sj_zero

@sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Open Source Developers Are Exhausted, Unpaid, and Ready to Walk Away⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Big question or not, we can only control ourselves.

  Everyone always stares at other people's resources and imagine how great it would be if those resources were used how we like, but at the end of the day, we control our resources.

  So is it a big question if it doesn't really matter because we can't do anything about it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK wind farms generate a record 22.7 GW of power on a single day⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  The only ones that seem to not be like that are hydroelectric and geothermal, since they're baseload. Which is why they're the two I advocate for the loudest -- why not use stuff that works?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Open Source Developers Are Exhausted, Unpaid, and Ready to Walk Away⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Big question is: how many of us are funding foss projects?

  It isn't difficult, and with how popular some are, it wouldn't be long before the projects could hire one or more full time devs at good rates.

  I support a few big projects I use every month through liberapay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Open Source Developers Are Exhausted, Unpaid, and Ready to Walk Away⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Big question is: how many of us are funding foss projects?

  It isn't difficult, and with how popular some are, it wouldn't be long before the projects could hire one or more full time devs at good rates.

  I support a few big projects I use every month through liberapay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wendy’s to close hundreds of restaurants as struggling customers cut back on dining out⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  With capitalism proper being a decentralized system, the alternatives are all forms of central planning, so it is reasonable to assume that central planning is what is being referred to when someone says capitalism is a failed experiment. Rejecting decentralized coordination leaves planning as the remaining category.

  If you think anything I wrote is a non sequitur, that simply shows you are missing the conceptual scaffolding behind the argument. The purpose of any economic system is to allocate scarce resources among humans who have effectively unlimited desires. Scarcity is the starting condition. Allocation is the problem. Economic systems are different strategies for dealing with that problem.

  That scarcity does not come from capitalism or from any human institution. It comes from physical existence itself. There is finite matter, finite energy, finite space, and finite time. Scarcity existed long before humans ever appeared, and it will exist long after. Showing that scarcity is universal rather than human-created is not a tangent. It directly addresses the foundation that all economic systems must operate on. No system gets to escape trade-offs, because the trade-offs are not created by the system. The system exists because of them.

  The system we live under that forces people to live with limited means is reality. Capitalism is one method of dealing with those limited means. Central planning is another method. Both are attempts to solve the same basic coordination problem. One distributes decisions through prices. The other concentrates decisions in administrative structures. Neither one abolishes scarcity. They only differ in how they respond to it.

• Cloudflare is down this morning
  Submitted ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨68⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Preparing for the hardware market disruption⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Glad I upgraded before it was too late.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How A Blast From The Past⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Ran windows 95 on a thin client a couple years ago.

  I forgot that you could just end up with a broken install from the word go. I had to reinstall twice until it was stable. I didn't do anything in particular different, it just didn't take that time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wendy’s to close hundreds of restaurants as struggling customers cut back on dining out⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The system is called reality.

  The problem we face is that there is unlimited desires, but limited resources. That problem was written into the laws of the universe when the big bang occurred and a finite amount of energy produced a finite amount of matter.

  Before a single homonid existed on earth, there was a limited amount of material on earth, a limited amount of energy available, a limited amount of space. Before a single homonid existed on earth, animals required food, shelter, heat, cool, and clean water.

  The Oxygen Catastrophe is an amazing extinction event where most life on earth was photosynthesizing CO2, and in spite of the early earth having about 20 atmospheres worth of CO2 the Earth effectively ran out and afterwards the atmosphere was composed of mostly nitrogen and oxygen. Amazing to think that there was a resource that abundant, that was effectively completely used up by life, before multi-cellular life even began in earnest.

  That extinction event killed almost all life on Earth, and ushered in an ice age that killed even more. That's life, and it isn't fair. Much of the life that remained had to adapt. Much life adapted to utilize this new oxygen waste. You and I utilize that waste material. Some photosynthesizers still exist, adapted to high levels of oxygen and low levels of CO2. Today, we live in a world that cycles between O2 and CO2, that's the only way we can survive.

  In about 250 million years, continental drift will form a new supercontinent, which will likely destroy most life on Earth. In about 750 million years, the luminosity of the dying sun will rise to the point that life on Earth will no longer be able to exist. A few billion years after that, the sun will run out of material, and will stop altogether. The solar system will slowly freeze for countless aeons. No life will survive that long. This is the end point of our reality.

  Systems that pretend reality doesn't exist, that this isn't the end point of everything, they're doomed because magic isn't real and every decision is a trade-off between multiple competing and true things.

  99.95% of life on Earth died in the oxygen catastrophe. 350 Wendy's stores might close, laying off all their employees. Unlike the life that died in the oxygen catastrophe, the employees of those 350 Wendy's can get new jobs, the real estate can be repurposed for new businesses that might not fail, and even capital equipment like ovens or deep fryers can be reused.

  Central planners like to pretend they can prevent catastrophe, but all it does is change the terms of disaster. Instead of "Which locations objectively sell enough product to justify their existence", often it becomes a war of nepotism, favoritism, lobbyists, and political favors. You can ask the empires of the Bronze Age Collapse how that worked out for them, but you can't because of them, only the ancient Egyptians survived, every civilization of the middle east fell. Some fell and were erased from history altogether by people who wanted to forget the horrors of for example the Minoans. New civilizations rose eventually in the same regions, but new ones that did things differently. Eventually, even the Egyptians fell to the Greeks under Alexander.

  Life requires suffering and limitation. Life requires constant adaption. Life requires successfully dealing with reality. Anyone who tells you differently, they're not telling you the truth, and any system that suggests you can avoid these truths will aways fail against systems that model reality more correctly.

  The positive thing is that a system like capitalism when it's working correctly (I'm not saying it does always, I'm not a modernist who believes you can fit everything in the world in one box) means that the Wendy's employees don't die, they just have to find new jobs, and perhaps that building will be bought by a new company that does things differently, or sells something different, and is more likely to provide enough useful goods or services that it can support itself. If it does, then instead of the result being a net human suffering, it'll be a net human positive. Perhaps that neighborhood actually needed a local restaurant in that spot. Perhaps it actually needed a book store. People who have an idea can take a risk and give it a shot, and maybe it survives and thrives, maybe it fails too and the cycle starts again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wendy’s to close hundreds of restaurants as struggling customers cut back on dining out⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Normally I'd even go a step further and challenge the idea that capitalism even exists in the postmodern world, but honestly stores shutting down because they aren't making enough money to continue operating is capitalism working as intended, not the opposite. And for once, that's a good thing.

  Most forms of economic system, particularly central economic planning, would tend to choose stores based on metric other than whether they were actually cashflow positive, resulting in higher resource utilization, lower efficiency, and so worse outcomes overall.

  Because Wendy's won't be using that building any longer, a different restaurant could take its place, and see if it can build a profitable business in its place. In my city, a local business took over such a building, and they make the best burgers on locally made buns in the city.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ISO Project Ideas For Wyse 3040 & 5010 Thin Clients⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  When I'm looking at thin clients for use in my systems, I look at a few different things:

  1. Max RAM capacity
  2. Max storage capacity (and method of expansion
  3. CPU capability
  4. Communication methods

  It looks like the 5010s are the most interesting to start with. They seem to be expandable to 8GB of RAM. They seem to have a DOM plugged into a populated SATA port, so I'm thinking you might be able to use an extension cable to install a proper SATA SSD and have decent storage. The APU is AMD pre-ryzen which is horrible for most purposes but I'd say is quite interesting for homelab use. Get some memory and real storage in them, and they're good enough to be basically fully powered servers for whatever you want. Being suck on USB 2.0 means you're pretty limited in that front. With upgraded memory and storage, you're basically looking at something you can integrate into a proxmox cluster easily.

  The 3040s are a bigger challenge. Limited memory (2GB soldered), very limited storage (8 or 16GB), and no immediately apparent way to upgrade them. On the other hand, the USB 3.0 port on the front means you can use a USB SSD or HDD to increase storage. With such a device plugged in, the Intel Atom X4 quad-core isn't a great CPU, but you can definitely do some limited fun things. As-is and without any mods, I'm thinking you could host game servers on these for older games without overtaxing them too much, or fun niche applications like gemini hosting or telnet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MPV: The Ultimate Self-Hosted Media Solution You're Probably Sleeping On⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This really seems like an AI generated article to, in a very complicated way, describe of what was until fairly recently just the status quo.

  Until fairly recently, if you had network attached storage you could just play the media off of the network storage. That's just how it worked. People playing media through the command line is something people have been doing for decades. What happened later was the introduction of services like jellyfin that would streamline the process.

  Overall, other than the extremely hyperbolic language promising to completely change your life by letting you do things the way that they were done decades ago, it reads like "you may not like cars, but let me introduce you to an amazing new technology known as walking" presented without any irony.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The government shutdown is now the longest - and likely the most damaging in US history⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Americans really aren't good at civics, are they?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Allegations swirl as 24 transgender residents of Indore attempt mass suicide⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I'm so glad you dejargonified.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Top economist on the economy’s dirty truth: The only people who feel good are ‘making over $200,000’ and ‘have large stock portfolios’⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered. Usually it's retail investors who end up getting slaughtered.

  Even people going deeply into risky bets usually have a "barbell" strategy where they'll rebalance from the high risk high growth to low risk low growth so they can see growth but in a downturn they aren't facing huge losses.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon to announce largest layoffs in company history, source says⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I suspect that Amazon is starting to take advantage of the lead it got from being a loss leader in so many markets.

  Amazon the store is effectively a loss leader I think for stuff like AWS, since people go "Oh, if the largest store in the world uses this hosting, we can use it for our business/government/project".

  I've seen it a lot in the past 5 years, where things they couldn't possibly have been making a profit sending to our house (like groceries) went way up and now local stores make more sense. A lot of stuff where they still have a price advantage is basically just because they're a marketplace for direct factory sales from places like China.

  If people like me and a lot of others are correct, we might be facing a period of extreme uncertainty and likely big recession. Amazon would be quite sensible to get in front of that and start cutting now so they don't need to take the pain at the same time everyone else is. Ford made a similar move prior to the 2008 financial crisis and that ended up being a great move for them in the medium term since they didn't need to be bailed out like GM. I wouldn't be surprised to see more competition in the AWS space in such a situation because platforms like that are actually pretty expensive compared to a few servers. I know if I were a CIO or CTO and my choice was to keep my staff and spend some capital or keep using AWS, in a downturn I'd be looking pretty carefully at on-prem for a lot of things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists have been studying remote work for four years and have reached a very clear conclusion: “Working from home makes us thrive”⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I appreciate this as a balanced take.

  I've done a little work from home, and it's nice being home, but it's still work. If you're doing your job right, it's still your job.

  Unfortunately, I've also seen that while some people are great at WFH and even do better, a lot of people either don't get anything done, or look very "productive" because they're harassing people still at work with meaningless busywork like sending emails that don't do anything or asking other people to do parts of their job they'd be able to do if they were at work.

  I think that partially goes to the point of "what is productivity?" since someone can look busy but not be doing anything that actually does anything positive for either boots on the ground micro views or mile high macro views. "Oh, look at how many emails got sent" great, did that actually help the business run? And sometimes the answer is "yes, and we should let this WFH worker continue at all costs", and in others the answer is "No, and we need to get this person into the office or eliminate the position because either would be better than the status quo"

  It's a bit managerial in the way to look at it, but in order to justify WFH, the people working from home must be providing enough value to justify their employment, because too much overhead waste and the business ends, maybe every business embracing WFH ends, and then all that's left is the ones that didn't. To be clear, that's not a moral stance, but a purely pragmatic evolutionary stance: Those things which survive continue and those that die do not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dozens killed in Gaza as violence erupts between Hamas and armed clans⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Fair enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dozens killed in Gaza as violence erupts between Hamas and armed clans⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So the war with Israel ends and the war between groups within Palestine begins?

  Just can't win!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In coal-addicted Poland, partisan politics throttle geothermal’s growth⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Hawaii is an odd one. By definition as a volcano they can have virtually unlimited energy, and yet there's something like 90% imported coal for their energy utilization. Far as I'm concerned that should be at the top of every environmentalists wish list.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Crunchyroll Faces Cancelation: Why Anime Fans Are Choosing Piracy After Latest Update⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  "Crunchyroll is also ignoring the needs of groups who require Closed Captions to understand the scenes better."

  They're called anime fans.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gremlin Grandma⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This guy gets it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gremlin Grandma⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I'll still put magus in my party every time.

  Fight me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨James should have used his money⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It's a kid's show, of course he is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FFS Plex, the server is on my local network⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, let me tell you a story.

  Recently I needed to use BitTorrent to download a very large file from an independent project. Usually I can just use my web browser, but this one was in the hundreds of gigabytes there just was no way.

  So I installed the original official bittorrent client, because I'm really out of the game I haven't torn today anything outside of my browser in years now.

  I had to pay close attention to not install multiple pieces of unwanted software. I had to uncheck a bunch of stuff and carefully navigate the installer. Even after that, the client was junk and constantly showed multiple videos ads at all times, and besides that it just didn't have the horsepower to download my torrent for me.

  I remembered using transmission on Linux so I decided to try getting that instead, turns out it had a Windows version.

  Downloaded, ran the executable, pressed next three times, opened up the torrent file, pointed to my existing download hoping it'd figure out what parts the file needed and in fact it did and the download was done quickly.

  If I had failed to uncheck any of the boxes, I guess you could call me stupid for non-un checking them, but to me it seems a lot simpler using the FOSS products that never had any checkboxes to uncheck in the first place.

  Meanwhile, and honestly I didn't use Plex very much because it just didn't seem like a very good product, but I also seem to remember I kept on ending up on the plex.net website instead of my own server. I think it was something along lines of if you go in to change certain settings it'll change domains on you? Either way, it was just not very well set up compared to Jellyfin, which had everything that I was using right there I never even remotely tried to send me somewhere else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FFS Plex, the server is on my local network⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Zero with jellyfin.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FFS Plex, the server is on my local network⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  By default for me it seems to really want me to get off of my server altogether and get onto their servers, and it seems to really want to get me off of my media and onto their half-baked streaming service.

  Really complex compared to just having my media show up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Those who are hosting on bare metal: What is stopping you from using Containers or VM's? What are you self hosting?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I'm using proxmox now with lots of lxc containers. Prior to that, I used bare metal.

  VMs were never really an option for me because the overhead is too high for the low power machines I use -- my entire empire of dirt doesn't have any fans, it's all fanless PCs. More reliable, less noise, less energy, but less power to throw at things.

  Stuff like docker I didn't like because it never really felt like I was in control of my own system. I was downloading a thing someone else made and it really wasn't intended for tinkering or anything. You aren't supposed to build from source in docker as far as I can tell.

  The nice thing about proxmox's lxc implementation is I can hop in and change things or fix things as I desire. It's all very intuitive, and I can still separate things out and run them where I want to, and not have to worry about keeping 15 different services running on the same version of whatever common services are required.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FFS Plex, the server is on my local network⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, I lowkey hated plex when I was using it. We never used it because it wasn't very good at the one thing it was supposed to be fore.

  It was trying so hard to get me to use their media, when what I wanted was to watch my media. By contrast, jellyfin just shows me my media.

  If you have a few bucks, the chromecast with android TV is what I'd recommend. The jellyfin app for android TV looks and works great -- as good as any paid streaming service imo. I got my wife using it daily, and she's not a tech person at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yes, That Great-Looking 'Star Trek: Voyager' Game Will Let You Spare Tuvix⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The big question is: Can you replicate Tuvix, then split the replicated tuvix back into the Neelix and Tuvok, then toss all 3 into the warp core?

  I really want to go full Janeway on this.