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sailingbythelee

@sailingbythelee@lemmy.world

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sailingbythelee OP ,

I think you've hit on the key difference between home and boat use: the variable voltage. My battery varies between about 13.3V and about 11.2V depending on its charge state. I'll look into these.

sailingbythelee OP ,

This is a good idea. A modern laptop is already power efficient and has its own battery, which I guess would act like a UPS and protect the motherboard from big swings in voltage from the main battery bank.

sailingbythelee OP ,

Hmmm, looking at the cost of large SSDs, I think you're right that I should downgrade my storage requirements. Or perhaps I could use a large HDD that is turned off while underway for "long-term" storage and a smaller SSD for media that I want immediately available. That would avoid the problem of spinning a HDD while bouncing around in high wind and waves.

And, yes, we do have books, lol. But we also enjoy movies. :)

sailingbythelee OP ,

Yes, I think you're right that distro doesn't matter. As I've been reading through the responses, I realize that the two main issues are storage (don't want to use HDDs on a bounching boat, but SSDs are expensive per TB) and power (limited battery and variable voltage). As you say, corrosion may also been an issue that I hadn't considered. I'll probably have to check in with the sailing forums to see if people have trouble with their laptops corroding at sea. This server isn't likely to get splashed directly, but it will be exposed to a lot of humidity and variable temperatures.

sailingbythelee OP ,

Yeah, good point. Now that you mention it, there is no real reason to run the server 24/7 on the boat. Also, HDDs would not be happy with the amount of bouncing that small sailboats undergo while at sea.

sailingbythelee OP ,

I was looking at something like this mini-router with OpenWRT:

GL.iNet GL-AXT1800 (Slate AX) Pocket-sized Wi-Fi 6 Gigabit Travel Router, Extender/Repeater for Hotel&Public Network, VPN Client&Server, OpenWrt, Adguard Home, USB 3.0, Network Storage, TF card slot https://a.co/d/0iP7qaKj

For a signal booster:
weBoost Drive Reach Overland - Cell Phone Signal Booster for Off Road Vehicles | Boosts 5G & 4G LTE for All U.S. Carriers - Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile & More | Made in The U.S. | FCC Approved https://a.co/d/00PNi0AE

sailingbythelee OP ,

I like the idea of using an industrial pc. Small sailboats experience a lot of vibration and sometimes violent bouncing, slamming, and heeling. Most things on a sailboat have been tossed around and flung onto the floor at some point, so it will have to be bolted down.

I don't know, maybe something like this?

KINGDEL Desktop Computer, Fanless PC, Intel i7 8th Gen CPU, 32GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB NVMe SSD, HD Port, VGA, 2xCOM RS232, W-11 Pro https://a.co/d/0eODy8RH

sailingbythelee OP ,

There is a certain satisfying symmetry to sailing the high seas while sailing the high seas.

sailingbythelee OP ,

Uh-oh, you've triggered one of my favourite topics: cost-conscious cruising. Get ready, because I do enjoy dispelling myths about sailing. :)

People think sailing is expensive, but it is absolutely within reach for the middle class, as long as you are willing to put in the work to do your own maintenance and repair. Look at your average small-city marina and you'll see that most of the sailboats are 30 to 40 year old fiberglass production boats. They basically last forever if you take care of them and at that age their cost depreciation curve has plateaued. So, the cost of entry is reasonable and relatively risk-free.

If you have any interest in sailing, I recommend checking out your local marina to see if they have a weekly keelboat race. Many sailors love to race and they always need crew. This is the best way to learn to sail for free. If you don't like the pressure of racing, you can sign up for a learn-to-sail course for a couple hundred dollars.

If you enjoy that experience and want to cruise, I suggest reading a few practical books about cost-conscious cruising. Don't watch the hot young video bloggers sailing million-dollar catamarans for YouTube and Instagram. Much like Linux vs Windows or open-source vs closed-source, sailing is as much about philosophy as it is about execution. You can spend big bucks on the latest and greatest, or you can buy old hardware and revive it with some learning and elbow grease.

The most common question in cruising is, how much does it cost? And the answer is, strangely, it costs as much or as little as you want to spend. You can spend millions or thousands of dollars, depending on your skills, your willingness to learn, and what you are willing to live with. I know a couple that lived for a year sailing the US East Coast in a 22-foot sailboat that they got for free. That's an extremely small cruising boat, by the way, with just a bucket for a head.

Think of sailboat cruising like living in an RV: you can live in an old 1965 VW camper van or a tent trailer or fancy stainless steel Airstream or a huge diesel Winnebago. It's up to you, but there are trade-offs. You can probably buy a broke-down old camper van on the cheap right now, if you are willing to learn to fix it up and then live in a very small space. Or you can work and scrimp for half a lifetime to afford that huge Winnebago. Most of us would pick something in the middle, making trade-offs between comfort, time, and cost.

A good book to start thinking about the philosophy of cost-conscious sailing is "Get Real, Get Gone" by Rick Page. Their philosophy is that small and simple is better than big and fancy for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is affordability and the ability to get started sooner than later. But be careful. If you read it, you may ditch your life ashore and end up a sea gypsy floating around the Caribbean in a small boat learning to fix diesel engines!

Also, by the way, there are plenty of smart, nerdy, do-it-yourself sailors. There is significant overlap in attitudes and mindset between the do-it-yourself sailor and the self-hosting computer nerd.

But truly, I hope I have convinced you that sailing is not only for the rich. It is for the adventurous. As a matter of fact, I'm heading out today for a week of wilderness sailing on board my very affordable sailboat. Maybe I'll see you out there one day!

sailingbythelee ,

I want to do the same, but I'm on the fence between Nobara and Bazzite.

‘A fine line between humor and flopping’: tech summit’s rap battle is the height of corporate cringe (www.theguardian.com)

The next time you’re sitting through a company-wide meeting, half-listening to a leader drone on about updates or product launches (and hoping they don’t announce layoffs or budget cuts), remember this: at least they’re not rapping....

sailingbythelee ,

I will never understand why these corporations spend big bucks on this cringe. I've been to one such event and I was shocked. What's worse is that long-serving people said you had to act as if you were enjoying it or else you'd hear from your manager afterwards. Imagine a bunch of middle-aged men at a sales conference shaking their hips and pretending to enjoy a cheesy rap battle. What an utterly soul crushing, suicidal-thought-inducing experience. I can't tell if senior management actually believes that this sort of corporate cringe is inspiring, or if they do it purposely to crush your soul and make you into a servile automaton. Are they out of touch or is it an Orwellian power move?

sailingbythelee ,

Sometimes the manager/foreman/supervisor is just the team member who is willing to be that interface between the frontline workers and senior management. The best middle managers are those who can thread that needle to the satisfaction of both groups.

I agree with you thst managers shouldn't consider themselves smarter than anyone else. Quite the opposite. Particularly when managing professionals or others with extensive knowledge, I'm a big believer in the concept of servant leadership. That's where you lead by inspiring the group to come up with ideas and then shaping, coordinating, and supporting those ideas through to a successful outcome.

sailingbythelee ,

We humans have these things called "boats" that have enabled the British Isles to receive regular inputs of new genetic material. Pretty useful things, these boats, and somewhat pivotal in the history of the UK.

sailingbythelee ,

I agree that AI is just a tool, and it excels in areas where an algorithmic approach can yield good results. A human still has to give it the goal and the parameters.

What's fascinating about AI, though, is how far we can push the algorithmic approach in the real world. Fighter pilots will say that a machine can never replace a highly-trained human pilot, and it is true that humans do some things better right now. However, AI opens up new tactics. For example, it is virtually certain that AI-controlled drone swarms will become a favored tactic in many circumstances where we currently use human pilots. We still need a human in the loop to set the goal and the parameters. However, even much of that may become automated and abstracted as humans come to rely on AI for target search and acquisition. The pace of battle will also accelerate and the electronic warfare environment will become more saturated, meaning that we will probably also have to turn over a significant amount of decision-making to semi-autonomous AI that humans do not directly control at all times.

In other words, I think that the line between dumb tool and autonomous machine is very blurry, but the trend is toward more autonomous AI combined with robotics. In the car design example you give, I think that eventually AI will be able to design a better car on its own using an algorithmic approach. Once it can test 4 million hood ornament variations, it can also model body aerodynamics, fuel efficiency, and any other trait that we tell it is desirable. A sufficiently powerful AI will be able to take those initial parameters and automate the process of optimizing them until it eventually spits out an objectively better design. Yes, a human is in the loop initially to design the experiment and provide parameters, but AI uses the output of each experiment to train itself and automate the design of the next experiment, and the next, ad infinitum. Right now we are in the very early stages of AI, and each AI experiment is discrete. We still have to check its output to make sure it is sensible and combine it with other output or tools to yield useable results. We are the mind guiding our discrete AI tools. But over a few more decades, a slow transition to more autonomy is inevitable.

A few decades ago, if you had asked which tasks an AI would NOT be able to perform well in the future, the answers almost certainly would have been human creative endeavors like writing, painting, and music. And yet, those are the very areas where AI is making incredible progress. Already, AI can draw better, write better, and compose better music than the vast, vast majority of people, and we are just at the beginning of this revolution.

sailingbythelee ,

Exactly. And if your ISP or cellular provider wants, or is forced, to gather information about your internet activities, they can almost certainly find a way. The cheap consumer-grade VPN services most of us use just prevent casual or automated observers from easily detecting your device's IP address. For most people that just want to torrent casually or use public wifi, it's enough.

sailingbythelee , (edited )

This comment is so wrong. You are dehumanizing Jews and condemning an entire country as illegitimate.

sailingbythelee ,

Gluetun is the bomb. You don't realize how much automated tracking of the torrent-verse is out there until your VPN connection drops unexpectedly and your torrent client continues merrily downloading in the clear. Gluetun is a fantastic killswitch and has never failed me. All hail the developer.

sailingbythelee ,

I see this in my day job, too. When I'm in a charitable mood, I chalk it up to pandemic trauma. But more realistically, I think it is a real change in our society's ability and willingness to compromise and see the world through the eyes of others. People want what they want and they don't give a fuck who they have to roll over to get what they want. They treat getting what they want as a matter of principle.

sailingbythelee ,

Don't go bothering Korean Jesus. He's busy with Korean shit.

sailingbythelee ,

The duck-duckling model would probably work okay on the highway, but not so well once you arrive in a town or city. You can't reliably get ten semis through a set of lights in traffic without getting split up. I guess they could have a depot outside of town where human drivers would meet the ducklings for the final leg of the journey.

sailingbythelee ,

The tiktok algorithm is good in the same sense that cocaine is good.

sailingbythelee ,

That's ridiculous. Government doesn't move that quickly. They've been thinking about how to deal with foreign interference for years. Also, I hate to break it to you, but the Palestine thing isn't that interesting or important in the grand scheme. At best, the Palestinians, like the Houthis and Hezbollah, are pawns used by Iran to stir up trouble from time to time. This conflict has been going on for 80 years already and the overall trend in the Middle East is toward peace and economic integration with Israel. No one is going to push the Jews into the sea and liberate Palestine for the Palestinians.

sailingbythelee ,

Perhaps I misspoke. I mean to say that the periodic flare-ups with the Palestinians are not that important anymore. They used to be. But nowadays, Israel's neighbours aren't invading with tanks and, as I said, the overall trend is towards peace and economic integration with Israel. I agree with you that Israel is important to the US for many good strategic and political reasons.

sailingbythelee ,

I've been paying attention to the Middle East for almost 40 years, punk. What? Iran, like, literally just sent drones into Israel? Oh no, literally what will we do? Like, oh my god, this is so terrible.

You can't take and hold territory with drones, especially not Iranian drones. Iran is not invading Israel. Grow up and go learn something.

sailingbythelee ,

I agree with you. The CCP classifies recommendation algorithms in a category similar to defense secrets. It isn't just Tiktok that can't be sold to non-Chinese, it is all recommendation algorithms. They know damn well what effect these algorithms have on a population.

sailingbythelee ,

I haven't followed it too closely, but I know this has been years in the making so the company should have a contingency plan. You have to wonder why the company refuses to take steps satisfactory to Congress to ensure that the CCP cannot access user data or influence the content or algorithm. It is economically suicidal to be banned in the US, which makes me think that Bytedance's CCP masters told the company to refuse. Of course, now that the law has been passed, Bytedance will have to separate their interests since I doubt they'll allow the app to be banned. They'd lose most of their advertising revenue if they were banned in the US. Not to mention the fact that a US ban would likely be followed by bans in other countries. I'm sure Bytedance can find a way to have another company manage their data while still making plenty of money. No need to pity a company making billions in revenue on the labour of content creators.

sailingbythelee ,

You make a good point about Bytedance perhaps not being permitted to have a contingency plan. However, the CCP may have one. Whatever Xi says is law in China.

sailingbythelee ,

Why do you say that Congress is making legislation against its own citizens' wishes? A quick Google search shows that polls suggest that twice as many Americans favour the ban as oppose it.

I'm still trying to figure out what the downside of this legislation is. It doesn't ban any specific content or speech, it just bans a particular company from operating a specific platform in the US. Tiktok is still permitted to operate if it is controlled by a company that isn't directly subject to the CCP. If Xi chooses to not let that happen, that is on him. Xi certainly can't cry foul without massive hypocrisy, given that he has already banned virtually all western social media.

sailingbythelee ,

Whoa, take it easy there, friend. That got personal rather quickly. Are you mad? I don't have a horse in this race one way or the other. I don't use Tiktok but I don't have anything against it either. It seems to me that social media apps pop up like dandelions and the main thing that determines whether or not they thrive is the number of people participating. I guess I'm wondering why anyone should care if Tiktok in particular survives or some other social media platform takes its place. They rise, they fall, but there always seems to be a replacement.

sailingbythelee OP ,

That sounds like an interesting possibility. I'll check it out. Thanks!

sailingbythelee OP ,

I didn't realize that the metadata was in such a bad state. But that would explain why I'm having difficulty finding the ebook equivalent of the smooth Jellyseer/Sonarr/Jellyfin ecosystem. Thanks for the insight.

sailingbythelee ,

That's a good one. I once gave an assignment for students to write an original poem. One student submitted The Charge of the Light Brigade by Tennyson and claimed it was his own. These were middle school kids so he didn't realize how famous the poem is. This shit has been happening forever. LLMs are another phase in the never-ending arms race between teachers and students who want to cheat.

sailingbythelee ,

I just bought a new dishwasher and it came with "smart" features like remote start and notifications, which I don't want. Easy solution: I didn't connect it to my wifi.

On the positive side, the manufacturer (Bosch) wasn't pushy about it at all. The only indication that the machine has smart features was a small instruction card, which I promptly tossed in the recycling.

sailingbythelee ,

I spent several hours trying to figure out why the fish shell configuration page (which is a dynamically generated local web page) wouldn't work, including uninstalling the snap version of Firefox and using apt to try to install the normal version of Firefox. Because neither version of Firefox could open the page, I spent hours trying to diagnose why the fish shell wasn't working properly. Eventually, I installed a different browser and it worked. I finally figured out that it was because Canonical tricked me into re-installing the snap version of Firefox via apt even though that is clearly not what I wanted. I'm still a bit salty about it.

sailingbythelee ,

Have you tried setting the nameserver to Google or Cloudflare to see if that works?

sailingbythelee ,

I suppose you have also logged into your Adguard server to verify that it can ping the internet?

In other words, you have successfully pinged Proxmox --> Adguard and Adguard --> Internet?

sailingbythelee ,

Exactly. Many people have an ignorant view of British cuisine, as though only foods grown in the British Isles are British. All kinds of foods and dishes from all over the world have been shipped, used, and adapted in Britain since at least the time of the Roman Empire. Heck, most of what a British, European or North American person would see on the menu of their local Indian restaurant is not traditional Indian food at all, but rather Anglo-Indian.

sailingbythelee ,

That was a very well-crafted and insightful comment, especially that last paragraph.

sailingbythelee ,

I think Americans need to absorb a bit more global context about the left-right spectrum. I see people saying that policies like universal health care, access to abortion, basic worker rights and affordable education are "far left". Most of the proposed policies of the left in the US are centrist in the rest of the Western world. Unless you are advocating for a Communist regime along the lines of the Soviet Union or Maoist China, you aren't really "far left". Similarly, unless someone is advocating for a fascist dictator state, we should probably not call them "far right". Of course, that is what Trumpists advocate for, so they really are far right!

sailingbythelee ,

I've never seen that diagram before. I like it.

sailingbythelee ,

The current bad reputation of the French is mostly because of WW2. They surrendered after only 6 weeks of fighting and then heavily collaborated with the Nazis. French collaboration was so heartfelt that they refused to hand over their navy to the British when requested to do so. They even fired on American ships and troops in North Africa when the Americans arrived to liberate them from German occupation.

The French were also enthusiastic participants in the Final Solution. According to Wikipedia, "the Nazis in France relied to a considerable extent on the co-operation of local authorities to carry out what they called the Final Solution. The government of Vichy France and the French police organized and implemented the roundups of Jews."

After the war, De Gaulle promoted the narrative that the French heroically resisted the Nazis, but this was not at all true. The famous French Resistance was tiny until the last part of the war, and only grew once it became clear that Germany would lose. The French government also denied their role in the Holocaust for over 50 years until 1995 when Jacques Chirac finally admitted that, "[T]hose black hours soiled our history forever. ... [T]he criminal madness of the occupier was assisted by the French people, by the French State. ... France, that day, committed the irreparable."

So, yeah, that's why people dunk on France, particularly when it comes to military matters. They certainly did not live up to the ideals of the Revolution or the martial prowess of Napoleon.

sailingbythelee ,

Not at all. I identified a particular historical event where the French failed badly. Identifying one country's specific mistakes doesn't imply that others are angels. For example, obviously no one would claim that Germany and Japan were "angels" during WW2, but that goes without saying, right?

In fact, I responded to another commenter who called them out for racism and arrogance because that is far too general a claim with no evidence.

sailingbythelee ,

That's most of the internet now. I mean, yay, we're calling bad stuff bad. I do it, too, and I'm also addicted to orange man news like all you other rubber-neckers, but yawn it's all getting a bit repetitious and homogenized. Unfortunately, as we get bored, the more these nutty politicians do crazy shit for the media to report on, all to keep our attention. It feels like a death spiral.

sailingbythelee ,

The two most important things missing from Linux are mass familiarity and certain important professional software suites. It isn't that Linux doesn't have software nearly-equivalent to things like the Adobe suite, MS Office, and AutoCAD. It is that it doesn't have those EXACT applications. Like it or not, in a professional setting, you usually have to use the big proprietary applications because that's what everyone else uses. Using standard software reduces compatibility and training headaches, and eases recruitment. Most technically-oriented professionals wouldn't even take a job that disallowed them from accessing and maintaining their competence with the standard software of their profession.

sailingbythelee ,

CCP-phobia, I think. It is inappropriate to conflate the CCP with the Chinese people.

sailingbythelee ,

I must have seen or heard every episode of Dora the Explorer when my kids were little. The other ear worm I'll never get out of my head is:

https://youtu.be/YJfb4SlhRmY

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