They’re trying to thread a needle, because they want to have their cake and eat it too. They’re not succeeding. They’re never going to. Either they are on the side of defending society and civilization, or they are trying to destroy society and civilization and profit from it. They think they can find a middle ground when there is no middle ground left anymore. The wealth gap has sprawled open into an impossible and still growing chasm that nobody can stand in anymore. That’s where the middle ground used to be. Now, it’s class war, us against them, and I find it hard to believe they’ll ever do the right thing or pick the right side. So they can keep trying to thread that needle if they want. It will do them no good. Their thread is too thick to fit. They have lost their social license to operate. They are not getting it back. Not from me, anyway.

Nvidia P40s with 24GB VRAM are relatively cheap for what they are and are available in bulk. They have no video output, no cooling (you can 3d print a duct for fans or probably buy one, or just lower the power limits and run them semi-passively until they start throttling)

If you want to putter around a bit with machine learning technologies (I refuse to call it “AI” because it’s not) they’re useful and reasonably capable tools, although far from the fastest compared to what’s out there nowadays.

Before you even start, consider adopting an ‘infrastructure as code’ approach. It will make your life a lot easier in the future.

Start with any actual code: If you have any existing source code, get it under git version control immediately, then prioritize getting it into a git hub like forgejo to make your life easier in the future. Make a git repository for your infrastructure documentation, and record (and comment/document too if you’re feeling ambitious) every command you run in a txt file or an md file or a script, and do that as religiously as you can while you’re setting up all this self-hosted stuff. You may want to dig it up later to try and remember exactly what you did or in case stuff goes wrong and you need to back off and try again. It might seem pointless now, but a year from now, you’ll thank me.

Especially prioritize getting your git stuff moved into a self-hosted forgejo if any of your stuff is hosted on the microsoft technoplague called github.

There is no more United States. They would have to be United for that name to still apply. Now there is only the Disunited, Distracted States of America and the rapidly growing Fourth Reich taking their territory from within.

You get what you pay for. Sometimes you get more than you pay for, sometimes you can get lots for free, but you’ll never get a guarantee. If you want anything resembling a guarantee, you have to pay.

You sound like you want guaranteed advice, but for free. That isn’t going to happen.

If you want non-guaranteed advice, just ask anywhere on the internet, like here for example. You’ll get lots of answers, none of them guaranteed, but some of them quite possibly very correct. Is that worth the price of “free”? It should be.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and even your worst enemy will sometimes agree with you. Social media may not be automatically bad but effectively all for-profit implementations are irredeemably corrupted and a catastrophic danger to the fabric of democracy and civilization. Banning it will not eliminate it but it is the only viable harm reduction strategy we have available for any of us at this point. Techbro dominance and devastating levels of abuse by cynical, manipulative actors has robbed us of the luxury of choosing any more reasonable, nuanced approaches.

Minnesota is already honorary Canadian and in my opinion, always has been.

Constitutions are made up by people and people can change them. All you need to do is either get everyone to agree, or make sure the people who don’t agree can’t stop you. Trump chose the latter, and has completely ignored and dismantled the US constitution. Whatever comes out the other side is going to be very, very different. I’m not saying that we should do that. But in the face of an existential threat like that, I don’t think it’s beyond reason that we could, in fact, get everyone to agree. It’s amazing how staring mutual death and dissolution in the face can change the bitterest of rivalries into if not perfect alignment, at least a functional working relationship. Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.

I ran Matrix for like a year, and pretty much hated every minute. It was fragile, complicated, and incredibly, bafflingly resource intensive. Matrix is an overengineered nightmare in my opinion, and it seems to be quickly distancing itself from self-hosters while pursuing enterprise usage. Neat technology, horrible implementation, misguided company.

XMPP is a breath of fresh air in comparison. Just like we still use email everywhere (even for authentication nowadays, fun!), XMPP is not obsolete simply because it’s older. It’s a solid foundation, plenty extensible, and does almost everything I can imagine needing to do without unnecessary complexity.

Matrix’s bridges are its killer feature, and it’s nice… when it works. But it’s simply not worth the headache of dealing with Matrix, in my opinion.

If the polls are rigged, does that imply that most Israelis don’t support the genocide? So … you think you’ve got a majority of people who don’t support the genocide and with that majority you plan to do … nothing? Just gonna … let the minority do what they want?

There’s a word for that, the word is “support”. You might not think you’re supporting it, but if you’re not doing something to fight it, then yes, you are supporting it. Get to work. Nobody ever promised that doing the right thing has to be easy.

We are so, so, so thoroughly cooked. I can’t even.

Lots of enabling in your comment.

People like you, with no control over the big decisions. Just like Palestinians can’t control Hamas, Russians can’t control Putin, US citizens can’t control Trump, and so on.

If people can’t control their own governments, who can? Who should? Other people’s governments? Is that how you think it’s supposed to work? That’s why Israel is obliterating Gaza? Because Gaza can’t get rid of Hamas themselves so Israel is going to do it for them? Do you think that is justified and the right way to do things? Is it Canada’s job to rescue the US? Is it Europe’s responsibility to stop Russia?

Are Iranians responsible for the Iranian regime? Yes, they are, that’s why they’re fucking protesting and dying in the streets right now. Resist, fight back, don’t comply, undermine your illegitimate government until they can be toppled.

Take responsibility. I am responsible for the actions of my government and my country. And so are you. You will be held responsible. And you should be. Other countries are not responsible for fixing your shit. You are. Fix it. Figure out how. Stop acting like it’s somebody else’s problem and you are just a humble peasant. Humble peasants can start revolutions. Lazy citizens who are happy with the status quo while pretending they don’t agree with it do not start revolutions. Which one are you?

“I AM THE LAW” --Judge Dredd

I don’t want the free petition websites online getting my personal network’s info and sharing or selling it, hence the interest in self hosting.

So either you’re creating a petition with a size of exactly “1” or you’re asking other people to trust YOU with their personal info instead, or you’re asking for a federated solution (extremely difficult to establish a verifiable web of trust framework, and STILL shares your “personal network’s info” whenever it federates or validates its data to dozens of other servers).

None of these scenarios are viable for creating a petition that anyone is going to take seriously (to the extent that anyone takes petitions seriously at all)

fail2ban mainly, but also things like scaling login delays (some sort of option often built into the software you’re running, but just as often not configured by default), or if you’re feeling particularly paranoid account locking after too many failures, and in general just not using default, predictable, common usernames or weak passwords, and honestly it’s even helped a bit by having slow hardware and throttled network bandwidth.

The goal is to make it so that someone can’t run a script that sends 100 million login attempts per second for common or stolen usernames and passwords and your server just helpfully tries them all and obediently tells them none of those worked… until one of them does.

Not only does this encourage them to TRY sending 100 million login attempts per second because your server isn’t refusing it, which is a huge waste of bandwidth and resources, it also makes it really likely that they’re eventually going to guess one right.

I’m really hoping that the magic Carney is doing is all behind the scenes, top-secret, serious powerbroker shit. And if he is, that’s going to be fire.

But if he isn’t, “meh” is an understatement. Because most of what he’s done in public has been typical neoliberal status quo, rape the environment, fuck the people, while telling them how much they’re both going to be enjoying it.

I’ve always believed he’s a sneaky snake. I know he was one to get elected.

The optimist in me wants to believe he’s a sneaky snake working on our side.

The pessimist in me is convinced he’s a sneaky snake working against us.

I guess time will tell us which one is the case.

And the moment it doesn’t, hostile takeover, baby!

“Please fill out and sign this credit card application form to prove that you are human.”

According to this reverse engineering effort, Tesla MCUs have 4GB of DDR4 onboard.

That is just the MCU, mind you, and I’m not sure what exactly it’s responsible for besides media, but besides whatever AI nonsense they use for self-driving which might have a good chunk of RAM onboard, it seems likely to me that most other computerized components are just using SOC (system-on-chip) processors with integrated onboard memory, not dedicated DDR. I am not an expert though, and may be wrong.

Tolerance of intolerance is the achilles’ heel of the tolerant. They lose sight of the fact that it is not only morally acceptable to punch Nazis, it is required at all times.

Meanwhile, all those smug and rich right-wing bastards who think they’re as smart as can be for marching down the low road instead while flinging shit on everyone else? They’re going to have an even worse time, soon they will have to worry about both the grassroots lurking under their feet and the high road collapsing on them simultaneously. Your money won’t save you. Rest in pieces, fuckers.