• 9 Posts
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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • I guarantee you that if Meta or Twitter/X was investigated similarly we’d find out very very similar things about their products

    Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, those “news” pages that show up when you open a new browser tab in Edge, Xitter, Snapchat, and anyone else using an algorithm designed to drive engagement so they can shovel ads at you is 100% the same or worse than TikTok.

    The problem is, as you said, is that TikTok is “evil Chinese company stealing our kids’ data” and all of the rest are “brave American captains of industry” and boy, we can’t possibly do anything that could possibly have our captains of industry making even one less cent than they do now. Why, that’d be communism!

    So uh, here we are.




  • If it makes you feel better, if society collapses to the point that there are no more clothes, ammo, or canned food, you’ll have long since been dead.

    Despite what people think, we humans are fragile and pampered and a modern person is going to just end up dead if society collapses to that extent.

    I knew a serious prepper dude (by which I mean he hoarded heirloom seeds and composting toilets and not silver and MREs) who, while preparing to survive, pretty much figured if it totally falls apart he and his family would end up dead, and that evening scores was probably a more useful use of his time than fighting for every last minute.

    I used to think he was insane (and hell, he probably is) but the older I get the more I can understand his view on getting even, and then anything left is a bonus.



  • For a server? I want it out of date, so long as “out of date” means “older versions with backported security patches”.

    I’m boring and don’t care about the new whizzy crap, because if it’s working now and it’s secure, I’m not touching it. There is no feature you can offer me that will make me want to update a stable working server, so don’t screw with what version of software I’m running.

    For desktop use? Give me KDE Plasma 6.2 right now, not three years from now. I need that new shit in my veins, so hurry the hell up.

    So I mostly use Debian stable on anything server-y, and Fedora on anything desktop-y.

    And, I posted this just a few days ago, but I don’t like, at all, going outside of distro repos on Debian for packages.

    You end up with dependency chain issues in dpkg/apt, because dpkg is super hyper prone to them anyways, and have installs you can’t easily just update or upgrade because it can’t figure out what in the hell you’ve done to it.

    So I just uh, don’t use 3rd party repos for updated versions of things unless it’s utterly critical to do so and/or accept that at some point I’m doing a clean install for a migration because shit will be so broken you can’t pull it to the current stable version because of the 3rd party software.



  • I think you’re both over- and under-thinking this.

    First: if you go with a cloud provider, your provider is your hypervisor. If they don’t directly and clearly offer the features (import, export, Windows, etc.) that you need, they’re not the right choice.

    On the subject of exporting images from the cloud to use locally, eh, that’s not the most common feature. It does exist, but I’ve never seen a provider that does it in a way that’s not a complete pain in the ass and/or is simple to use one you have the image, which sounds like something you might actually want. Someone giving you a qcow image of your disk does not necessarily make importing it and getting it back up on a local KVM system easy, for example.

    It sounds like half of what you need is a decent laptop (Windows in the cloud kinda sucks for any application that’s got any sort of GPU-accelerated component, still.) and the other half is just a Linux server somewhere running docker, be it VM, real hardware, or some box sitting in your closet at home.

    (Edit: clarification: you can get a Windows VM that has a proper GPU passed thru to it, but they’re expensive and if you don’t get a GPU, then you just have basically software rendering, which limits what kind of software you can reasonably use with reasonable performance.)

    Nothing you mentioned about your “future home server environment” can’t be run on a VM, but I would comment that you’re looking at a pretty expensive route if you go the VM path. Nextcloud, for example, will want ~3-4gb of ram to not utterly suck and be useless. A full *arr stack with something like qbittorrent can happily eat another 4-5gb. Add in Plex/Jellyfin? That’s another 2-4gb there, too. And so on.

    You might actually end up spending less on a dedicated box than you would on a VM, simply because the pricing for things like RAM are usually substantially better for real, actual, physical hardware once you get past like, 4 or 8gb.

    I’d also recommend going with a containerized install for all this stuff: I bounce stuff around between servers and it’s just a matter of lifting the data out of the bind mount and moving it to it’s new home, and then a docker compose up and we’re done.

    TLDR: Cloud maybe fine, bare metal maybe fine: it comes down to budget and comfort with what you’re willing to deal with.