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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2024

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  • I actually moved away from classical self-hosted cloud storage solutions after trying the usual suspects like opencloud, nextcloud etc.

    And for me the time and effort (also the ressource-hogging if you don’t use quite overpowered servers) just weren’t worth it. Not when the used interfaces most of the time are open standards anyway and simpler solutions do the job:

    Radicale for contacts and dates via a webdav subset. Webdav concidently being widely supported for integrating online storage into any filesystem (or as the backend for several other things like for example syncing my bookmarks over several devices and browsers). SFTP or the million tools being just a frontend for it.

    One shiny platform like for example Nextcloud to do it all might be nice for a lot of users when they have someone dedicated to maintain it. But for selfhosting (as in: mainly for myself) the constant attention needed to fix stuff was quite tedious.

    When I think of “Google Drive” or “Dropbox” alternatives nowadays it’s just a drive hooked up to some low-spec device and accessed via one (or several) already existing open standards.

    (Bonus point: that lost phone is simply cut off by deleting its keys - unlike so many dedicated platform where you have to manage -if you even can- multiple dedicated users and their rights just to easily separate your personal access from your devices that are by design not all equally secure.)


  • Have in mind that compressed filesystem would be slower.

    Often the opposite is true, depending on case. Compressed files load faster, so if you have the cpu power to spare (which you usually have in games while loading) and loading speed is the bottle-neck then compression speeds things up, often considerably.

    And even in the age of ssds processing data and moving it through ram is much faster than the disk, so even for writing some amount of transparent compression is possible without affecting speeds.


  • Might be just my experience but what actually keeps people from switching is a proper support time line. Long-term and rolling releases can keep people using them for years after which they actually know what they want, what they can get used to and they don’t wanjt. Most distros however screw up something at the inevitable upgrade long before that, which then leads to “well, guess I could reinstall and try something else anyway”.


  • Productivity is such a bullshit idea… Like how do you measure productivity? In GDP?

    Yes, but normalised for buying power and per capita. Where I live the last several decades saw an increase by +250% in normalised economic output per capita, while at the same time real normalised wages stayed the same. Which marks a stark decoupling of economic output and wages (thus usually also pensions, taxes (public budgets), sometimes health care - all linked to wages) that did not exist before. What happens to all those gains? They get transfered upwards to a few rich people, while the system is now only based on less than a third of the economic output… Alas! “We can’t afford proper pensions, social security or even just maintaining the existing infrastructure anymore” is the most sang song everywhere the neoliberal insanity rules.

    And alongside it come fairy tales about demographics (how should the working people afford double the amount of people that need support? easy… when everyone of them is 6x as productive -> see output per capita still more than 3 times as high) and a lot of agitation pitting the “lazy stupid youth” against the “greedy old generation” when in reality they get all fucked over by the same small minority (with the old ones just having a better buffer because they already worked when the system wasn’t that broken).

    Long story short: Industrialisation killed so many jobs… but in reality the people still working suddenly made enough to provide for the rest because of massive production gains (and so children didn’t need to work anymore, women could stay home and raise the kids etc). Automation killed so many jobs, yet again the actual productivity per capita massively increased. In general development of tech but also society happened and increased life expectancy as well as productivity side by side. And now we are talking about the impact of AI. Guess what… the problem is again not AI. It’s having changed the system to the point where workers get exactly nothing from productivity gains because we need to push imaginary stock market numbers and shareholder profits instead. Well done Reagan, Mulroney, Thatcher, Mitterand, Kohl and countless others…




  • In addition to that other answer: they are bad at maintaining their userspace tools. The basic nvidia-setup program was at times so broken that you could only change stuff as root because using su or sudo crashed the app. Which is fun if your root account is deactivated by default… And they couldn’t be bothered to fix it for literally more than a year.

    I still have a script in my files that was running in early boot to change the fan speed at boot because there was no other way to change configs once booted and logged in.







  • There is NO justification for privately owned corporate AI.

    Not that I actually like it, but I think privately owned corporate AI isn’t the primary problem. It’s the broken market that is the real problem creating some insane bubble that can (temporarily at best - but who cares for long-term effects nowadays) only be sustained by shoe-horning AI into 1001 applications that it can’t fullfil properly.

    Corporations competing with actual applications in fields where AI makes sense wouldn’t be a problem, corporations competing for insane sums of financing by outpacing each other in terms of lies, fairy tales and trust-me-bro pseudo-science statements are. Because with insane amounts of money and nothing to actually show they instead spend a fraction of it on PR bullshit to advertise AI use in cases where it doesn’t make sense, to get more money again. Rinse and repeat, with no actual value created.


  • Setups like Android or those new fancy ummutable distros don’t actually make anything more secure. If the underlying OS is drectly exploited they don’t protect you. Not having a mechanism included to get you root permissions regularly, doesn’t help you against exploits achieving the same in unplanned ways. In fact -allthough that’s a minor issue- you can probably specifically target the latter distros even after a patch: After all we are talking about direct changes to binary code here. On that level you could get ideas about manipulating the overlay to access the unpatched files.

    In the end the most effective way to be more secure is not a mass produced thing like Android that locks out everyone (and not even being that good at it because there are masses working to circumvent it to get control over their device back), but to minimise you attack surface: Don’t have stuff activated you don’t need. Have a kernel compiled for your device with only exactly the components you really need. Or whitelist all kernel modules you need and nothing more. Explicitly declare what a user can do and access actively (see: SELinux, AppArmor with strict policies) instead of relying on the underlying passive permission system.





  • Germany’s problem is not building stuff but corruption.

    Our street/sidewalk was opened up f****ing 7 times in the last 3 years for fiber-optic cables. Because if there is money to be spend they will find a way to give it to some buddies for putting the 2nd, 3rd or 10th set of redundant cables into the ground.

    Oh, and guess what is not available here… a fiber connection, because actually connecting those cables is not where they can make money. And if they somehow manage this some day… I’ll pay insane prices compared to any other country.

    Which is both again caused by corruption, a.k.a. a few big companies and their well-paid lobbyists working hard to be the only option.