just_another_person

just_another_person , 9 days ago (edited 9 days ago) to Selfhosted in Electricians of fediverse, should I have my selfhosting box grounded?

Do you have money to replace everything plugged into those outlets, and sufficient home insurance that also ignores such things? Then, no, I guess.

Just take an hour and make a ground yourself. It doesn't take a lot of specialized knowledge to do so.

Edit to say, I'm pretty sure any surge protector worth itself has a ground output on it already. Just run a wire from it into the literal ground if possible, or over to a place in your home that is properly grounded. You're just trying to give something like a lightning strike a path of least resistance to discharge into. Any metal conduit in your home SHOULD be grounded, so that's an easy option.

just_another_person , 9 days ago to Technology in Visions of a Post-Apocalyptic Internet: The Future of Democratized Information

Yeah, thanks for the writeup. It was a good read. You're creating the kind of content you want to see more of, and we should all be doing more of that.

just_another_person , 9 days ago to Technology in Visions of a Post-Apocalyptic Internet: The Future of Democratized Information

The very design of the Internet is just a bunch of interconnected servers, and search engines just consolidate access to that. I don't need that to reach my bank, or pay my bills online, or even to find code I'd like to use. They make it easier, sure, but name one site you go to that doesn't have its own localized search built-in? My grandmother just needs to know how to do the things she needs to do, and that all works fine for her. My friend spends hours just link hopping on Wikipedia for no reason. My neighbor wants to find the best deals on whatever new thing he wants to buy, okay, you'll probably need a search engine for that. Different use-cases.

Your writeup is presupposing that everyone NEEDS the latter kind of usage on the Internet, and that just isn't the case. The use of a search engine is totally optional when you're describing the Digital Divide, which is more about access to information and services being a human right. I don't think the founders of that concept had Netflix and Amazon shopping in mind.

just_another_person , 10 days ago to Technology in Visions of a Post-Apocalyptic Internet: The Future of Democratized Information

There's a few things in here I would say you're absolutely deriving from a fundamental misunderstanding of what they are.

• Gatekeeping: I'm not sure what this means in your context, but it sounds like you're imagining that some technically specific groups aren't fond of outsiders, and make it impossible for newcomers to join. What you may be misunderstanding is that some groups - just as in any other field - are specific to a catered crowd for a reason, while others or not. There are proper channels to go through to get accepted into said groups, most of which in the FOSS world would be to create something adjacent to that space that becomes popular and recognized. Johnny Newcomer wouldn't just be able to jump into the "1337 HaxX0rs Lounge" private IRC otherwise, but that isn't gatekeeping. I can't wander onto an MLB field, or an F1 racetrack just because I want to learn, and amateurs won't get access to similarly skilled people in the technical communities for the same reason. Teaching newcomers can be time consuming and takes a lot of effort, and people just want to focus on their own things in their free time.

• "Open Internet": The Internet by its nature is open. Access to it is not, because the hardware is not, and the delivery is not. As far as places people can't go, or don't have access to, that's quite subjective I suppose, but I'd say the majority of it is decided who is making what content, and how much they decide to charge for it and to where people can access it from, surely. If we dial things back 20 years, there was a lot more free stuff, but once corporations get involved - especially if they are publicly traded - they find ways to monetize everything. This does not prevent others from being able to publish at will whatever they want online, it just seems most people don't bother anymore. A "Closed Internet" would more suggest you had to "pay to play" in that sense, but I've never seen an example of that happening in the real world.

• Enshittification: I think you just missed the mark on this point from where the title and initial direction of your writing was heading. You're right about corporations making things shitty out there, but they can only affect their own little places on the Internet as a whole. People don't need search engines to use the Internet, they just prefer them. They don't need streaming services, they just tend to use them. They do need unrestricted access to human services (governmental or otherwise), information, and communications to really thrive in the world we live. The ones who are fucking that up are the corporations consolidating that physical access, and the authoritarian governments who are restricting how you get that access, and what you can see from it. This is what is leading to the massive partitioning and decentralizing of the Internet as a whole and it's services right now as we speak, which could be a good or bad thing depending on how you see it. Google censoring for governments is objectively awful, but there are other options.

I'm not trying to be nitpicky, so sorry if it comes off like that, but there's some big swings for ideas in your writeup that presuppose some of the smaller ideas above, that I think shape the very ideas you're writing about, but will unravel if thinking slightly differently about the root cause of them.

just_another_person , 11 days ago to Technology in Why we don't have 128-bit CPUs

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just_another_person , 11 days ago to Technology in Why we don't have 128-bit CPUs

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just_another_person , 11 days ago to Technology in Why we don't have 128-bit CPUs

Is this a question?

We haven't even come close to exhausting 64-bit addresses yet. If you think the bit number makes things faster, it's technically the opposite.

just_another_person , 11 days ago to Technology in ‘Blue screen of death’ at the ballpark: How the Mariners tapped a tech nerve in viral rally video

Well, the BSOD without a reboot should have been the giveaway. The keyboard clicking noises should have been another.

just_another_person , 11 days ago to homeassistant in Automating skylights with blinds to block direct sun

Light sensor threshold, and a rule to trigger the blinds. Pretty simple.

just_another_person , 11 days ago to Technology in ‘Blue screen of death’ at the ballpark: How the Mariners tapped a tech nerve in viral rally video

I think you might just be using cheap shit off of Amazon lol.

just_another_person , 11 days ago to Technology in ‘Blue screen of death’ at the ballpark: How the Mariners tapped a tech nerve in viral rally video

This was a prerecorded video, if you did not catch that.

just_another_person , 11 days ago to Technology in ‘Blue screen of death’ at the ballpark: How the Mariners tapped a tech nerve in viral rally video

It was a premade video...

just_another_person , 11 days ago to Technology in ‘Blue screen of death’ at the ballpark: How the Mariners tapped a tech nerve in viral rally video

I'm sure they would not entrust such a thing to a Windows OS in reality lol

just_another_person , 12 days ago to Technology in “We Can Still Contact Technical Support in the West”: Russian weapons are being manufactured on foreign machinery — but why are they still running?

Seems this is a loophole that needs to be closed, but who do we yell at to do so?

just_another_person , 12 days ago to Technology in CUDIMM Standard Set to Make Desktop Memory a Bit Smarter and a Lot More Robust

These are unrelated products. Not sure what you mean.