Nibodhika
@Nibodhika@lemmy.world
- Comment on Backups: Am I doing this right? 2 hours ago:
I figure the most bang for my buck right now is to set up off-site backups to a cloud provider.
Check out Borgbase, it’s very cheap and it’s an actual backup solution, so it offers some features you won’t get from Google drive or whatever you were considering using e.g. deduplication, recover data at different points in time and have the data be encrypted so there’s no way for them to access it.
I first decided to do a full-system backup in the hopes I could just restore it and immediately be up and running again. I’ve seen a lot of comments saying this is the wrong approach, although I haven’t seen anyone outline exactly why.
The vast majority of your system is the same as it would be if you install fresh, so you’re wasting backup space in storing data you can easily recover in other ways. You would only need to store changes you made to the system, e.g. which packages are installed (just get the list of packages then run an install on them, no need to backup the binaries) and which config changes you made. Plus if you’re using docker for services (which you really should) the services too are very easy to recover. So if you backup the compose file and config folders for those services (and obviously the data itself) you can get back in almost no time. Also even if you do a full system backup you would need to chroot into that system to install a bootloader, so it’s not as straightforward as you think (unless your backup is a dd of the disk, which is a bad idea for many other reasons).
I then decided I would instead cherry-pick my backup locations instead. Then I started reading about backing up databases, and it seems you can’t just back up the data directory (or file in the case of SQLite) and call it good. You need to dump them first and backup the dumps.
Yes and no. You can backup the file completely, but it’s not a good practice. The reason is that if the file gets corrupted you will lose all data, whereas if you dumped the database contents and backed that up is much less likely to corrupt. But in actuality there’s no reason why backing up the files themselves shouldn’t work (in fact when you launch a docker container it’s always an entirely new database pointed to the same data folder)
So, now I’m configuring a docker-db-backup container to back each one of them up, finding database containers and SQLite databases and configuring a backup job for each one. Then, I hope to drop all of those dumps into a single location and back that up to the cloud. This means that, if I need to rebuild, I’ll have to restore the containers’ volumes, restore the backups, bring up new containers, and then restore each container’s backup into the new database. It’s pretty far from my initial hope of being able to restore all the files and start using the newly restored system.
Am I going down the wrong path here, or is this just the best way to do it?
That seems like the safest approach. If you’re concerned about it being too much work I recommend you write a script to automate the process, or even better an Ansible playbook.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
Came here to say exactly this, SOMA is an absolutely amazing game and it’s all about this question.
- Comment on Will AI Startups End Up Like Blockchain Startups? 3 days ago:
You know you can get your money back if you sent it to the wrong person, right?
No you can’t, take a 100 bill and throw it out of a tall building, how do you plan on getting it back? That’s the equivalent of sending Bitcoin to a random address.
But even if you give the bill to a random person you can’t get it back, you might forcefully take it, and even if you sue the person and he’s legally forced to give it back to you he’s not forced to. The exact same is true for Bitcoin, no one can revert a paper money transaction.
- Comment on Will AI Startups End Up Like Blockchain Startups? 4 days ago:
Your arguments are nonsense, just because lemmy is a decentralized social network and better than reddit, that doesn’t mean that blockchain is useful for anything.
No, but it means you recognize the usefulness of decentralized platforms.
In what application do you need 0-trust validation of tokens?
An example would be money but others could be international ownership across, e.g. cars.
Also if you use it for money, what happens when you accidentally send the money to the wrong address? Since it’s decentralized no one has the authority to get that money back to you, do they?
Same thing that happens if you give money to the wrong person. Is that an argument against paper money?
- Comment on Will AI Startups End Up Like Blockchain Startups? 4 days ago:
Absolutely, I even mentioned that it’s an impossible problem, even so it’s an elegant solution to it, because it’s more profitable to participate.
- Comment on Will AI Startups End Up Like Blockchain Startups? 4 days ago:
First of all no technology is the only way to solve a problem, for example Lemmy and Reddit essentially solve the same problem except one is open source decentralized and the other is centralized and closed source. With that in mind, Blockchains solve the decentralized 0-trust validation of tokens, which can be used for anything you might need a token for, e.g. money or proof of ownership. Sure, you can do that in a centralized manner, but the fact that we’re having this discussion over Lemmy instead of Reddit should be enough of a proof to you of why you can’t always rely on centralized solutions. If you have any other technology that solves tokens in a decentralized 0-trust way I would love to hear about it.
- Comment on Will AI Startups End Up Like Blockchain Startups? 4 days ago:
Is it that you don’t understand the problem or the solution? Or maybe you got scammed and lost money by buying a picture of a monkey that someone assured you would be worth way more, akin to an old person being against emails and thinking they solve nothing because once they sent money to a Nigerian prince.
- Comment on Will AI Startups End Up Like Blockchain Startups? 4 days ago:
Yes, but not to the same extent. Both AI and Blockchain are amazing technologies, but those people that are pushing either as the next big thing since slice bread don’t understand them.
Blockchain is an elegant solution to a decades old problem that’s actually impossible to solve called Byzantine fault tolerance by making it costly to bad actors to the point where it’s better for them to become good actors. It is revolutionary, but very unlikely that someone will make a profitable product out of it, especially because the two more obvious uses for it already exist and are open source.
LLMs, which is what people are calling AI, is also a very cool new step for text prediction. But it’s not in fact intelligent, so it can’t do anything without supervision, and more often than not it’s easier and safer to create something yourself than to fix a possibly broken, possibly malicious creation by someone else. LLMs are great for stuff like brainstorming or suggesting short pieces of code that I was about to type anyways, but to think they can produce a book or a program on their own is absurd.
However, as much as I think Blockchains are elegant, they solve an abstract and very specific problem, whereas LLMs are good at solving generalized stuff. There are plenty of applications that would benefit enormously from having LLMs, e.g. a bot that finds, summarizes and points you to documentation at work would help anyone having to deal with documentation to make them more efficient, and companies that invest in these sorts of solutions might come up with great products. But most of the time they’re using it as a buzzword or worse trying to remove a person’s job which will backfire.
- Comment on Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?! 5 days ago:
Oh no, a random on the internet who can’t read the list of issues to understand they are all service and not deployment related, with no qualification whatsoever and who reads like an angry teen thinks I don’t know about a technology I’ve been using since before he knew how to talk. I’m devastated.
- Comment on Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?! 5 days ago:
¯\(ツ)/¯ what do I know, I only do this for a living plus manage a couple of home servers with dozens of services for almost a decade.
- Comment on Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?! 5 days ago:
I would bet that the problem is with Plex being inside docker. Might be one of those situations where being more experienced causes issues because I’m trying to do things “right” and not run the service on my server directly or with root or on network host mode.
But being inside a container causes these many issues I can’t even begin to imagine how it would be to get it to do more complex stuff like be accessible through Tailscale or being behind authorization.
- Comment on Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?! 5 days ago:
Nope, Jellyfin works directly same as always has
- Comment on Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?! 5 days ago:
Even though they’re both on the same LAN? That sounds stupid, why would I need my videos to travel half across the globe to go from one room to the next?
- Comment on Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?! 6 days ago:
Some of it yes, the claim for example, but the rest is still pretty bad UX (and even that is stupid, I shouldn’t need a claim to watch locally), I’m an experienced self hosing person and I’m getting frustrated every step of the way, imagine someone who doesn’t know their way around docker or is not familiar with stuff… Jellyfin might be less polished as some claim, but setting it up is a breeze, never had to look at documentation to do it.
- Comment on Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?! 6 days ago:
Jellyfin has an app for fire stick, it works flawlessly
- Comment on Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?! 6 days ago:
It’s curious that I’m almost in the opposite boat, have been using Jellyfin without issues for around 5 years, but recently was considering trying Plex because Jellyfin is becoming too slow on certain screens (probably because I have too much stuff, but it shouldn’t be this slow).
- Comment on What determines whether people are likely to purposely (but mistakenly) put two words together (without a space)? 2 weeks ago:
The joke is because German concatenates words instead of using prepositions, which means that this:
Hottentottenstottertrottelmutterbeutelrattenlattengitterkastenattentäter
Is a perfectly valid German word which means the “would be murderer of the Hottentot mother of the good for nothing stutter kid who was placed on the opossum cage”.
- Comment on PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why 2 weeks ago:
At least in 2013 when I started using Steam more seriously if your connection dropped it would prompt you asking if you wanted to switch to offline mode. And I know this because I had Steam on a laptop that I carried in my bag hibernating and I didn’t had internet in some places I went to. So that has been fixed for over a decade.
- Comment on PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why 2 weeks ago:
But that is an apples to oranges comparison, just because you personally don’t care about those features doesn’t mean others don’t care either. For games without those features mentioned in the original comment (like Baldur’s Gate 3) not having join by IP is ridiculous we agree there. But for games that do it’s just not feasible, there’s too much of what makes the game the game in those features. Don’t get me wrong, I personally think that companies should not just kill the game and should provide ways to make their game playable offline after closing the servers, but it’s not as simple as allowing you to join by IP for the games being discussed here. What level would your character be? What load out would it have set? Which items would be unblocked? Etc, etc, etc, the servers that control all of that are too engrained into the fabric of the game, and that’s something that happened organically because people liked those features and wanted cross-progression, security, etc. Can all of that be removed? Sure but then you’re left with a shell of what the game is/was, still I believe companies should make such a release before closing the servers, but again this has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with direct join by IP.
- Comment on PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why 2 weeks ago:
You’re again mixing the point, your friends IP doesn’t have authentication, progress, chat, etc, etc, etc. You’re talking about a different kind of server.
- Comment on PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why 2 weeks ago:
This is the relevant bit of what you’re replying to:
I don’t see how modern games would function without that service running. Who am I playing against? What’s their name? How did I get my account progress?
None of that comes from the game-server but rather from the service-server. Even if social games that have those features allowed you to connect to a server directly, you would still need to connect to their servers for all of that stuff.
Direct IP connection has nothing to do with authentication and social flows (e.g. names and progress like the comment you’re replying to mentioned) and would not help in the slightest with it.
- Comment on PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why 2 weeks ago:
You’re mixing stuff up, the direct connect for multiplayer where you put the IP has nothing to do with authentication that he’s talking about. Whenever you open up a multiplayer game it will authenticate yourself with PSN using the account you have on the playstation, then if your authentication succeeded it will authenticate with the game service-servers which will reply with stuff like your progression in the game, whether someone has sent you a message or a friend request, etc. Modern games are a platform in and of themselves, essentially they have an entire Discord on steroids internally which you’re using before, during and after playing online matches. If the PSN is down you can’t authenticate with those servers… I mean, they could allow you to login using username and password, but that’s: 1 not needed since the PSN is almost never down and 2 probably against some TOS from Sony for you to release games on their platform. So if the PSN is down you would not be able to get into the main screen for multiplayer anyways, so there’s no place where you could input the IP for the game-server you want to connect to.
I’m not defending the system, but it is what it is, games have organically evolved to have all of these social features which people do use and like, it makes sense that Sony won’t allow you to go over them and authenticate directly with the game specific service-servers and it makes sense that if you’re relying on all of that for login you also rely on it for matchmaking (which is where the IP would come in place). Could it be better? Sure, but there’s no incentive for it to be, PSN is rarely down and games (at least large ones) take forever to be sunset, and by that time there are almost no people playing them anyways.
- Comment on PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why 2 weeks ago:
I don’t disagree completely, but it’s not as easy as you think. We’re not talking about server in the sense of a headless game client that will coordinate a match, we’re talking about a whole infrastructure of micro services and a web of communications and APIs just to get a basic authentication working. Not to mention possibly encrypted hard coded addresses to contact. That being said I 100% agree that before a game is abandoned a plan should be put in place to allow people to keep playing it, even if it’s complicated and cumbersome to setup, or even if it’s as crude as removing authentication entirely.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
It depends, as a general rule I would say that if you have to ask it’s better not. I send emojis to my colleagues, although usually just :) or :O but that’s about the same I send my wife so it’s mostly because I just don’t use too many emojis. I wouldn’t consider it unprofessional, but also I’m very open minded and also wouldn’t mind people using curse words which I know for sure others mind.
- Comment on is feeling disrespected reason good enough to change jobs? 1 month ago:
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I got a >100% in 3 years from a >50k by switching companies. That being said I don’t think I would change my current job for a different one, if I ever get made a significantly higher offer elsewhere I’m more likely to use it as leverage to get a similar raise here, so I can definitely understand the not wanting to leave a given company.
- Comment on Not disparaging the dead or anything. But why does it seem in the US we are expected to feel sorry for a person who overdoses on illegal drugs? Didn't they make the choice knowing the outcome? 3 months ago:
By that logic you also don’t feel bad for people who die in car accidents because from the first time they got behind a wheel they knew of the possibility. You should also not feel bad about people who are ran over, from the first time you walked outside your parents told you it was a possibility. Every time you go outside you’re risking being hit by a car, so don’t expect me to cry when that happens, right?.. Right?..
No, life is full of dangers, and ODing is just one of them. Most people who OD are in a bad situation and started using drugs to cope, and then it took control of them. Almost none of them made a conscious decision to OD, and one could argue their road to using that amount of drugs was also not entirely their choice, after all lots of those cause chemical dependency. Think about this, someone is stressed at work, they’re offered a cigarette by a friend who smokes daily, they smoke it and feel the stress going away, are able to focus and get through that tough spot, so they do it again next time they’re stressed, and then they start to get more and more stressed, but now they’re hooked, and trying to quit will be extremely difficult… Would you really not feel bad if that person developed cancer because he was stressed once and a friend offered a cigarette? How is ODing any different?
- Comment on Is it really possible to tax the rich? 3 months ago:
Yeah, and this should showcase just how bullshit the system is. IMO every one of those 100 trades in the middle should be taxed, this removes bullshit from the system, you can’t buy a contract saying you’ll buy the stock, because that would be buying something of that value and would be taxed. We need to start seeing those 100 trades, as what they are, i.e. a way to try to rig the system.
- Comment on Is it really possible to tax the rich? 3 months ago:
But then the value goes WAAY up. Let’s assume you live in a very good house, and mortgage it you’re able to get 5 million out of it. Do you think someone like Jeff Bezos could live for 5 years with that?. You can do it fairly straightforward, everytime you take a loan, the full amount of that loan gets added, after a period of 5 years that value disappears, if at any point that value goes above 10 million, you start paying taxes on it. And the higher it goes the more tax you pay on it, just like how income tax has brackets, and just like how up to certain values are exempt.
For you or me if we were ever loan 10 million over 5 years we wouldn’t have a way to pay it back. For an Uber wealthy they do that fairly quickly, Bezos mention costs 600k a month, so he’ll get into the first bracket from just that in a year and a half.
People need to realize just how big the gap is, there are plenty of ways to tax extremely rich people without affecting the middle class by just putting the bracket so high up that it’s impossible for a middle class to reach it.
- Comment on How did Third World countries handle the Covid Pandemic? 3 months ago:
MF got elected after saying his son is too educated to date a black woman, in a country with a very large black population. How does anything else he did surprised you? The day he got elected I quit my job and moved to another country.
- Comment on How did Third World countries handle the Covid Pandemic? 3 months ago:
That would mean Brazil is not a developing nation, but USA is.