sj_zero
@sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net
- Comment on I ❤️ selfhosting 4 days 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 Jobs report postponed due to government shutdown 1 week ago:
"They can't keep getting away with this!!!"
- Comment on Self-hosting paradox: Windows for specifically MS word 1 week 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? 1 week 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? 1 week 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? 1 week 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 2 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. 2 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 2 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 ??? 2 weeks ago:
Erm... Yeah, that's matrix with encryption enabled on the room.
- Comment on Messaging apps - XMPP vs Matrix vs ??? 2 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 2 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 2 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 3 weeks ago:
Really sad that we haven't found more context, but it suggests there's a huge trove of new discoveries to be found.
- Comment on Bully Online mod taken down abruptly one month after launch 3 weeks ago:
Very good point.
- Comment on Bully Online mod taken down abruptly one month after launch 3 weeks ago:
No, Rockstar has been pretty consistent on shutting down all mods for their games. There is a source Port of vice City and GTA III I got shut down too, and it wasn't for sale.
- Comment on Self-host Reddit – 2.38B posts, works offline, yours forever 3 weeks ago:
I'd be worried about having some of the voat stuff on a hard drive I own.
I'm surprised GitHub hasn't automatically nixed the archive.
- Comment on Every anime ever… 3 weeks ago:
The first 4-5 episodes of Trigun (the 90s version) are so bad compared to the rest of the series. They're structurally necessary but annoying and lame compared to the rest.
- Comment on US would reach 100% renewable energy by 2148 at current pace 4 weeks ago:
Hydroelectric.
I always end up looking like I hate green energy because I'm critical of wind and solar, but geothermal and hydroelectric are actually super practical.
- Comment on US would reach 100% renewable energy by 2148 at current pace 4 weeks ago:
My NFTs may be down 98%, but they're going to the moon!!!
- Comment on GOG's new owner says Steam is winning due to ease of use, not quality, while criticizing the platform for releasing hundreds of games daily that are "not super high quality" 4 weeks ago:
I dunno, some of the games I've bought on GOG just aren't very good either. Especially stuff on gog that isn't good old games.
- Comment on US frackers were already facing a global oil supply glut. Trump’s Venezuelan dream could make it worse 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, there's been an irony in that the one group that doesn't really benefit from lower oil prices are oil companies.
- Comment on US would reach 100% renewable energy by 2148 at current pace 4 weeks ago:
I bought my pets.com stock on this logic back in 1999, as well as my beanie babies.
- Comment on US economy added 50,000 jobs in December, capping off one of the weakest years of job gains in decades 4 weeks ago:
"usually"?
Fact check: pants on fire.
Until Reagan, both Democrats and Republicans were relatively fiscally responsible, not racking up too much debt relative to GDP. Part of the reason for that is the US economy was growing at a meteoric rate being one of the only industrialized countries not to be destroyed in World war II, and with a quickly growing economy it was a lot easier to keep spending under revenue because revenue was increasing every year. The debt number rarely dropped, but inflation saw the national debt relative to GDP shrink. Reagan tripled the national debt to get out of the stagflation crisis of the 1970s (among other things, he was also fighting the Cold war), bush 1 spent money at a high rate too. Clinton almost balanced the budget thanks in part to the huge economic boom from the dot com bubble. Bush 2 doubled the national debt due to increased military spending on two wars that were part of the war on terror, security spending, and since then there's been no winning move, with Obama doubling the national debt, trump almost increasing it as much in 4 years (which included the pandemic to be fair) as Obama did in 8, Biden ran it up a bunch, and Trump is keeping up the tradition with very little in sight in terms of an exit strategy for anyone at this point.
Even the post-WWII fiscal restraint was a bit of a mirage. The Bretton woods system meet the US dollar the reserve currency of the world, would you allowed them to play some games when issuing currency that allowed the federal debt to State relatively small. If everything was kosher, the stagflation crisis of the 1970s never would have happened.
While there have been times in the past that the United States has paid off its debts, such as after the revolutionary war and after the civil war, they would have been so long ago that even the definitions of parties would be fundamentally different. For the most part, other than immediately following World war II where demobilization allowed for the sale of a bunch of military hardware, nominal debt value almost never dropped, and even inflation adjusted would tend to stay around the same spot until stagflation broke everything.
- Comment on Self-hosting in 2025 isn't about privacy anymore - it's about building resistance infrastructure 4 weeks ago:
Always has been.
Even if you like who's in charge right now, they could change how they act or they could be replaced.
They could shut us down or do a lot of things, but it's harder to break 10,000 servers than one.
- Comment on CD PROJEKT and GOG co-founder Michał Kiciński acquires GOG from CD PROJEKT 4 weeks ago:
It's a shocking deal for the #2 PC game store.
- Comment on words 5 weeks ago:
I always love it when it's asked and an LLM goes "I know it seems like I'm just an artificial intelligence, but I very deeply feel X"
It actually reminds me of watching shows like chobits, because those shows always show highly sentient Androids, but they very much seem to react in ways that suggest emotion felt much more deeply than just doing what statistical models suggest would be desirable or appropriate. On the other hand, in a lot of the true stories where humans claim to fall in love with AI and AI claims to fall in love back relating to large language models that we see today, The words look heartfelt, but it's quite obvious that it's just a pattern, and very similar things into getting said to a bunch of the people in these stories.
- Comment on Contrarian take: The "Soft Landing" narrative looks dead if you analyze Burry’s latest hedges 5 weeks ago:
There's other options than just a short. Defensives have been doing great despite not being in the direct line of fire. Some money market funds have been giving 5% and it's a great place to keep dry powder too. Alternatively, you can use a dumbbell strategy where you take risks with a small part of your funds but lock your profits into low risk things.
So there's lots of options, not just buy or short.