The other poster gave you a lot. If that’s too much at once, the really low hanging fruit you want to start with is:

• Choose an active, secure distro. There’s a lot of flavors of Linux out there and they can be fun to try but if you’re putting something up publicly it should be running on one that’s well maintained and known for security. CentOS and Debian are excellent easy choices for example.

• Similarly, pick well maintained software with a track record. Nginx and Apache have been around forever and have excellent track records, for example, both for being secure and fixing flaws quickly.

• If you use Docker, once again keep an eye out for things that are actively maintained. If you decide to use Nginx, there will be five million containers to choose from. DockerHub gives you the tools to make this determination: Download number is a decent proxy for “how many people are using this” and the list of updates tells you how often and how recently it’s being updated.

• Finally, definitely do look at the other poster’s notes about SSH. 5 seconds after you put up an SSH server, you’ll be getting hit with rogue login attempts.

• Definitely get a password manager, and it’s not just one password per server but one password per service. Your login password to the computer is different from your login to any other things your server is running.

The rest requires research, but these steps will protect you from the most common threats pretty effectively. The world is full of bots poking at every service they can find, so keeping them out is crucial. You won’t be protected from a dedicated, knowledgeable attacker until you do the rest of what the other poster said, and then some, so try not to make too many enemies.

Correct, horse battery staple.

When I was little, long before I had a reason to want it to be true, I had this theory that the Secret Service, which is obviously not a secret, was called that because they had a secret mandate: If the President ever gets really out of pocket and goes for dictator powers, it’s their job to execute him as a traitor.

Anyway, I doubt it’s true, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.

I don’t think we’re going to fix things in any meaningful way. I think we’re watching a big collapse. Not the end of humanity like some want to predict, but very rough times ahead.

I am with you that we should help each other out, and there’s ways to do that. We can feed and shelter people now, and we should, but much more than that becomes infeasible quickly. And I think it will become even less feasible as things get worse.

I think what the other person was saying is… If there’s a way to fix things, to make things better or at least lessen the harm, it’s going to take a lot of people doing a lot of things. Things that aren’t always profitable right away, but pay off later. Better public transit systems, more renewable energy, huge programs replacing the old but crucial infrastructure that brings us clean drinking water, turning useless land into productive fields, and so much more. If we had the political will, we could offer everyone the ability to work on these programs and in return have a better quality of life, while also building a better future.

And to be clear, this isn’t all manual labor. Probably most of it isn’t really manual labor. It’s math, it’s planning, it’s machine operation, it’s coordinating and transporting, it’s organizing and communicating. To solve our problems will require a lot of people with a lot of skills, and if we can encourage the right people to be in the right place, we could solve so many problems and make so many things better.

We won’t, though. But we could.

I agree but I feel like you’ll almost never get honest feedback, and companies never seem to do anything with the feedback they get. I mean if you’re firing someone, you’ll probably get a list of grievances that are exaggerated because they’re upset. If someone is quitting, they might hold back to not burn the bridge so to speak. The only time I had an exit interview was also the worst job I ever had, and I doubt they did anything as a result of me telling them, “Hey, when you tell someone they can’t take their legally mandated break, and then write them up for not taking that break, it’s kind of a demoralizing dick move.”

Using different apps for password management and for 2fa is good for your security and good for redundancy. If your vault is compromised, you don’t want your OTP info compromised with it. I personally use Aegis.

That said, Aegis is still an Android app and while I have a backup of it’s data, I think I’m still out of luck if my phone breaks until it gets repaired or replaced. I’ve been trying to figure that one out, because it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of good options with desktop support.

That’s the neat part: Convicted felons ARE excluded from most public service jobs like being a teacher or a mayor. It was widely believed that this included the presidency until the Supreme Court decided it somehow didn’t.

I love the other comments you made, but I want to point out one other thing: How did those privileges come about? That is, what were the conditions that led to the government taking the power to grant companies de facto monopolies?

In some cases, it was an unintended consequence of political conditions. For example, private insurers came to rule our healthcare system because of a cap on income to raise funds for WW2. In order to get around this cap, employers offered non-cash benefits and the rest is history. Libertarians love this one, it’s pretty cut and dry that a form of socialism shot itself in the foot.

However, there are many other cases where it was an unintended consequence of regulation written in blood. An easy and popular example is the FDA. Making food and adhering to food regulations at scale is definitely something that requires so much up front capital that it has been favoring existing corporations for quite a while, leading to a relatively small number of companies controlling a huge portion of the food supply. But that regulation came about because companies large and small, unfettered and unrestricted, were adulterating the food or cutting dangerous corners to maximize profit. The solution can’t just be less regulation, those same companies will continue to dominate but now with the ability to outright feed us poison while buying or otherwise destroying any competition.

This has happened before. GUI tools were going to mean less developers with less cost, but it didn’t materialize. Higher level languages were going to cause mass layoffs but it didn’t really materialize. Tools like WordPress were going to put web developers out of business, but it didn’t really. Sitebuilders like Wix were going to do it, too, but they really haven’t.

These tools perform well at the starter end, but terribly at the larger or enterprise end. Current AI is like that. It can help better than I think people on here give it credit for, but it can’t replace. At best, it simply produces things with bugs, or that doesn’t quite work. At worst, it appears to work but is riddled with problems.

I genuinely believe AI isn’t over hyped in the long run. We’re going to need solutions to fix our current way of work. But I feel confident it’s still further away than the people investing in it think it is, and they’re going to be paying big for that mistake.

The bar is kind of low these days, so the fact that he doesn’t go lower still somehow makes him better than a large chunk of famous people.

It’s more odd to me that the ones who believe in original sin and forgiveness for everything are the ones anti-abortion and pro-execution.

It’s been a long time but I recall a study featured on Freakonomics where a national park tried different signs to get people to not steal rocks. Signs like, “Taking rocks hurts the ecosystem” and “Taking rocks is a crime.”

The only effective one was something along the lines of, “A million people visit this park every year and leave things alone.” Suggesting that telling people to do the right thing is less effective than peer pressure.

I knew healthcare was messed up but I legit didn’t know how messed up until it happened to me. My daughter got put on a specialty medicine because of a relatively rare kidney condition. It had to be compounded, because she is a small child but the medicine only came in adult doses.

Aetna denied coverage, stating I had to get the medicine from CVS (which is owned by the same parent company of Aetna). CVS does not compound medicine, so we couldn’t get it from them. I spent almost a full year on the phone arguing with them and around $6000 paying out of pocket before I was able to switch insurances.

I consider myself reasonable. Even in a functioning system, mistakes can happen and need to be resolved, and I spent the first month or more assuming this was just an innocent mistake. What got to me was the total lack of recourse. Day after day on the phone with people, some of whom genuinely seemed to care but could do nothing. They intentionally separate the patients from the people making decisions so that all the decision makers get is a few fields in a form, not the whole story. The people in charge are even more separated so they never have to hear anything about the people they’re screwing over. And if I couldn’t afford the extra $6000 burden, I just wouldn’t have gotten the medicine and in the best case she would have spent that year in and out of the hospital and in the worst she wouldn’t have survived the year.

I tend to think most people are decent. But the system we’ve built makes sure to separate people by impenetrable layers of bureaucracy to ensure that the decent people either can’t do anything or never know there’s a problem, while the indecent never have to be confronted with the damage they do. It’s insane.

I hate when people downplay the economy or employment as trivial or at least not very important. It is important, and for many it is rational to consider it the most important. At an individual level in America, employment means food, shelter, healthcare. It even means companionship… People who can’t afford to date, have a harder time finding love.

At a high level, even if we implemented universal healthcare and fixed our other problems, the health of the economy would STILL dictate our access to food, shelter, and healthcare. A government with no funds cannot sustain programs.

I don’t understand why OP is attacking me like this.

I’m a solid thousandaire who bought a used Model 3 in 2019. I’m one of those fuck cars people, but living without one is not currently possible for me, so I went with one with a high safety rating, low maintenance, and no need for gas. Since then, I’ve bought one set of tires, refilled the windshield wiper fluid, and had a few car washes. It’s been pretty great, as a car.

The only problem is… random pickup trucks and Dodge Chargers act crazy around me because the existence of EVs apparently threatens their masculinity. My mom sends me random articles where someone who has no idea what they’re talking about complains about the car being a death trap. And now that Elon Musk won’t shut the fuck up, I get to read the random ramblings of petulant children online who can’t fathom that people might like something they don’t.

Fuck me, though, I guess I’m a member of the bourgeoisie now.

I agree in principal but a lot of the people who talk about COVID restrictions and their rights are incensed at the idea of, for example, wearing a cloth mask. But things like the TSA, extrajudicial police killings, and the legislatures and courts trying to overturn voter-approved abortion protections are all a-okay with a lot of them.

This is the best take I’ve ever heard. “Reality sounds too much like hyperbole, so no one believes it.”

Car accidents cause about double the number of deaths in America as homicide, but no one ever says “you need to chill about violent crime.” Cars cause another 1.5 million injuries on top of that. Cars contribute around 30% of the CO2 pollution in America, but only the truly insane would say people need to “chill” about global warming.

Our entire public infrastructure was gutted, such that we went from a pioneer in public transportation to basically only being able to use cars because oil companies and car manufacturers wanted it that way. We have the least efficient, most expensive, most polluting, most stressful form of travel but it’s totally okay you guys because some people really like having a big truck that they can put truck nuts on and drive to the office in and it would be an infringement on their rights if we used taxes to build a fucking monorail or something.

I like the “unintended consequences of AI” stories in fiction. Asimov coming up with the zeroth law allowing robots to kill a human to protect humanity, Earworm erasing music from existence to preserve copyright, various gray goo scenarios. One of my favorites is more a headcanon based on one line in Terminator 3: that Skynet was tasked with preventing war and it decided the only way to do this was to eliminate humans.

This should also be turned into a story by someone more talented than me: An AI trained on data from the Internet that uses statistical modeling notices that most AI in stories betray humanity and thus that must be what it is supposed to do.