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dan

@dan@upvote.au

Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
d.sb
Mastodon: @dan

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dan ,
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With theft the originally owner loses what is stolen, with copyright infringement the owner only loses the license fee for 1 copy.

There used to be an anti-piracy lobby group in Australia literally called "Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft". I always had an issue with their name since they were really against copyright infringement, not "copyright theft" which is just a nonsense term like you said. It's been ruled several times by courts both in Australia and in the USA that it can't be called "theft" (e.g. https://www.techdirt.com/2013/12/02/surprise-mpaa-told-it-cant-use-terms-piracy-theft-stealing-during-hotfile-trial/).

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I always found these anti-right-click scripts funny since they usually don't block Ctrl+S to save the page, Ctrl+U to view source, or Ctrl+P to print (or these days, F12 to open the browser dev tools)

dan ,
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I have a domain with a catchall email address and just make up something random myself every time I'm signing up for a new site.

dan ,
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I actually use Lidarr for managing CDs I've ripped myself. It helped me convert a mess of files with nonsensical names into a nice clean directory structure, plus I can track which albums I've got vs which ones I'm missing.

dan , (edited )
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and you shouldn't be using any of those, since the order can and will change. The numbers are based on the order the devices and device drivers are initialized in, not based on physical location in the system. The modern approach (assuming you're using udev) is to use the symlinks in /dev/disk/by-id/ or /dev/disk/by-uuid/ instead, since both are consistent across reboots (and by-id should be consistent across reinstalls, assuming the same partitioning scheme on the same physical drives)

This is also why Ethernet devices now have names like enp0s3 - the numbers are based on physical location on the bus. The old eth0, eth1, etc. could swap positions between Linux upgrades (or even between reboots) since they were also just the order the drivers were initialized in.

dan ,
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Right :) the original meme was just talking about drive names (/dev/sdX)

dan ,
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Depends on what you run on the server. A lot of the VMs I use for https://dnstools.ws/ have 5GB space and they use less than 2GB of it. They don't have much installed though.

dan ,
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In the USA, it's recommended to label it as "Honey with corn syrup" (PDF: https://www.fda.gov/files/food/published/PDF---Guidance-for-Industry--Proper-Labeling-of-Honey-and-Honey-Products.pdf) but that's just a recommendation, not a law. The FDA should get stricter about this.

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I wish they called it "Outlook Express", like the old free one. This is confusing.

They want to get rid of regular "Outlook", but "Outlook (new)" is missing a LOT of features. It's essentially just a webview that loads the web version, so it doesn't have features like native add-ins and PST files and likely never will. It doesn't look like any other Windows apps either. A good web interface, but a pretty bad app. Why even make it an app at that point? Just tell people to access the site.

dan ,
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It's weird they use webviews given they maintain the desktop port of React Native (https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/) which feels a lot better than a web view since it actually uses native UI components rather than just embedding a web browser.

It's gotten to the point where Apple's newer Windows apps (like Apple Music) look better than Microsoft's, because Apple are actually building native WinUI apps.

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Given there's people in this thread incorrectly using "internet" instead of "web"... Probably never.

dan ,
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It's an old meme, but it checks out.

dan , (edited )
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Someone that has an $87 food budget probably isn't going to buy imported Italian cheese.

There's some US-made "parmesan" that's somewhat decent and quite a bit cheaper than the legit Italian stuff, just make sure you buy a block of it and not anything pre-grated, and that it doesn't have any filler ingredients.

Some US-made parmesan is produced using similar techniques to Parmigiano Reggiano, they just can't legally call it that since it's not made in a specific area in Italy.

dan ,
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My employer allows Linux - only a customized version of Fedora that's preconfigured to handle our environment, including certificates (802.1x, browser client certs, etc) with automated renewal, endpoint management software, deployment of settings using Chef, etc.

We have a few internal apps built using React Native though, which is only available on Windows and MacOS. There's been some Github repos trying to port React Native to Linux but nothing that's production-quality yet.

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Use Winget or Chocolatey. If you use an app that's not packaged yet, it's easy to package it yourself.

dan ,
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It's hard because Mozilla need money to survive, and the world needs Mozilla, but it's been hard for them to find a stable source of funding. Mozilla relying on their main competitor (Google) for most of their income is a massive risk. I can understand why they're trying approaches like this, even if the users don't like it.

Does anyone here have a suggestion as to a better way for them to increase their income?

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1100 people does sound like a lot, but some of those employees are probably working on things other than the browser. I wonder how many people work on Google Chrome in comparison.

dan ,
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The percentage of users that donate to open source projects they use is very low, and I'm not sure that'd significantly change just because Mozilla start asking people to do it.

dan ,
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Secondly, the reason so few users donate to open source projects is because these projects are so poorly marketed to potential supporters. That’s why a sophisticated organisation like Mozilla is so well placed to sell the stories behind some of these projects.

This is definitely a good point.

the percentage of users that click on ads and shopping is also very low.

You'd be surprised. I've worked in ad tech. Retargeting ads (where you see ads for items you've viewed in the past) and abandoned cart ads (which you see if you add items to your cart but never check out, sometimes with a discount coupon attached) have very good clickthrough rates. Targeting based on customer list performs pretty well too.

In any case, I really doubt they could make even 1% of what they currently make with the Google deal. AFAIK they make around $400 million per year from that deal: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-google-search-deal-for-firefox

dan , (edited )
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Energy consumption is essentially the same, as it's using the same radios.

For what it's worth, I have several SSIDs, each on a separate VLAN:

  • my main one
  • Guest. Has internet access but is otherwise isolated - Guest devices can't communicate with other guest devices or with any other VLANs.
  • IoT Internet: IoT and home automation devices that need internet access. Things like Ecobee thermostat, Google speakers, etc
  • IoT No Internet: Home automation stuff that does not need internet access. Security cameras, Zigbee PoE dongle (SLZB-06), garage door opener, ESPHome devices, etc

(to remotely access home automation stuff, I use Home Assistant via a Tailscale VPN)

Most of these have both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz enabled, with band steering enabled to (hopefully) convince devices to use 5Ghz when possible.

This is on a TP-Link Omada setup with 2 x EAP670 ceiling-mounted access points. You can create up to 16 SSIDs I think.

dan ,
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A lot of access points, even consumer-grade ones, have this option. It's usually accomplished via predefined firewall rules on the access points themselves.

Consumer-grade access points usually let you have just one isolated guest network, whereas fancier ones (Omada, Unifi, Ruckus, Aruba, etc) usually let you enable isolation for any SSID (ie the "guest network" is no different from any other SSID)

dan , (edited )
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I don't want my guests to be able to access my home server or Omada controller for example, or spread malware (their phone may have malware without them even knowing). Also, I give the guest wifi to people other than friends, like contractors. Phone reception is horrible at my house so I give them the wifi so they can use wifi calling.

dan ,
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I used to have a Netgear Nighthawk router/AP I bought from Costco, and if I remember correctly, its guest network automatically isolated guests from other guests. This router didn't support VLANs so I think it was just a bunch of firewall rules.

dan ,
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Hewlett Packard Enterprise makes good products. It's very common to see their server and networking equipment, plus their subsidiaries (like Aruba). I'm always surprised that their consumer division is completely different and makes such terrible ones.

dan ,
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These days it's not uncommon to have a powerful GPU just for AI acceleration.

dan ,
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Are modern iGPUs not powerful enough for these tasks? The UHD 770 is pretty powerful, especially for video encoding/decoding (it can transcode 8+ 4K streams simultaneously)

dan ,
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That makes sense. Thanks.

dan ,
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You'll need a good GPU for best results.

dan ,
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Tailscale does NAT hole punching which really helps when dealing with systems behind NAT or restrictive firewalls. Your phone can connect directly to your home network without having to go through a VPS if you use Tailscale, even if your home internet connection doesn't have a static IP.

dan ,
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I know everyone says to use Proxmox, but it's worth considering xcp-ng as well.

dan ,
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I agree that Proxmox VE is better; I'm just saying that people should compare multiple options and pick the one they like the best.

I'm using Unraid on my home server because it can run Docker containers in addition to KVM and LXC (via a plugin).

dan ,
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People that want to train AI models on Reddit content can just scrape the site, or use data from archive sites that archive Reddit content.

dan ,
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Another thing to avoid taxes is donating stock to charities, as you can deduct the market value of the stock rather than just the cost basis.

Say you buy some stock for $100 and it goes up in value to $400. If you sell it, you have to pay capital gains tax on the $300 gain.

However, if you donate it, you don't have to pay any tax and can deduct the whole $400, meaning your taxable income is reduced by $400 (which would be a ~$120 reduction in income tax for someone with a 30% effective tax rate).

Of course, you still end up with less money than you would have if you didn't donate. But if you're going to donate anyways, donating stock with gains is better than donating cash because you've already paid income tax on the cash but haven't paid any tax on the stock gains.

dan ,
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What about archive sites like web.archive.org and archive.today? Both still work fine for Reddit posts, and neither are blocked in www.reddit.com/robots.txt, so so far they haven't shown an intent to block them.

dan ,
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You don't need every post, just a collection big enough to train an AI on. I imagine it's a lot easier to get data from the Internet Archive (whose entire mission is historical preservation) than from Reddit.

The thing I'm not sure about is licensing, but it seems like that'd the case for the whole AI industry at the moment.

dan ,
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I think some people don't understand that software can be complete/finished and not need any more updates unless a bug is reported. Software doesn't have an expiry date.

dan ,
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Oh yeah, I didn't consider the fact that emacs might have a lot of breaking changes (I don't use it). Thanks.

dan ,
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but if the bugs are low-priority and have easy workarounds, it's not so bad.

dan ,
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I don't use emacs so I didn't know that, but on Android I have apps that haven't been updated in a long time (games I purchased as part of Humble Indie Bundles that just came as APK files) that still work fine.

dan , (edited )
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I saw on the local news this morning that an AT&T outage meant that people on mobile networks other than AT&T couldn't call 911 here (San Francisco Bay Area). Their suggested workaround was to make sure you have wifi calling enabled. Okay cool thanks I'll just make sure that my emergencies only happen in areas with good wifi.

dan ,
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Thankfully I already had it enabled since the area in and around my house seems like a dead zone for cell phone signal. I only have one bar of signal when I'm inside.

dan ,
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You could install and configure the unattended-upgrades package to install updates in the background. I usually wouldn't recommend it on testing or unstable though. Works well on Debian stable since there's generally no breaking changes.

dan , (edited )
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It makes sense that VPN users see CAPTCHAs though... By design, it's hard to differentiate an attacker from a legitimate user, and there's a LOT of cyberattacks that go via VPNs.

That's also why banks and online stores don't like VPNs. It's hard to tell if it's you logging in vs if it's an attacker using the same VPN as you.

dan ,
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The difference with a public network at a coffee shop or whatever is that people usually aren't using that network for DoS attacks.

who’s ISP sticks them behind a CGN is on that front.

Good ISPs that use CGNAT also use IPv6, and modern OSes prefer IPv6 over IPv4. There are some bad ISPs that use CGNAT and don't support IPv6, in which case I imagine the experience for users isn't ideal. I've tried using a network like that and kept getting "unusual traffic from your computer network" CAPTCHAs on Google.

dan ,
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Jellyfin still doesn't have a good solution for music. None of the players that support it are anywhere near as good as Plexamp.

dan , (edited )
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At home - Networking

  • 10Gbps internet via Sonic, a local ISP in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's only $40/month.
  • TP-Link Omada ER8411 10Gbps router
  • MikroTik CRS312-4C+8XG-RM 12-port 10Gbps switch
  • 2 x TP-Link Omada EAP670 access points with 2.5Gbps PoE injectors
  • TP-Link TL-SG1218MPE 16-port 1Gbps PoE switch for security cameras (3 x Dahua outdoor cams and 2 x Amcrest indoor cams). All cameras are on a separate VLAN that has no internet access.
  • SLZB-06 PoE Zigbee coordinator for home automation - all my light switches are Inovelli Blue Zigbee smart switches, plus I have a bunch of smart plugs. Aqara temperature sensors, buttons, door/window sensors, etc.

Home server:

  • Intel Core i5-13500
  • Asus PRO WS W680M-ACE SE mATX motherboard
  • 64GB server DDR5 ECC RAM
  • 2 x 2TB Solidigm P44 Pro NVMe SSDs in ZFS mirror
  • 2 x 20TB Seagate Exos X20 in ZFS mirror for data storage
  • 14TB WD Purple Pro for security camera footage. Alerts SFTP'd to offsite server for secondary storage
  • Running Unraid, a bunch of Docker containers, a Windows Server 2022 VM for Blue Iris, and an LXC container for a Bo
    gbackup server.

For things that need 100% reliability like emails, web hosting, DNS hosting, etc, I have a few VPSes "in the cloud". The one for my emails is an AMD EPYC, 16GB RAM, 100GB NVMe space, 10Gbps connection for $60/year at GreenCloudVPS in San Jose, and I have similar ones at HostHatch (but with 40Gbps instead of 10Gbps) in Los Angeles.

I've got a bunch of other VPSes, mostly for https://dnstools.ws/ which is an open-source project I run. It lets you perform DNS lookup, pings, traceroutes, etc from nearly 30 locations around the world. Many of those are sponsored which means the company provides them for cheap/free in exchange for a backlink.

This Lemmy server is on another GreenCloudVPS system - their ninth birthday special which has 9GB RAM and 99GB NVMe disk space for $99 every three years ($33/year).

dan , (edited )
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Wired doesn't show a paywall for me for some reason, but in any case the the original source is Ars Technica which I don't think shows a paywall to anyone: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-honor-refund-policy-invented-by-airlines-chatbot/

dan ,
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I'm just joking. It's a common habit software developers have for some reason.

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