sugar_in_your_tea
@sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Europe is looking for alternatives to US cloud providers 19 hours ago:
egress costs, which is their true and much sneakier vendor lock in trap.
Absolutely. That’s basically Oracle’a db strategy.
Things like this are why I’ll never use AWS, even if I get to a scale where it makes sense. I value the ability to switch to a different provider or self-host with my own hardware.
the only answer is government regulation
Ideally the market is competitive enough that regulation isn’t needed. But maybe that ship has sailed.
I agree with regulations like Net Neutrality, so I guess it would depend on how it’s worded. I’m just worried massive players like AWS would find ways to abuse any regulations we try to make to exclude others.
But yeah, I don’t pitch switching at work, because I’m not in charge of infra or really involved with it at all. I’m a SWE, not a devOPs or IT tech, so if I’m touching anything in Cloudwatch other than looking at logs, something has gone horribly wrong.
- Comment on [help] Cheap SSDs for storage 19 hours ago:
Oh sure, server grade stuff is cool, but rarely needed for a home lab.
- Comment on [help] Cheap SSDs for storage 1 day ago:
server grade budget.
And probably not server grade requirements.
- Comment on AdNauseam is a uBlock fork that goes further: it actively attacks marketers by auto-clicking every ad before blocking 1 day ago:
And lots of it.
- Comment on Do you dislike your dependency on Android? To the rescue comes Mobile Linux "PostmarketOS" - Funded via Donations, Focus on Reliabilty for 2025 1 day ago:
Just try mounting it, if you get bucked, try again.
- Comment on Europe is looking for alternatives to US cloud providers 1 day ago:
We use AWS at work, and the “cutting costs” thing seems largely a way to further lock-in customers. They want you to build around their tools so the switching cost is high enough to not be worthwhile. Then again, I don’t work directly with billing (I’m a SWE, not in OPs), but what I’ve seen looks a lot higher than I would’ve guessed.
Idk, maybe it’s reasonable at scale, but it seems to get really expensive really fast.
- Comment on Not just crumbs in the CPU socket: Over 100 AMD 9800X3D chips are now reported to have gone pop and the most by far have died in ASRock motherboards 1 day ago:
I got an ASRock x370 board and it had fewer problems than other first gen Ryzen boards, was one of the first to support 5000 series CPUs, and it’s still working well in my NAS with no dead ports or anything.
They used to be one of the lowest quality boards, but they’ve earned my respect. My current motherboard (b550) is also ASRock and the only problem I had was the WiFi chip sucking on Linux (known issue, I replaced just the WiFi module and everything is golden). My wife has a Gigabyte board and it had some minor issues.
So yeah, ASRock is on my good list for now.
- Comment on The case against conversational interfaces « julian.digital 2 days ago:
It’s a great article, actually click through and read it if you haven’t already.
My favorite example of truly effortless communication is a memory I have of my grandparents. At the breakfast table, my grandmother never had to ask for the butter – my grandfather always seemed to pass it to her automatically, because after 50+ years of marriage he just sensed that she was about to ask for it. It was like they were communicating telepathically.
That is the type of relationship I want to have with my computer!
The author’s point is that natural language is a slow way to communicate, and it’s not even our preferred way, so why are we pushing so hard for it?
One of the best productivity tools for me is my CLI shell, which predicts what I’m about to type based on what I’ve done in the past. There’s no AI here, just simple history search. It turns out i do the same thing a lot.
None of this is to say that LLMs aren’t great. I love LLMs. I use them all the time. In fact, I wrote this very essay with the help of an LLM.
The author argues that LLMs are an augmentation to existing tools, not a replacement. Just like the mouse didn’t replace the keyboard (my example), LLMs won’t replace existing workflows, it’ll merely help in the knowledge retrieval stage.
For this future to become an actual reality, AI needs to work at the OS level. It’s not meant to be an interface for a single tool, but an interface across tools.
This is where I partially disagree.
Yes, I think some level of AI makes sense at the OS layer, but its function should be to find the right tool, not to be a tool. For example, “open my budget” would know from context which file that is (family, company, client, etc), which program (GNUCash, Excel, or a URL in a browser), and then pass on context to the app-specific AI, which would know which part to open and be ready for context-relevant questions (is it payday? Was I just looking at concert tickets? Is someone’s birthday coming up?).
But even then, the usefulness of a system-wide AI is pretty limited. Most people can efficiently navigate to what they want. Indexes work well to find files (and full text search is feasible), file extensions work well to open the right application, and applications remembering what they were last doing is usually sufficient.
So I see it as more of an accessibility feature at the system level instead of an actual, useful system in itself. However, I really like the idea of different models passing context in some standard way to each other so I can seamlessly move between apps.
But I absolutely agree with the main point here: AI should be seen as an add-on, not a replacement.
- Comment on PSA: If your Jellyfin is having high memory usage, add MALLOC_TRIM_THRESHOLD_=100000 to environment 2 days ago:
Also depends on the storage medium (SD? SSD?), assuming there’s no transcoding.
- Comment on Do you dislike your dependency on Android? To the rescue comes Mobile Linux "PostmarketOS" - Funded via Donations, Focus on Reliabilty for 2025 2 days ago:
Same. I still have my previous phone, but I don’t use it anymore because it’s insecure, not because it’s broken. I’m still using a laptop that’s even older precisely because it gets security updates since it runs Linux.
I’d absolutely lay a premium for longer support and it’s a large part of why I got a Pixel this time around, they advertise 7 years of support and I hope to hold them to that.
- Comment on Do you dislike your dependency on Android? To the rescue comes Mobile Linux "PostmarketOS" - Funded via Donations, Focus on Reliabilty for 2025 2 days ago:
The thing is, I don’t really care about Android apps, and honestly supporting them probably adds a bunch of limitations since they have a lot of expectations on the system.
I just want an immutable base system w/ flatpaks, a basic dialer, a robust SMS/MMS app, Firefox, and good enough battery life (15 hours w/ moderate screen on time). Basically, openSUSE Aeon or Fedora Silverblue with phone-specific apps.
I’m happy to help port the various software I want to use, but I need the phone to work as a phone first.
- Comment on Do you dislike your dependency on Android? To the rescue comes Mobile Linux "PostmarketOS" - Funded via Donations, Focus on Reliabilty for 2025 2 days ago:
Absolutely! The controls might suck and regular phone features might be iffy, but you could totally run the Jaca version of Minecraft if you wanted. No guarantees about performance though.
- Comment on Do you dislike your dependency on Android? To the rescue comes Mobile Linux "PostmarketOS" - Funded via Donations, Focus on Reliabilty for 2025 2 days ago:
And we’ll keep saying it until we get there.
- Comment on Elon Musk and Taylor Swift can now hide details of their private jets/// Private aircraft owners can now ask the FAA to keep their registration information out of the public eye. 2 days ago:
Precisely.
I’m no fan of random billionaires, but I’m a huge fan of privacy.
- Comment on Elon Musk and Taylor Swift can now hide details of their private jets/// Private aircraft owners can now ask the FAA to keep their registration information out of the public eye. 2 days ago:
And you could probably get it with a subpeona or FOIA request if you really need it. This just stops random people from snooping.
- Comment on Do you dislike your dependency on Android? To the rescue comes Mobile Linux "PostmarketOS" - Funded via Donations, Focus on Reliabilty for 2025 2 days ago:
It’s also less interesting.
Using regular Linux means you can do a ton of stuff you currently can’t on Android:
- plug in a USB hub and use it like a desktop - Steam Deck does this
- run regular desktop/server software - want a portable Minecraft server? Go for it!
- do things w/ btrfs snapshots so you can restore phone state if you mess something up (e.g. I accidentally uninstalled an app and lost settings)
- keep getting security updates long past when anyone in their right mind expects to get them
Android is already FOSS, and you can get phones with minimal stuff on top of the FOSS core. That’s cool I guess, and I use one such distro (GrapheneOS), but it’s still Android at the end of the day. I want something different, but I still want basic phone stuff to work (calls, SMS, MMS, camera, etc).
- Comment on Do you dislike your dependency on Android? To the rescue comes Mobile Linux "PostmarketOS" - Funded via Donations, Focus on Reliabilty for 2025 2 days ago:
I’m okay with an older phone, I just want basic features to work consistently and well. Maybe support a newer phone every 5 years or so to provide an upgrade path.
- Comment on Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral: With the rise of loosely moderated social media platforms, a fringe vigilante movement is experiencing a dangerous evolution. 3 days ago:
Hmm, I seem to recall Trump being a pedophile.
- Comment on World Backup Day 3 days ago:
Thanks for the motivation to make sure my backups (which are totally configured properly) are working. :)
- Comment on How to secure Jellyfin hosted over the internet? 3 days ago:
Just make a different API prefix that’s secure and subject to change, and once the official clients are updated, deprecate the insecure API (off by default).
That way you preserve backwards compatibility without forcing everyone to be insecure.
- Comment on Cheapskate's Guide: Nuking web-scraping bots 3 days ago:
The admin could use a CDN and not worry about it, if it’s just static content.
- Comment on Automatically Crack Safes With This Autodialer 3 days ago:
Now you can keep out LPL for 30 seconds!
- Comment on Google To Allow Double Serving Ads. 3 days ago:
Yeah, it’s not worth it. Maybe sometime I’ll get something like pihole set up so YouTube is usable on my TV, but for now, I just plug in a laptop w/ proper ad block.
I’d totally pay for YT if it was reasonable for my usage. But I honestly watch so little that their monthly sub just isn’t worth it for me.
- Comment on Power is not energy: why the difference matters [Technology Connections] 3 days ago:
natural gas is billed per kWh
Really? That’s interesting, since I’ve only seen something like BTU (therms in my area) for heat content or CCF for volume. I know they can be readily converted to kWh w/ a calculator, it just seems odd, especially when everything seems to be advertised in BTU (e.g. furnaces).
- Comment on Power is not energy: why the difference matters [Technology Connections] 3 days ago:
The part about electricity is pretty short, just a few bullet points and a couple paragraphs. If it was video form, I could cover it in 2-3 min complete with visuals.
I don’t know why this video is so long.
- Comment on Power is not energy: why the difference matters [Technology Connections] 3 days ago:
In our case,
Yeah, we had all that stuff too. This was many years ago, but I remember the electricity section being fairly basic, as in mostly covering how volts and amps interact (i.e. high voltage, low amps is way worse than low voltage, high amps, in terms of safety). And that’s really about it. Maybe we covered other stuff, but it really wasn’t important to go further, probably because I went to school before EVs and whatnot were commonplace.
I think my education was quite good. I was very much prepare for the university I went to, but that kind of meant we skipped some important stuff. For example:
the economics course in high school included our tax system
We didn’t really learn economics or taxes in high school. I mean, we discussed basic supply and demand, but that was more in the context of history than anything actually applicable to life (i.e. Great Depression’s impacts on supply and demand). I learned the vast majority of what I know about economics, investing, and taxes on my own because I’m interested in it. It just didn’t seem to make the cut for high school, where we learned a wide variety of other stuff, like biology, math, history, English, etc. A basic high school day was broken up into 6 periods, usually consisting of:
- math - start w/ geometry and end at pre-calc or calculus (depending on which track you took)
- history - US, European, world, etc
- english - literature, writing, etc
- foreign language - needed 2 years; select between Spanish, German, Japanese, or French (maybe one or two more); the other two years were electives IIRC (but more restrictive than the next group)
- electives - PE, shop, etc; there were several options, no guarantees as to what people took
- science - biology, chemistry, physics, etc
I did two years at the high school and two years at the local community college so I could get a 2-year college degree at the same time as my high school diploma. That was pretty rad, but I wonder if maybe I got super compressed education since I had about half the class time as my peers (about 3 hours/day vs 6), but we had more reading at home, which I think made up for it (I’d spend 3-4 hours/day studying vs 1-2 hours from regular high school).
However, at the end of it, there were some gaps:
- didn’t know how taxes worked - pretty easy to learn later, but I did need to teach myself (I think we had a PF elective option)
- didn’t know how economics worked - basically anything at the government policy level was a black box - we covered basic supply and demand, but not how the fed creates money, tariffs, etc, outside of some brief mentions in US history
- very basic overview of how consumables like electricity and natural gas work - i.e. what a watt hour is, or how to compare electricity and gas; school mostly stuck to principles and theory, not practical things like understanding your gas bill
I don’t think that was a failure per se, it just wasn’t deemed important since the whole point of high school was to prepare you for college, and anything that didn’t help with that seemed to get dropped. I think this is unfortunate, and that high school should have you ready to make a decent wage outside of school (i.e. finish w/ marketable skills, like the German system does).
Absolutely mandatory (like 60% of total course load), school specialty curriculum (like 20-30% of total) and then the rest was up to you to choose what you wanted to learn.
Yeah, we were pretty similar, except we didn’t have “school school specialty curriculum” since I went to public school, and public schools are standardized in what they teach. So we had something like 70-80% as mandatory curriculum, which prepares you for college, and 20-30% electives, which hopefully prepare you for life. I did shop (make stuff out of wood), home ec (cooking), drawing (nearly failed, I suck at art), and visual communications (graphic design, photography, etc survey course).
- Comment on Power is not energy: why the difference matters [Technology Connections] 4 days ago:
Same. I just look at the temp and wind speed and make an educated guess, erring on the side of more layers.
- Comment on Privacy disaster as LGBTQ+ and BDSM dating apps leak private photos. 4 days ago:
Ah, makes a ton of sense. We do the same, basically use a
.envfile for local dev and OPs overrides the vars with whatever makes sense for the environment. - Comment on Privacy disaster as LGBTQ+ and BDSM dating apps leak private photos. 4 days ago:
That would require us to manually remake this user account
That sounds fine? Just add it to the script when down-syncing. Or keep auth details in a separate DB and only sync that as needed (that’s what we do).
The customer is paranoid, as the project is their public facing website, so they want testing against the actual prod environment.
That’s the main problem then, not this testing engineer. We do test directly on prod, but it’s not our QA engineers doing the testing, but our support staff and product owners (i.e. people who already have prod access). They verify that the new functionality works as expected and do a quick smoke test to make sure critical flows aren’t totally busted. This covers the “paranoid customer” issue while also keeping engineers away from prod.
Maybe you’re doing something like that now, idk, but I highly recommend that flow.
- Comment on Another 122.88TB SSD just launched and this one comes from an obscure Chinese startup you've probably never encountered 4 days ago:
Honestly, that size of drive doesn’t need a comparison. This isn’t for your average user, so you don’t need to dumb it down for them.