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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • This whole internet could run on a tiny fraction of what it current consumes, with no drop in service levels… if the extraction of profit from every single interaction was not prioritized.

    That being said, I was addressing someone who refused to believe that local inference was even possible on CPU; this tells me that the efforts to present the current grift as the only and inevitable AI outcome is working, on minds that do not fundamentally grasp what the technology is, nor what it’s doing. I think the tech is great, and highly useful - the way they are implementing has perverse incentives and existential outcomes, and it does not have to be that way, but it is, because capitalism.


  • Listen, everything that they are doing by scorching the planet and turning the tap water brown, could be achieved on CPU or much smaller GPUs on local machines - it’s a question of focused, tight training. What they’re doing instead is literally attempting to build gigantic models that take in absolutely everything (burning real books in the process because fuck history we got money to make) and attempting to sell the idea that this brute force, one-thing-does-it-all approach, which requires us to give up everything else that is good in the world, is the only way forward, and yes, we must build the roko basilisk now.

    It’s a big, big grift.





  • Sometime in the last two years, the number of people consider themselves to be programmers has at least doubled. We have a giant contingent of people who have never gone through the hell of actually developing a skill but are now “developers” in much the same way that typing “make me a song like ______” now makes you a musician. No theory, no chords, no building of callouses, just load up our AutoPlagio and dance the night away!

    And these sudden Developers and such are all very upset at having their legitimacy questioned by a bunch of… of… NERDS.



  • It would be accurate to say that the Internet reached a critical mass of user in 1995. I was here in 1992, and 95 is when media started talking about the internet as a necessary thing for businesses etc to get onboard with, and by extension, when loads on servers started to get wild. A communal pool of servers for the web community to lean on during times of extreme demand is still an excellent idea that can solve a lot of problems, but not if we let capitalists run it for profit. Never work.



  • This: https://mwl.link/run-your-own-mail-server.html

    I don’t have this book by MWL, but, when I got my first Sysadmin job in 2015, I took over a network almost entirely run on FreeBSD, and I was gifted a couple of other books of his, in particular his ZFS volumes with Allan Jude, and I can say that his work is easy to read and good at giving you the most basic raw facts of the matter. If you really want to understand email, read this book and I guarantee you will get all the information you need.

    I am not his marketer, just a person who was helped immensely by his work. He’s on the Fedi as well, you can search in Mastodon.


  • Understand what a Reverse Proxy is, because you will not escape reading that phrase.

    Host things with Docker for now. If you don’t start hosting until you understand everything, you won’t start for a long time and that is silly.

    Use Cloudflare for now, because they handle a lot of security stuff for you that you definitely don’t want to screw up. If you don’t know what Cloudflare is, read up on CDNs and why they exist. Their Zero Trust Tunnel is the easiest and safest way to go, as long as you don’t plan to do anarchy or sedition on it, just talk about your household plants and dogs and what not and you’re fine.







  • It’s great to give your brain daily workouts on the ins and outs of systems, but if you’re feeling burnt out, you’re doing that too much, probably, and my guess is, it’s coming in at moments when you were trying to solve some other, more interesting/relevant problem.

    It comes down to whether you’re trying to self-host, or trying to learn Linux at a level where you could get a job doing it. Often it’s a bit of both, so don’t feel like you need to make that decision right now.

    But my advice: whatever you’re hosting, use their recommended easy way to host it. In most cases, this means running a container. In most cases, Docker. If you can wrap your head around using docker compose files, your practical problems are reduced by an insane amount, and idiocy at the developer level becomes your only concern. For instance, I used to run Tandoor, but the dev pushed changes into their “stable” docker container that failed to properly migrate my data, and the whole thing cacked. But that wasn’t a system problem on my end, it was a case of a dev who was more interested in playing around with data than with providing a stable app.

    So, if you take this approach, which I absolutely do recommend, the one thing you need to be sure of is that you have a good backup strategy, and that you backup before you do any pulls of new images. Docker allows you to select old versions so if you don’t like changes that get pushed on something, likely you can just rebuild the old version, but the changes might mess with your database migrations, so you need those backups. Other than that, you cannot go wrong with Docker, if you just want the damn thing to work, rather than get daily aggravating lessons in esoteric systems problems which are above your paygrade.


  • Bad week for me. Tandoor had become the home of quite a lot of recipes, and well, I’m never gonna just pull a docker container again without a backup, cause I did a pull and the bastard stopped working.

    So I setup Django and got started doing my own recipe server cause I was never very enthused about Tandoor, too much netflix-like Presentation bullshit and did not allow for the very simple thing I wanted, which was, a compact list of my recipes by alphabet that I can swiftly click on the one I want.

    I also need to get my Python chops back cause I think there will be jobs again, soon enough.

    Meanwhile, anyone got any suggestions of a better recipe app? Needs to run as a Linux server, that’s about it. I can go Tailscale if it has no security. If I get mine to something usable I’ll make it available.


  • I will be one of many saying this: if you want to self-host you need to learn Linux. It can be done, but this is not like taking a pottery class and you don’t really get to show anyone, the only people who will understand are people who are also able to do what you do. It’s rewarding on many levels, but pleasure and sociality are not among those rewards. :>