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Voroxpete

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Voroxpete ,

Polling in Ukraine consistently puts approval of Zelensky’s handling of the war at around 90%.

Please actually try listening to the people you’re speaking on behalf of before you speak.

Voroxpete ,

Oh man, love this idea. I’m gonna try it on my bank. “Here’s the deal, I keep all the money that I’ve already stolen, and you have to agree not to call the cops or hire any additional security.” Brilliant.

Not sure what the bank is supposed to get out of it though.

Voroxpete ,

In the analogy, I have a whole lot of their money. You never watch Heat? Like that, but I didn’t fuck it up thanks to my many years of watching heist movies and playing Payday 2.

Voroxpete ,

It’s quite likely that the cost actually outweighs the gains. Adblocking really isn’t all that prevalent across Internet users as a whole. I think the stats are something like 10% or lower.

Voroxpete ,

Yes, but server-side injection, if I understand it correctly, means you have to actually remux the videos into a single stream. That’s additional processing load, which is basically their main cost of business.

Voroxpete ,

Well, most of their efforts have been relatively low cost on their end. Stuff like manifest v3 isn’t actually particularly expensive to do. Just requires you to have near total capture of the web browser market.

Voroxpete ,

Yeah, I try to make this point as often as I can. The notion that AI hallucinates only wrong answers really misleads people about how these programs actually work. It couches it in terms of human failings rather than really getting at the underlying flaw in the whole concept.

LLMs are a really interesting area of research, but they never should have made it out of the lab. The fact that they did is purely because all science operates in the service of profit now. Imagine if OpenAI were able to rely on government funding instead of having to find a product to sell.

Voroxpete ,

The fact that regulations make capitalism less dangerous doesn’t mean that capitalism is fine as long as its regulated.

Hand grenades have a tonne of safety features, but you wouldn’t let your kid play with one. “Safer” isn’t the same thing as “safe”.

Voroxpete ,

Opening up to institutional investment means opening yourself up to ownership by a culture that demands infinite growth. In recent years this has gotten particularly bad; with the rise in interest rates, stocks can no longer deliver moderate growth and still be considered worthwhile investments. Everything is either a rocketship to the moon, or its a sell. Combine that with a string of US court cases that have interpreted tge law in such a way as to foster the belief that its illegal for companies to put anything ahead of shareholder value, and what you get is a top down imperative to squeeze the maximum profit out of everything. When you see Microsoft mulling over ideas like putting ads in your start menu, or EA talking about in-game advertising, this is why. When you see Spotify raising prices multiple times while crowing about how their content production costs are basically non-existent and changing their contracts so that smaller artists literally don’t get paid for their music, this is why.

Voroxpete ,

“Listen, we already watered down our deadly poison a little and it’s still killing us. Unless you have a better idea we’ll just have to keep drinking deadly poison.”

Help for getting started with hardware

I dived into the selfhosting rabbit hole once again and again I am stuck at the hardware part. I’d like to start small-ish to make it realisable. I thought about a NAS (Openmediavault probably). First I wanted to do it on a Raspberry Pi with an external hard-drive but then I read USB connected drives are unreliable and so on....

Voroxpete ,

Yeah, try to avoid using USB hard drives.

A refurbished business PC is an excellent choice (or, better yet, make friends with someone who works in an IT department and grab a few machines when they’re being thrown out; you’d be amazed how often companies dump perfectly good hardware). Don’t worry about the windows license, you’re not actually paying for it by the time you get to refurb prices.

You should easily be able to pick up something decent for under $200 (hopefully that fits your budget). If you go with a small form factor (not ultra small) you can probably get an SSD and two 3.5" drives in there (watch out for the small form factor Lenovos though, they only have one 3.5" slot). Alternatively, look for a larger desktop tower style that could have 3 or 4 drive bays if you want to do something like a RAID5.

Don’t sweat too much about buying older hardware. What’s old and busted for Windows is lightning fast when we’re talking about self-hosting a file server or a Pihole.

Voroxpete ,

You definitely wouldn’t want to use them in any kind of RAID for a start.

Voroxpete ,

Yeah, this notion that Musk suddenly went off the rails is pure face saving fantasy.

Like, no, Musk didn’t suddenly become an idiot. He’s always been an idiot. We just bought his hype, and the healthy thing to do is admit it and learn a lesson.

Voroxpete ,

helping to develop

This, my friend, is the hype. Musk has never helped to develop anything. He’s not an engineer or a scientist. He’s a rich asshole who buys his way into tech projects, all of which were either doing fine without him (Tesla, PayPal) , fail utterly (Hyperloop), or suck up resources that could almost certainly be applied more effectively by the government itself if they weren’t being funneled into a for-profit operation (SpaceX).

Voroxpete ,

To be vaguely credible for a moment, it is and it isn’t. On the one hand, Russia will have a very hard time replacing high end losses like Su-57s, Ka-52s and other hardware that relies heavily on modern electronics, materials, and manufacturing techniques. On the other hand, they don’t need any of those things to grind Ukraine down by sheer weight of numbers, armour, and artillery fire. The Ukraine conflict has basically devolved into WW1 trench warfare, which suits Russia prefectly. A slow, grinding, attritional war is one that plays entirely to their strengths. It doesn’t take a lot of modern to equipment to lay minefields and pre-range howitzers, so on the defence Russia can crush any Ukrainian push, and on the offence they can pay in blood for every mile.

Ultimately, the loss of something like a Su-57 is largely meaningless to Russia, because they only ever existed as a propaganda tool in the first place. Even if the Su-57 was the ultramodern fighter Russia claims (its not), they only ever built six of the damn things. That’s a rounding error compared to the US stock of F-35s and F-22s. It’s no different than all the noise over deploying the Armata. Whether they did or didn’t was never going to matter because they’ve got something like twenty of the things in total, and that’s not enough to affect anything in a conflict of this scale. It’s all just propaganda and posturing.

Voroxpete ,

No, on that score I fundamentally disagree. Ukraine has used its limited pool of armor extremely effectively, and even with a small, outdated airforce they’ve been able to utterly neutralize Russia’s ability to bring its naval assets to bear. The reason air and armor haven’t mattered as much in this war is simply because one side can’t risk what they have, and the other side doesn’t know how to use what they have.

Russia has not used these assets effectively because what they have is outdated, badly designed, and being operated by poorly trained crews with terrible doctrine. The reason Russian armor keeps getting popped by ATGMs isn’t because Javelin and NLAW are wunderwaffen, it’s because they’ll park a fucking T-72 in the middle of an open fucking field with no infantry support, crew all buttoned down so they have no visibility, and then act surprised when someone pops a rocket at it.

The single most telling piece of footage from the initial invasion was a video of a Ukrainian squad firing an RPG at a Russian tank, then reloading and firing again from the exact same fucking position! There is no world where you should ever, EVER be able to do that. Against any competent military, the moment you let off that first rocket you should be running like fucking crazy because the entire area you are in is about to become a shooting range with you as the paper. There should have been multiple machine guns lighting up their position. Instead the Ukrainians are just calmly taking their time, reloading and popping another shot because they know the Russians have no infantry support and no situational awareness.

Same with Russian air power. They’ve been losing expensive planes and top of the line helos to MANPADs. Not high end stationary air defense systems like Patriot. Fucking MANPADs. Because their pilots are dogshit.

In an actual war with NATO, Russian artillery would be meaningless because every single gun would get deleted from the air the moment it fired (the US literally has radar systems that can detect the trajectory of incoming rounds and calculate exactly where they came from). But Ukraine can’t do that because they barely have an airforce. Russia can’t do that because they have an incompetent air force. So we get WW1 trench warfare. What neither side has is ground attack aircraft with a radar signature the size of a bumblebee. You throw that into the mix and suddenly you’re going to see just how important air power really is.

Voroxpete ,

Stealth

Citation needed

Voroxpete ,

“Landlords say that would push them to sell.”

So, you’re saying it would increase available housing supply? Sounds great.

Oh, and for the record, they will not, in fact, sell. Most housing in Ontario is still under a 2% annual rent increase limit. Landlords are doing just fine (and by “Just fine” I of course mean “We have a national housing crisis because landlords are hoarding all the available supply”)

Voroxpete ,

You guys get raises?

Voroxpete ,

Asimov’s stories were mostly about how it would be a terrible idea to put kill switches on AI, because he assumed that perfectly rational machines would be better, more moral decision makers than human beings.

Voroxpete ,

This guy apparently stopped reading the robot series before they got to The Evitable Conflict.

Voroxpete ,

For their trouble, Humane says it’s offering two free months of their Humane subscription, which is the $24-a-month data plan to use the device.

Wait, so this piece of crap costs $700, and you have to pay more than the cost of a Netflix subscription (assuming that hasn’t gone up again while I write this) just to ask ChatGPT questions without using your prefectly good phone?

Voroxpete ,

Jesus Christ. And people actually bought this thing?

I know the Venn diagram of “People who buy into AI tech hype” and “People who bought into crypto” is basically a circle, but even so, that is some unbelievable levels of begging to be scammed. I’m starting to think this whole scene is just people with a very specific humiliation kink.

Voroxpete ,

Not really. All of the underlying mechanics of crypto are so simple that they can be very easily interacted with by bots. Bots make up the vast majority of all crypto trades; mostly wash trading, but also front-running attacks, scams or outright thefts like this one. There are so many exploitable flaws in crypto that every bug is basically a self-executing bug bounty.

Voroxpete ,

Hold on, you’re right, we should consult someone with actual military experience who handles fully automatic long guns professionally. Preferably someone like a front line soldier with excellent marksmanship credentials.

One sec…

Yeah, my wife said this is dumb and you shouldn’t do it. You’ll just fuck up your barrel. If you want to get good at holding a gun while shooting, hit the range.

Voroxpete ,

No joke, my wife actually owns that helmet and it is so much more ridiculous looking in reality. Like, truly one of the dumbest helmets of all time.

Voroxpete ,

So, end capitalism and build a fully automated post-scarcity utopia where machines do all the work and humans spend our lives doing the things we really want to do?

Sounds good bro, let’s do it.

Voroxpete ,

Saskatchewan is such a fucking great case study in why this shit works, because you have literally identical conditions all around them, excerpt in that one detail, and the price differences are enormous.

Voroxpete ,

It won’t be long before they block that too. I really wouldn’t put it past them to just say “Fuck it, no internet, no computer.”

Voroxpete ,

Why in God’s name are you running either of those things on windows?

Voroxpete ,

Counter-point; if someone is into degradation specifically, wouldn’t they be happy to be kink shamed?

Voroxpete ,

In all seriousness, if you’re self hosting anything, please learn your way around Docker and Linux. It’s a small time investment up front for huge payoffs. You’ll get more value out of your hardware, and you’ll have a system that’s much more reliable (Windows was not built for 24/7 uptime).

Voroxpete ,

Windows Server isn’t so bad as a server platform, although it comes with a lot of unnecessary overhead, and its container support sucks. Given that containers are really the way to go with self-hosted services now, that makes Windows Server a poor choice.

But realistically, when most people say they’re self hosting on Windows, they mean regular old consumer Windows, which absolutely hates running for extended periods without rebooting. It’s just not built for uptime.

Voroxpete ,

Yeah, it has to have certain specific types of CPU. They’re making this a requirement for all Windows 11 machines if you want to keep receiving security updates. It’s going to create a mountain of e-waste.

Voroxpete ,

Europe keeps on proving that we can in fact regulate these companies, and it’s fucking pathetic how the US and Canada don’t.

Voroxpete ,

A comment that really stuck with me was when someone said “How people treat furries is a great way of finding out what kind of person they really are.”

Furries harm no one. In fact, they bring a lot of joy to a lot of people. At Toronto Pride the furries are one of the highlights of the parade. Kids absolutely love them; all these fun people in their animal costumes just out having a great time.

But it’s considered socially acceptable to mock them. Even among self-proclaimed leftists. And that tells you that those people would mock you too, for being queer, or black, or trans, if not for the fact that they had built an identity for themselves around being “the good guy.”

Find out how someone feels about furries, and you’ll very quickly learn who are the performative progressives, and who are the real ones.

Voroxpete ,

I’d watch the shit out of that movie.

Voroxpete ,

Yeah, I’ll always give credit where credit is due, and no matter how much I detest Musk, this is a legitimately good move and I fully endorse it.

Voroxpete ,

Wait, wut?

Voroxpete ,

Ah. Whoosh on me I guess.

Does the form factor between 3.5" and 2.5" matter in a NAS server? (slrpnk.net)

Been finding some good deals on 2.5 disks lately, but have never bought one before. Have a couple of 3.5 disks on the other hand in my Unraid server. Wondering how much it matters wether I get a 2.5 or not? What form factor do you prefer/usually go for?

Voroxpete ,

For the record, so are a lot of 3.5s. Always read up on your drives before buying.

Voroxpete ,

Awsome resource. You win the Internet today.

Voroxpete ,

Important note; some WD Reds are still SMR. You have to check which specific type.

Voroxpete ,

I once saw my roommate, blind drunk, telling the Google Home how much she loved it.

What tips or resources would you recommend to someone who knows about Linux and wants to self-host, but has no experience self-hosting?

I have several years of Linux experience and I know how to fix my own problems, and I have experience self-hosting using Docker and Docker Compose, but I really feel that I don’t know how to self-host and that I just copy and paste commands without understanding it, I would really like to learn how to self-host by myself but I...

Voroxpete ,

Get to grips with Docker. OCI containers are the standard method of self hosting basically everything now, so once you’re comfortable with Docker and compose files, literally anything you could want to host is available as a drop in component for your system.

An excellent way of playing around with Docker is to install Dockge. It’s a web UI with some really helpful features. First, it can convert Docker Run commands into compose files for you (once you start to play around with this it’ll be clear why that matters), and second, its very good at pointing out where and how you’ve made errors in your compose files. But most importantly, unlike Portainer (the most popular Docker UI) it works with the Docker command line rather than trying to replace it. With Dockge you know exactly where all of your files are and if any part of your setup breaks you can repair it very easily. It also doesn’t have Portainer’s problem of flashing error messages on the screen for 0.3 seconds then whisking them away. It exposes the entire Docker terminal output so your debugging process is much, much easier.

You’ll also want to learn about reverse proxies (I reccomend Caddy for its unbelievably simple config file; an entire site is three lines). These are really important for serving multiple different services from one source.

For anything that you can’t run in Docker, VMs are an acceptable solution, and LXC containers are a better solution, but one that requires a little more work to get to grips with (fun fact, LXC has its own web UI, which is fantastic, but almost nobody seems to even know it exists). Since you’re already familiar with Linux, you may want to ignore the suggestion to use Proxmox and just set up a server with your preferred flavour and go from there. All of this can be done with any modern Linux distro, so you might as well work in an environment you’re comfortable in.

Voroxpete ,

This is really the crazy part; tech is basically operating a stream of bubbles, endlessly collapsing one into the next in the search for infinite growth. It’s gotten to the point where the bubble collapse barely even seems to matter anymore unless you’re one of the suckers going down with it. The industry as a whole has basically embraced perpetual collapse as its fundamental structure.

Voroxpete ,

Throw in KDEnlive for video editors.

Voroxpete ,

Tom Waits, IIRC, successfully sued the makers of a commercial for mimicking his voice, so there is precedent. And the fact that OpenAI reached out to her about using her voice, and that Altman tweeted the word “Her” on its own as a teaser of the product makes it pretty clear that they had knowledge and intent. I think she’s likely to have a pretty solid case here if she chooses to pursue it.

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