sj_zero
@sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net
- Comment on Why MAGA suddenly loves solar power | The Trump-led attack on solar eases as the right reckons with its crucial role in powering AI and keeping utility bills in check. 1 day ago:
It really isn't.
Hydroelectric and geothermal are utility scale renewable energy. Solar just drives up electricity prices.
- Comment on Upcoming California law to require operating systems to check your age 1 day ago:
Well, that would have been the entire history of computing right up until the point that the government starts fiddling with operating systems so ultimately we'll have to provide proof of identity to download or install software.
I know you kids are too young to remember this, but back in the day there used to be a cartoon from The New Yorker, "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog". Very quickly it appears that many jurisdictions are trying to make sure that it is built into the frameworks of computing that everyone will know exactly that you're a dog.
- Comment on Upcoming California law to require operating systems to check your age 2 days ago:
Everyone ignoring what is essentially the end of open computing.
- Comment on What us the best way to add remote access to my servers? 2 days ago:
Apache guacamole is something I wish I had when I started. Let's you connect with telnet, ssh, RDP, or VNC using html5
- Comment on Server randomly locked up. Trying to find out why 2 days ago:
In sysctl.conf you can put
kernel.panic=1
Where 1 is the seconds until reboot.
- Comment on Server randomly locked up. Trying to find out why 4 days ago:
For homeservers if you're not always on-site to look at it, it's a good idea to set a reset on kernel panic.
More ideal not to reboot of course, but I am often hundreds of miles from my servers so a kernel panic over something that wouldn't have otherwise killed the system is something I'd rather live with and reboot.
- Comment on Citizen scientists discover a Great Barrier Reef coral giant ‘like a rolling meadow’ 6 days ago:
The size of seven libraries of Congress!
- Comment on You can log into 28 vintage computer systems in your browser for free, thanks to the Interim Computer Museum. Experience legendary OSes, architectures, programming languages, and games 6 days ago:
Haiku has come a long way, I'm told, but I haven't tried it yet (and I don't think I own anything that can run it on bare metal)
- Comment on So simple! 1 week ago:
Erased my LinkedIn 5 years ago.
Nothing of value was lost. However, much was gained.
- Comment on Karim Diané Gets Support From George Takei For Playing Star Trek’s First Gay Klingon 1 week ago:
A Klingon throuple is going to have more black eyes than a bag of peas.
- Comment on Ubisoft cut staff at Splinter Cell devs Ubisoft Toronto, as part of their push to save €200 million 1 week ago:
People who like games were pushed out and replaced by people who like money or power.
- Comment on Old Thin Clients - Which CPU is fine? 1 week ago:
Always go with more ram. I can say that from experience.
I'm partial to fanless, but keep in mind my empire of dirt is almost entirely fanless so I'm just partial to it.
- Comment on Where Inflation Has Risen the Most in the U.S. (2019–2025) 2 weeks ago:
Insurance in particular is something that I really feel like regulators should be looking into because especially during the pandemic, people were driving a lot less, people are in their homes more so there would be less robberies and less catastrophic destruction, but insurance soared.
It was a long time ago now, but my predictions also ended up playing out in the data where they were paying out way less and still cranked up premiums.
- Comment on What type of computer setup would one need to run ai locally? 2 weeks ago:
I'm running a 4B model on one of my machines, an old surface book 1.
It's a brutal machine. heat issues, and the GPU doesn't work in linux. But pick a minimal enough model and it's good enough for me to have LLM access in my nextcloud if for some reason I wanted it.
Biggest thing really seems to be memory, most cheaper GPUs don't have enough to run a big model, and CPUs are dreadfully slow on larger models if you can put enough RAM in one of them.
- Comment on I ❤️ selfhosting 3 weeks ago:
The "aha" moment for me was running nextcloud.
Under Google, they've always been chill, but you know in your heart of hearts that if they wanted to they could get pissy if you had something copyrighted or something they politically disagree with or something inconvenient for them on your google drive.
But I was sitting there, and it's like 'Wait, I can just keep all my stuff on here, and literally nobody cares because I'm copying my files from my hard drive to my hard drive'
It feels like moving from a rental to a house you own.
- Comment on [Fediverse.games] Five Free & Open Source Games to Try in 2026 4 weeks ago:
mindustry is also on android on f-droid. I remember playing a bit when I took a lot of long airline flights.
- Comment on Finally installed my own Firewall 4 weeks ago:
Why my firewall is a fanless sign PC. Never really heats up, and I don't need to worry about the unreliability added by fans.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
"They can't keep getting away with this!!!"
- Comment on Self-hosting paradox: Windows for specifically MS word 4 weeks ago:
To be fair, and this is coming to someone who is fully sold on LibreOffice and hosts Collabera, the two word processors can open each other's documents, but cannot produce identical outputs for the same files.
For 99.99% of things switching between the two is going to be just fine, but every once in awhile that 0.01% will really bite you, especially if it is something important such as equations which I have seen first hand don't properly migrate to LibreOffice.
- Comment on what is good remote desktop software? 4 weeks ago:
Depends exactly what you're doing on that old PC.
If you just need to connect for administration and the like, VNC is decent. It's my default.
If you want to watch videos or the like, I'd definitely suggest Sunlight and Moonlight. It's a streaming remote desktop that's meant for streaming gaming, and so it's really good at video and audio.
- Comment on Self hosting Sunday! What's up and how long? 4 weeks ago:
Oh, and for anyone who has never used it, Apache guacamole is a really neat tool for centralizing configuration. Effectively, you can set it up as a website with a username and password that will transfer through ssh, telnet, VNC, and RDP, so if you need to hop into something while you are outside the home, it's going to be effective. That's something that I wish I had known about earlier, it would have made a lot of rough days a lot easier.
- Comment on Self hosting Sunday! What's up and how long? 4 weeks ago:
On the topic of dns, I still use GoDaddy. People ask why, it's because GoDaddy seems like a good idea in 2003 when I got my first domain, and 2006 when I got my current one. At that point it's just inertia, I tend to buy several years in advance because I don't like annual payments, I know it makes me a weirdo. That means I'm locked in for several years and it's not enough of a problem to do anything about.
Anyone who uses GoDaddy knows that they turned off their dynamic DNS option quite some time ago. My system is pretty stable so I don't usually need to change it, but if I have a power failure at home or I need to reboot my router, I obviously need to change my DNS at those moments.
When I'm away from home, I end up having to use TeamViewer to hop into a jump box vm I have set up for that purpose. The two obvious problems with that are first of that TeamViewer is a proprietary product, and the second of all that they see me hopping into a jump box regularly and they assume that I'm a commercial customer. There is apparently a way to tell them that you're just a hobbyist, but I haven't gotten around to filing that.
What I did do is set up a script that compares the current IP to my DNS IP, and if they are different then I send myself an email that contains the old IP in the new IP. This way, I don't need to hop into my network to find out what the new IP address is. I also added a little bit there to save the last successful IP address sent by email to /tmp/ so that if I lose my IP address but I'm doing something where I can't hop onto the GoDaddy website to fix it, I don't get 100,000 emails with my new IP address.
I killed my house power a couple weeks ago, and the whole system worked exactly as intended. I was pretty happy to see that.
- Comment on Ubisoft propose cutting up to 200 jobs at Paris headquarters, as unions reportedly agree three day strike 5 weeks ago:
Ubisoft has been getting it's nuts kicked for years now. During the last quarter, its profit margin has been -24%.
Under these conditions, money > people for anyone. If you made 50,000 a year and every year you were coming up 12,500 short, you'd be looking to make major cuts to your spending, and if someone was going to get hurt as a result, you'd have to just apologize and move on because that's not sustainable.
Anyone who holds Ubisoft stock for the past 5 years hasn't made a profit. In fact, they bought a stock at around 80 dollars that is 4 today. Without changes, their investments will go to 0, and every worker at Ubisoft will lose their jobs at that point.
It may appear as if this is a unique feature of capitalism, but under any economic system, underperforming systems need to be cut. People aren't buying the games, people aren't playing the games in great enough members and at high enough prices to justify having so many people working on each game, so there just isn't a good reason to keep giving resources to all the workers.
- Comment on My country's police just busted a dangerous 3d printed weapons manufacturer. 5 weeks ago:
Hopefully someday these places make murder illegal so people can't kill others without violating the law.
- Comment on The tendency to feel like a perpetual victim is strongly tied to vulnerable narcissism 5 weeks ago:
“I also want the average person to understand that our research is not political. What I mean by this is that our research is not demonstrating that certain groups have high levels of the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood and thus are narcissistic – to use this research against others of various political affiliations is irresponsible and inaccurate. It is likely that the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood occurs among various people, and it may manifest differently depending on the way the person is.”
While I would typically take such a statement suspiciously because often people deny the thing they're doing, in this case I can say I've seen left leaning people who don't want the spotlight and take on load to make things better for others, and right leaning people who want to be the center of attention and to be a victim who isn't getting their due, and vice versa. A persons temperament can affect their ideology, but doesn't necessarily have to.
- Comment on Messaging apps - XMPP vs Matrix vs ??? 5 weeks ago:
Erm... Yeah, that's matrix with encryption enabled on the room.
- Comment on Messaging apps - XMPP vs Matrix vs ??? 5 weeks ago:
A lot of things people say about matrix don't apply to conduit. I've run it on an Intel Atom d2550 and it ran fine.
- Comment on Missing Kansas teacher found dead in snow after vanishing during massive winter storm 5 weeks ago:
Even in Canada, we don't go out in a snowstorm unless we really really have to.
Even with top equipment, it's risky.
- Comment on Archaeologists Say They've Finally Found a Long-Lost Basilica That Matches the Description the Architect Wrote 2,000 Years Ago 5 weeks ago:
People end up incorrectly utilizing a modernist historical lens, and they don't realize just how much of our history is barely transmitted.
2,000 years is a long time. Even this article points to exactly one remaining architectural treatise from the first century, of the entire field which was almost certainly written down somewhere given that the Romans were and still are world famous for their architecture.
If we were to step away from the digital environment which may lose every piece of information it has in a century or two, how many pieces of paper have your name on it, and how many of those pieces of paper are likely to survive over 2,000 years?
Anthropologists looking that far back have a real challenge. So much so that many people are still taught things that were just embellishments by angry contemporaries of certain political figures who's writings on the topic of their enemies happen to be the only one to survive.
They used to say history is written by the winners, but now I say history is written by the people who write and maintain history. It certainly would be nice if a famous historian looked over at the populist Jew in the 0th century would gain quite a following amongst the lower classes, but in the absence of such a piece of documentation, and only having a verbal testimony that was much later written down by a state which had captured those stories for itself, that's what is there.
If we were to take the epistemological stance that people who weren't explicitly recorded didn't exist, then no one would exist in the Americas outside of a few civilizations (and even then the books were burned so no). We have all kinds of tools and buildings and the like, but no one would exist because outside of those civilizations, many of the indigenous Americans didn't have a writing system.
Another uncomfortable reality is that outside of a few examples such as ethiopia, great zimbabwe, and Egypt, most people on the entire African continent would disappear if this was the required epistemological framework. Even today many of their stories remain unrecorded, passed down only by verbal tradition. Which by the way is an absolute tragedy because based on the few that have been recorded, there are some fascinating stories on the continent.
The thing is coming in the modern era, one of the most interesting discoveries was that many verbal stories passed down Did contain empirically true facts. A number of incredible archaeological finds in Greece were discovered by archaeologists attempting to check the locations where ancient poems suggested there might be something. Before Homer wrote down or had written down his stories, many of the tales were passed down over millennia. The Minoan civilization of crete, for example, was only found incredibly recently, and besides the old stories we can't even read their writing.
- Comment on Stone tablet found with carved symbols that do not match any known language 1 month ago:
Really sad that we haven't found more context, but it suggests there's a huge trove of new discoveries to be found.