• 4 Posts
  • 424 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • This is a foundational restriction with how federation works and was discussed back during the exodus from reddit when they cut off their API. Votes can’t be federated without identity attached, or you’d end up with a single vote multiplied by however many instances federated it to yours.

    This is the price of the fediverse being uncensorable. Everything you do on it is oublic, and norhing can be reliably deleted from the entire fediverse.

    There was some efforts to obsfucate voting by one of the m/kbin lemmy alternatives, to have each account have an associated hidden account with a randomly generated name that would technically be the account used for voting, so only the admin of your own instance could connect between your public account identity and your voting identity, but that could also just be defeated by basic pattern identification.

    As far as instance admins are concerned, this has been known from the start, and is completely outside of their control. That said, it could definitely use some more signposting for awareness. It’s shocking how often this entire discussion gets repeated by people who apparently never thought to look into how federation actually works.





  • This company has illegally installed their cameras in more than one town, then tried to sell the local police force on them.

    They have lawyers on staff that they use to coach local politicians on how to hold the votes to establish contracts with them in ways that aren’t technically illegal, but ensure that no community opposition has a way to have their voices heard.

    You can find a lot of these sprts of stories by searching online. In local subreddits, ones dedicated to talking about flock, and local news.


    Benn Jordan has a good 40 minute video giving an overview of these systems, how they work, what they track, and why they are a problem. He highlights some cases where families were held at gunpoint by police due to failures of these systems. He also experiments with defeating the AI that reads plates.


    Louis Rossman is currently leading a campaign against their installation where he lives in Austin, Texas right now. Has a number of videos on it.

    Overview before the Austin City Council vote: https://youtu.be/4RM09nKczVs

    Call for people to show up at the Austin City Council session to discuss the potential contract with Flock, and showing how difficult it is to find this sort of stuff and be involved with your local government: https://youtu.be/g4vL1ERdZ9Y

    Call to action 2: https://youtu.be/hDOmYqlwxD4

    Austin City Council reschedules the vote (in a questionably illegal fashion) with less than 24 hours notice when they realize they kicked the hornet’s nest: https://youtu.be/iscDYp6dtl8

    Minor followup during the wait for the revised time, at two of the three parks with 90% of reported car break ins these cameras are meant to deter: https://youtu.be/2QbtDWrlPpc




  • Built in… I think 2021? Maybe 2020? Would have been October-ish. It was right as nVidia’s 3000 series came out and no one was able to get ahold of them, or any other GPUs, at MSRP.

    • CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (came with CPU cooler)
    • Mobo: Asus TUF GAMING X570-PLUS ATX AM4
    • RAM: G.Skill Ripjaws V 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR4-3600 CL16
    • OS and games that need fast loading drive: Samsung 970 Evo 1 TB M.2
    • Drive for everything else: WD_BLACK 2 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM
    • Also misc USB 3.0 drives, around 20TB total for media, emulation, backups, old games where load speed doesn’t matter, etc.
    • GPU: Asus DUAL EVO OC GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER (Tried to hit a sweet spot on price vs power, and then find the best performing card of that type. But mostly this was just snatching up whatever I could grab at MSRP. No one was getting GPUs when I built it, but I lucked out with an alert from NewEgg)
    • Tower: Fractal Design Meshify C ATX Mid Tower (came with two fans)
    • PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA 750 G3
    • Additional fans: Two Noctua A14 PWM chromax 82.52 CFM 140 mm

    Use case when built: Gaming at 1080p with settings maxed out (or close), pimping old game graphics using reshade, running a home virtual server lab for learning, never having to close out of applications or browser tabs to ensure other programs had enough speed. Programming using RAM hungry IDEs (Jetbrains and VSCode).

    Use case now: Mostly the same, but gaming at 1440p (upgraded my monitors) with high frame rates requires bumping down settings at times. Don’t play too many recent AAA games either, so it’s mostly fine for my needs, but the GPU is finally starting to show its age. Thankfully my eyes are pretty “console-ified” so with variable refresh rate I don’t usually notice framerate until it drops below 30. Little less use of the virtual homelab stuff. Still program at home occasionally, but again, not as often anymore. Use as a lazy man’s media server to share media folders to Kodi across the house.


  • Vampire Survivors’s Ode to Castlevania DLC

    It’s so fun to see them actually get to use the IP VS was inspired from, and the DLC is absolutely a love letter to all of Castlevania, including some of the more obscure characters in the lore. The DLC has roughly double the content of the base game, with at least three big “unlock/events” locking more layers of content behind them. Tons of new playable characters, tons of new weapons, one new massive map with its own unique mechanics and progression, and so much classic Castlevania music and remixes. Totally worth it.




  • Exchange Server is effectively dead mid October too. Technically they have Exchange Server SE as an option, but it’s clearly not how they want people using Exchange anymore. They don’t even want hybrid setups.

    Which is extra annoying because if you have Azure AD (I guess it’s Entra ID now) syncing from an on prem AD forest, half of the mailbox management shit in Exchange Online just doesn’t work and forces you to make the changes on-prem anyway.




  • Have fun with that then. Sorry about your balls.

    If you’re competent and technologically saavy enough to use a Linux distro as your daily driver, you can learn to make Windows work for you too.

    Waste of effort if you don’t need to interact with any Windows environments for school or work, but definitely possible.

    For me? I’m happy to get paid to automate shit using PowerShell that should have been basic built in functionality from the start. PowerShell is just the most convenient scripting language due to being packed-in with most Windows installs, and tons of built in functionality for interfacing with other Microsoft products. So as long as Microsoft keeps sucking, I’ve got a comfy paycheck.

    And if the year of the Linux desktop ever finally happens? I’m ready, I’ll be cheering, and I’ll be ready to get paid helping companies to make the switch.


  • I’m usually a Windows “shill” or at least a casual defender of it, as I work in a Windows environment and it’s not as bad as people pretend it is. No shade against Linux, I love it and Windows is bad. Just not like “I’d rather self-castrate” bad.

    Anyway…

    But for a home server? Either be super lazy and set up samba shares from your Windows desktop for the drives (avoid having a server at all) or bite the bullet and use Linux. You’ll get so much more out of a Linux server that it’s not even funny.