IsoKiero
@IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on Word documents will be saved to the cloud automatically on Windows going forward 19 hours ago:
This actually is a really good idea.
Yes, for the reasons you mention. And very, very much no. My corporate hat immediately thinks about a crapload of stuff our network drives have which is under various NDAs, restrictions to store outside EU/ETA, restrictions to store even outside our country and so on. At least our accounts have mandatory MFA and other standard safety features, but cloud storage has a different threat model than our local hardware which also makes it’s own little headaches.
I don’t play on the contract/legal field on corporate at all, but I do know that some of those NDAs have numbers big enough to bring the whole circus down and other clauses which can even throw someone in jail if things really go wrong. I just hope I’m not the scapegoat at that point.
- Comment on Google will block sideloading of unverified Android apps starting next year 22 hours ago:
There’s plenty DIY projects around the net with various raspberry models. You just need some knowledge, preferably access to a 3D printer, an soldering iron, some tools and other bits and bobs. It’s definetly doable, but I can understand if someone prefers to throw some money on the table and get one pre-built.
- Comment on Stop children using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told 3 days ago:
VPN, Tor (and similar, like I2P), every imaginable P2P network, proxies, all non-http protocols (smtp, ftp, nntp, xmpp and other instant messengers and so on) can all transfer any kind of data, porn included. And a ton of other things. Heck, I’m quite sure there’s a minecraft mod where you can assemble JPG-images out of the blocks and view them that way. And then you can use stuff like uuendoce where you can use anything that can move plain text to transfer binary data.
There’s no way to block all of that unless you shut the whole internet down. And even then you can still trade good old playboy-magazines with your friends. VPN in itself has very little to do with the actual problem, beyond that someone apparently noticed that their current “save-the-children” iteration had pretty large holes in it.
- Comment on Stop children using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told 3 days ago:
If they were really after kids watching porn (or even porn in general) it would be technically somewhat simple to force ISPs to provide filters on their end as a subscription service. I’m pretty sure I’ve even heard that kind of services in the past. Make it even opt-out if you really want to.
That way ISPs would just ban everything from pornhub and others unless you spesifically want it allowed or even provide a portal where you could block reddit, twitter, tumblr or whatever you wish on your account. That kind of technology already exists and it’s used on many corporate setups.
There’s obviously ways around that, but there’s no technical way to block every possible way to move bits between computers. Even if they would shut down the whole internet there’s still ways to build mesh-networks or even buy USB-drives from a shady alley.
But as we all know, it’s not about porn and not about children.
- Comment on Americans’ junk-filled garages are hurting EV adoption, study says 4 days ago:
I’m not in the US, but here where we have snow and all the fun that comes with it using garage can be actually harmful to your car (and your garage) unless you spend a ton of energy to melt and dry all the snow every night. If there’s some snow or ice on somewhere it doesn’t really do anything but bring it in a lukewarm garage and then you have water (and likely road salt) all over the thing. So your car corrodes faster and there’s a ton of moisture in the garage for mold, rot and everything else prospering inside.
I’m driving old, cheap cars. Keeping them dry them every day during winter in the garage would easily cost me as much as the cars themselves in a year. So cars stay outside and garage stores my tools and other valuables in a good condition so that I can fix those old shitboxes.
- Comment on Digg’s new app is basic, but a great start 5 days ago:
I’d bet they get some investor funding due to already known brand, struggle to exist without massive userspace for few years and silently die again in next 3-5 years.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
No. Switching from 140 to 160 hp isn’t something you’d really even notice on everyday commuting. More is more of course, but unless your driving style is very aggressive that doesn’t really make any difference on the driving experience. What it might do is improve your range slightly, but that depends heavily on multiple different things and if your driving style and conditions on most common routes aren’t suitable it might even reduce the range you’ll get out of the thing.
- Comment on OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models 1 week ago:
There’s experimental storages where heat is pumped to underground pools or sand, but as far as I know there’s heat exchangers and radiators to outside, so majority of excess heat is just wasted to outside. But absolute majority of them are closed loop systems since you need something else than plain water anyways to prevent freezing in the winter.
- Comment on OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models 1 week ago:
Or you could build the centers in colder climate areas. Here in Finland it’s common (maybe even mandatory, I’m not sure) for new datacenters to pull the heat from their systems and use that for district heating. No wasted water and at least you get something useful out of LLMs. Obviously using them as a massive electric boiler is pretty inefficient but energy for heating is needed anyways so at least we can stay warm and get 90s action series fanfic on top of that.
- Comment on YSK that despite being outside of US jurisdiction, Lego has dropped diversity and inclusion terminology from its annual report 2 weeks ago:
it’s really hard to prove that a candidate was rejected because of their ethnicity
Same in Finland at least to some extent. Statistics and published tests show that you’re less likely to get even an interview if you have a foregin sounding name but of course the official reason is always something ‘acceptable’. And when hiring people the reason can be whatever, “not good fit for our team”, “other applicants had better suited skill set”, “not enough experience in X” and so on. All perfectly good reasons to pick someone else in theory and in practise it’s impossible to prove any racism on selection.
Obviously not everyone does this and any of those can be a real reason to pick someone else even without any racism (intended or not), but it’s still common enough to be statistically meaningful.
- Comment on AOL will end dial-up internet service in September, 34 years after it's debut — AOL Shield Browser and AOL Dialer software will be shuttered on the same day 2 weeks ago:
Just over the weekend I browsed trough my old blog (yes, those were a thing too) to check which year I did some remodeling on our house and stumbled on a note where I complained about slow 3G connection about 10 years ago. Compared to traditional dial-up that’s still orders of magnitude faster(~10/1Mbps back then on our location) but on a snowy day (with severe packet loss) it apparently took 10 minutes to get Skype and XMPP to even log in and over a minute to get SSH session open.
I suppose you can just barely get email trough today and even then you better not be in a hurry.
- Comment on Can I build a fully decentralised website? 2 weeks ago:
Well, depends on what OP is looking for. For example running multiple web servers on different locations with same content and load-balancing them is absolutely doable. But impossible to say what they’re actually after.
- Comment on Checkmate. 2 weeks ago:
gold foil
Aluminium foil hastily coloured with a golden marker.
- Comment on AI in Wyoming may soon use more electricity than state’s human residents 3 weeks ago:
effectively limitless
And it’s generated anyways, no matter if we pull some minuscle amount of it out or not. 47 terawatts all the time (according to wikipedia), or all the power we currently consume per year in about 150 days (assuming my quick math is even close). Of course we can’t (and probably shouldn’t) capture 100% of it, but there’s plenty of energy to at least shut down few coal ovens.
- Comment on AI in Wyoming may soon use more electricity than state’s human residents 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Duckstation(one of the most popular PS1 Emulators) dev plans on eventually dropping Linux support due to Linux users, especially Arch Linux users. 4 weeks ago:
actively going out of your way to remove the existing support is petty and just an asshole move
Sure, but the dev doesn’t owe anything to anyone. He of course could ask community for help with this, sugar coat every answer, spend his (I assume already very valuable and sparse) free time to deal with assholes while trying to organize wider developer base to manage the issue and so on.
But he/she is still not obligated to do so and most definetly not obligated to deal with assholes all day every day instead of working with the passion project. Anyone around here thinking this is a wrong call can step up and volunteer to manage the thing, you don’t even need to know how to code, just filter trough the crap and create meaningful tickets and find people from community who’re willing to spend their time on fixing it.
- Comment on Welcome to the new world of risk: Microsoft cuts off services to energy company without notice 4 weeks ago:
Also, at least in here, lease costs (like all as-a-service things) are considered to be flexible while own hardware and specially workforce are static costs. And no one wants to increase static costs, even if it’s clear as daylight that flexible cost only flexes upward over time unless the company suddenly shrinks by quite a lot.
- Comment on Google Assistant Is Basically on Life Support and Things Just Got Worse 4 weeks ago:
You’re absolutely correct. I have few smart switches around the house and automations for yard lights and stuff like that are pretty nice to have but I still have the physical switch where the dumb switch was to interact with if the automations are down or I just want to override them. The ones I use even accept the same faceplate than traditional ones so there’s no change on anything unless you want to automate things.
- Comment on Steam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition 4 weeks ago:
I’d bet that there are more mastercard users who haven’t even heard about Steam or Valve than there’s users on Steam. And MC with others are using their massive leverage right now, what you’re going to switch to?
Also 3 times bigger is definetly something. It’s like asking what’s the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars (answer is about billion dollars). Not quite, but effectively the same. And payment processors have the power to practically stop all money transfers to Valve (which they are threatening with already). Microsoft or Apple might have cash to fight that, Valve most definetly could not sustain legal fight with them if absolute majority of their income is cut off.
- Comment on ‘If I switch it off, my girlfriend might think I’m cheating’: inside the rise of couples location sharing 4 weeks ago:
Society has apparently forgotten the good old ‘call me when you get there’-thing. My wife travels by car with our kids now and then for 300-400km at a time and it’s nice to get messages/calls like “we’re at X, stopped for coffee” or “we got here”. That’s all I need and it’s also a part of relationship and communication. There’s no value on following a dot on the map. They even had a small accident one time and I heard about it soon enough. Even if I had their live location it would mean absolutely nothing as they were over an hour away, it was way more important to get proper help there before notifying me instead of getting distracted by my calls/messages at that time.
- Comment on Steam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition 4 weeks ago:
Valve is basically a small business one bad Monday from going bankrupt compares to payment processors.
Few quick searches around the internet says that (measured by revenue) Mastercard alone is roughly 3 times bigger than Valve. So even if Valve is pretty big player it’s not even close on major payment processors. And they’re not playing on the same rules either, any payment processor can vanish payments for anyone with just ‘fuck you, that’s why’ -reasoning buried in their contracts. There’s almost no one who could afford to fight with them even in theory and much less in practise.
- Comment on datacenter liquid cooling solution 4 weeks ago:
If you are willing to deal with potential galvanic corrosion, condensation, leaks, replacing fluid every now and then and so on I suppose you could use red or yellow radiator coolant from your local car service shop. It has all the properties you’ll want from a coolant liquid, but as others have already mentioned, it’s not really worth the hassle. Atleast if you’re not running something really power hungry, like GPU farm. And even with liquid you have the very same problems than air, you need the heat to go somewhere. So either have very long pipes (and pumps to match them) so you can have the radiator on a different room/outside or big fans to move the hot air away from radiator.
- Comment on ‘If I switch it off, my girlfriend might think I’m cheating’: inside the rise of couples location sharing 4 weeks ago:
The recipent is your partner.
And provider of whatever service you use to share your location. Being a bit paranoid about your privacy in this day and age is not just fearmongering and tinfoil-hats.
It can be extremely usefull for example for grabbing shit in a mall
Or communicate in advance that it’ll take 30 minutes for you to find your shit and then meet up at a cafe, by car, at lobby or whatever. Live location doesn’t add anything to that, assuming it even works reliably enough inside buildings.
- Comment on Custom remote backup 5 weeks ago:
Obviously we’re talking about hobbyist level stuff and with that there’s always something what can go wrong and it’s not always obvious what it is. So if the ‘remote end’ doesn’t have someone who can do at least very basic troubleshooting it can be nearly impossible to fix the setup over the phone unless you just replace the whole thing and ship whole units back and forth.
But in this particular case the remote end has someone who knows their stuff so it’s taken care of, with or without a KVM. I’ve been thinking a similar setup with my relatives and on my case the distance isn’t an issue but it’s still something I’d need to bother family members with and, for me, it was simpler to get a storage box from hetzner and run backups to that instead of getting more hardware.
Maintenance is anyways something you need to consider and viable options for that vary on a case-by-case basis, so there’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution.
- Comment on Custom remote backup 5 weeks ago:
It won’t help if your power supply breaks and KVM itself can malfunction too. It’s of course nice to have, but it has limitations.
- Comment on Custom remote backup 1 month ago:
I would consider also the case where something goes wrong. Maybe the whole thing crashes, maybe you misconfigure something, maybe there’s a power outage or something else happens and you lose the connectivity. Is there someone on site who can do anything to your hardware as you can’t easily just go and figure it out by yourself?
If the answer is ‘no’ then I would strongy reconsider the whole approach. On a worst case scenario the system goes down before you’re even back home from the trip and then your hardware is just gathering dust.
- Comment on How do people calculate pi to the hundredth+ decimal place? 1 month ago:
There’s plenty of information on wikipedia about different functions and algorithms. Also check out Numberphile on youtube, they have several videos about the topic.
Or wait for someone who actually knows their math to explain it on here, I’m not one of them.
- Comment on Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent 1 month ago:
The best mechanics can track down an issue by reasoning about what could be causing it
Same principle works with IT. I do and have done sysadmin stuff for quite a while and there’s always some random software or whatever I’ve never heard of and someone comes and asks me to fix it. Then you start to ask questions, “what exactly doesn’t work”, “can you show me what you’re doing”, “what should happen when you press that button”, “can you show settings on that thing” and so on. Then you can start to dig down, does the server they’re using respond to ping, does DNS resolve (it’s always DNS after all), does that thing work on the next workstation, when did the problem appear and was there some other maintenance or changes going on at that time and so on.
Same principle, just start to reason the whole thing from bottom up, check everything you come across untill you find something which doesn’t work and then do what’s needed to fix that, rinse and repeat until the problem goes away and make sure that what you’re doing won’t cause new problems. Just the tools are different, the mindset is more or less the same.
- Comment on Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent 1 month ago:
Does a senior mechanic need to understand the physics of piston design to be a great mechanic
I would argue that if senior mechanic doesn’t understand the physics of piston design at least on some degree he’s not a great mechanic. Obviously mechanic doesn’t need understanding on metallurgy, CAD models and a ton of other deeper level stuff just like an IT engineer doesn’t need to know on a deep level how circuit boards are designed or how CPU die manufacturing process works. But both benefit greatly when they understand why something is built the way it is.
I’m also an systems engineer of sorts and have worked with software engineers. And I’ve had requests like “Can’t you just set 'bind-address = 0.0.0.0 on mysql-server and disable firewall” on a directly internet-facing machine and then received complaints when I’m “making things more difficult” from “senior software” -titles. Sure, I can’t write the code they’re doing, or at least it would take me a crapload of more time to do that but on the other hand there’s guys who have so very narrow understanding on anything they work with that it makes me wonder how they can do their work at all in the first place.
Of course no one can master everything in any field but I find it concerning that a lot of guys just press the buttons more or less randomly until their thing works without any clue on what they actually did and how it might affect on different parts of the house of cards they’re building.
- Comment on Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent 1 month ago:
It’s always DNS, everyone should know that.
It’s not DNS. There’s no way it is DNS. It’s not technically possible for it to be DNS.
And it’s always DNS.
