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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I’m not going to watch the video, but what’s the procedure for switching between Linux and Windows? Usually you dedicate a GPU entirely to VFIO, with a 2nd GPU for the host OS (or run headless).

    Anyway, will it work? Yes, minus some anti-cheat software. Will it be a simple solution? Well, once you get things stable, yes. The tech behind this is mature, but it can be a rabbit hole.

    I would look into a non-Nvidia GPU for your 2nd PCIe x16 slot (x4, shared with the 2nd M.2 slot FYI). Good idea to check IOMMU groups before buying anything, but modern AMD motherboards are usually fine. Blacklist the Nvidia drivers and dedicate the 3070 to VFIO to make your life easier, and run Linux off the secondary GPU. Intel A380 might be a good choice. Do gaming stuff on Windows and stream via Parsec/Looking Glass/Moonlight+Sunshine; everything else on Linux.





  • It’s easy* to setup Hashicorp Vault with your own CA and do automated cert generation and rotation, if you are willing to integrate everything into Vault and install your root CA everywhere. (*not really harder than any other Vault setup, but yaknow). I may go down this route eventually since I don’t think a device I don’t control has ever accessed anything I selfhost, or ever will.

    I have a wildcard subdomain pointing to my public IP, and forward port 80 to an LXC container with certbot. Port 80 appears closed outside the brief window when certbot is renewing certs. Inside my network I have my PiHole configured to return the local IP for each service.

    Nothing exposed to the internet at all. There is a record of my hostnames on Let’s Encrypt but not concerned if someone will, say, deduce apollo-idrac is the iDRAC service for a Dell rackmount server called apollo and the other Greek/Roman gods are VMs on it. Seemed like a house of cards that would never work reliably, but three odd years later I only have issues if a DNS resolver insists on bypassing my PiHole. And that DNS resolver is SystemD-ResolveD which should crawl back into whatever hellhole it came out of.


  • They could hijack your site at any time, but with a copy of your live private certs they (or more likely whatever third party that will invariably breach your domain provider) can decrypt your otherwise secure traffic.

    I don’t think there’s significant real tangible risk since who cares about your private selfhosted services and I’d be more worried about the domain being hijacked, and really any sort of network breach is probably interested in finding delicious credit card numbers and passwords and crypto private keys to munch on. If someone got into my network, spying on my Jellyfin streaming isn’t what I’m going to be worried about.

    But it is why CSRs are used.



  • The layoff includes Mary Kirby, who’s been a core writer in the Dragon Age franchise since the first game. Saw takes that the layoffs are just eliminating multiplayer positions, but that’s not true.

    I’ve long suspected that Dreadwolf will make or break BioWare. Since it’s following the same script as Andromeda and Anthem - endless delays, no public progress just lots of b-roll and concept art - I don’t think development is going well. ME: Legacy might have bought BioWare some breathing room but I can’t interpret this as anything other than death throes for the studio.

    BioWare is dead, long live Larian and Spiders?


  • I’ve found the idea of LXC containers to be better than they are in practice. I’ve migrated all of my servers to Proxmox and have been trying to move various services from VMs to LXC containers and it’s been such a hassle. You should be able to directly forward disk block devices, but just could not get them to mount for an MinIO array - ended up just setting their entire contents to 100000:100000 and mounting them on the host and forwarding the mount point instead. Never managed to CAP_IPC_LOCK to work correctly for a HashiCorp Vault install. Docker in LXC has some serious pain points and feels very fragile.

    It’s damning that every time I have a problem with LXC the first search result will be a Proxmox forum topic with a Proxmox employee replying to the effect of “we recommend VMs over LXC for this use case” - Proxmox doesn’t seem to recommend LXC for anything. Proxmox + LXC is definitely better than CentOS + Podman, but my heart longs for the sheer competence of FreeBSD Jails.








  • This reinforces my belief that online advertising produces a lot of objective data (“how many times was my ad viewed? clicked?”) but benefits from not being able to tie that to outcomes companies are actually interested in (“are the ads expanding business?”).

    A number of years ago I read an analysis on how some large social media site had changed the order of a few important buttons out of the blue. This was likely from A/B testing showing increased engagement, but it was probably just confused users clicking on it. I bet similar things happen all the time in ads, possibly inadvertently. If an A/B change shows increased ad clicks, it’s unlikely not to be adopted, even if it’s not intentional clicks.


  • I think you are broadly correct in that we can’t snap our fingers and simply change the amount of money flowing back to the coffee bean growers. However, I’m highly skeptical there’s any inherent reason why markets should spread the profits this unevenly. If no one was growing coffee beans there wouldn’t be any coffee shops either.

    The questions you should be thinking about is why are the profits so unevenly distributed? Market forces, of course, but how much are these forces inherent or created? If they were created, what caused it to be the way it is? Would a system born out of powerful countries trying to advance their own interests (cheaper materials) and willing to exploit power imbalances to do so be an explanation?


  • Embrace, extend, and extinguish (EEE) - We don’t think they can. If anyone can explain how they technically would, please let us know. Even if Meta forks Lemmy and gets rid of the original software, Lemmy will survive.

    It doesn’t start out with maliciousness. The rank and file technical staff at Facebook aren’t evil. Facebook understands the value of top tier tech talent and top dollar buys you smart people.

    The initial federation is rough, but the problems are resolved surprisingly quick. None of the doom and gloom comes to pass, and Facebook consistently acts as a trustworthy actor. Their employees aren’t really different than their open source counterparts. They make good faith contributions to open source codebases. Their collective experience with distributed systems proves useful in solving growing pains as the Federation grows.

    They eventually start to make proposals to ActivityPub. There’s outrage but no one can come up with good technical objections, so they are approved. The doom and gloom didn’t come to pass, and looks like it never will.

    Facebook doesn’t need malicious intent for what’s going down. It slowly, maybe quickly, becomes the dominate actor in the space. Facebook is pouring money into making Threads the best it can be, and what’s wrong with them trying to build an audience?

    Thread’s improvements set an increasingly high standard for what people expect. More uptime, cleaner UI, more responsive API calls, more personalized frontpage algorithms, higher resolution videos - more and more features. More and more cost. Even people who kneejerk reject Facebook recognize how much better their site is. There are still important reasons to go with Lemmy or Kbin over Threads, but FOSS projects have never been good at making their case in ways random-not-technical people can understand, let alone why they should care about them.

    After a while, Facebook starts walling people into their platform. Starts with little things like how Reddit added video and picture hosting to replace Imgur et al. It’s not malicious, but rather from TPMs who are under pressure to increase engagement. After a while what else is there? Just don’t turn the heat up too many degrees at once.

    It’s wrong to think of Facebook as a uniquely bad actor. This isn’t 90s/2000s Microsoft with blatantly transparent EEE aims. There have always been bad actors. There will always be bad actors. There are bad actors with us right now.

    Facebook needs to make money, and they won’t do so by directly charging users. There’s only one path forward for Facebook in this, and it will come at the expense of its users and everyone else in the Fediverse.

    Build something useful, then put up walls around it, and then exploit it for profit; the internet’s monomyth. You don’t have to read the writing on the wall, but it is there. Federating with Threads is signing your own death warrant.

    If the Fediverse experiment is going to survive, it needs to be able to withstand these bad actors. One of the ways it can do so is to recognize and reject them. Facebook has so many resources and so much power and we don’t have to run the experiment to know where this will go. It is important to explicitly say “your goals do not align with what we are trying to build, and therefore we will not voluntarily interact with you.”



  • I agree with your point. Metaface is the most hilariously transparently bad actor on the internet. That well is so poisoned there’s no olive branches that will save their reputation. The incentives for these companies are clear and produce a consistent pattern: build something useful and start building walls around it so you can exploit whatever you’ve built to produce the most shareholder returns. Any instance that cooperates with a Bookmeta instance is willfully ignorant how it will end, even if MaceTook truly does not have malicious plans at the start.

    But beyond the other responses, I think it’s worth thinking deeper on this. It’s easy to reduce it to “It’s simple. We kill the Zuckerberg.”

    There have always been bad actors, and will always be bad actors. There are probably bad actors in the room with us right now. If this whole threadiverse experiment is going to survive, it needs to be able robustly handle them even when the bad actors can bring a lot of resources to bear.

    Also the real fun happens when TheMeta.Com starts proposing changes to ActivityPub. Even if the changes are purely technical and make perfect sense there’s going to be slapfights.