/ˈbɑːltəkʊteɪ/. Knows some chemistry and piping stuff. TeXmacs user.

Website: reboil.com

Mastodon: baltakatei@twit.social

  • 0 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 12th, 2023
  • baltakatei@sopuli.xyztopolitics @lemmy.world•White House refuses to come clean on Musk drug testing
    5·
    1 month ago

    I think the cognitive reset that psychedelics can awaken come in basically two varieties: delusions of grandeur or empathy. Elon Musk has benefitted from privilege, luck, and the immunity to consequences that comes from being a figurehead leader for people who expect him to make the right noises to support their cause. This lucky run has fueled his fantasy of making humans an interplanetary species like in his Iain M. Banks science fiction novels that he uses to name his SpaceX vehicles.

    In Elon Musk’s case, engineers at Tesla and SpaceX have shared his technocratic vision up until he tried to adopt Trump’s Maga base away from Trump (e.g. with his fascist Nazi salute). Engineers of solar panels, self-driving cars, and space vehicles have to have a minimum level of empathy to deal with the stresses of working in teams to overcome difficult problems; most probably genuinely want to help humanity by expanding capitalism to asteroid mining and Mars colonies; the Maga mob, though, have much more grounded ambitions of restoring their socioeconomic dominance over cultures not their own. Attempting to curry favor with both at the same time only works if your leadership inspiring improvements in solar panel, self-driving car, and space technology dominate news stories with success after success, building and maintaining momentum beyond what Trump can disrupt with his own media stunts like the tariff posturing. But Trump has succeeded in making the Maga faction feel victimized and dominated the news cycle so far in 2025.

    Elon and Trump are both salesmen, but the latter only has to break things to get attention. So, I am not surprised that Elon finds solace in mind-altering drugs to comfort himself from the realization that his support base simply is smaller than Trump’s.

  • baltakatei@sopuli.xyztopolitics @lemmy.world•F.D.A. Poised to Restrict Access to Covid Vaccines
    8·
    2 months ago

    “The F.D.A. will approve vaccines for high-risk persons and, at the same time, demand robust, gold-standard data on persons at low risk,” the officials wrote.

    During a “town hall” live streamed on Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Prasad said he thought the new approach to Covid vaccination was “a reasonable compromise,” leaving the shots available to many Americans “but also generating evidence.”

    Before approving Covid vaccines for wider use, the F.D.A. “anticipates the need” for new clinical trials in which participants under 65 are randomly assigned to receive the new shots or a placebo, Dr. Prasad and Dr. Makary wrote in the journal.

    In other words, Vinay Prasad (appointed by Trump to the FDA for claiming the political left was using the COVID-19 pandemic to end democracy) needs to see more evidence (people dying of COVID-19) before devoting resources towards vaccine development.

    I suspect Prasad is a podcast charlatan using his oncologist credentials to advance his career by stoking conservative resentment against mask mandates in order to gain popularity and name brand recognition to sell his personal philosophy books.

  • baltakatei@sopuli.xyztopolitics @lemmy.world•Kash Patel is seriously infuriating FBI officials
    12·
    2 months ago

    He wrote a book describing how, among other Unitary executive theory-friendly proposals, he would dismantle and reform the FBI into a Trump-supporting organization. See Government Gangsters (2023).

    On his Trump loyalty

    President Trump has proven that if you don’t bend the knee to the left’s disinformation attacks, you can win. In fact, as Devin Nunes and I learned during the Russia Gate probe, when they attack us, it’s because we are, as a friend once told me, “over the target.” Their attacks got louder and more desperate the closer we got to the truth. So we must stay the course. The more we expose of their machinations and lies, the more the American people will understand the truth and demand reform. That is how public officials keep the mission first, that is how they deliver accountability, and that is how they honor their duty to serve the American people they work for.

    How the FBI can be made to stop investigating crimes of the President or Congress (e.g. the Mueller investigation, the Mar-a-Lago raid, etc.)

    Congress can remove funding from the Washington, DC, headquarters and instead reassign FBI funding—and therefore FBI personnel—throughout the United States, putting field-level agents back in the field. If Congress wanted to, it could reduce the FBI behemoth in Washington, DC, to just a single field office dedicated to investigating crimes within the district and place the headquarters anywhere else in America. They could even go so far as to have senior FBI leadership run the circuit, as it were, managing the affairs of the bureau from different branches and moving after a set period of time to reduce the chances of entrenched interests and political relationships being formed. Yet even if Congress doesn’t alter funding, the president and a reform-minded FBI director can internally reassign agents outside of Washington, emptying out the DC HQ in order to put agents back in the field. A new FBI director could also change the rules dictating that FBI agents must do a tour of duty in DC before getting a promotion, instead focusing on promoting those with the most experience and success in the field.

    MAGA should he shielded from committing crimes like the January 6th insurrection

    January 6th gave the Deep State and the entire ruling regime afraid of the America First movement the perfect vehicle to label normal, patriotic, God-fearing Americans as not just racists or white supremacists (something they had been falsely charging for years) but as insurrectionists or even domestic terrorists. In the past, they charged us with having bad opinions. They said our policies would hurt the country or even that we were bad, mean people. Now, they have gone a giant step further to make the ridiculous claim that we want to overthrow the government. This escalation in rhetoric is intended to try and legitimize their efforts to move the political battlefield from the court of public opinion much closer to the court of law, where they can prosecute MAGA Republicans by politically weaponizing federal law enforcement. Really it moves us one step closer to a world where dissent isn’t just deemed objectionable, but it’s ruled illegal. That isn’t America—it’s Venezuela, Russia, Iran, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or all the other hell holes of the world that we are happy we don’t live in.

  • baltakatei@sopuli.xyztoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•[Question] about the security basicsEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    Maybe try out FreedomBox? freedombox is a Debian package which automatically sets up apache2, firewalld, fail2ban and Letʼs Encrypt. It also automatically adds pre-canned configuration files for applications you install with it (e.g. Mediawiki, WordPress, Matrix, Postfix/Dovecot). The theoretical goal of FreedomBox is to allow anyone to set up a webserver and administer it via a webUI. So, although I would say itʼs not quite there yet for command-line-illiterate users, I have found the software useful as a turnkey server to see what makes certain web applications tick, albeït in mostly vanilla form.

    For example, after installing a new app like WordPress, you could examine what exactly the FreedomBox scripts changed in the /etc/apache2/ or /etc/fail2ban/ configuration files.

  • baltakatei@sopuli.xyztoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•What is the best way to create a image gallery website?English
    2·
    2 years ago

    fgallery

    TL;DR: fgallery is a dumb static web gallery generator: EXAMPLE, SETUP.

    There’s fgallery which is a small Debian package that takes an input directory (e.g. photo-dir) and creates a static website in a new directory (e.g. my-gallery).

    $ fgallery photo-dir my-gallery

    Description

    From the Debian package details page.

    static HTML+JavaScript photo album generator

    “fgallery” is a static photo gallery generator with no frills that has a stylish, minimalist look. “fgallery” shows your photos, and nothing else.

    There is no server-side processing, only static generation. The resulting gallery can be uploaded anywhere without additional requirements and works with any modern browser.

    Among all the Debian packages similar to this one, this seems the most recently maintained (version 1.9.1 came out 2022-12-31). It is licensed GPLv2+ so the source code is available.

    Upload to a web server

    After running fgallery as described above, upload my-gallery to your static web page directory (e.g. /var/www/html/ with a typical apache2 setup) and open the index.html through a web browser.

    Here’s an example gallery I made just now (setup procedure).

    Image

    ( Photo by Baltakatei / 🅭🅯🄎 4.0 )

    Viewing locally with a browser

    To view the gallery locally without uploading to a web server (e.g. a Digital Ocean droplet) or static content hosting service (e.g. AWS S3), you can do so with your own web browser. However, because the fgallery webpage uses Javascript and since modern browsers refuse to render Javascript in HTML pages at local file system addresses (e.g. file:///) due to same-origin policy, the easiest solution is to make a simple webserver via python3:

    $ python3 -m http.server -d ./my-gallery

    Then, you can visit the my-gallery/index.html file via a local http:// address at http://localhost:8000/.

    Summary

    fgallery lacks many complex features (no image database, no metadata editing, no dynamic server processes for editing images, etc.). However, I’d argue its lack of features is the main feature. It just takes a directory of photos and spits out a directory you can plug into your hosting service. Updating the the gallery is just a matter of running the same $ fgallery photo-dir my-gallery command again and re-uploading.

    Edit(2023-07-07T12:05+00): Clarify python3 commend.

    TL;DR: fgallery is a dumb static web gallery generator: EXAMPLE, SETUP.

  • baltakatei@sopuli.xyztoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Question on Lemmy SMTPEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    If it’s anything like SMTP on a Mediawiki or Discourse instance (example notes, then what you probably need is something called “transactional email” (I’m guessing you’re looking at a guide like this?). I’ve made use of this guide for looking up vendors for that service.

    In theory, the same server hosting a Lemmy service could also send and receive emails. However, in practice there’s a high probability of these emails landing in spam boxes. The defacto proof-of-work hurdle that inhibits email spam today is paying commercial transactional email companies a monthly fee. I’m hopeful that one day self-hosted email server software will become easier to set up through things like FreedomBox (via Postfix, Dovecot, and Rspamd), but the fundamental reputation problem remains, imo.

    So, I doubt a Lemmy setup guide would automatically take care of email setup. In any case, the process involves creating at least one MX record (according to instructions provided by your transactional email service) with your DNS provider which depends on the name servers you have configured for your domain registrar. The transactional email service you select should provide instructions for what port to open, as well as what SMTP URL, user name, password, and postmaster email address to provide to Lemmy.