cecilkorik

It's great that you're able to maintain that optimistic perspective for your life and I think that's really important.

But I'm curious how you reconcile that with the fact that bad things are objectively going on in the world, do you just ignore them and pretend they're not happening, accept them and move on with your life knowing you have little control of it, or do you acknowledge they're bad and still hope to change them and improve the world, just without letting it get to you in your daily life? Like for example, if I told you that I thought the US especially was in an incredibly dangerous political situation right now that could mark the start of a worldwide descent into conflict, war and deadly, life-changing economic turmoil... would you say that's impossible, or unlikely, or do you just believe there are enough good people to stop it from happening but you still understand the danger? Or is it something you too are worried about, and you're just not letting it take the joy out of your life?

I think the latter is probably a very healthy attitude and if you can pull that off I'm happy for you, and I'm not trying to start a political flamewar in any way, I'm just trying to understand your perspective compared to mine. I guess I'm just wondering if you are happy because you actually see the world completely differently than I do and maybe one of us is wrong (it could be me), or if we see the same things and you choose to be happy despite it. Because it's something I struggle with personally. The world seems very... bad... to me right now, and it really hurts to think of all the people I think this is going to affect, probably including me.

DNA is nature's 3d printer, and it's actually really fucking good. It took awhile, but it made all of us and a lot more.

And nothing of value was lost.

It's not like it's an existential threat or anything. Besides, we can just use the military to shoot at the climate until it cooperates. /s

The short answer: For a router, either find an off-the-shelf Wifi router that is supported by OpenWRT (very nice and very easy), or (and this is my personal preference) build your own firewall mini PC which will be much more complex and powerful to the point of complete overkill but also fully controllable right down to the network stack (and what's the point of a homelab if not fiddling around with such things?).

You can run OpenWRT directly on full AMD64 PC if you want, or even just a Raspberry Pi (some people appear to have had good luck with the 4B and 5, though I don't know the specifics of that approach) The famous PfSense would be another option, based on BSD. I used to use that, but I really wanted something directly Linux-based.

Which brings us to the fact that you can also even use a standard Linux distro like Debian and install all the tools you want on top of that and set up all the firewall yourself from scratch. That is actually what I do, using Linux kernel's nftables for NAT Masquerading/IP forwarding and managing it currently with foomuuri which is essentially just a very lightweight nftables configuration manager. It doesn't do anything you can't do directly with nftables, but even though it's perfect for me but I'm not sure I would recommend it in general. They have some very simple examples, but the documentation is pretty sparse, you need to either understand nftables under the hood or infer what you can by reading between the lines of the few examples you can find. A more mature and traditional Linux firewall like firewalld might be preferable if you want. Either way, this is definitely a much more complex route though, and fighting with firewall rules to get things to work is not everybody's idea of "fun". It is powerful though, and infinitely flexible. If you want it to "just work" without hassle, stick to the single-purpose devices and use OpenWRT as the OS designed to do this. It's way simpler.

If you do decide do go the DIY firewall route though, all you really need for a firewall PC is at least a second NIC (some motherboards have two wired NIC onboard already, you can use one for WAN and the other + WiFi for LAN) or you can a PCIe network card that has multiple ports. I wouldn't really recommend using one of your existing Mini PCs for this, as it's really not a good idea to share the firewall/network appliance functionality shared with other services, both for security and for configuration complexity reasons. The firewall really works best and is easiest to configure when it is truly just a gateway for the network, putting traffic from one side out the other side, plus whatever fundamental network/firewall services you need to accomplish that. When you start also trying to selectively route some of that traffic to actual services on the firewall itself, it gets really complex and ugly really fast, and even if you can get it working which is often very nontrivial, it's also very fragile and it's easy to blow open holes in your security this way.

I've actually now got a pair of mini-PC firewalls, both set up using foomuuri, uCARP and Kea to do failover with each other so if one goes offline the other takes over its IP and starts routing traffic until it comes back. It's not perfect or completely bulletproof but it's pretty good for an amateur! In a pinch (when my previous, non-redundant firewall died) I've also used an GL.iNet travel router as my network's primary router temporarily and their routers support an expansion board with 5G/SIM support so that could be an option too. I have to say it worked perfectly and was actually pretty nice, my only hesitation is that the travel router (at least the one I have, Beryl AX) seems to run a bit hot and I'm not sure it's really intended for 24/7/365 operation (plus I need it for when I travel). They do make home routers too though, so maybe worth looking into, they're really nice hardware running their own fork of OpenWRT out of the box.

It will be funny if they come back and can only rule over ashes.

No, that won't really be funny, but it's also not going to happen like that. You seem really obsessed with this narrative of how powerful these people are. You need to get over that. They only have the power we give them. Stop giving them so much power. You give it to them with your words about them. They are not gods among men. They are just people with a lot of money and money is just meaningless paper unless we decide to work for them and bow before them because of it. Stop doing it yourself and stop assuming everyone else is going to keep doing that, and suddenly they don't seem so powerful anymore. Because they're not.

They don't really understand anything because they don't really think. They just repeat what they're told while convincing themselves its an independent thought that appeared in their head as if by magic. These are the people outsourcing most of their thinking these days to ChatGPT, because it's not something they've ever really valued or been interested in doing themselves. Life's a lot easier when you don't have to think about much. They're "doers" not "thinkers". And frankly, it shows. We see an awful lot of stuff getting done right now, and very little thinking.

"As you can clearly see on this chart I made of the value I put on things, the value I put on my own work is the highest, and the rest of you are very low, and you should feel bad that I don't value your work! What are you going to do about it? Work harder? Haha, that will just make my value go up even higher!"

That is a joke alright. They won't last long without the entire system of civilization and human labor they rely on. They love the myth that they can reliably automate those systems. They can't, and they doubly can't against an adversary who intends on breaking those systems and then waiting for them at the exit of their underground bunker. Humans are endurance hunters. When its hunter vs hunter, all the money and preparation in the world (which they might literally have) isn't going to do a goddamn thing to save them from sheer numbers and determination. Together, we are too strong. This is why they try to divide us. But nothing unites us like a common enemy.

In terms of health risk, not intentionally putting chemicals into your lungs that haven't been prescribed by a doctor is best, but non-disposable vapes are a good harm reduction strategy for those who can't get out of the compulsive habit.

"I work this hard, everyone should work this hard!" -- someone has no idea what hard work is.

Fuck that. Be loud. As much as they want to convince you you have no power and they've already won, in fact, power remains, and always has been, with the people. We are the people. Be loud, be obnoxious. Use your power.