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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • What I find incredible is just how slow-moving and cruft-filled it has become.

    For example, DotNet has had string interpolation since C# 6, back in 2015. That’s a decade, already.

    Java recently yoinked their implementation because they just couldn’t make it work.

    That’s damning.

    Right now - ignoring the wider ecosystem and looking purely at the core language - I am seeing the very latest LTR version of Java as being on-par with C# pre-2010 in terms of continual material improvements and ease of use.

    Yikes.

    I still use Java, but… yikes.


  • And I self-host precisely because of the money I save using surplussed hardware. I have a symmetrical 1Gb SOHO fibre connection from my ISP, so I can host whatever the hell I want, I just need to stand it up. And a beefy older system with oodles of RAM is perfect for spinning up VMs of various platforms for various tasks. This saves me craploads of money over even a single VM on cloud platforms like Vultr. Plus, even if I were to support a “heavy” service sufficiently in demand to warrant its own iron, it still costs me less than a year’s worth of hosting to obtain a decent platform for that service to run on all by it’s lonesome.

    My only cloud costs end up being those services which are distributed for redundancy and geographical distance, such as DNS and caching CDNs.


  • the key is to simply seed all of your content for as long as you have it in your collection.

    Tell that to TheGeeks. If you aren’t actively uploading - not just sitting there sharing, but actively sending data to anyone else - you’ll eventually be warned, then banned.

    Back when I was trying to use their site, they had only one system: strict 1 ratio on a time limit. If you couldn’t maintain a 1+ ratio, and achieve it within a very limited amount of time, it didn’t matter what you grabbed or how long you shared back out, you got banned. At the time they had no other way to get ratio other than sharing back out - no freeleech, nothing. Which meant if you were wanting any content more than 2-3 HOURS old, you were looking at a ratio shortfall because there was no way to make up that ratio you were losing by downloading that content. There were simply too few peers after you to overcome the masses of seeders ahead of you satisfying peers.

    It was absolutely brutal, which is why I now refuse to deal with any sites with that rule (1+ ratio with time limit) even if they have other ways (freeleech, etc.) to mitigate it. Like, f**k those sites. I’ve been seeding some torrents for close to 15 years, I have no problem letting shit remain resident in my client. So sites like MyAnonamouse it’s going to have to remain.


  • If you are talking about sites that have a strict, non-negotiable seeding ratio requirement, it is impossible. Your only real long-term option is to write a script that will grab everything that gets uploaded on a 30-second cadence, and then aggressively super-seed that content back out. And this is regardless of what it is - this script runs 24/7, doing about 2,880 hits on the website a day for new content. Still, even with the script it will be difficult to have your overall ratio exceed more than about 1.5-2, and you may still get banned for individual seeds that never exceed 1 because no-one is very interested in them.

    I have tried to use sites that have strict ratio minimums, and long-term success is impossible without an edge like the script I mentioned. It’s why I now work with sites - like myanonamouse - that have minimum seeding times for everything you grab, regardless if anyone else needs it. They tend to be far less stressful and user-hostile.






  • My microwave is a 1977 Amanda Radarange. It can boil a cup of water in ⅕ of the time a modern microwave can.

    Now granted, it has zero fancy settings and a simple number pad that does nothing but set how long you want the microwave to run.

    But honestly, this simplicity is a large part of it’s charm. No connectivity needs, no features locked behind paywalls, no extraneous bullshit or never-used features. Just a tool that does only one thing, and does it exceptionally well.





  • don’t use plastic if you can avoid it. It’s not easy to recycle.

    Plastic bags, styrofoam, and those hard plastics marked types 1 & 2 are the ones most likely to be recycled into new products. They are easy to break down and recycle into new containers.

    Hard plastics marked types 3 through 7 are most likely to be filtered out and either incinerated or dumped straight into the landfill, as it costs more to recycle them than to just create new straight from oil.


  • Unfortunately, most plastics are useless to recycle - they either get incinerated or dumped straight into the landfill by the companies who collect and filter them.

    Which is why my wife and I only bother with plastic bags, styrofoam, and the hard plastics marked types 1 & 2. These are the plastics which are easily recyclable, and therefore, have a non-trivial chance of actually being recycled.

    We put types 3 through 7 straight into the trash, as they have about a 97% chance of not actually getting recycled.




  • His router is tri-band though meaning it has 2 5ghz transceivers.

    Unfortunately, for many models - like the Linksys WRT 3200ACM - that second antenna (technically the third one if you include the 2.4Ghz one) doesn’t function at all without the manufacturer’s firmware. It’s a dead stick with any third-party firmware, and is 100% software-enabled.

    I have found this fact to be reliable whether it is DD-WRT or OpenWRT, and across several different manufacturers including Asus and D-Link.


  • Our civilization demands that I be profitable to a parasite who leeches a majority of my labour’s value in order to accumulate obscene levels of wealth.

    Without exorbitant amounts of time spent maintaining that profitability, I will end up poor, homeless, and eventually dead from exposure. This leaves vanishingly little time to spend on open source work, regardless of how intellectually and ethically attractive it may be.