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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • See this going around and… that is a LOT of reaching from a random CSR trying to placate an angry user.

    “We are currently working with Rockstar games to find a fix” followed by “You can buy the game you already have for cheap” just means that Valve sent an email saying “Bro, what the fuck?”. And Rockstar will likely send a response of “Do you want GTA 6 or not?” and this will never come up again.

    I would like to be proven wrong (GTA:O is trash but some people like it) but … not optimistic. And we get these kind of “A random CSR said something to make me stop asking to speak to their manager!” level of “leaks” a few times a year. The vast majority go nowhere.


  • Can we? Yes. Immediately sending peacekeeping forces to prevent the IDF from continuing to engage in genocide and coordination with neighboring countries to figure out whether this is a relocation situation or a proper two state solution (and what that would require).

    Will we? No. Because if we cared we would have done it decades ago. The US doesn’t care because we decided Israel are our allies in the region and most of NATO falls along those lines. And neighboring countries don’t care because they don’t actually like the Palestinian people (and actively block refugees) and mostly just want to hurt Israel through them.




  • it is unclear just how much trump is angry at ivanka and jared for allegedly narcing on them.

    But pretty sure even eric and don jr know they are getting dick all. He openly loathes them and it might be his only redeeming quality.

    Nah. It is just the nature of being the party of gun nuts while openly failing almost all of their purity tests. We actually saw similar (just to a much lesser degree) when trump said something like “I love vaccines” and was boo’d like crazy.

    He is a symptom of the rot. Not the source. And by and large he just tries to ride it as best he can.


  • No. There is every reason to “defend yourself”. The key is to actually be aware of what research and efforts are out there and minimizing your risk profile any time you are dealing with a black box.

    I mean, it is known that people can pick locks. Do you plug your ears every time you hear someone talk about how doors can be compromised? Or do you give up on everything and remove every single deadbolt in your home?

    Or… do you do a bit of research and figure out what you can do to make your home harder to break into. Whether it is sturdier screws, a reinforced doorjam, or other methods?


  • I can’t speak to monero specifically

    But:

    • Why aren’t they catching more criminals? They are. They just are finding alternate sources of evidence. Dick Wolf shows love to talk about how cops need to protect themselves from any poison fruit and blah blah blah. The reality is that they immediately go to the poison fruit and use that to make a plausible excuse for why they investigated something else that can confirm information they got from the illegal source. If you’ve ever wondered why they would think to investigate a random unrelated company that ends up being the smoking gun…
    • Why didn’t anyone claim the bounty? Because the CIA and the like don’t want people to know they compromised it?

    Back in my pure research days it was always fun to guess what the latest “big thing” was actually about. It was especially fun when you would be looking for funding opportunities and see really weird stuff that made no sense for the org sponsoring it but would have made perfect sense for a different 3LA.

    It was ALSO real fun to totally never notice when certain funding opportunities dried up and then there was a big push in the news about how we need to outlaw technology those opportunities totally didn’t already compromise.

    Like, for the better part of a decade The Big Thing was graph analysis techniques. And the number of kids who had no idea they were basically writing algorithms to process social media (especially twitter) was downright sad. And the people who DID realize what their work was geared toward? They applied for jobs where they got paid a lot more to do exactly that without needing to pretend it is actually about data storage technologies or optimizing cell tower load.

    And… let’s just say that most of those algorithms ALSO apply toward cryptocurrencies and transaction logs (since they had great applications for bank transactions…) and even doing a number on tumblers and so forth.


  • While I agree this definitely feels like more of a threat than an action, it IS worth understanding the many times that tor nodes have been compromised. Exit nodes are a well documented mess (and have many of the same vulnerabilities normal VPNs do) but eavesdropping and traffic analysis are also probabilities based upon how much of the network any given org has access to.

    If that NGO was doing hinky stuff or just doing a sloppy job? Those cops might actually have a LOT of actionable data that just needs a bit of processing.


    Which is why it is always important to understand what your risks and benefits from a privacy related tool are. People often think “I’ll just put everything through a vpn/tor” which DRASTICALLY increases their risk profiles. But they also don’t understand how tor works well enough to even know what it gives them over a traditional vpn (as opposed to “Dark Web” stuff which is a different mess).


  • If you need an “off the shelf, low effort” IDE then you pick whether you are using VSCode or Vim/Emacs and then go to youtube and google “best plugins for ${LANGUAGE} in ${EDITOR}”. And you get basically a minute of copy pasting to have it set up to about the same level of optimization.

    Aside from that? The reality is that everything takes time to learn. It took you time to learn your preferred emacs config. It took me time to learn default vim and then what my preferred vim config should be and how to take advantage of it. Just like it took time to learn the editor that came with python on windows for years (still might?).

    Which gets back to this being a boomer ass article.


  • CEC is pretty amazing for any relatively modern device (console, blu ray player, etc) in a “normal” setup.

    The main problems are if you are a bit of a “power user” and have a receiver or something (although I have also heard issues with soundbars) with it not always being clear what audio outputs will be used. And as consoles become more and more glorified computers you can run into issues where a simple workflow like:

    1. Start xbox
    2. Start download of big game for later
    3. Go back to “TV” to watch youtube

    Results in the xbox shutting down and not actually downloading the game.


    As a “power user” I just got a sofabaton (Just as mediocre and finicky as a Harmony but you won’t have forgotten that because your config is a decade old). but I keep telling myself that I should futz with my nvidia shield to see if I can use my receiver’s remote for everything instead.


  • Yes. A much less boomer-coded article would be better.

    But as someone who has actually used a lot of the various IDEs over the decades and keeps coming back to vim (and is already expecting to go back to vim within a year because of invasive copilot shit…): Those niche editors? They are either genuinely bad ideas (think TempleOS levels of insanity) or they became plugins for every other IDE. I like vim a lot but emacs is the same (actually emacs is an OS with a text interface but…). And many of those plugins ALSO exist for vscode and atom/sublime and so forth.

    Because good (uncopyrighted…) ideas propagate. That is development and design.


  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.ziptolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldAs it should be
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    7 days ago

    That… is a really shitty meme that misses the point?

    If you actually look at what the overlay exposes, the User still has the ability to pick specific channels, control volume, power, etc. All they really lose are the DVR (good example) and all of the user friendly stuff related to tv guides and the like (bad example).

    I assume this is just AI engagement farming bullshit that someone fell for and posted to lemmy but… I would actually say it would make more sense if the overlay were almost inverted.


  • I REALLY hate articles like this

    Saying we “lost” this software just shows that people don’t understand what software design/engineering is.

    Basically every screenshot of the “lost” TUIs look like a normal emacs/vim session for anyone who has learned about splits and :term (guess which god I believe in?). And people still use those near constantly. Hell, my workflow is generally a mix between vim and vscode depending upon what machine and operation I am working on. And that is a very normal workflow.

    And that is what we want out of software development. The good ideas move forward. The less good ideas become plugins for sickos. Because everyone loves vscode right now but… Microsoft is shitting that up REAL fast with copilot and just wait until every employer on the planet realizes that and ban it.

    And the rest just ignores the point of an IDE. Yes, taking your hand off the keyboard to touch the mouse LOWERS YOUR EFFICIENCY*. But it also means you can switch between languages or even environments trivially. Yes, it is often more annoying to dig through twelve menus to find what you want or talk a co-worker through how to do basic git operations that would be three commands. But holy crap I hate the people who “can’t work without my settings” that mean they are incapable of doing any “live” debugging or doing any peer programming where they aren’t driving.

    Back in the day we had plenty of people who were angry that not everyone was using vi and a bunch of tcsh scripts to develop because it clearly meant they didn’t understand what they were doing and were too dependent on compilers and debuggers. And it was just as stupid then as it is now.



  • What pisses me off the most with the entertainment industry, is how they expect you to buy the same things whether it’s a different format or on a platform multiple times.

    No, they don’t. Yes, there are the people who will buy every single release of every single disney movie. But the general idea is that just because someone bought The Fifth Element on DVD twenty years ago doesn’t mean they are buying every single new 4k UHD re-release. Obviously that would be preferable but…

    Furthermore, they willingly take away shows, movies .etc on a reguar cyclic basis on streaming platforms.

    That annoys the piss out of me. But… that was how TV worked for decades. Seinfeld will always be on at 7 PM on TBS every single day until the end of time. But the three people who actually liked Coach? Once that got replaced by… Becker? It was “gone forever” and no longer something you watch when you are skipping school at lunch. And if you were REALLY a Wings superfan? You bought it on tape.

    Most of this boils down to… we actually have it REALLY good these days. I remember when I had to make it a point to stop off at Best Buy on my way home from work for a month because I had read that a really cool CRPG called “Evil Islands” was coming out and knew that Best Buy would buy like three copies. And some random soccer mom was likely to buy something for her kid while she was buying batteries. And, of course, Best Buy wouldn’t tell anyone when they got new games and when they would put them on the shelves.

    Now? I can hear about my dream game and still wait until a week or two after launch for a sale because Steam will “never” run out of copies.

    It’s like, leave us the fuck alone. If something is not available anymore with absolutely no assured plans to bring it back for re-release and to be available on even streaming platform which leaves us to pirate - let it fucking be. What, are you going to make a shitstorm for people who buy movies and shows while thrifting? Surprised these fuckers haven’t gotten to that process yet because of how god damn greedy they are.

    I personally have no problem pirating shit if I can’t get it otherwise (mostly because I would rather a proper blu-ray rip or to have it on Steam/GoG/whatever). But I will always call bullshit on that mentality of “We are just pirating because we can’t get it otherwise!”

    Decade or two back and abandonware was very much a thing. Plenty of us were signed up to private trackers so we could share CyClones or Star Crusader because those were dead games. And plenty of those trackers had specific rules about not having anything that is currently for sale… or Nintendo… because they totally were about preservation and it was nothing about getting sued. Then CD Projekt start up this Good Old Games site and it is exactly what we were all asking for. And… that led to discussions on what happens when suddenly those old dos games ARE available.

    End result? GoG rips are the preferred medium because they are DRM-free(-ish) and so forth. And it was obvious it was never about preservation and was just about wanting to pirate shit. Which… is fine. Just obnoxious when people pretend they are noble because they want to play Darklands without paying.

    Which is kind of the other recurring theme. People want to be pirates. Cool, steal that shit. Just don’t pretend you are morally superior and a freedom fighter and blah blah blah. You want free shit. Cool.


  • More drives is always better. But you need to understand how you are making it better.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels is a good breakdown of the different RAID levels. Those are slightly different depending on if you are doing “real”/hardware RAID or software raid (e.g. ZFS) but the principle holds true and the rest is just googling the translation (for example, Unraid is effectively RAID4 with some extra magic to better support mismatched drive sizes)

    That actually IS an important thing to understand early on. Because, depending on the RAID model you use, it might not be as easy as adding another drive. Have three 8 TB and want to add a 10? That last 2 TB won’t be used until EVERY drive has at least 10 TB. There are ways to set this up in ZFS and Ceph and the like but it can be a headache.

    And the issue isn’t the cloudflare tunnel. The issue is that you would have a publicly accessible service running on your network. If you use the cloudflare access control thing (login page before you can access the site) you mitigate a lot of that (while making it obnoxious for anything that uses an app…) but are still at the mercy of cloudflare.

    And understand that these are all very popular tools for a reason. So they are also things hackers REALLY care about getting access to. Just look up all the MANY MANY MANY ransomware attacks that QNAP had (and the hilarity of QNAP silently re-enabling online services with firmware updates…). Because using a botnet to just scan a list of domains and subdomains is pretty trivial and more than pays for itself after one person pays the ransom.

    As for paying for that? I would NEVER pay for nextcloud. It is fairly shit software that is overkill for what people use it for (file syncing and document server) and dogshit for what it pretends to be (google docs+drive). If I am going that route, I’ll just use Google Docs or might even check out the Proton Docs I pay for alongside my email and VPN.

    But for something self hosted where the only data that matters is backed up to a completely different storage setup? I still don’t like it being “exposed” but it is REALLY nice to have a working shopping list and the like when I head to the store.


  • A LOT of questions there.

    Unraid vs Truenas vs Proxmox+Ceph vs Proxmox+ZFS for NAS: I am not sure if Unraid is ONLY a subscription these days (I think it was going that way?) but for a single machine NAS with a hodgepodge of drives, it is pretty much unbeatable.

    That said, it sounds like you are buying dedicated drives. There are a lot of arguments for not having large spinning disk drives (I think general wisdom is 12 TB is the biggest you should go for speed reasons?), but at 3x18 you aren’t going to really be upgrading any time soon. So Truenas or just a ZFS pool in Proxmox seems reasonable. Although, with only three drives you are in a weird spot regarding “raid” options. Seeing as I am already going to antagonize enough people by having an opinion, I’ll let someone else wage the holy war of RAID levels.

    I personally run Proxmox+Ceph across three machines (with one specifically set up to use Proxmox+ZFS+Ceph so I can take my essential data with me in an evacuation). It is overkill and Proxmox+ZFS is probably sufficient for your needs. The main difference is that your “NAS” is actually a mount that you expose via SMB and something like Cockpit. Apalrd did a REALLY good video on this that goes step by step and explains everything and it is well worth checking out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu3t8pcq8O0.

    Ceph is always the wrong decision. It is too slow for enterprise and too finicky for home use. That said, I use ceph and love it. Proxmox abstracts away most of the chaos but you still need to understand enough to set up pools and cephfs (at which point it is exactly like the zfs examples above). And I love that I can set redundancy settings for different pools (folders) of data. So my blu ray rips are pretty much YOLO with minimal redundancy. My personal documents have multiple full backups (and then get backed up to a different storage setup entirely). Just understand that you really need at least three nodes (“servers”) for that to make sense. But also? If you are expanding it is very possible to set up the ceph in parallel to your initial ZFS pool (using separate drives/OSDs), copy stuff over, and then cannibalize the old OSDs. Just understand that makes that initial upgrade more expensive because you need to be able to duplicate all of the data you care about.

    I know some people want really fancy NASes with twenty million access methods. I want an SMB share that I can see when I am on my local network. So… barebones cockpit exposing an SMB share is nice. And I have syncthing set up to access the same share for the purpose of saves for video games and so forth.

    Unraid vs Truenas vs Proxmox for Services: Personally? I prefer to just use Proxmox to set up a crapton of containers/vms. I used Unraid for years but the vast majority of tutorials and wisdom out there are just setting things up via something closer to proxmox. And it is often a struggle to replicate that in the Unraid gui (although I think level1techs have good resources on how to access the real interface which is REALLY good?).

    And my general experience is that truenas is mostly a worst of all worlds in every aspect and is really just there if you want something but are afraid of/smart enough not to use proxmox like a sicko.

    Processor and Graphics: it really depends on what you are doing. For what you listed? Only frigate will really take advantage and I just bought a Coral accelerator which is a lot cheaper than a GPU and tends to outperform them for the kind of inference that Frigate does. There is an argument for having a proper GPU for transcoding in Plex but… I’ve never seen a point in that.

    That said: A buddy of mine does the whole vlogger thing and some day soon we are going to set up a contract for me to sit down and set her up an exporting box (with likely use as a streaming box). But I need to do more research on what she actually needs and how best to handle that and she needs to figure out her budget for both materials and my time (the latter likely just being another case where she pays for my vacation and I am her camera guy for like half of it). But we probably will grab a cheap intel gpu for that.

    External access: Don’t do it, that is a great way to get hacked.

    That out of the way. My nextcloud is exposed to the outside world via a cloudflare tunnel. It fills me with anxiety but as long as you regularly update everything it is “fine”.

    My plex? I have a lifetime plex pass so I just use their services to access it remotely. And I think I pay an annual fee for homeassistant because I genuinely want to support that project.

    Everything else? I used to use wireguard (and openvpn before it) but actually switched to tailscale. I like the control that the former provided but much prefer the model where I expose individual services (well, VMs). Because it is nice to have access to my cockpit share when I want to grab a file in a hotel room. There is zero reason that anything needs access to my qbitorrent or calibre or opnsense setup. Let alone even seeing my desktop that I totally forgot to turn off.

    But the general idea I use for all my selfhosted services is: The vast majority of interactions should happen when I am at home on my home network. It is a special case if I ever need to access anything remotely and that is where tailscale comes in.

    Theoretically you can also do the same via wireguard and subnetting and vlans but I always found that to be a mess to provide access both locally and remotely and the end result is I get lazy. Also, Tailscale is just an app on basically any machine whereas wireguard tends to involve some commands or weird phone interactions.


  • Railjack itself is fun.

    Railjack in pubs is hell on earth. Because you can never be sure when it is safe to “abort mission” so you basically need to rush to Nav to go back to dojo after every single mission. Which often includes at least one person who wants to do another one and doesn’t realize WHY you go back to dojo during pubs. Also, when there is a Nightwave for it, you have the hosts who just leave party the moment the objectives are done which has like a 70% chance of putting the rest of the party into a nav-less railjack where they just have to quit out and lose all the rewards.

    Also, we are at the mercy of the host’s railjack. It has gotten better but you still get the occasional “meta” railjack where only the pilot seat has good guns and everyone else needs to just get in their archwings or do endless repairs and forging because the guns are worthless.

    Which… basically makes it the worst of all worlds in Warframe

    • We have the host migration issues but they are almost guaranteed rather than occasional
    • We have the annoying delay between runs common to the open worlds
    • Much like Spy, a bad matchmaking guarantees a loss or a miserable time

    Which is why I suspect that Railjack will always remain a thing that is there for story quest sequences and not much else.


  • This is the internet. Always assume people are selling something.

    In this case? MAYBE it is someone advertising their handyman service (doubtful because this is a nonsense premise). More likely? It is the same as all those posts about the fucking aligator or puppy and all the ai generated jesus missing a leg and wearing a military uniform pictures where people say “Why don’t these posts ever go viral”? It is nonsense that boomers stare at and share.

    Which in and of themselves are “harmless”. But when the metrics for those posts get high enough? THAT is when the owner of those bots post ads.

    Screenshotting with no citation kind of undermines that so… good? But it is important to understand why content like this exists.