And none of that changes anything.

You still have an org that is, to public perception, picking and choosing when they have jurisdiction and don’t… and it almost always seems aligned with how influential the country in question is. They are fundamentally lawyers so I am sure there is a document with all of these corner cases written out but that really doesn’t change the de facto of it.

And on the chance they DO decide they have jurisdiction? It just means that bibbi has to be careful about where he goes on holiday.

At its core, the ICC creates an illusion of justice when there is none. Which makes it a self serving farce that serves the interests of those who control them (which, ironically, includes the US, as you yourself point out).

If giving them more money solves it, cool. I’ll believe it when I see it. Because it is still the same fundamental issue with basically any international peacekeeping org: They only have power when they are the proxy of a, generally imperialist, power. But it creates a fairy tale that justice will be served and there is accountability when there really isn’t any.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court#Trial_history is a good starting point.

In terms of toothlessness? The active refusal to weigh in on the Uyghur Genocide is a “great” example of this. Or, for the tankies in the audience, the refusal to weigh in on all the evil the US is doing with ICE et al. Let alone our decades of wars of aggression.

Also… ya know, Netanyahu and Putin.

But generally? Their trials are weighted heavily towards African warlords who aren’t useful anymore.

As for legitimizing? Recent events are skewed due to a lack of interest in both the crime and the trial itself. Instead, I would recommend looking at the reality of the Nuremburg Trials themselves. Jacob Gellar did a spectacular video on this (that is only kind of tainted by doing Youtuber Voice for a lot of the quotes). But the short of it is that a lot of “crimes against humanity”… aren’t actually crimes in legal systems. And by making a farce of having an actual defense lawyer, it mostly just gives the accused a chance to lie about what they have done… or brag about it.

But, generally speaking, the ICC is, in many ways, the worst sins of the UN. Having a venue where nations are encouraged to discuss things and negotiate is good. But the moment you try to apply any penalties or enforce any of those negotiated terms, you just highlight how toothless the org itself is. And the ICC have very much done that as nations too powerful to be acted upon are, at best, given a slap on the wrist. And mostly it is a matter of punching down on “global south” nations where enforcing said rulings largely benefit the “global north” interests.

Like… in a lot of ways, your average HOA has more power than the ICC.

I mean, there are definitely arguments for abolishing the ICC. At the best of times they are toothless or, like the Nuremburg Trials, actively platforming and legitimizing those they are ruling against. And the rest of the time they are retroactively justifying the actions of the more imperialist nations… like the USA.

But, like always, the chuds can’t even pretend to have a good reason for what they are advocating for.

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There are two general cases where drones are useful (for combat, not just surveillance): Swarms and tactical/targeted strikes.

For a swarm? It is literally any other artillery barrage. You either find shelter or you die. It is just a case of the attackers spending a lot more money so that they don’t have easily detectable artillery pieces (or man portable mortars) to lug around

For targeted strikes? The advantage there is that quadrotors (et al) aren’t easily detectable by humans when they are high up in the air (shockingly easy for the kinds of mics that are already used to triangulate gunfire though… and there is some university research to amplify specific frequencies for “tactical” headphones). This means that an operator can essentially hover even 20-30 feet up above a target and then either drop the payload or fly it in.

At which point it is literally the same defense as mortars. The fancy kind of netting to reduce the effectiveness of airburst munitions (and prevent drones from reaching the juicy bit). Trenches/foxholes to minimize the damage caused by any one detonation. And… just closing the damned door on the APC.

What you are describing is something we mostly only see in video games and the Drone Racing League. The idea that you get above your target, swoop down, and do a trench run through the hallways to get to your high value target.

First? That pretty much gets stopped immediately if people just close doors and windows.

But more importantly? You need to be a DAMNED good pilot to do that at speed so that you can’t be stopped in time. And you need ridiculously effective real time intel. Because if that HVT walked down the hallway to inappropriately flirt with Private Pyle? Your ace drone pilot is now blowing up a few random admins and not the Super General or whatever.

Which more or less becomes the same issues as mortars but with an added bit of snipers: “Important” people don’t stand near windows.

Drones, like mortars, are still pretty effective at harassing infantry and breaking up (poorly) entrenched positions. One of the most infamous examples of this is the Benghazi embassy attack. Most reports (so grain of salt) put the contractors as being REALLY good at shooting back. But when the attackers did a bit of math (allegedly weeks earlier…) and dropped mortars on their asses, it basically collapsed the defenses.

And… obviously drones are super effective at going after civilian targets. Same as mortars (or high angle grenade launchers, according to a certain nazi running for the Senate in Maine…).

But this is also something we “solved” back in World War 1 and 2. Which… is a big chunk of why the war in Ukraine is a lot closer to a WW2 battlefield than not.

And… people are now wondering just how fast Bitwarden can speedrun late stage capitalism with recent changes. And realizing just how much data Bitwarden Corp actually has.

We go through cycles of this. Company A is bad but Company B is good… and it is almost always based on marketing. Google used to be AMAZING because “do no evil” and “they gave me a bunch of gigs of email storage!”.

Hell, some of us might be old enough to remember when Spideroak was the bee’s knees and totally secure… until people started realizing there were issues with what they were saying. They have no copies of your encryption key… but you can recover your password. And then there was the brief debacle where people realized they could download any file they had the hash for. But hey, they weren’t Dropbox!

I don’t think a company being involved inherently makes it bad. I don’t even think a company that keeps keys on their servers are inherently bad. Data… gets murky but that is more because of the logistics of what that means for hosting and operating costs.

But it IS important to actually assess a product before using it and to understand the risks. Every year or so people lose their shit at Protonmail when they find out that, contrary to widespread belief, Proton Corp isn’t going to serve a century in a black site for their customers. And every single time, people point out that Proton never said they would. They are VERY upfront about what they do and don’t provide and… the reality is that most of the privacy oriented benefits of that service are in that they don’t require any kind of authentication to create an account. Which… is akward when you realize it is better to NOT pay if privacy is your concern.

But what makes a random start-up with no meaningful (professional) footprint “a more trusted option than Google”?

A “privacy product” inherently involves a lot of trust. When the creators are academics with little to no professional footprint, you need to assess things based on what information they do provide you. Whether that be code (yay open source) or customer interactions (forum posts).

I know we all yearn for the days of “Use Google. Their motto is ‘do no evil’ so you know they are our friends!”. But… that was a much stupider time.

Like, even if you suckle at the teat of Saint Capitalism, you should at least want a good product. And… this looks like enthusiast code with minimal maintainability but a heavy emphasis on marketing.

Never going to not smirk at the israelis getting an L.

But be wary of media coverage of these kinds of drones. If you listen to The News, they are the greatest paradigm shift ever and you should totally give the military industrial complex even more trillions of dollars to find a solution!

The reality is that they are a lot closer to mortars than not. Comparatively short range and low payload weapons that are ridiculously cheap. Against an entrenched position with minimal defenses, they are devastating. But, ironically, most of the same defenses against mortars apply here too. They just tend to be ridiculously effective in Ukraine due to a mix of propaganda and how incredibly undisciplined russian conscripts are (see also: the idiots falling off of aircraft carriers in the us military). And… we aren’t THAT far off of basically connecting small arms, sensors, and simple motors up to shoot drones out of the sky in areas where we don’t care about collateral damage from falling bullets.

Don’t get me wrong. Cheap drones have very much changed the battlefield. But… closer to “affordable” night vision gear equalizing things rather than the initial advent of (good) night vision gear basically turning rich (read: US) militaries into invisible killing machines.

Fair enough. I’ll still say that is bad engineering but acknowledge that starts to get into the realm of taste.

Either way, in the past 24 days you have MR commits on 8 of those and April looks similar. The code is generally poorly documented and skimming the closed MRs, I am not seeing much discussion or review in any of them. So I stand by

At best, this is enthusiast code without proper engineering and is immensely unmaintainable. Use at your own risk.

From a quick glance at the repo?

The commits generally come hot and heavy. Going back to the earlier 2025 commits and the messages mostly look like what you would expect from folk raw dogging main. Arrdalan in particular looks “real”-ish. Whereas jkaczman is already showing signs of the kinds of commit messages that claude et al generate, but those ARE based off certain style guides.

Roll up to 2026 and I can see 11 commits on May 17 alone, they all look like claude messages, some are outright just arbitrarily changing magic hashes, and there are little to no comments.

Not gonna fully call this ai slop but, it is REAL flipping sus as it were. At best, this is enthusiast code without proper engineering and is immensely unmaintainable. Use at your own risk.

Like… I am not going to say I am NOT surprised.

But it really does make sense if you look at history as a whole. Catholicism has largely always been characterized by a religious third party meddling in politics, economics, and the legal system. When they have a critical mass of Believers, they are a force to be feared. When they don’t? They are a nagging voice that world leaders are expected to kiss the ring of.

In this case? Somehow the catholic church is NOT the most evil voice in the room which… is a whole level of fucked.

But England broke with the pope centuries ago. And people forget that the US was “founded” by protestants. Or that the country is basically controlled by evangelical christofacists (another flavor of protestants). Like… it is STILL a big deal that JFK was openly catholic.

So… in a lot of ways? This is one fallen empire that pissed away its soft power getting mocked by the figurehead of a falling empire that pissed away its soft power.

Pointing out that the US spends massive amounts of money on military spending is just a fact. https://www.nato.int/content/dam/nato/webready/documents/finance/def-exp-2025-en.pdf is the official NATO write up of this from last year and the only countries that outspend the US (as a percentage of their GDP) tend to be the countries that are where The War will kick off Poland) or… countries with other things going on

And keep in mind that is in terms of GDP percentages and how massive the US’s economy was for most of that period.

The “conservative” talking point is not: “The US spends money on war while the EU spends money on healthcare and actually giving a shit about its population”. It is “The US spends money on war so you should do whatever we want”. Its also worth understanding that The EU did not spend that money anywhere near that altruistically but it doesn’t change the situation that the EU/NATO finds itself in.

Because when that military is increasingly likely to be the aggressor? You need to rapidly start making guns and revisiting what is required of your populace. People have exploded over Germany recently more or less codifying a standing policy but… there is a reason politicians are looking at their conscription laws.

Look. We all live in a content bubble. But if you actually want to understand the world, rather than just get angry in ways that are convenient to influencers and politicians, actually look at statistics and respond to facts. Rather than getting pissy and screaming “fake news” because you don’t’ like what you saw.

Because, to be clear, I REALLY don’t fucking like how broken the US is because of how much it spends on the military.

Yes… I said that the US was the military might of NATO. I did not say that was the only reason we have a truly massive military.

If all you are able to do is build tangential strawmen then… do yourself a favor and just go post on chatgpt.

You talk about GDP percentage, as if every country had a similar GDP per capita, and could this afford to spend similarly

Where did I ever say this?

The reality is that the US had more then enough money to both fund its military and fund its social programs, but it chose to instead fund the military and the already wealthy.

Which changes absolutely nothing from the perspective of NATO

Not a one sided deal to the disadvantage of the US as Americans seem to be made believe by Trump and his oligarchy.

Where did I ever say this was a one sided deal?

If you think we ‘happened’ to keep a large standing army just because we were defending Europe.

Where did I ever say that?

Because, for decades prior, the US was the military of NATO. The US pumped massive percentages of its GDP into maintaining a standing military while most of NATO focused more on social programs with comparatively minimal military spending.

And threats like russia wouldn’t attack out of fear of having to fight said militarized nation. Whereas now there is a very clear window where the nations that might stand up against them are rebuilding. “Fortunately” russia is stretched pretty far by a failed invasion of Ukraine but… go read the wikipedia article on how their previous invasions of Ukraine went.

Welp. The Internet as a whole is real broken. But Lemmy is very rapidly taking the cake for THE place where you can never discuss anything and the only responses are people who are incapable of having a conversation and are just angry that you didn’t say what they wanted to hear.

Dead Internet Theory looking increasingly not that bad. Or, better yet, prioritizing different social media where people respond to each other rather than the voices in their own heads. Somehow… we managed to actually leap frog reddit on the way down?

A better approach is to always run any software like this in a container/VM.

For piracy this is particularly important as you can very easily set it up so that it can ONLY communicate over VPN. So if your VPN goes down, you stop sharing.

My “primary” is qbitorrent+gluetun over proton (port forwarding). For Soulseek I have that go over the same tunnel but don’t bother with port forwarding.

I do my nonsense on a server in my basement. But you can run a docker compose stack on a Windows desktop if you really want to.

Its one and the same.

They don’t have any more (or less) credibility than the us government has. If the Iranian regime says something about how the war is going, assume it is a lie by default.

It is just in this specific case, what they say tends to line up with what third parties are corroborating.

Again. Fascist regimes lie. They don’t HAVE credibility as a result. That doesn’t mean everything they say is a lie, but it does mean everything they say should be verified by third parties.

Nobody said they weren’t