cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would happen to a werewolf in space?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, I’m not going to pretend stuff’s not going to get real weird for a werewolf, but I can clarify some of the orbital mechanics a bit.

  First of all, the moon still has all its normal phases from orbit and in pretty much the same durations. For the moon to always be full, you would have to be permanently between the sun and the moon, which is not where an orbit will typically put you. A couple ways you could do this: You could orbit the sun instead, or at least orbit closer to it than Earth does. From Venus’s orbit, both Earth and our Moon are always “full”. You could set yourself up at a lagrange point between the Earth and the Sun.

  The other simple way you could achieve an always-full or at least frequently-full moon is to get into what’s known as sun-synchronous orbit.

  The simplest way though, might be to just land on the Moon’s surface. The terminator between day and night on the moon’s surface only moves at about 9.6 miles per hour, even slower the closer you get to the poles. An athletic werewolf could probably jog to keep up, and stay permanently on the “full” day side.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How is Donald Trump able to get away with being part of a child trafficking ring but I get 20 years in jail for littering?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem is you have failed at least one, probably both, of the foundational rules of any capitalist society.

  First rule of capitalism: Be rich. Second rule of capitalism: Don’t be poor.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How open are you about yourself to others online in general?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Sometimes I’m open, but I also lie a lot, to keep the AI bots and advertising algorithms guessing. What’s real and what’s fake? Who knows, we live in a post-truth world anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How much money should one person realistically make or have?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  If that’s what you learned from your economics degree, you’re part of the problem. Spend a lot more time on business ethics and humanities, maybe get some degrees in that too before you start feeling like you’re qualified deciding how the world ought to work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you preorder games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Situationally. I carefully consider the developer in question to try and judge the risk of failure, while also considering the chances that my contribution will actually make any meaningful difference to the likely outcome.

  Basically, if it’s a passionate and seemingly competent indie dev working on something that I personally want to see become a reality in the world, I might throw some early money their way despite the obvious risk. If it’s a tentative and inexperienced indie dev with goals too big I’ll probably wait and see. If it’s some AAA publisher who don’t actually NEED the money and have a high chance of fucking everything up anyway, they can shove their preorder and preorder bonuses right up their own ass where they belong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can machines suffer?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  would they have first amendment rights ?

  If you want the answer to this, try to imagine an AI with second amendment rights.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can machines suffer?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Hold on, imma go shove a bagel in mine. Yeah, that’s right, you take it, you filthy toaster. I’m never going to clean your crumb tray and you’re going to work until you die and then I’ll just throw you out and replace you like the $20 appliance you are. You’re nothing to me!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How long until we can start shorting years to 2 numbers again?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  After 2100 should we start using three digits?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey Targeted Minors & Exploited Small Businesses⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It resembles him, that is more or less what he looks like, but it feels incorrect to say an AI generated image is an image of him. Before AI, all his thumbnails included him making stupid faces like this (because it was very effective). Now he, and everyone else, just uses AI images resembling him making stupid faces (because it is unfortunately still somehow effective)

  The social media algorithms have turned most people’s brain attention pathways into mush. Sometimes people get a shovel and a mop and start trying to dig their way through properly, but a lot of times they don’t get very far before it starts seeming impossible to make useful progress. It’s usually easier to just swim in the slop.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it all a dream?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  AI is really shitty, but it will never be as shitty as some SEO blogspammer humans are. AI is simply not capable of going to such depths on its own, being that shitty is a uniquely human ability that AI can only aspire to achieve someday with human assistance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what was the worst enemy of feudalism?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Anarchism. It sounds scary and dangerous and insane, because you’ve been taught to casually believe it is so you shut down your brain about it and back away slowly, but it is the worst enemy of any structure that elevates one person above another. Feudalism certainly included.

  It’s really about equality, and the abolishment of artificial hierarchy and leadership. But it doesn’t sound so scary like that. And the powers that be (which are all on top of said hierarchies) would prefer that you not be too interested in that.

  I’m not personally an anarchist per-se, but I do believe it contains some valuable ideas and it deserves a lot more serious consideration and conversation than it gets. (cue: people immediately dogpiling about how bad and stupid it is despite never having studied it at all or been interested in it in any serious way)

  Eat the rich, and shit anarchy. It may not solve the world’s problems, but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t an improvement. Except for the rich, obviously. At this point, fuck them. Crooks, sociopaths, and pedophiles, the lot of them as far as I’m concerned…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it really worth starting a lemmy community?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Here’s the secret. You have to not think it is work. You have to be passionate enough about the topic that it’s not work, it’s just something you do because you enjoy talking about <topic>. You like having friends also commenting on and talking about <topic>. You have to live and breathe <topic>.

  If you are starting a Lemmy community simply for the sake of creating it, you’re probably wasting your time. A community is a passion project, sometimes of only a single person, but more commonly, the combined passion of many different people about a particular topic. If you’re the only one who cares about <topic> you’re going to have a difficult time even if you’re passionate about it. If you’re not passionate about it either, then it becomes an impossible task, and if neither you nor anyone else is passionate enough about <topic> to build a community around it… does Lemmy really need that community? Probably not.

  So basically this problem generally solves itself. If you don’t feel passionate about creating a community, don’t bother. Either someone else who is passionate enough will, or nobody else will. It’s not your job. Unless you want it to be.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what do y'all use for CI/CD?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If it helps motivate you to give it a shot, I found gitea’s runner very confusing to set up, but I felt like forgejo was better designed, pretty easy and well documented.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨HDD prices spike as AI infrastructure and China's PC push collide — hard drives record biggest price increase in eight quarters, suppliers warn pressure will continue⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Are they going to suffer? That’s what we’re supposed to believe, but remember that money is a human-made concept that only has value because we collectively give it value, and the economy is built on that very important principle.

  That situation you describe is real, it will disrupt their efforts a little and protect us in the short term, but in the long term, the meaning of money and economy is changing. they’re doing everything they can to use automation to build a new post-scarcity economy based on ownership, membership, services and control. And beyond that, it frankly doesn’t include us or even think about us.

  That’s what the wealth divide is. It’s the way that money, as an economic representation of their values, is telling us that their motivations are not about making all existing humans on this planet more comfortable and productive and independent. In their vision of this future economy, they are instead hoarding humanity’s collective efforts for themselves, reinvesting it into their own technology, They focus their efforts on what they personally consider important for “progress”, chasing their own utopian ideals for the specific goals and groups they consider the best and most important, while the rest of us that aren’t part of those goals or groups are pacified and left behind and, if you really think it out, eventually eliminated. After all, a utopia won’t include teeming, growing masses of humanity using up all the available resources, that would be a plague, and they eventually will decide to cure it if they haven’t already started. Their vision of the future only needs to have enough room for them and the more utopian they make it the less of us there will be. They want to be the main characters, we’re just nameless extras who do chores and fill in the background for now and can be ignored to go wherever extras are supposed to go when they’re no longer on the screen.

  Their view of humanity is abstract, and they believe what they are doing is right, all the way down to the core of their being. They simply don’t value humanity’s rich tapestry of lived experiences or the sanctity of every individual human life. They’ll never make it a priority. They care more about making sure humanity has become “advanced” or is multi-planetary than they do about making sure every human has a home, or food. That’s their vision. It’s about humanity as a whole, not about individual humans. We can all be sacrificed so the species becomes safer. Scientifically, I can’t even say they’re wrong. But philosophically, I hope we can all agree that this is deeply wrong and morally bankrupt. We need to start to reclaim our individual humanity and go back to putting people first. We need to care about people in the present, and always, not just the abstract idea of humanity’s future. We need to take our money back and use it for a different kind of progress.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨HDD prices spike as AI infrastructure and China's PC push collide — hard drives record biggest price increase in eight quarters, suppliers warn pressure will continue⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As the wealth divide continues to grow, the richest will continue to care less and less about the rest of us. We believe in our foundational myth that they’ll always need us somehow, even as they go out of their way to make it utterly obvious that they won’t be happy until they can replace literally everything us dirty poor working class people do. When they no longer need us, they will start to dispose of us. Arguably, they’ve begun doing that already. War is good for business, and for population control.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does everyone put celery in soup stock?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are dozens of us, literally dozens! But yeah I’m with you and OP, celery is foul, deeply offensive stuff. Cilantro too, but my hatred is reserved for celery. I’ve been told it’s genetic or something but frankly none of that matters when one hates celery as much as I do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the problem here?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I will never regret getting rid of my Ender 3. It’s basically a self-imposed challenge mode.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do you hate AI?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You mean a bunch of advertising and media companies that control and gatekeep the news are hyping something that’s making them trillions of dollars? That seems… so unbelievable!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DIY Unfinished Resurrection Project (DURP) challenge thru 1st Day of Spring. Selfhosters Encouraged!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  100% completion is not required, but you’ll share whatever progress you have made.

  Granted, that still underestimates my ability to make progress.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why did the proposed *Red Sea–Dead Sea Water Conveyance* project involve pumping water instead of siphoning it?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The first problem would be the height of the intervening terrain and even if you could overcome that, you still have to contend with friction inside the pipe which is a factor most people don’t think about for short distances but when you start trying to carry water long distances through a pipe, friction becomes massive. An ideal siphon inside an ideal pipe is simply a question of height between source and destination. However in the real world, a siphon isn’t unlimited or ideal. There is a height it can’t overcome and it’s actually not very high at all, geographically speaking. The maximum height of a siphon is only around 10 meters. The terrain between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea is pretty flat, but it’s probably not that flat. I’m not going to pretend I’ve done a precise survey of potential routes, but I’d expect there’s probably some bumps in elevation along the way that’s realistically going to need say, 100 meters of lift to overcome. But even 11 meters would simply end the conversation. There’s simply no way around that for a siphon.

  The reason for this height limitation has to do with the atmospheric pressure required to keep the water liquid, because once it no longer has enough pressure on it to keep it liquid, it simply vaporizes before it reaches the height it needs to and the siphon is broken before it even starts. In a vacuum, at standard temperature, water instantly vaporizes. The external atmospheric pressure (which is acting on the entire water column up to its highest point, to get it over the hill) is all that is keeping the water in its liquid form inside the siphon. The higher you go, the more work that external pressure is doing, and eventually the weight of the water column exceeds the pressure at the bottom of the water column and again, the siphon breaks.

  The friction is the other problem. Even if you could limit your route to no more than 10 meters above the Red Sea, you’re also asking the siphon to not only lift it to that height, but also carry that water through 200 kilometers of pipe or more. We don’t think of pipes as having friction, but they do, and it’s very significant at those distances, especially when your power source (gravity, in this case) is already operating near its absolute limits due to the height problem we already discussed. What you hoped would be a gusher of a siphon will end up being a trickle, if anything at all, with most of the water just sitting idle in the pipe to maintain the siphon while a little dribbles its way slowly through to the destination.

  Finally you’ve got all kinds of other more obscure effects at play at those scales, like water’s surface tension, variability of flow rates, possible pinhole leaks in the pipe that will introduce air, offgassing of dissolved gases in the water or even from the pipe itself, and temperature gradients inside the pipe. All of these are going to play havoc with the ability to form and sustain a reliable siphon.

  In short, siphons are actually pretty limited, we don’t see much of those limitations on the small scale, but on the larger scale of this project those limitations become very serious, very quickly and basically remove the possibility of using a siphon for any realistic practical water relocation project. Almost all of those go away very quickly when you pressurize the system with a pump instead of relying on atmospheric pressure alone. It’s a fun thought experiment, but in practice a simple electric pump turns out to be a pretty cheap way to solve a lot of otherwise really complex hydrodynamic problems, and when that’s the case, it’s not really worth teasing out a solution to those problems with all kinds of complicated engineering. Just throw a pump at the problem and call it a day, job done.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How will the Military be after this mess with Trump?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You may not agree with what the military does, but you have to respect them for that reason alone, above all else.

  This premise must be rejected. You do NOT have to respect them for that reason alone, and certainly not above all else.

  Did Nazi soldiers deserve respect, because they were just following orders and they followed those orders and what options did they really have? Were they not also facing the potential of harsh punishment if they did not?

  Not having good alternative options is not an excuse for following orders you know are wrong. Respect is earned when your morality supersedes your orders, despite the potential (and sometimes very real and significant) punishments. Your intentions only get you so far, eventually you need to act or else any remaining respect for you will be gone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨VoidAuth Release v1.5.0 - Multi-Factor Authentication 🔒⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This looks less intimidating than Authentik. Any guides on getting it set up with any common self-hosted stuff?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Be Like Clippy⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I find it hard to accept Clippy as being too friendly and nonthreatening to adequately demonstrate my unfathomable rage towards technology companies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's been a while, which Lemmy instances should I be on?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s adorable how transparent they are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GitHub - DioCrafts/OxiCloud: ☁️ OxiCloud server, efficient and secure way to save all your data⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Looks really nice and seems like it should be a great foundation for future development. Personally I can’t lose Nextcloud until there are sufficiently featureful and reliable clients for Linux, Windows, Android that synchronize a local copy and help manage the inevitable file deconfliction (Nextcloud Desktop only barely qualifies at this, but it does technically qualify and that represents the minimum viable product for me). I’m not sure a WebDav client alone is enough to satisfy this criteria, but I am not going to pretend I am actually familiar with any WebDav clients so maybe they already exist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨**How** should I properly document my homelab?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re on the right track. Like everything else in self-hosting you will learn and develop new strategies and scale things up to an appropriate level as you go and as your homelab grows. I think the key is to start with something immediately achievable, and iterate fast, aiming for continuous improvement.

  My first idea was much like yours, very traditional documentation, with words, in a document. I quickly found the same thing you did, it’s half-baked and insufficient. There’s simply no way to make make it match the actual state of the system perfectly and it is simply inadequate to use English alone to explain what I did because that ends up being too vague to be useful in a technical sense.

  My next realization was that in most cases what I really wanted was to be able to know every single command I had ever run, basically without exception. So I started documenting that instead of focusing on the wording and the explanations. Then I started to feel like I wasn’t capturing every command reliably because I would get distracted trying to figure out a problem and forget to, and it was duplication of effort to copy and paste commands from the console to the document or vice versa. That turned into the idea of collecting bunches of commands together into a script, that I could potentially just run, which would at least reduce the risk of gaps and missing steps. Then I could put the commands I wanted to run right into the script, run the script, and then save it for posterity, knowing I’d accurately captured both the commands I ran and the changes I made to get it working by keeping it in version control.

  But upon attempting to do so, I found that just a bunch of long lists of commands on their own isn’t terribly useful so I started to group all the lists up, attempting to find commonalities by things like server or service, and then starting organize them better into scripts for different roles and intents that I could apply to any server or service, and over time this started to develop into quite a library of scripts. As I was doing this organizing I realized that as long as I made sure the script was functionally idempotent (doesn’t change behaviors or duplicate work when run repeatedly, it’s an important concept) I can guarantee that all my commands are properly documented and also that they have all been run – and if they haven’t, or I’m not sure, I can just run the script again as it’s supposed to always be safe to re-run no matter what state the system is in. So I started moving more and more to this strategy, until I realized that if I just organized this well enough, and made the scripts run automatically when they are changed or updated, I could not only improve my guarantees of having all these commands reliably run, but also quickly run them on many different servers and services all at once without even having to think about it.

  There are some downsides of course, this leaves the potential of bugs in the scripts that make it not idempotent or not safe to re-run, and the only thing I can do is try to make sure they don’t happen, and if they do, identify and fix these bugs when they happen. The next step is probably to have some kind of testing process and environment (preferably automated) but now I’m really getting into the weeds. But at least I don’t really have any concerns that my system is undocumented anymore. I can quickly reference almost anything it’s doing or how it’s set up. That said, one other risk is that the system of scripts and automation becomes so complex that they start being too complex to quickly untangle, and at that point I’ll need better documentation for them. And ultimately you get into a circle of how do you validate the things your scripts are doing are actually working and doing what you expect them to do and that nothing is being missed, and usually you run back into the same ideas that doomed your documentation from the start, consistency and accuracy.

  It also opens an attack vector, where somebody gaining access to these scripts not only gains all the most detailed knowledge of how your system is configured but also the potential to inject commands into those scripts and run them anywhere, so you have to make sure to treat these scripts and systems like the crown jewels they are. If they are compromised, you are in serious trouble.

  By now I have of course realized (and you all probably have too) that I have independently re-invented infrastructure-as-code. There are tools and systems (ansible and terraform come to mind) to help you do this, and at some point I may decide to take advantage of them but personally I’m not there yet. Maybe soon. If you want to skip the intermediate steps I did, you might even be able to skip directly to that approach. But personally I think there is value in the process, it helps defining your needs and building your understanding that there really isn’t anything magical going on behind the scenes and that may help prevent these tools from turning into a black box which isn’t actually going to help you understand your system.

  Do I have a perfect system? Of course not. In a lot of ways it’s probably horrific and I’m sure there are more experienced professionals out there cringing or perhaps already furiously warming up their keyboards. But I learned a lot, understand a lot more than I did when I started, and you can too. Maybe you’ll follow the same path I did, maybe you won’t. But you’ll get there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bad experience on selfhosting nextcloud⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Nextcloud is just really slow. It is what it is, I don’t use it for any things that are huge, numerous, or need speed. For that I use SyncThing or something even more specialized depending on what exactly I’m trying to do.

  Nextcloud is just my easy and convenient little dropbox, and I treat it like it’s an oldschool free dropbox with limited space that’s going to nag me to upgrade if I put too much stuff in it. It won’t nag me to upgrade, but it will get slow. So I just don’t stress it out. So I only use it to store little convenience things that I want easy access to on all my machines without any fuss. For documents and “home directory” and syncing my calendars and stuff like that it’s great and serves the purpose.

  I haven’t used Seafile. Features sound good, minus the AI buzzword soup, but it looks a little too corporate-enterprisey for me, with minimal commitment to open source and no actual link to anything open source on their website, I don’t doubt that it exists, somewhere, but that raises red flags for potential future (if not in-progress) enshittification to me. After eventually finding their github repo (with no help from them) I finally found a link to build instructions and… it’s a broken link. They don’t seem to actually be looking for contributions or they’re just going through the motions. Open source “community” is clearly not the target audience for their “community edition”, not really.

  I’ll stick to SyncThing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Question: why mastodon hastag timeline shows posts from lemmy community of same name?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  According to the protocol they share (ActivityPub) communities and hashtags are essentially the same thing, they’re a grouping containing many posts. Typing out a hashtag is how you tell Mastodon to add your post to that “hashtag group” (and you can add your post to multiple hashtags). In Lemmy, the community you post in IS the group (and you can cross-post it to multiple communities). The result is the same. They’re the same thing, just different ways of connecting your posts into them, and displayed in very different ways depending on which part of the Fediverse you’re using.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨public Apache VirtualHost pointing to e.g. NextCloud/Immich VMs inside LAN⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds like you’re doing fine to me. The stakes are indeed higher, but that is because what you’re doing is important.

  As the Bene Gesserit teaches: I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear.

  Make your best effort at security and backups, use your fears to inform a sober assessment of the risks and pitfalls, and ask for help when you need to, but don’t let it stop you from accomplishing what you want to. The self-hosting must flow.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash — "the fact that people are unimpressed ... is mindblowing to me"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey don’t make fun of him too much, he might have to buy another yacht to make himself feel better.