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CosmicTurtle

@CosmicTurtle@lemmy.world

Due to lemmy.world blocking pirating communities, I will now be using !CosmicTurtle0

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

CosmicTurtle ,

You'd think it should be less expensive.

But then you're not thinking of increasing shareholder value.

How dare you!

Massive Thank You

I've been at this self hosting stuff since Christmas and at every step of the way, I've come asking for help and advice from this community (and the related ones) and everyone has been super generous with their knowledge and guidance. I am extremely humbled by the kindness you have all given me. Shit, I'm even grateful for when...

CosmicTurtle ,

Shit, I'm even grateful for when you all tell me off.

Oh fuck off!

Just kidding! I haven't seen any of your posts here (mostly because I sort by all) but yeah the people in this sub are top tier.

A few weeks ago I came here to ask about building my own computer and which parts to get because it had been years since I've done so and everyone was nice about it.

CosmicTurtle ,

Look into the benefits offered by your other credit cards. My identity was stolen a few years ago and I learned like a few months ago that one of my credit cards offers free identity protection services if/when your identity gets stolen.

They handle all of the annoying shit like contacting the bank, getting the debt off of your credit card, etc.

If not, and you were part of the Equifax (or any) hack, you likely have this same service available to you for free.

CosmicTurtle ,

It's because all those people think that if they work harder, maybe, just maybe, they will be like him.

Source: I used to be one of those rubes and now I know better.

CosmicTurtle ,

Why do you have so many porn tabs open?

CosmicTurtle ,

Yup. Never ever buy lifetime licenses.

Even on software you love. Especially for software you love.

CosmicTurtle ,

If it's for software you like, yes. Lemmy apps are a great example of this.

A lifetime license isn't going to sustain the dev long term. If you like the app, buy a monthly subscription that gives them predictable income every month. Do a year if you feel confident about it. But honestly monthly is probably best.

For shitty corporate apps like Adobe, pirate that shit.

CosmicTurtle ,

Iirc the way that blind works is by verifying you work at a specific company but then that email address cannot be used again.

It's not associated with your specific account.

Someone who worked at blind explained that but there's no way to know this for sure.

CosmicTurtle ,

The IT Crowd

CosmicTurtle ,

The problem is that they can't control open source drivers. They could, however, release a printer that ran on proprietary closed source drivers. But they'd have to spend money on developers to maintain that code whereas right now, drivers are more or less stable and developed for free.

What they could do is require the use of HP printer paper, with embedded RFID or watermarks that would be readable by HP printers. I'm honestly surprised they haven't gone down this road.

Amazon's Hidden Chatbot Recommends Nazi Books and Lies About Amazon Working Conditions (www.404media.co)

An Amazon chatbot that’s supposed to surface useful information from customer reviews of specific products will also recommend a variety of racist books, lie about working conditions at Amazon, and write a cover letter for a job application with entirely made up work experience when asked, 404 Media has found.

CosmicTurtle ,

At least Amazon is thinking of the shareholders.

IRS has launched its free tax filing service, Direct File, in 12 states (arstechnica.com)

"Direct File provides a free, secure option for taxpayers with simple tax situations in 12 states to file their taxes directly with the IRS," the Treasury Department said. "Direct File is easy to use, with no hidden junk fees, and works as well on a smartphone as it does on a laptop, tablet, or desktop computer. Direct File...

CosmicTurtle ,

These states:

  • Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming
  • Arizona
  • California
  • Massachusetts
  • New York
  • Washington
CosmicTurtle ,

The hardest thing about Linux Mint is installing all of your software. It's daunting even for very established users.

I moved from Ubuntu to LM a few months ago and I've enjoyed it.

CosmicTurtle ,

Can confirm. Vim is my operating system.

CosmicTurtle ,

The biggest reason I use jellyfin: you don't need to pay for plex premium to stream to your phone.

I get plex needs to make money. But talk about a basic feature that people need...

CosmicTurtle ,

Wait, I thought Google wanted Apple to start supporting RCS. So that everyone can talk to each other.

So Google is just...trying to strong arm apple to give up their proprietary protocol for their own?

That's so fucked up.

CosmicTurtle ,

I've requested confirmation and have only gotten it once or twice.

What I've started doing is actually just sending them their same exact terms via their corporate registered address (regardless of their instructions) with the arbitration clause and jury trial waiver and just about anything I don't agree to removed. I tell them so long as they continue to provide the services to me, that they implicitly agree to the terms I'm sending them, with any further updates requiring them to send a registered (not certified) letter.

I intentionally do not provide any way for them to identify my account except for the return address.

I figured if I ever had to go to court, one of these things would happen:

  • judge finds that the original terms are enforceable, which means I'm no worse off
  • judge finds that my amended terms are enforceable, which means it worked
  • judge finds both terms unenforceable and I can continue to sue them

So far, no company has ever written me back or turned off my access to the site.

I suggest everyone do this because these forced arbitration clauses are very anti-consumer and we need to start clawing back our rights.

CosmicTurtle ,

Car companies have definitely imagined this. And if they could, they 100% would.

CosmicTurtle OP ,

I remember working on a PC back in my Geek Squad days that had a lever.

For air circulation, what should I be on the lookout for? Making sure I have clearances, of course, but should I buy more fan that I need?

CosmicTurtle OP ,

I've been learning the same. Though, I don't get the sense that SATA is going out of style. I could be wrong though.

CosmicTurtle OP ,

I for one would not purchase any Intel hardware as long as AMD is around. Not that they’re bad or anything, but AMD gives me much Kore “bang for the buck”.

If you have a processor line in mind, let me know. Happy to give them another look, given my experience with AMD is 30 some years old.

And then there’s the cooling. I see you went with a radiator and fan, but I strongly suggest getting some type of liquid cooling. The prices are not that bad anymore (unlike about 10 years ago, which was insane).

I'm not tied to the cooling solution I picked. I just picked something that looked affordable and did what I wanted. I'd love to do liquid cooling so long as it isn't a pain. I helped my friend back in high school do liquid cooling and it was a proper mess. We came close to shorting his entire rig.

As for the board, you’ll get all kinds of different suggestions. Some people swear by Asus, I’d rather go with Gigabyte (love the Aorus line), so it’ll come down to brand trust at the end of the day.

I have zero brand loyalty here. The boards I'm looking at right now all have embedded wifi with the annoying antenna...I really want bluetooth embedded so it seems like I'll have to have wifi but just not use it.

CosmicTurtle OP ,

is that really a concern? 2 cables vs. pushing a card into the mobo?

CosmicTurtle OP ,

Two GPUs? Is that a thing? How does that work on a desktop? Honestly, if it wasn't for my curiosity into AI, I'd just go with the onboard video though given my need for specific resolutions, I find comfort in having a dedicated card.

I've been using ubuntu exclusively for 10 some years and don't use snap at all. tbh, not even sure what snap is.

If it's not apt, then I don't use it.

CosmicTurtle OP ,

I've gone back and forth on whether I need RAID locally. Giving up at least a third of your storage capacity (assuming RAID 5) for the off-chance that your hard drive dies in 3-4 years seems like a high price to pay. I had two drives fail in the lifespan of my current desktop. And I had enough warning from SMART that I could peel off the data before the drives bricked. I know I got lucky, but still...

CosmicTurtle OP ,

I was really hoping to cannibalize the 32 GBs of DDR3 RAM but I couldn't find a MoBo that supports it anymore. Then I saw DDR5 is the latest!

I don't really do any gaming. If I wasn't going to tinker with AI, I'd just need a card for dual DisplayPort output. I can support HDMI but...I prefer DP

CosmicTurtle OP ,

And if you want to join the “I use arch btw” crowd...

I may be a linux nerd and pedantic, but not that pedantic. 😅 I've looked into Linux Mint and not opposed to an distro switch. I've been very happy with Ubuntu over the years. My first distro was slackware, then Fedora. Settled in Ubuntu and haven't turned back.

if CUDA should be part of your calculus or not.

Probably not, if my cursory google search is correct. But happy to be convinced otherwise.

Though another nicety for my latest builds, is multi-gig nics (though 2.5Gb was my ceiling, since you’ll also need the network gear to utilize it)

I've had the benefit of laying my own CAT-5e in my house. Given the distances, CAT-6 was going to cost twice as much with a negligible increase in bandwidth. That said, I'm restricted by the narrowest straw, which is wifi (when streaming media to my phone) and ISP (which taps out at around 300mb/s). My current PC has 1gb/s card and I've only occasionally had issues.

I use newegg for its reviews of items, specifically so I can search for the term “linux” in any given product’s reviews.

Oh that's a good tip!

CosmicTurtle OP ,

I actually did. And the quantum twin that succeeded is now solving global warming.

I am the twin that didn't succeed.

CosmicTurtle OP ,

I know that this is the self-hosted community but I very much agree. The way I run my desktop is that I can, in most cases, lose my primary hard drive and I'll survive. It won't be pretty and I might have a few local repos that I haven't synced in a while but overall, it ain't bad.

Now, that doesn't mean I don't want my primary hard drive restored if I can do it. I've been lucky enough to be able to restore them from the drive. But if I can't, the most I lose is some config files, which I should start to version control but I get lazy.

I can't back up my media. It's just too big. But yar.

My greatest fear is losing my porn collection. 😅 But not enough to RAID.

CosmicTurtle OP ,

I just checked the specs for the M.2 NVMe drive that I pulled from an old laptop. It's read speed is 3000mbs so it looks like I'm good there. Thanks for the heads up though.

CosmicTurtle OP ,

With the conversations I'm having here, I'm leaning in the direction of integrated video (assuming I can get one with display port) and a discrete card just for AI work.

I use VirtualBox for VMs. I'm assuming there are instructions on how to give the card to the VM? My cursory google search came up with dubious results.

CosmicTurtle OP ,

Are CUDAs something that I can select within pcpartpicker? Or is this like a cloud thing?

CosmicTurtle OP ,

Oooh, I had not considered that but thank you for the recommendation. The only thing I don't like about these PCs is that they all have RGB lighting. I really don't need this and I don't get their appeal.

CosmicTurtle OP ,

I typically code a lot of back-end and processor intensive workloads. The issue I have with i5s is that they don't seem to be as "snappy" as i7s. I've worked with both for good long periods of time. When I had an i5 laptop, I had to off-load a good majority of my development to the cloud because I couldn't do containers and listen to music and run two monitors at the same time. I never had the same issue with i7 processors, even on a laptop.

CosmicTurtle ,

I think I used to do something similar with email spam traps. Not sure if it's still around but basically you could help build NaCL lists by posting an email address on your website somewhere that was visible in the source code but not visible to normal users, like in a div that was way on the left side of the screen.

Anyway, spammers that do regular expression searches for email addresses would email it and get their IPs added to naughty lists.

I'd love to see something similar with robots.

CosmicTurtle ,

I remember one interview I had with a candidate. It was for a database analyst position that required SQL.

The first round was typically a phone screen where I chat with the candidate, get to know them a bit.

Second round was code review. I asked them to do a SQL query that did x.

The queries were simple. The goal was to get the candidate to walk through the query.

I had one candid that, over screen share, wrote the query flawlessly. Then I asked them to explain what it was doing. The candidate froze.

I can get understand getting nervous so I moved onto an insert statement. I had them write one and then do another without using certain terms (often leading to a sub query).

Again, flawless. I asked what situations would you use one over the other.

Again, they froze. I started to get suspicious that they were cheating and had them, instead of typing the answer, say the answer. When they couldn't, I knew enough that it wasn't going to work.

CosmicTurtle ,

Every time this kind of post comes up, I always ask what software is only supporting discord. The response has consistently been some niche software where it's only a handful of users. The other kind is devs trying to evade Nintendo lawyers because apparently that's a thing.

So...if you're going to post this meme, name and shame. Discord only support is bad. But I have never run into this in the wild.

CosmicTurtle ,

Typst says discord is for chatting with the community. But the project has issues and discussions enabled.

I'm okay with "hey hang out with us on discord".

I'm not okay with "Need support? Only discord."

CosmicTurtle ,

It reminds me of a lawmaker in one of the flyover states that wanted to make it illegal to look at the source code of a website.

Think about this for a second.

And realize that this twat is writing laws.

CosmicTurtle ,

No, it was a few years back when a researcher found that there was a plain text file of county employee social security numbers just sitting inside the JavaScript of a government website.

There are too many Google results from the upcoming election for me to sort through but suffice it to say, the guy was a class A idiot.

CosmicTurtle ,

I use GitHub private repos for my home configuration stuff. So it's not open source since I'm the only one using it and I don't want someone else to know how to attack my network.

For certain configurations, self hosting doesn't make sense. For people like me, who would rather spend his time doing the stuff I care about instead of maintaining the stuff I don't care about, I'm okay giving Microsoft some "control" over my code for the convenience.

That said, I am thinking about moving my FOSS code off of GitHub since that is an option. I'd have to see their CI/CD pipelines though.

CosmicTurtle ,

Given the number of TV shows and movies around this topic, I can sense this change coming.

If I have to interact with someone that's wearing goggles, I might go full Luddite.

How Quora Died (slate.com)

“Why Do So Many Music Venues Use Ticketmaster?” “What’s It Like to Train to Be a Sushi Chef?” “How Do Martial Artists Break Concrete Blocks?” If you were looking for answers to such questions 10 years ago, your best resource for finding a thorough, expert-informed response likely would have been one of the most...

CosmicTurtle ,

It's sad that so many plugins like this exist.

Remember ExpertsExchange? They charged people for the correct answer but was in the top 10 results. They got blocked very quickly when Google, yes Google, allowed you to block any site from your search. That feature is now gone and you have to specify that in your search terms.

CosmicTurtle ,

It's definitely worth learning. I had the damnedest time with docker until I went to a meetup and had someone ELI5 to me. And it wasn't that I wasn't technical. I just couldn't wrap my head around so many layers of extraction.

The guy was very patient with me and helped me get started with docker compose and the rest is history.

Music Piracy Is Back, Baby (gizmodo.com)

"Muso, a research firm that studies piracy, concluded that the high prices of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are pushing people back towards illegal downloads. Spotify raised its prices by one dollar last year to $10.99 a month, the same price as Apple Music. Instead of coughing up $132 a year, more consumers...

CosmicTurtle ,

For those who are unfamiliar with both Bandcamp and Bandcamp Friday, can you ELI5?

CosmicTurtle ,

Except it's not just a pizza. Corporate will have spent millions of dollars on anti-union consultants, enough money to give pretty good raises across the board.

Then, while eating the pizza, you'll have to listen to a lecture about how unions are bad, mandatory btw.

CosmicTurtle ,

Back then, Amazon was the shit. My GF at the time and I cancelled our Costco membership because shipping was good and selection was better.

Now, Amazon is shit. And now back to buying in-store whenever possible. And got a Costco membership again.

I have a running cart in my Amazon and about once every two weeks I'll hit the purchase button.

Just not worth it anymore.

CosmicTurtle ,

Yeah..

Hate to break it to you but our world is owned by like 11 companies

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