Lol. Some galaxy brains were ‘Oh my Apple would never roll over and simply do what they’re told! They’ll keep our data safe!’ and mad at me for saying exactly this was going to happen.

Well, huh, look at that. A corporation that rolled over faster than a well-trained golden retriever. Who would have guessed it.

Do you have a credit card?

If you do, Oracle offers a shockingly generous free tier of stuff. 2 little baby EPYC VPSes, a 4-core 24gb ARM instance, and a bunch of other sundries including 10TB/month of data transfer.

You can run a LOT of fediverse services on those free Ampere instances, and even something like GoToSocial will run on the little baby EPYCs.

And to just cut off the incoming dudes: yes, Oracle is a shitty awful company with shitty awful policies run by a shitty awful billionaire, but that’s no reason to not take free shit from them.

(And to the next group of people: I’m closing in on 4 years of free Oracle shit and they haven’t banned me, so I’m inclined to think all those stories are incomplete and they were doing something - mining, portscanning, hosting questionable shit, torrenting stuff, running a vpn that was abused - more than “nothing”.)

Universiality, basically: almost everyone, everywhere has an email account, or can find one for free. As well as every OS and every device has a giant pile of mail clients for you to chose from.

And I mean, email is a simple tech stack and well understood and reliable: I host an internal mail server for notifications and updates and shit, and it’s rapid, fast, and works perfectly.

It’s only when you suddenly need to email someone OTHER than your local shit that it turns to complete shit.

Now now, they’re not just inconsiderate assholes and leeches.

They’re inconsiderate nazi oligarch assholes and leeches.

Well, that’d certainly be a novel solution to the trolley problem. Just make sure FSD always defaults to hitting the non-nazis first.

For what they’re charging, you’re not going to get elite private security, you’re going to get mall cops on their day off.

This is not for the actual rich, it’s for tiktok influencers to show off.

Glad my last phone had a slight fire-related incident and that I got a iPhone SE 3 before they killed it, because as a replacement this is just plain a bad deal.

$170 more for a whole lot of shit that I cannot summon a single care about.

Ah cool, the one time I read the article it’s wrong and saying that there hadn’t been someone who had stepped up yet.

Well, I’ll go back to making uninformed comments based solely on the headline, because clearly the articles are not adding any value. (/s, etc.)

Make H5N5 great kill everyone again!

In general, signal has proved they store no data besides the phone number itself, and in court they have only been able to give phone numbers.

My problem with signal is actually this, because it’s only part of the story.

Let’s say the FBI suspects you of doing something horrible, like say you played baby shark in public. They have good cause to believe you’re a Signal user, so they get a judge to authorize a subpoena based on your phone number, and Signal complies - and, yes, all they’re doing is confirming to the FBI that you have an account with them.

Now they’re going to go after you with ‘We know you have a secret messaging app you use, Signal, and we know you used it to plan playing baby shark at the mall last Tuesday.’

And so, if you’re not really clear on how all of this works, it’s a fantastic wedge to try to pry actual incriminating information from you. Or, hell, you let them look at the app on your phone negating the whole damn encrypted part in the first place, because you’re sure they already know.

Properly secure messengers shouldn’t be tied to that level of PII, because, well, cops can still try to use it to bludgeon you.

Maybe a little paranoid, but I’ve decided to embrace some of the paranoia since not doing so means you have to trust in the rules and policies that the law puts in place and well, uh…

Well, “maintainer” is usually a single person job. They didn’t write all the code or whatever, just were the gatekeeper to what got added and making sure shit works.

So I mean, it’s not great nobody is stepping up, but it’s also not like they magiced up the entirety of linux’s wifi support single handed, either.

Even following ‘beginner’ tutorials is hit or miss

It’s gotten worse than it even used to be, because more than half the “tutorials” I’ve run across are clearly AI written and basically flat out wrong.

Of course, they’re ALSO the “answers” that get pushed by Bing/Google so even if you run into someone who is willing to follow documentation, they’re going to get served worthless slop.

One thing I will give arch is that if there’s a wiki entry for something, it’s at least written by a human and is actually accurate which is more than I’ve found ANYWHERE else.

The only way you could make that worse is if Palantir bought them all first.

had a falling out

Boy that’s the most sanewashed way saying ‘whipped up a mob that wanted to hang him’ I think I’ve ever seen. Kudos, I guess?

There’s no such thing as too much seeding.

Well, maybe the 85tb of Ubuntu 24.04 I’ve done is too much, but I mean, whatever.

(I’ve got basically everything I’ve downloaded in the last 7 years seeding, some 6000 torrents. qBittorrent isn’t the most happy with this, but it’s still working, if using a shit-ton of RAM at this point.)

And more fun, lots of laptops have really goofy routing. I’ve got one where the DP alt mode on the USB-C ports are on the dGPU, but the HDMI ports are on the iGPU. And the internal panel is on the iGPU unless you switch it to be on the dGPU because yay mux.

Why? I don’t know. Too much meth while laying the board out or something I guess.

10940X

“They say”, but they’re right. Ryzen chips do have worse idle power usage, but you’re talking about 10w or so, at most.

And uh, if you were looking at an X-series CPU, I can’t see how that 10w is a dealbreaker, because you were already looking at a shockingly inefficient chip.

Everything is temporary, except for that 25 year old system that’s keeping everything running and can’t be replaced because nobody knows how or why it works just that if you touch it everything falls over.

I don’t recall exactly, but it’s more like days rather than hours. At some point the instances will mark you as down, and then stop trying to federate with you, so there’s a hard limit but it’s fairly generous and not especially aggressive.

I found the PR for the queue, and it mentions retries but doesn’t seem to mention exact timing, at least to my quick read. ( https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3605 )

I mean, eBay exists. You can get a Commodore 64, a Mac II-era mac, or a 486 for not that much money.

I have a giant pile of retro stuff including those, and an absurdly expensive Pentium 1ghz box with a proper Vortex 2 and 3dfx voodoo 5 card, sitting around for retro gaming.

Which uh, mostly is all I do anymore. There’s also a TON of modern improvements to emulate floppy drives, replace hard drives with SD cards, and even new video and sound cards that are waaaaay better than what you had to deal with when the hardware was new.

It’s not as cheap as it was 5 years ago, but it’s still reasonable if you have an era you’re after and kinda stay focused on one or two retro computers and don’t, say, decide you want to own one of every G3 and G4 tower that was made or anything insane like that.

…stop looking at me like that.

There’s also a ton of Youtubers that are touching all sorts of rare and expensive hardware that’s a good watch, too. (8 Bit Guy, LGR, Adrian’s Digital Basement, Necroware)