Just some Internet guy

He/him/them 🏳️‍🌈

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • I think P2P has stood the test of time. Torrents scale extremely well, any large scale video would have so many peers the server wouldn’t have to participate at all. These days most torrents easily saturate my gigabit connection no problem with just a handful of peers. Torrents tends to spread like wildfire.

    The main issue would be storage space, but I think a lot of YouTubers would be perfectly okay with spending $5-10 a month to pay for the storage costs with all the benefits you get from not being tied to YouTube’s ToS and policies. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the earnings from sponsor spots.


  • want someone to prove his LLM can be as insightful and accurate as paid one.

    The full DeepSeek model is available for download, and should generate about the same quality answers as the official one, with the bonus of less censorship. I pretty trivially got it to talk about the Tiananmen Square, and they can’t even ban me for it.

    That said, that’s rarely the point. It’s usually because you can, a cost saving measure, sometimes you plainly just don’t need a good model, sometimes you want privacy, sometimes you need privacy at the cost of quality.

    If your business is shoving customer reviews into a model, you really don’t need the best model for it to tell you how angry the customer is.

    Personally I just do it for fun and because I can. Sometimes you just do things for no other reason than because you can.





  • You can’t really easily locate where the last version of the file is located on an append-only media without writing the index in a footer somewhere, and even then if you’re trying to pull an older version you’d still need to traverse the whole media.

    That said, you use ZFS, so you can literally just zfs send it. ZFS will already know everything that needs to be known, so it’ll be a perfect incremental. But you’d definitely need to restore the entire dataset to pull anything out of it, reapply every incremental one by one, and if just one is unreadable the whole pool is unrecoverable, but so would the tar incrementals. But it’ll be as perfect and efficient as possible, as ZFS knows the exact change set it needs to bundle up. It’s unidirectional, so that’s why you can just zfs send into a file and burn it to a CD.

    Since ZFS can easily tell you the difference between two snapshots, it also wouldn’t be too hard to make a Python script that writes the full new version of changed files and catalogs what file and what version is on which disc, for a more random access pattern.

    But really for Blurays I think I’d just do it the old fashioned way and classify it to fit on a disc and label it with what’s on it, and if I update it make a v2 of it on the next disc.


  • Both use Linux under the hood. You can even install LineageOS on some TVs.

    The only reason AndroidTV is bullshit is the manufacturers because casual users want shit like Netflix and Prime preinstalled. Google TV in particular comes with a lot of crap and the ads, which believe it or not some users take as a feature.

    But that’s not inherent to Android TV as an OS, it’s exactly like Android phones and manufacturers preloading a bunch of crap to make an extra buck. If your run AOSP you get none of that crap, and it’s fully open-source.



  • For the most part, it’s just like how you learned to be good with a controller: experience. The more you use the mouse the better you get. You brain just learns that this amount of movements equals roughly this distance moved on the screen.

    For a lot of people, disabling mouse acceleration helps with precision. By default there’s an acceleration curve, so you move the mouse faster and the cursor goes even faster, disabling it makes it so the cursor tracks the mouse precisely. It can make it harder to do a 360 though, as acceleration can help get the speed needed. Dial in your sensitivity settings to where it feels comfortable for aiming, because if you make the sensitivity too much for the 360 it’ll be really hard to aim with any sort of accuracy.

    There’s a rhythm game called Osu! if you want to stress test your mouse accuracy.




  • I think it counts. You always have the option of taking your data with you and go elsewhere which is one of the main points of self-hosting, being in control of your data. If they jack up the prices or whatever, you just pack up, you never have to pay or else.

    Also hosting an email server at home would be an absolute nightmare, took me 10+ years to get that IP rep and I’m holding on to it as long as I can.

    I have a mix of it: private services run at home, public ones run on a bare metal server I rent. I still get the full benefits of having my own NextCloud and all. Ultimately even at home, I’d still be renting an Internet connection, unless you have a local only server.


  • Is it directly exposed over the Internet? If you only port forward the VPN on your router, I wouldn’t worry about it unless you’re worried about someone else already on your LAN.

    And even then, it’s really more like an extra layer of security against accidentally running something exposed publicly that you didn’t intend to, or maybe you want some services to only be accessible via a particular private interface. You don’t need a firewall if you have nothing to filter in the first place.

    A machine without a firewall that doesn’t have any open port behave practically the same from a security standpoint: nothing’s gonna happen. The only difference is the port showing as closed vs filtered in nmap, and the server refusing to send any response not even a rejection, but that’s it.



  • Proof of work is what those modern captchas tend to do I believe. Not useful to stop creating accounts and such, but very effective to stop crawlers.

    Have the same problem at work, and Cloudflare does jack shit about it. Half that traffic uses user agents that have no chance to even support TLS1.3, I see some IE5, IE6, Opera with their old Presto engine, I’ve even seen Netscape. Complete and utter bullshit. At this point if you’re not on an allow list of known common user agents or logged in, you get a PoW captcha.



  • I was totally above 13 or had parental consent when I went to forums in the early 2000s. I totally wasn’t actually 9.

    It’s wild to me this concept disappeared? It’s literally never been a good idea to reveal you’re a minor online. The laws are against you. Companies don’t want to deal with a curated minor experience, even less so in the current times. If they do, you get the crappier version of things.

    The worst thing to happen to the Internet is when Facebook normalized using your real name and real info online.


  • It’s not impossible, been running my own email server for about 10 years and I inbox pretty much everywhere. I even emailed my work address and straight to inbox. I do have the full SPF, DKIM and DMARC stuff set up, for which I get notices from several email provides of failed spoof attempts.

    Takes a while and effort to gain that reputation, but it’s doable. And OVH’s IPs don’t exactly have a great reputation either. Once you’re delisted from most spam databases / old spam reputation is expired, it’s not that bad.

    Although I do agree it’s possibly one of the hardest services to self host. The software to run email servers is ancient and weird, and takes a lot to set up right. If you get it wrong you relay spam and start over, it’s rough.



  • As a starting point. Are there any hardware recommendations for a toy home server?

    Whatever you already have. Old desktop, even old laptop (those come with a built-in battery backup!). Failing what, Raspberry Pis are pretty popular and cheap and low power consumption, which makes it great if you’re not sure how much you want to spend.

    Otherwise, ideally enough to run everything you need based on rough napkin math. Literally the only requirement is that the stuff you intend to run fits on it. For reference, my primary server which hosts my Lemmy instance (and emails and NextCloud and IRC and Matrix and Minecraft) is an old Xeon processor close to a third gen Intel i7 with 32GB of DDR3 memory, there’s 5 virtual machines on it (one of which is the Lemmy one), and it feels perfectly sufficient for my needs. I could make it work with half of that no problem. My home lab machine is my wife’s old Dell OptiPlex.

    Speaking of virtual machines, you can test the waters on your regular PC by just loading whatever OS you choose in a virtual machine (libvirt if you’re on Linux, VirtualBox or VMware otherwise). Then play with it. When it works makes a snapshot. Continue playing with it, break it, revert to the last good snapshot. A real home server will basically be the same but as a real machine that’s on 24/7. It’s also useful to test things out as a practice run before putting them on your real server machine. It’s also give you a rough idea how much resources it uses, and you can always grow your VM until it fits and then know how much you need for the real thing.

    Don’t worry too much about getting it right (except the backups, get those right, verify and test those regularly). You will get it wrong and eventually tear it down and rebuild it better what what you learn (or want to learn). Once you gain more experience it’ll start looking more and more like a real server setup, out of your own desire and needs.