you just asked me.

Yes, we all know that. That’s what we’re telling you. Nobody is installing power line if running Ethernet is simple.

You seem to be expressing shock that people would choose powerline adapters as their first choice. People are replying to tell you that it’s not their first choice, but they chose it anyway because running Ethernet is often way too difficult.

I think that the answer to “can you install network cabling” is mostly “no”. That’s why mesh networks are so popular these days.

I’m waiting for hexOS to get more mature before I dive into the DIY NAS setup.

I think you’re going to have a problem keeping your power supply floating in the air like that