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2 yr. ago

  • Titus is fairly trustable (he's made a few videos on the dangers of custom Windows ISOs like AtlasOS) but the thing is written in good chunks with AI assisted development and it's also the dude's Rust learning experience as well, so the code is not great. Parts of it are meant to run under ArchISO to install Arch (another sin, an automatic Arch installer) so it makes sense to want to just one-liner download and run the prebuilt binary.

    I wouldn't use it personally but his audience is for it. It targets quick and easy, not proper and secure. It's mostly meant to easily install and clone his setup, it's too early in development to really be that useful for everyone.

    On the winutil side he also does the | iex PowerShell sin, but the toolbox do be really useful to debloat a Windows install.

  • I've read some posts about editing fstab to mount them at startup, but they don't cover whether the drives will be available to other users or not. Can I just add them to fstab and mount them somewhere that's available to all users, then sort out the permissions? If so, where's the best place to put them?

    Yes pretty much. It just explicitly tells the system where to mount it, and for some filesystems you can even force the UID/GID and modes.

    Usually /mnt/whatever for static mounts and /media/whatever for removable mounts (those appear as drives in file managers, whereas /mnt doesn't). You can set the users option in fstab and it'll let users mount and unmount it without sudo as well, or auto to always mount it on boot.

    From there usually you can make a shared group, chown the mount to root:thatgroup, then chmod g+s to make sure the group is inherited. And you should mostly be good to go.

  • You can't, because normies don't care about tech other than it benefits them directly in some way. They care about the experience they get and doing the same thing everyone does because normies are like sheeps.

    Normies barely even get how emails work and it's been like over 40 years. They know if they sign up for Gmail it's free, they get a ton of space and an @gmail.com address. That's it.

    And even then, people looked at me weird back in 2007 when I made my Gmail account because "everyone uses Hotmail, why wouldn't you use Hotmail, everyone uses it so it must be the best". Heck just yesterday, the teller at the mechanic shop looked at me weird because I used $storename@max-p.me to place the online order, they were utterly confused. They thought I made a Gmail or Outlook for all of those aliases. People don't think about using emails, they think about using Gmail or Hotmail/Outlook.

    Same with Reddit, it didn't become popular until normies felt like they were missing out by not being on Reddit, and arguably that was Reddit's downfall flooding the site with the same repeated arguments and opinions over and over. And for that too, I've been told my "Reddit looks weird" because I use a third-party app. People want to use Reddit so they download Reddit.

    Normies don't use Twitter because they want to microblog, they use Twitter because their idols are on Twitter and they want to mimic them. If Taylor Swift opened a Mastodon account and posted exclusively there, we'd get a massive spike of users. And they all would want to register on the same instance as her and it would be the only viable instance to them.

    They just want to fit in and do the same as the others, using the same services and same apps and everything. "Influencers" are everything these days.

    The best way to get normies on the Fediverse is IMO, endorsing Threads and BlueSky, which will effectively force them to integrate because those platforms integrate.

  • Manipulating the game can be a lot of fun, more than the game itself. In a way, it kind of becomes like a higher level kind of game. When done appropriately and not ruining other people's fun, that is. I've had good fun on friend's private servers and giving their shit code a good stress test.

    I have zero respect for those that just download cheats and use them to pass off as skilled and ruin the fun for others. It's like ethical hacking: do it with permission or at least be transparent about it.

    There's game servers out there to play against other cheaters, and it can truly be hilariously broken and entertaining. I've also been quite fascinated by Minecraft servers like 2b2t where cheating is basically necessary to survive at all. The exploit content and drama that have come out of this server is bonkers. But everyone knows they're playing against cheaters, the fun is seeing how you can outcheat your opponents.

    There's also the whole speedrunning community, the ways people have broken games wide open. Fascinating and very entertaining stuff. The skills you need to perform a lot of those glitches are insane and extremely challenging. Hours of grinding to get frame perfect glitches work, several times during a run. It's a whole new puzzle, with so many more variables.

    Why would someone cheat on games like CS2, Apex, Valorant and the likes, that I don't know. Some people are really just kind of losers I guess. I personally don't see the appeal, I'd want to be famous for the cheats and not even compete with non-cheaters because that's just plain unethical and unfun. There's also a big difference between finding dupes in Minecraft vs an aimbot in a competitive shooter.

  • I used Boost for Reddit, and now Boost for Lemmy.

    It's incredible how much the app is part of the experience. Same experience, completely different data source, it mostly just feels like early Reddit again, with niche subs of mere hundreds of people.

    People are on average nicer here. Few loud nutjobs but overall I have mostly pleasant discussions.

  • Patience. It really helps to have all the latest set up: SPF, DKIM, DMARC. Then after that it's a matter of IP reputation, you can email the various blocklists and you wait for the rest of them to clear on their own.

    I've had that IP for 10 years and it has never sent spam, and I've sent enough emails that people open that it actually does get through fine. I haven't had to think about it for a long time, it just keeps on working. Barely had to even adjust my Postfix config through the upgrades.

  • You can boot it in a VM and do it from a VM. In fact even if the VBIOS is completely broken, you can still usually override the VBIOS in libvirt/qemu and boot it anyway and then you can flash it.

  • The developer benefits from reaching more people, some of whom are likely to purchase the proprietary license. Or sometimes you dual-license just so that licenses are compatible. Each license has pros and cons for both the developers and the users.

    Qt for example, the LGPL means you need to dynamically link to it, and if you ship your own Qt libraries you must provide the source code for it. But if you're a company that writes proprietary software and can't dynamically link, then you can purchase the proprietary license which allows you to do a lot more, but you're compensating the devs for it. And for the Qt devs that's good because either you pay them, or you use it for free but must share your changes with everyone.

    For ElasticSearch, that makes it so Amazon can't just patch it up and sell the modified version without sharing what they changed. They wanted to add back a FOSS license to stop the bleed to OpenSearch which many in the FOSS community switched to purely for the license because even separate software should be compatible license-wise if you want a sustainable FOSS project. But the AGPL requires sources merely for being able to talk to it over the network, so Elastic gets the free dev work, or the juicy license payments. The other free licenses achieve similar goals with technical differences that might matter for the user. But as a developer using ElasticSearch maybe you do want to ship your software under the SSPL, so you can pick the SSPL version.

    Dual-licensing MIT/GPL for example, you can build proprietary software, or GPL software where you can vendor it in as GPL-only as well, and thus guarantee your user their GPL rights.

  • Only time will tell. They've definitely done their own share of EEE like for a while you could use Facebook Messenger over XMPP then closed it down.

  • The SSPL is irrelevant, you pick the AGPL license and the SSPL doesn't apply to you.

    Qt is dual-licensed as proprietary and LGPL and nobody complains about that, KDE is in most distro's repos. You pick the LGPL licensed version and you're good to go, the proprietary license doesn't apply to you.

  • Definitely can appreciate the carefulness here. Imagine they just open the floodgates and now some random Mastodon instance on a $5 VPS is getting hammered with millions of activities because they followed an account with millions of followers on Threads, and now it's federating millions of likes and thousands of posts.

    Meta is trying to be a good fediverse participant here. They could just come in and crush the entire fediverse and be like "lol should have gotten beefier servers".

  • I haven't looked into it particularly deep but it's not like there's a ton of stuff a WM can possibly do unless the code base is littered with raw X11 calls everywhere.

    Most of the window placement and tiling logic shouldn't be tied directly to X11 and only a small part of it should really be interacting with X11 to place and size windows. So one should target that intermediate spot that makes all the X11 calls.

    And if the code is too shit to port, it probably deserves to die.

  • The identifier is unavoidable for push notifications to work. It needs to know which phone to send it after all, even if it doesn't use Google's services, it would still need a way to know which device has new messages when it checks in. If it's not a phone number it's gonna be some other kind of ID. Messages need a recipient.

    Also, Signal's goal is protecting conversations for the normies, not be bulletproof to run the next Silk Road at the cost of usability. Signal wants to upgrade people's SMS messaging and make encryption the norm, you have to make some sacrifices for that. Phone numbers were a deliberate decision so that people can just install Signal and start using E2E texting immediately.

    If you want something really private you should be using Tor or I2P based solutions because it's the only system that can reasonably hide both source and destination completely. Signal have your phone number and IP address after all. They could track your every movements.

    Most people don't need protection against who they talk to, they want privacy of their conversations and their content. Solutions with perfect anonymity between users are hard to understand and use for the average person who's the target audience of Signal.

  • You don't have to trust the server and shouldn't have to trust the server if the client is doing proper E2E because you know the maximum amount of metadata it's got.

  • It's possible to do but also probably not worth the amount of effort to reimplement all of those protocols only for super old WMs that don't have a Wayland equivalent. None of them are particularly complex, so It's probably easier to just port those to wlroots than implement the compatibility, and it's an opportunity to make an API or library to make it easy to write WMs.

  • If your stuff is all Docker then yeah, immutable makes sense as it makes the entire box declarative and immutable: you can get back the exact same operating Docker environment on the server, and then you can get back the exact same Docker workloads going with the Docker compose configurations.

    If you ever need to run stuff you'd run on Debian, you can just shove it in a Debian container.

    That said, if most of the stuff is containers, the risk of just the core Debian breaking is fairly low. Pick whatever is easiest for you to deal with based on your needs. Immutable distros have a bit of a learning curve.

  • From a user's perspective, yes, but as an instance admin that's also a DMCA nightmare.

    That's a great example of the eternal fight between mods and users that ultimately drives admins away: users feel entitled to post that stuff, and mods have to take it down. The user is anonymous and possibly from a country with very lax laws, so they're protected. The admins have to pay for the servers with real money and their real identity, and thus also an easy target for lawyers.

  • Porn is often really high traffic, which is expensive to run. But a lot of people are weirdos too and tend to push it to the border of legality, which can be challenging for admins if your users keep posting lolis even if it's not allowed. And they'll scream at you "it's not technically illegal".

    The other thing people do a lot with porn is post stuff from sketchy sources or repost paid content for free stealing from OnlyFans pages and the big porn studios. And lately, AI generated porn of non-consenting celebrities. And of course now the increasing pressure to make sure to keep minors out or heaven forbid they're shown trans porn.

    It's expensive to store all that porn, it's insanely expensive to distribute it, you need lawyers on standby for the firehose of DMCA reports, you need a solid team of moderators scrubbing the site as fast as possible for CSAM, or run AI tools that needs a lot of fast hardware to run at any decent speed (you need to analyze every frame of a video, for example).

    It's just expensive as fuck overall and that's why a lot of the porn sites have the sketchiest ads ever, and that's because you can't run regular ads as most advertisers don't want to be shown next to questionable content.

    On the fediverse you have the added challenge that ideally, you scrub things before they get federated due to federation bugs. Or you risk being defederated which you probably will anyway as most admins just don't want to deal with it.

  • Texting is also damn convenient, I can deal with several conversations at once without having to pause the movie I'm watching.

    Speaking on the phone doesn't just tie your line, it ties your whole life too.

  • That's enough upgrades it could cause some issues, but I wouldn't expect it to be a problem with the RAID array itself, mostly applications and configs that don't work anymore because you're jumping 6 years into the future in terms of software versions. Some things like PostgreSQL you have to dump the data out, install the new version and load it back in, so that's one example of something that could break and would be expected to break.

    I believe if you just boot the 24.04 installer it'll see the drives right away, they're pretty persistent. But failing that, you can assemble it manually with mdadm --assemble, or you can backup your /etc/mdadm.conf. That should give you some confidence that if something wrong happens with the Ubuntu install it will be easy to reinstall fresh and not lose your array. Just get it mounted readonly in the live ISO so you know how to get your data, and you'll feel a lot safer doing the upgrade.