NaibofTabr

Seriously, fuck Pearson. Garbage company.

Nice save, and a fantastic PSA.

Also I’m a big fan of sleeping on a problem as a path to a solution. I’m not sure how exactly that skill develops, but it’s definitely something that I’ve done a few times over the years.

Graphene is the most amazing material, it can do anything and everything… except leave the lab.

There are definitely at least 9 circles of emacs filled with tormented souls.

Perfect explanation.

Thank you, I try. It’s always tricky to keep network infrastructure explanations concise and readable - the Internet is such a complicated mess.

People like paying for convenience.

Well, I would simplify that to people like convenience. Infrastructure of any type is basically someone else solving convenience problems for you. People don’t really like paying, but they will if it’s the most convenient option.

Syncthing is doing this for you for free, I assume mostly because the developers wanted the infrastructure to work that way and didn’t want it to be dependent on DNS, and decided to make it available to users at large. It’s very convenient, but it also obscures a lot of the technical side of network services which can make learning harder.

This kind of thing shows why tech giants are giants and why selfhosted is a niche.

There’s also always the “why reinvent the wheel?” question, and consider that the guy who is selling wheels works on making wheels as a full-time occupation and has been doing so long enough to build a business on it, whereas you are a hobbyist. There are things that guy knows about wheelmaking that would take you ten years to learn, and he also has a properly equipped workshop for it - you have some YouTube videos, your garage and a handful of tools from Harbor Freight.

Sometimes there is good reason to do so (e.g. privacy from cloud service data gathering) but this is a real balancing act between cost (time and money, both up-front and long-term), risk (privacy exposure, data loss, failure tolerance), and convenience. If you’re going to do something yourself, you should have a specific answer to the question, and probably do a little cost-benefit checking.

Right, OK, but Signal sustains itself on charity.

But if I’m reading the materials correctly, I’ll need to set up a domain and pay some upfront costs to make my library accessible outside my home.

Why is that?

So when your mobile device is on the public internet it can’t reach directly into your private home network. The IP addresses of the servers on your private network are not routable outside of it, so your mobile device can’t talk to them directly. From the perspective of the public internet, the only piece of your private network that is visible is your ISP gateway device.

When you try to reach your Syncthing service from the public internet, none of the routers know where your private Syncthing instance is or how to reach it. To solve this, the Syncthing developers provide discovery servers on the public internet which contain the directions for the Syncthing app on your device to find your Syncthing service on your private network (assuming you have registered your Syncthing server with the discovery service).

This is a whole level of network infrastructure that is just being done for you to make using Syncthing more convenient. It saves you from having to deal with the details of network routing across network boundaries.

Funkwhale does not provide an equivalent service. To reach your Funkwhale service on your private network from the public internet you have to solve the cross-boundary routing problem for yourself. The most reliable way to do this is to use the DNS infrastructure that already exists on the public internet, which means getting a domain name and linking it to your ISP gateway address.

If your ISP gateway had a static address you could skip this and configure whatever app accesses your Funkwhale service to always point to your ISP gateway address, but residential IP addresses are typically dynamic, so you can’t rely on it being the same long-term. Setting up DynamicDNS solves this problem by updating a DNS record any time your ISP gateway address changes.

There are several DynDNS providers listed at the bottom of that last article, some of which provide domain names. Some of them are free services (like afraid.org) but those typically have some strings attached (afraid.org requires you to log in regularly to confirm that your address is still active, otherwise it will be disabled).

UBIOS’s unique features over UEFI include increased support for chiplets and other heterogeneous computing use-cases, such as multi-CPU motherboards with mismatching CPUs, something UEFI struggles with or does not support. It will also better support non-x86 CPU architectures such as ARM, RISC-V, and LoongArch, the first major Chinese operating system.

Hmm, I haven’t read the full spec, but typically when you’re making mismatched components work together like this it means you can only support security features that are common for all of them - that is, any security can only be the lowest common standard. Does anybody know where to find more specific information on security features in UBIOS? Wider compatibility generally means more vulnerability.

One of the major design goals of UEFI was to add security to BIOS, which never had any real security in its design. If UBIOS is less secure than UEFI then it’s really not a good idea to use it for anything beyond personal devices.

Does UBIOS have feature parity with UEFI or is it just targeting a different use case altogether? UEFI’s security features are still not complete protection, but it would be a terrible idea to run a network server without them in the present cybersecurity environment.

Flatpaks are better than Snaps, but properly maintained dependency trees and SBOMs are best, by a wide margin.

Roblox didn’t just “make it easy”, it’s their entire business model, which is the problem. Watch the videos. The discussion isn’t about how much of a percentage Roblox takes, it’s about how kids basically get pressured to work in digital sweatshops to create the content which is what Roblox sells.

It’s child exploitation for profit:

investigation: How Roblox is Exploiting Young Game Developers

Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper.

No one should patronize Roblox. They exploit child labor for profit:

investigation: How Roblox is Exploiting Young Game Developers

Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper.

When you hear “Roblox” you should think “child exploitation”.

You must be using the wrong repositories… try enabling apt --please-dont-track-me-fbi

But a proper package manager is better, and we already had that.

There is a crow pulling both wolves by the tail called “bedrock linux” that can install packages using both apt and aur.

Oh god… what happens when they both try to pull the same library as a dependency, but slightly different versions because different repos?

They should be powered on if you want to retain data on them long-term. The controller should automatically check physical integrity and disable bad sections as needed.

I’m not sure if just connecting them to power would be enough for the controller to run error correction, or if they need to be connected to a computer. That might be model specific.

What server OS are you using? Are you already using some SSDs for cache drives?

Any backup is better than no backup, but SSDs are really not a good choice for long-term cold storage. You’ll probably get tired of manually plugging them in to check integrity and update the backups pretty fast.

You will use Copilot and you will like it have no recourse.

Hmm, but you have to install and run the Python environment for that. AWK is typically present on *NIX systems already. Python seem alike overkill for basic text processing tasks.

Nobody said anything about serfdom.

Communities shouldn’t be able to fail like so.

Communities are always able to fail like so. A division between members can absolutely fracture any kind of social cooperation.

Your average stand-alone commune doesn’t get that much bigger than a family-farm.

This isn’t a commune, it’s a compound. Or a live/work arrangement. Or just a cult, depending on how “we’re all family here” they are.

I wouldn’t encourage too deep an integration between artisans and single communes. Everyone in the commune should know how to make their commune work and who do go to outside the commune when specific tools or expertise are needed beyond their commune’s residents.

This isn’t a commune, it’s just a town, or a village.

The whole concept of a commune is self-supporting, self-sustaining and to at least some degree self-contained. Also, frequently, self-absorbed.

No one person in a commune should be irreplacable or capable of taking the whole thing down

The smaller the group is the more inevitable this is. At a very small size (less than 20 people), where the group is dependent on itself for food production, then just the loss of basic labor might ruin the group’s ability to provide for itself.

in a way that prevents residents from being able to just up and leave.

If everyone just up and leaves, what was even the point of forming a commune? Again, what you’re talking about is just a town. A primarily agrarian town maybe, but still just a town.

Well it’s less about how you would react individually, and more about how the commune as a whole would deal with the internal division.

In small interdependent groups, social breakdowns can cause the entire community to fail, because every member is an essential part of how the community supports itself and there are no backups for any skill set.

The bus factor problem applies if people start refusing to work with each other.