Alex Vranas @Alex@vran.as

Today is day one of my time off. I don't go back to work until next year.

Looking forward to relaxing, enjoying winter activities, and seeing family.

I got stuck like a year ago and never got my Mastodon server properly upgraded.

I'm very far behind, but at least there aren't any major vulnerabilities discovered yet.

Anyone have any recommendations on jumping from 3.4 to 4.2 without a headache?

Due process has already been served. Donald Trump, at a minimum, can be said to have given aid or comfort to hundreds criminals collectively convicted of over 600 crimes related to insurrection or rebellion against the United States. Many of those convicted have testified that they were obeying commands from Trump, and those commands were public and visible to all of us on Social Media.

He doesn't need to be convicted of anything to meet the 14th Amendment's disqualification clause.

States need to stop waiting for the court's permission and take action now. The Constitution never said the courts were responsible for removing a seditious candidate.

It is the state election offices that are required to operate as required by the Constitution. That includes omitting candidates that have participated in a sedition until a proper vote by Congress.

Not a single state election office took real action, they had to be forced in Colorado.

I would honestly consider a court removing a candidate from a ballot to be massive government overreach if we hadn't written this exact scenario into the Constitution 155 years ago.

The larger story is that 49 states have still failed uphold the 14th amendment requirement that Trump be removed, and we're reaching the three-year anniversary of J6.

Without a 2/3 vote of Congress to override this rule, it is illegal to put him on the ballot. Colorado is the only state obeying this law today.

Matrix is really strange. I like the idea, but there are some serious issues with the way it works. Kinda cool that you can basically roll your own Signal / Telegram server, but it's extremely heavyweight and really vulnerable to abuse.

It's also nice to follow over 1k accounts because that's the only way any content makes it to me. I actually filter some accounts out of my user timeline just to fluff up my federated timeline.

I still follow those accounts, I just have a more curated personal timeline.

One of the things that I thought was a downside to running a single-user instance is that not all of the comments load for popular posts. I really only see the people I follow, I have no other users filling in the blanks in my database.

But this makes it harder to get stuck in the weeds. If I want to see reactions to a post I can open the thread on its home server and see everything.

It's honestly a good filter to keep me from responding to posts that aren't productive to respond to.

It looks like it was just the couple I tried to join. the matrix chat and the free software chat seem to be targeted right now.

@matrix Was setting up a #Matrix Synapse server to play around with today of all days, only to find that joining a handful of rooms completely maxed out the CPU and RAM, mostly because it is downloading heaps of garbage from the matrix.org Synapse.

It looks like the @matrix flagship server is currently under attack by far-right trolls.

All of the larger rooms are currently flooding with pornspam and slurs.

That whole "defederate from every instance that federates with Threads" idea is dead-in-the-water at this point, right? I've heard this strategy come up several times since Meta announced planned ActivityPub support, and it has always sounded to me like community suicide.

Jones Soda now offers a mug with Jim Jones on it.

BUT...

You have to drink 25 cans of "Mary Jones" soda with 100mg THC each to be eligible.

“I saw this blasphemous statue and was outraged,” said Cassidy, a former US navy pilot who has previously run for Congress unsuccessfully in Mississippi. “My conscience is held captive to the word of God, not to bureaucratic decree. And so I acted.”

The Oath of Enlistment means nothing. It's nationalist theater.

A reminder that, despite the propaganda, veterans/troops are not the reason Americans have rights. If they are Republican, and many of them are, they are part of the fight to destroy the pillars of freedom this country was founded on until all that's left is a Christofacist Dictatorship.

Which is why military/police worship is such a popular Conservative aesthetic: They know who will carry out their will should they ever overthrow this nation.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/15/satanic-temple-vandalism-iowa-state-capitol