cstine

@cstine@lemmy.uncomfortable.business
0 Post – 120 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Because it's no longer 1996 and there are domains beyond ccTLDs and com/net/org?

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Data this app collects: yes.

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And that's why corporate social media is so sticky: your average user doesn't care WHAT is done to them and the most they'll maybe do is grumble slightly and spend a little less money, but won't actually bother to do anything or make any changes, or go somewhere else.

The only comment I'd add here is that you should make sure you have a real domain, that you've paid actual money to, when setting this up. ActivityPub assumes the domain is immutable, and the free dynamic domain names you can get (or free TLDs like, say, .ml was) are a bad choice. Spend the $10 or whatever, because if something happens to your domain name, you cannot just update it in the database and fix federation: it completely breaks everything in a way that's not repairable.

I killed all delivery nonsense a while ago. It was like 4 fees plus a demand for a tip on top of inflated prices; go to the restaurant and pay $15 or pay DoorDash $35 for the same shit? Fuck that, I'll drive and pick my own damn food up.

And bonus, if half of it gets eaten in the car - I mean "wasn't given to me by the restaurant", sorry - at least I'm the one who ate the damn thing.

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The closest thing you're likely to get is a black and white Brother laser.

It's as open as a printer is likely to ever be in terms of driver support, the availability of parts is reasonable, and you plug the thing in via USB and then forget it exists until you need to print something.

I have a 2300D I've had for most of a decade now and the only thing I've had to do is put paper in it.

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Nah. If you enjoy it, and your kids like spending time with you gaming, then who cares?

Life is too short and kids grow up too fast to care what some grumpy old people who wouldn’t know fun if it hit them in the head will say about what you enjoy.

Wow, I'm shocked that they're going to sell the biometric data to anyone who wants it. Well, not that shocked. Actually, not shocked at all.

They're not wrong in that most people aren't suited to or should be running what is effectively public services for other people from some surplus Dell R410 they found on eBay for $40.

That said, it's all a matter of degree: I don't host critical infra for people (password managers, file sharing, etc.) where the data loss is catastrophic, but more things that if it explodes for an afternoon, everyone can just deal with it. I absolutely do not want to be The Guy who lost important data through an oversight on an upgrade or just plain bad luck.

But, on the other hand, the SLA on my Plex server is 'if it works, cool, if not I'll fix it when I can' and that's been wildly popular I haven't had any real issues, because my friends and family aren't utter dicks about it and overly entitled, but YMMV.

TL;DR: self-hosting for others is fine, as long as the other people understand that it's not always going to be incredibly reliable, and you don't ever present something that puts them at risk of catastrophic loss, unless you've got actual experience in providing those service and can do proper backups, HA, and are willing to sacrifice your Friday evening for no money.

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ActivityPub is not a distributed network: you don't have communications between servers in a mesh, the server that owns a community(ex. fediverse@lemmy.world) pushes out JSON data to any subscribers.

Small servers won't talk directly to each other, unless they're subscribed to communities on each other so having a lot of small servers doesn't actively impact the load on each other, but only on the larger servers that have the more active communities.

And, even then, the JSON requests are going to be a lower impact than a user actively browsing the site, though probably only marginally and maybe not in all cases.

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Funny, when Google started building fiber, ISPs threw a fit and tried to make it illegal in a lot of places for big tech to build broadband networks.

So uh, which is it guys?

He looks like he's either going to tell the cops they're so fired, or he's shit himself.

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To be fair to Hogwarts Legacy, I would strongly suspect that a good number of the people actually playing that are actual children that probably need someone to point out things like that to them, since they probably don't have the same level of experience playing games as you do.

However, if I hear one more thing about how travel was so inconvenient before the invention of floo powder, I'm going to punch something.

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Good news, then: http://canvas.toast.ooo/

Yep, straight from Macarena to Tubthumping and nobody even noticed.

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Another point of view is that OSS and Linux is absolutely amazing.

With a very limited set of exceptions, you can grab Ubuntu or Fedora or whatever, make a USB boot drive, and be in a GUI and shitposting on the internet in about 5 minutes.

Linux has grown tremendously from when I started using it, which was when you'd probably have to end up editing a config file for X11 to add the modeline so X knew the resolution and refresh rate of your monitor because there was no auto-configuration for anything more than like 640x480@60hz (and even that might not work).

And in just a few years we went from very very few games working with Wine, to damn near everything that doesn't need ring0 rootkits working almost perfectly.

So yeah, it's not perfect, but it's absolutely light years from where it was 5 or 10 or 20 years ago and maybe focusing on how great it actually is vs bemoaning the things that still need work will help keep you motivated.

That said, at the end of the day software is just a hammer: you use it to build something. If Linux doesn't work but MacOS does, or Windows, or whatever does then use what works. There's no point in using something that doesn't do what you want to the point that you're angry/stressed/tired of dealing with it, because life is way too short to spend all your time fighting broken software when all you wanted to do was draw a picture or play a game or watch a movie or whatever.

I'm still waiting for .rar so I can buy unregistered.rar, which is the way it's meant to be.

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Agree with this comment: Firefish is much better than the current state of Mastodon, especially since all the complaints you have are basically being wont-fixed by the current dev team.

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Eh, I think CIG has enough true believers buying JPEGs for this to continue pretty much until the whales die of old age or just run out of money to send him. I wouldn't be shocked if we're still talking about this in another decade, except this time it's $1.2 billion in funding.

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ActivityPub isn't anything more than JSON over HTTP(s); there's no reason at all that you couldn't simply tunnel all the traffic using hidden services over Tor using nothing more than the Tor daemon to create a hidden service and the proxy functionality to route all outbound HTTP traffic over Tor.

Honestly, from all the Gen Z and younger kids I know in my life the big thing that's probably killing the fediverse is it's not a media-first platform.

Not a one of them really participates in text-primary social media, which is what Lemmy definitely is.

Mastodon supports it better, but there's so much gatekeeping around the "right way" to share media content that the few people I know that tried to use it just bounced off it because they couldn't figure out the technical and social aspects of how to interact, because it's just piles of conflicting opinions.

They will, however, spend an insane amount of time on TikTok or Youtube or Twitch or Instagram or Snapchat endlessly watching whatever comes up and scrolling along to the next thing or sending pictures/videos of whatever they're doing at that moment to their friends.

This is a fight between IBM and Oracle. There's been a lot of bad blood between them since Oracle did a s/Red Hat/Oracle/r for their own branded distribution.

IMO that's the main driver behind this change: don't feed your largest competitor free stuff and not something specific against Rocky/Alma/whoever else is using the code.

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UptimeKuma is what I use; it'll watch tcp connections, docker containers, websites... whatever. And the notifications are pretty comprehensive and probably cover anything in 2023 would want to be using.

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Blue lives matter, unless they're inconvenient, making me follow the law, or I can score some cheap points ranting about how terrible they are.

It's just a bit more platform enshittification, honestly.

Every social-oriented company is realizing that the Free Money Tree has died, burned down, and is now a rotting stump in the middle of the High Interest Rates woods, and they're in utter panic because not a single one of them is actually profitable, has ever been profitable, or reasonably has a path to profitability.

Reddit, Twitch, Discord, etc. are all living on borrowed money and time and the only way they're going to survive is if they either squeeze money out of the users directly, squeeze it out of their partner/content creators, or find a new investment which isn't something that's happening anywhere.

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While I'm not a psychologist, I read far too much crap online, so take this as a layman's view.

There's been a lot of research around the dopamine feedback loop around social media, as well as the fact that arguing and "winning" is a major dopamine hit, so I wouldn't be the least bit shocked that a lot of the more toxic people are literally addicted to the dopamine that social networks give you that they're arguing and posting for no other reason than their next hit.

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I think the top 3 reasons are, ultimately, the same reason; the people who are already there don't want you there, and they like the obscurity of discovery and obfuscation of communication, confusion around instances for onboarding, and ability to gatekeep exactly how you're allowed to use the platform.

There's issues with the underlying platform, for sure, but the established user base likes it the way it is, and is very strongly invested in preventing change.

And, that's okay! If you have a platform that you enjoy using, it should be defended, and aggressively.

But, at the same time, you shouldn't be utterly confused why so many people either don't want to or bounce right off your platform and aren't sticky when it's pretty obvious (and has been for a while) that the culture is the big driver for it.

Windows task manager is a poor indicator of actual clock speed for a number of reasons, one of which is that it's going to report the highest clock speed and not the lowest one, which in highly multi-core CPUs isn't really representative of what the CPU is actually doing. Looking at individual core clocks and power usage is more indicative of what's actually happening.

That said, I've had pretty bad luck with x86 laptops with the higher-end CPUs; even if you get them to fantastic power usage they're still... not amazing. I managed to tweak my G14 into using about 10w at idle, which sounds great, until you look at my M1 Macbook which idles under 3w.

If thermals are really a concern, you may want to look at the low voltage variants, and not the high performance, though that's a tradeoff all on it's own.

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Part of the problem is, IMO, the corporate structure built around these companies.

I've always wondered why Twitch has 1200 employees, or Reddit has 2000, or Twitter had 5,000. What do they all do, and is the cost of carrying so many people justified?

I'm betting (and honestly, the Twitter shitshow kinda has shown) that you maybe don't actually need 1,200 people to run a streaming site, and maybe you don't need 2,000 to run a text-based link aggregation site and that this weird tech company obsession with growth and size is actively counterproductive, at least to some extent, when it means you can't carry the costs of the company without having to absolutely trash the experience of your users to do it.

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It's a combination of:

  1. people hate Facebook and don't want them anywhere near the fediverse and
  2. secret talks with NDAs never foretell good things.

Meta's reputation most certainly precedes them here, and they're not a company known for politely co-existing with others but rather for stomping in, and taking what they want and packaging it and selling it.

IMO people have a reasonable basis for reacting strongly (though it's 2023 and the 'hyperbolic over-reaction' is the required thing online it seems).

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Alternate option: see if the performance of the various cloud gaming providers meets the mom approval factor. She's not playing anything the extra latency is really an issue with, and you can then avoid the hot, noisy, expensive gaming laptop category entirely and just get almost ANY laptop your mom likes, instead.

One minor correction: if lemmy.there has users subscribed to blargh@lemmy.here, the content that is federated to lemmy.there won't vanish if lemmy.here does: that copy is more or less independent once it's federated out.

It's not a 100% complete clone, but it's also not at risk of totally vanishing off the face of the earth, either.

There are issues with further interaction with that group (since the host instance is gone and it won't federate back up and then out to other subscribers), but the content does still exist anywhere it was subscribed to.

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Because you can't make thousands of spambots on your own instance because as you noted it'd take about 5 minutes to defederate and thus remove all the bots.

You want to put a handful on every server you can, because then your bots have to be manually rooted out by individual admins, or the federation between instances gets so broken there's no value in the platform.

And for standing up more instances, you have to bear the cost of running the servers yourself, which isn't prohibitive, but more than using bots via stolen/infected proxies (and shit like Hola that gives you a "free vpn" at the cost of your computer becoming an exit node they then resell).

Also, I'm suspicious that it's not 'spam bots' in the traditional sense since what's the point of making thousands of bots but then barely using them to spam anyone? My tinfoil hat makes me think this is a little more complicated, though I have zero evidence other than my native paranoia.

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As a product of American eduation, I can say resolutely that no, that was absolutely not taught.

Of course, this is partially because American education sucks and partially because we never HAD common land here: everything was privately owned, after it was stolen from the people who already lived here, and then most of it had people who had no say in the matter enslaved to work on it for the people who stole the land.

Of course, this is ALSO not really taught, because it'd make people feel sad and make the US look kinda bad, so it's always talked about but you get like, a week of coverage on both subjects, at most.

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Apple will follow suit: don't be taken in by the 'we love our customers' nonsense they like to present. They make billions in selling ads too, they just do it a little more quietly than Google.

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The real risk isn't really Meta, or Reddit, or whatever coming in and shitting on everything, but rather the same thing that happened on Reddit: upvote bots, bought and paid for mods, communities that get astroturfed by corporations with fake reviews/"questions" about if a cool new product is, in fact, cool/"hey i just found this thing!" posts and so on.

Those aren't as immediately obviously toxic as lemmy.facebook.com would be, but they're still a corrupting influence that degrades the experience for everyone, and they do it in a way that's less obvious to a lot of people because I mean, is it just a random person, or is it a paid-for shillbot?

Still, have to be careful of Meta federating their piles of users, but it's not really the risk that's likely to happen in the short term as much as "social media marketers" shitting things up the way they shit up everything they get anywhere near.

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The answer for your question is 'no'.

You're never going to reduce power usage substantially by swapping PSUs, because there's just not enough efficiency gains to be had even if a Pico PSU was more efficient which they really aren't.

You say the hardware is 'nothing too different' but you mention ddr4 vs 3, which makes me think the Dell is a generation or few older which could easily impact power draw by 10w.

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Personally, the word I'd use for it is 'boring'.

Loved ME and did a playthrough with the Legendary re-release, but when I hit Andromeda, I got to the planet and went 'You know, I don't care about ANY of these people, what we're doing, and I'm not going to drive around for 30 more hours of this' and just kinda... stopped playing.

The constant politics argument is tiring. Do you know the politics of the guy who made your favorite game? What about the guy who made your text editor? Or your browser? Or the software in your microwave? Or grew your food? Or the guy who made that song you like? What about the owner of the last convenience store you bought your mtdew from?

Even if the commentary is coming from an honest point of view and not just shitty astroturfing (and it very much isn't), it doesn't matter. If you don't like it, use an instance that's not run by them and who cares.

Read the bill and while not a lawyer, it's pretty clearly targeted at big corporations; two specific bits which likely make it non-applicable:

  • (a) applies in respect of a digital news intermediary if, having regard to specific factors, there is a significant bargaining power imbalance between its operator and news businesses

  • (d) requires the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (the “Commission”) to maintain a list of digital news intermediaries in respect of which the enactment applies;

Lemmy instances don't have a bargaining power imbalance (or, really, ANY power to bargain at all), and the CRTC would have to list you as a 'news intermediary' for it to apply.