qjkxbmwvz
@qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 4 days ago:
A lot of non-graphical utilities — basically the *NIX coreutils, plus stuff like rsync, ssh, compression/archival tools (tar, gzip, bzip2, etc.), grep, and the like. Git also comes to mind.
I think part of this is that the UNIX philosophy is “developer friendly” — tell a good dev they need to make a compression utility that follows this protocol, and they will make a compression utility that follows the protocol.
- Comment on It's a fun new game 1 week ago:
Having a CC doesn’t mean you have debt…
- Comment on This is why we have a defense budget 1 week ago:
“Why the HELL should I have to press 2 for English?”
— bumper sticker I would see on my bike commute back in the day.
- Comment on What steps do you take to secure your server and your selfhosted services? 3 weeks ago:
Fail2ban config imcan get fairly involved in my experience. I’m probably not doing it the right way, as I wrote a bunch of web server ban rules — anyone trying to access wpadmin gets banned, for instance (I don’t use WordPress, and if I did, it wouldn’t be accessible from my public facing reverse proxy).
I just skimmed my nginx logs and looked for anything funky and put that in a ban rule, basically.
- Comment on Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you 1 month ago:
Yeah, without being a policy junkie I think a reasonable step would be to have Prop 13 only happy to primary residence — investment real estate would be subject to a “wealth tax,” but folks wouldn’t get priced out of their primary home due to gentrification.
- Comment on Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you 1 month ago:
Right, that’s a huge downside for sure.
Property tax is on the one hand a wealth tax, which sounds like a great idea; but on the other hand, it’s a wealth tax that disproportionately affects people with the bulk of their assets tied up in real estate — which often means middle class homeowners.
So while you can certainly look at prop 13 as “good” in that folks don’t get priced out of their existing homes, it of course gets used to the advantage of rent seekers, etc.
It’s…complicated.
- Comment on Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you 1 month ago:
California disagrees: …wikipedia.org/…/1978_California_Proposition_13
Property tax is assessed when there’s a sale, and otherwise changes very slowly. It’s a controversial measure.
- Comment on Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink cartridges via forced firmware updates, removing older firmware versions from support portals 1 month ago:
But this is a weird thing to lie about — the only reason to implement toner DRM is to get people to buy your cartridges. But if your public statement is, “it’s ok to buy off brand cartridges,” then…well… that’s kinda weird.
Not saying you’re wrong, and they could be trying to have their cake and eat it too (court the anti-DRM crowd but also scare people into sticking with their toner). I’m just saying your snarky/sarcastic response seems unwarranted here.
- Comment on Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink cartridges via forced firmware updates, removing older firmware versions from support portals 1 month ago:
Brother deny the claims: arstechnica.com/…/brother-denies-using-firmware-u…
- Comment on Apple refuses to break encryption, seeks reversal of UK demand for backdoor - Ars Technica 1 month ago:
Lemmy is not encrypted, my comments are public, your comments are public, we both know that. Anyone with a raspberry pi or an old netbook can scrape them.
If I use an encrypted service and all of a sudden everything that I thought was encrypted was decrypted by the service provider without my consent? That’s breaking encryption.
If on the other hand I use an encrypted service and they tell me that they can no longer offer the service, my data will be destroyed after X days, and I need to find another way of storing my encrypted data because of privacy invading government policies? That is not breaking encryption.
- Comment on I'm Tired of Pretending Tech is Making the World Better 1 month ago:
For many things I completely agree.
We just had our second kid, and neither set of grandparents live locally. That we can video chat with our family — for free, essentially! — is astonishing. And it’s not a big deal, not something we plan, just, “hey let’s say hi to Gramma and Gramps!”
When I was a kid videoconferencing was exclusive to seriously high end offices. And when we wanted to make a long distance call, we’d sometimes plan it in advance and buy prepaid minutes (this is on a landline, mid 90s maybe). Now my mom can just chat with her friend “across the pond” whenever she wants, from the comfort of her couch, and for zero incremental cost.
I think technology that “feels like tech” is oftentimes a time sink and a waste. But the tech we take for granted? There’s some pretty amazing stuff there.
- Comment on This is also when I conveniently forget you called, making your preferred method of communication incredibly slow compared to texting. 1 month ago:
Seriously, it is the lowest-latency and highest-bandwidth communication method we have, when used appropriately.
- Comment on Sadge 2 months ago:
Sounds like it was a 2 petawatt pulsed lase, with picosecond pulses, so 2kJ/pulse. Staggering amount of power for a pulsed laser!
Note that it’s not CW, so the average power will be much, much, much less than the pulsed power. Too lazy to find the rep rate to see average power.
- Comment on Sinners!!! 2 months ago:
Remind me again, what color was Obama’s scandalous suit?
- Comment on [sh.it.post] We're #5! We're #5! 2 months ago:
If you exclude blocked instances, you’re a lot higher than #5…
- Comment on World's largest pumped storage power plant fully operational in China 3 months ago:
For those wondering about the energy, not just the power:
When fully charged, the upper reservoir can store enough energy to power the plant at full capacity for 10.8 hours, equivalent to nearly 40 GWh.
- Comment on YouTube devs be like 5 months ago:
I really don’t think it’s the devs driving these decisions…
- Comment on Palo Alto Networks confirms mystery zero day now exploited 5 months ago:
The network gear I manage is only accessible via VPN, or from a trusted internal network…
…and by “my network” I mean my home network (a router and a few managed switches and access points). If a doofus like me can set it up for my home, I’d think that actual companies would be able to figure it out, too.
- Comment on Guerrilla Women 5 months ago:
…which implies the existence of integer women, real women, complex women, imaginary women, rational & irrational women.
- Comment on topical 5 months ago:
Open to discussion, but since 2008, the Democrats have won every election where the leadership didn’t “put their finger on the scale” in the primaries/picking the candidate. Obama, Obama; Clinton arguably shouldn’t have been the nominee and Sanders should have; Biden was (?) properly primaries; Harris was picked — obvious pick, but still, not primaried.
Or the other reason, that the US is too sexist to elect a woman. It’s depressing either way of course.
- Comment on topical 5 months ago:
The Democrats, in hindsight, fucked up with the economy and/or the messaging.
Did inflation happen because of the groundwork that Trump laid down in his term (not to mention global pandemic)? Sure — but did inflation get really bad under Biden? Yes, absolutely. That doesn’t make it his fault, but it makes it a problem that the Democrats probably needed to address more aggressively, an all-out attack on rising cost of living.
At the start of the pandemic, for me to carry $100 of normal weekly groceries home from the supermarket was a real challenge, but I could do it. Now, I carry $100 no problem, with a toddler on my shoulders. The money doesn’t really matter to me, but from what I’ve been reading, it really mattered to a lot of voters. Again: I think his will be worse under Trump (if it does get better, it’ll be due to some shady tax rebates to supermarkets or big ag or something, IMHO).
So while the Dems are talking about first time home credits and whatnot, Vance is out there lying about the price of eggs — but it’s a lie that “feels” right to a lot of people, and anecdotally, has some truth to it in that inflation/cost of living increase is real. Nevermind that the R policy is…what, exactly? But they say they’ll fix it, and they point out that Dems are currently in power, and that’s enough for a lot of people.
- Comment on lab toys 5 months ago:
Whatever you do, do not touch that one BNC cable. Just trust me on this.
- Comment on Clever, clever 5 months ago:
Awesome bandwidth to be sure, but I do think there is a difference between data transfer to RAM (such as network traffic) vs. traffic purely from one location to another (station wagon with tapes/747 with SD cards/etc.).
For the latter, actually using the data in any meaningful way is probably limited to read time of the media, which is likely slow.
But yeah, my go-to would be micro SD cards on a plane :)
- Comment on bitey 5 months ago:
Fun fact, the (rough) conversion efficiency of calories to mechanical joules in the human body (separate from the mechanical to electrical you’re referring to) is about 25% — but this is about the same factor as going from calories to joules! So, for a human to put out 13.5 kJ of energy would require about 13.5 food calories (kilocalories).
- Comment on hard to argue with 5 months ago:
Same argument against vegetarianism/veganism — we have teeth “designed” or evolved for eating meat, thus we should eat meat.
…we also have brains capable of abstract reasoning, but nevermind that!
- Comment on CNC Kitchen – What is the best way to dry your desiccant? (microwave) 5 months ago:
Perhaps microwaving for significantly longer, at a low power level, would be safer and result in higher success/yield?
- Comment on The ability to be spontaneous in life is directly proportion to the size of your bank account 5 months ago:
I think it has a lot to do with disposition and convenience. I’m lazy, and I don’t like to drive if I can help it. But I live near enough to public transportation that we’ll spontaneously decide to hop on the subway and grab dinner on the waterfront.
It’s not the money that’s preventing us from hopping in the car to go to some new beach for dinner, it’s the convenience.
- Comment on The ability to be spontaneous in life is directly proportion to the size of your bank account 5 months ago:
I mean…it depends on the job? I go on walks during working hours all the time to clear my head and think about a problem I’m working on. I don’t try to hide this from my manager.
- Comment on Is it possible to run a reverse proxy only on a specific service or port? 6 months ago:
It’s mostly so that I can have SSL handled by nginx (and not per-service), and also for ease of hosting multiple services accessible via subdomains. So every service is its own subdomain.
Additionally, my internal network (as in, my physical LAN) does not have any port forwarding enabled — everything is over WireGuard to my VPS.
- Comment on Based on true events 6 months ago:
For a while I thought the Google AI result had a pretty logical, well thought out, practical solution — use glue.