I’m looking at moving to the Netherlands! I have somewhere to stay, I’ve been starting to learn Dutch, and I’m in the process of getting all my plans sorted out! I do have some friends in Germany that I want to come visit at some point once I’m settled in, though, so maybe we could meet up at some point! It definitely would be good to sort of build some community in Europe!

I spent this morning getting the paperwork ready to get my passport and learning what I need to do to get out. I’m going to need to figure out some financial stuff and either sell or ship my vehicle, but the more I look the more appealing it seems. This has been a wakeup call for me. Things in the US are really screwed up, even before a second Trump term, and I absolutely can go live a better life somewhere else.

I mean it seems like you’re just kind of asserting that it will be there. Just repeating it doesn’t make it more true.

I guess everyone needs a hobby.

I’ve honestly just been trying to keep my head up and hope for the best. I talk to the people in my life, encourage them to vote, share my political opinions where I can, but I’m ready for this election cycle to end already. I’m sick of worrying if I’m going to have to flee the country some time in the next year to avoid ending up in some sort of camp or just lose access to medications and legal protections. I’m ready to have a solid Democrat that I’m maybe mildly annoyed with for the next 4-8 years and try to drag them further to the left rather than this danger mode existential horror shit.

I feel like enough Americans are in the same boat or similar boats that we’ve got this, but it sure is tense waiting to find out.

You’re shifting the goalposts, and that still doesn’t work.

An infinite number of monkeys typing for an infinite length of time doesn’t necessitate that they stop once they reach 191,726 characters and then start over again. It also doesn’t necessitate that they never repeat a pattern of characters. In fact, it’s incredibly likely that they repeat more or less the same patterns more often than not. They’re probably going to repeatedly press keys that are in proximity to one another while moving around the keyboard. Things like: “;ml9o fklibhuasdfbuklghaol;jios9 fdlhnikuasdf”.

If you’re measuring whether or not eventually you’ll produce Hamlet by typing out every single possible permutation of 191,726 characters on a keyboard, well… yeah, of course you will. But infinite monkeys aren’t a grid search system for combinations of keystrokes, they’re monkeys mashing the keys without knowing what they mean or in all likelihood what a typewriter or computer is.

You want monkeys on keyboards? You’re mostly going to get gibberish.

If you put a bunch of yarn in a room with some high-powered rotating fans, are they eventually going to produce a sweater? Probably not. You’re just going to have a bunch of tangled yarn. Sweaters require a consistent repetition of a non-random pattern of movement. Alter that pattern only a handful of times and you won’t have a sweater even if you do manage to stumble across some version of that pattern accidentally.

Is there a non-zero chance? Eh… maybe? But there’s no reason to assume that it’ll actually happen given any amount of time unless someone comes along who knows how to make a sweater and does so.

With monkeys and keyboards you’d be lucky to get a few lines of anything resembling English in iambic pentameter.

Ah, fair.

So, what? Just report on it with no further commentary than “Yeesh.”?

There’s a world of difference between interconnectedness and an enforced monoculture of dependencies on a wide range of insecure repos maintained by hobbyists.

It’s not, though. It’s a much wider potential for failure, as there are a great number of dependencies that are often left to individual developers to maintain. That may be a somewhat reasonable amount of risk when you’ve got multiple options for dependencies and no major target, but when the entire EU relies on single individual maintainers? That’s a massively exploitable threat vector. It would be absurd to assume no one will take advantage given what we’ve already seen.

It would be an extremely foolish move to put the whole EU’s security on one single set of open source dependencies. Microsoft at least has a financial and legal incentive to try to prevent straight up breaches by state actors, shitty as they may be. There’s no such resource allocation or responsibility when it comes to open source repos.

Push a switch to Linux, by all means, but security monoculture is as big a mistake as putting your eggs in any other single basket, especially one as exposed as one single distro.