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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I think I may not be presenting my position well, and thus am coming off as a right wing partisan hack of the sort that wants to defund the EPA. That’s not my position.

    A lot of people (mostly conservatives and big businesses) that complain about ‘red tape’ as a way of attacking various regulations. For example, people will say it’s impossible to build a power plant because of environmental red tape.
    A lot of that regulation is positive though. For example, even if the land is cheap, you can’t build a power plant next to a nature preserve because the pollution will kill all the birds. And I like that regulation. The power people will of course complain as will the mines that were going to sell the plant coal. In cases like this, IMHO, they can all fuck off.

    At the same time though, the ‘red tape’ that many businesses complain about does sometimes actually exist. That is, to do business you have to get endless streams of licenses, approvals, permits, etc for things where the bureaucracy and licensing process adds little or no value to either the industry or the population at large.
    From what I’ve read, this sort of thing exists a lot in Germany. I’ve talked to a few people who were starting a business in Europe and they specifically avoided a few countries for that reason.


  • The problem with this question is your friends, if whatever you decide on isn’t something your friends have or are willing to get, then it’s not useful for you. Signal offers probably the best mix of adoption and security. It however misses a few notable features, for example the iOS client has no way to back up or restore your messages. I’m a big fan of matrix, which seems very extensible and has good security, but if you are in a sensitive application like an authoritarian country, it wouldn’t be my choice. All the messages are stored on the server and while they are encrypted it’s still not what I would use for a chat I never want to see in court.


  • First- understand that everyone goes through this, everybody has an answer for you, but the answer that worked for them may not work for you. There’s no right or wrong answer. A lot of people say ‘the way to get over someone is to get under someone’ personally I’ve never subscribed to that sort of thinking. It leads to unhealthy rebound relationships IMHO.

    The only thing that will really fix this is time. So there is no magic bullet. There are things you can do to help though or pass the time faster. The biggest one is find ways to not ruminate. Focus your attention on other things, ideally useful things. Take some time to improve yourself in fun ways. Hit the gym is an obvious one, but I generally recommend take up a hobby or learn an instrument or take a class. Basically learn some fun new skill and focus your attention on that. It serves as a distraction from your grief, but also a source of engagement and a little happiness.
    It WILL get better.




  • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.mltoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldSynology vs DIY
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    1 year ago

    Honestly I think you’ll be happy either way. Synology is very very good at some things. And the software makes it very easy and approachable to spin up a lot of private cloud type stuff without a lot of technical messing around. That said, you will get more hardware/performance for your dollar with a PC server. You can go the DIY route, or if you don’t mind a little more power consumption and want more performance buy a used Dell PowerEdge on eBay. Based on what you say, I think you’ll be happy either way. The real value you get from Synology is their software. Their photo app is very wife friendly. And I don’t think you’ll find any serious restrictions with it, you get full root SSH access into the box.

    So I guess my suggestion would be evaluate the photo management in TrueNAS versus Synology. You can spin up a virtual machine of TrueNAS on your desktop and play with it if you want. The only other gotcha is if you want Plex to do transcoding you definitely want the PC because you can throw in a GPU and accelerate that a lot.

    //edit- the one other thing to mention is backups- Synology has GREAT backup software and it’s free. Active Backup for Business will back up your desktop/laptop, versioned, deduplicated, very efficiently. And Hyper Backup will backup your Synology itself (or some parts of it) to the cloud, optionally with client-side encryption. I suggest Wasabi as the backend for that, it’s only like $7/TB/mo. Or just get another Synology and put it at the house of someone you know and you have an instant offsite backup with no recurring cost.


  • I love this whole cyberdeck thing.

    I remember back in the early 2000s, there was a lot more innovation when it came to portable devices. There were gadgets that sort of resemble modern smartphones just clunkier (iPaq), ones with keyboards below the screen (BlackBerry), ones with slide out keyboards (HTC and others), ones that flipped open like laptops but could fit in your pocket (HP Jornada), etc.

    Somewhere along the line all that innovation went out the window and now every single phone or gadget looks more or less exactly the same. Like take the top 10 or 15 smartphones, debrand them, and put them in a box, and 99% of people couldn’t tell the hardware apart.

    You would think there would be a market for some level of variation, or just have one company that makes the phone 5 mm thicker but the battery lasts for 3 days. But we don’t even see that.

    Foldable screens seem to be spurring a little bit of innovation so I have hopes. But until then, I would love to see some of these cyberdeck designs put into production. I would happily pay a couple hundred bucks for a raspberry pi equivalent of a Jornada 720 (as long as the keyboard is touch typeable like the old one).





  • Absolutely I use ad block. Ublock origin, plus a couple other privacy related extensions, plus browser configured with most privacy settings turned up all the way.

    Most publishers seem to have no interest in giving me a good browsing experience, only in shoving as many ads as possible down my throat and violating my privacy as much as possible. So I have zero sympathy. I have sympathy for the smaller websites that then get locked as well, that wouldn’t otherwise have intrusive ads, but I am not going to subject myself to the larger ones just for their benefit.

    Without ad block I have found a lot of websites almost totally unusable, or significantly more time wasting. Reddit is of course a big one, new Reddit without ad block is a total clusterfuck. YouTube is also pretty bad.

    Thing is, I’m happy to pay. I’m looking forward to an era when I can do microtransactions in crypto to pay a website a couple pennies for content I like.


  • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDeleted
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    1 year ago

    VPN endpoints would not necessarily have low IP reputation. A VPN provider that allows its users to spam the internet is probably not a good one anyway. And besides, that would not inhibit registration, it would just make users fill out a form to apply so the server operator would have to go through and approve it.


  • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDeleted
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    1 year ago

    Doesn’t have to be a crypto miner. Just has to be any sort of computationally intense task. I think the ideal would be some sort of JavaScript that integrates that along with the captcha. For example, have some sort of computationally difficult math problem where the server already knows the answer, and the answer is then fed into a simple video game engine to procedurally generate a ‘level’. The keyboard and mouse input of the player would then be fed directly back to the server in real time, which could decide if it’s actually seeing a human playing the correct level.


  • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDeleted
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    1 year ago

    I’d do a few things.

    First, make signing up computationally expensive. Some javascript that would have to run client side, like a crypto miner or something, and deliver proof to the server that some significant amount of CPU power was used.

    Second, some type of CAPTCHA. ReCaptcha with the settings turned up a bit is a good way to go.

    Third, IP address reputation checks. Check IP addresses for known spam servers, it’s the same thing email servers do. There’s realtime blacklists you can query against. If the client IP is on them, don’t allow registration but only allow application to register.