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”.)

Oh good, just what I always wanted: some techbros able to SSH into my bed and tell how horrible my sleep is.

Do love the exposed AWS creds though. That’s some premium high-quality software engineering.

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.

No joke.

I’ve gotten to the point where I just don’t really play anything anymore because of it.

You go ‘boy I’d like to see what new games are coming soon’ and you immediately land in a cesspool of people throwing a fit that there’s a black guy, or a trans girl, or a white chick that doesn’t make their little peepee hard, as well as any other awful sexist, racist, ableist swill you can possibly imagine all over every inch of anything that remotely looks like gaming media or discussion forums.

I just kind of have quit looking, and just playing old games for the 2nd or 3rd time, despite the fact I would happily have bought anything that seems remotely fun a couple of years ago because I don’t want to subject myself to those morons, end up playing games with them, or like, having anyone confuse me as being one of them as you said.

No no, you don’t understand!

He’s one of the good billionaires!

(/s for some of you, and for others perhaps you should reconsider why you feel the need to defend a billionaire, regardless of your opinion on video game platforms)

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

They’re inconsiderate nazi oligarch assholes and leeches.

But I was assured it would be the equivalent of a 4090! Surely someone with an ugly jacket wouldn’t lie about their products?

(/s, etc.)

Why is every CEO’s brain turning to sludge all of a sudden? I mean I get sucking on the toadstool of the king to ensure you get your share of the public coffers as they’re looted, but uh, this dude sells plastic toys and video games t-shirts for twice the price of everyone else.

And he wants to sell parts of his company which are in countries that aren’t absolute shitholes, and his sales pitch is that you get… free woke?

I’d say combining these necessary data points is probably enough to identify me

The EFF has had a couple of websites that would profile you on exactly this data, so you’re completely correct in that even the basic normal required metadata is more than enough to identify you pretty well.

coveryourtracks.eff.org is where it’s living now, and a quick glance shows that just using browser capabilities and such is absolutely enough to identify me.

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.

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 )

Yeah. There’s a retry queue, which does expire after a certain time period, but for a short outage that’s how it’d work.

Debian stable is great: it’s, well, stable. It’s well supported, has an extremely long support window, and the distro has a pretty stellar track record of not doing anything stupid.

It’s very much in the install-once-and-forget-it category, just gotta do updates.

I run everything in containers for management (but I’m also running something like 90 containers, so a little more complex than your setup) and am firmly of the opinion that, unless you have a compelling reason to NOT run something in a container, just use the containerized version.

fax the FBI their plans

Opsec is not the fediverse’s strenth, no. Anything you post here is going right to the FBI, courtesy of Palantir and Peter Thiel.

Anything you post online ANYWHERE is likely to end up there: if it’s not e2e encrypted, then you just told the FBI, and even if it is, you probably shouldn’t trust that it’s actually secure unless there’s public audits showing that it is, and you’re using a reproducible build from verified source.

…also, unrelated rant: stop taking pictures of people at protests and posting it online. Why is everyone doing state security’s job for them?

Look, if you can post your way out of this, then we should have been able to post our way into not having to.

But, judging from the outcomes of all THAT posting, I strongly doubt there’s a single thing anyone can post anywhere that’ll suddenly make people decide to wake up one day and go ‘Oh my! What a mess, I should throw away my entire world view and do ________!’ because that’s very much not how people actually work.

Best case, there’s enough pain and blood to nudge the lazy fucks into doing something in 2 years, but really, that doesn’t do anyone any good for the next 2 years and also very much isn’t assured: at least some of the lazies are actually in favor of this and the facists have a pretty good grip on the media and social network effects, so you can’t make a toot and expect it’ll do shit.

We’re past the polite letters to the editor stage, and in the misery and violence phase, even if it’s still being mostly coated in decorum.