Unironically why I switched my parents to Linux - they don’t touch any important settings so usually the only problems are when they get a new popup / prompt they’ve never seen, which ofc happens a lot more on windows especially when they decide to push some new thing or decide that they want to convince people to enable something new or change a setting that they want people to use.

I also love that if they call me I can just ssh in over tailscale and do whatever needs doing.

Keep in mind that if you set up raid using zfs or btrfs (idk how it works with other systems but that’s what I’ve used) then you also get scrubs which detect and fix bit rot and unrecoverable read errors. Without that or a similar system, those errors will go undetected and your backup system will backup those corrupted files as well.

Personally one of the main reasons I used zfs and now btrfs with redundancy is to protect irreplaceable files (family memories and stuff) from those kinds of errors, as I used to just keep stuff on a hard drive until I discovered loads of my irreplaceable vacation photos to be corrupted, including the backups which backed up the corruption.

If your files can be reacquired, then I don’t think it’s a big deal. But if they aren’t, then I think having scrubs or integrity checks with redundancy so that issues can be repaired, as well as backups with snapshots to prevent errors or mistakes from messing up your backups, is a necessity. But it just depends on how much you value your files.

I don’t have strong opinions about BlueSky (I have an account, I prefer activitypub but it’s whatever), but to me I will view it as centralized until someone who is not BlueSky runs a second relay server that is federated with the BlueSky run one.

And based on the writings of one of the creators of activitypub, Christine Lemmer-Webber, there are some hurdles to that happening: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

Wouldn’t that only work if your neighbors tv was plugged into Ethernet so that the wifi chip can be free to start a hotspot? I can’t find any info about that so I’m not sure.

I still have a smart TV so I don’t need to have a non smart tv. But I refuse to use smart features for several reasons:

• The built in software is often laggy, ugly, and hard to navigate (mine is from like 2016 so all 3 of these are huge issues for my specific TV but my parents just bought a 2024 model oled and I find their gyro / touchpad / pointer remote to be excruciating to use)
• I hate the idea of getting used to the Samsung apps / os and then feeling like I need to stick with Samsung
• They never seem to support the software very long - my TV pre-dates Samsung’s current tv OS and no longer receives updates, so the Plex app available for it doesn’t even connect - so I couldn’t use it even if I wanted to

I mostly watch stuff downloaded to my Plex, so a PC running Plex htpc / desktop or any android box (Nvidia shield is pretty good) with the Plex or jellyfin app is all I need. I also like that I can easily watch YouTube through a browser with ad block and sponsorblock (I think smarttube does that for Android boxes like the shield)

I also game on the PC so I guess you could consider it a game console for the purposes of categorizing the use case.

The nice thing about Samsungs is that basically all their remotes work with all their TVs, so I just found one without the smart button so I can’t tell that mine is smart, and I obviously never connected it to internet. I think it’s a lot cheaper than trying to get a commercial dumb TV too.

I see, but couldn’t they just sign up for a provider and then hook up their bots to the same search that you use? Or is the search obfuscated for you too? In other words how do they obfuscate it for the bots but not for the customers? That’s what I never really understood - if the answer is just that the people running the bots are just too lazy to hook them up through the same unobfuscated search that paying customers use then that makes sense, but I always assumed there was more of a barrier since Usenet seems to have evaded legal action since forever.

What stops Usenet from being attacked legally in the same way, aren’t they straight up hosting copyrighted content? I’ve always stuck to torrents because it seemed more decentralized, especially if you use DHT instead of an indexer.

ensuring greater security and privacy for users

Don’t worry guys, they’re just concerned for the users security and privacy

My primary use case is safeguarding my important personal artifacts (family photos, digitized paperwork, encryption key / account recovery / 2FA backups) against drive failure (~2TB), followed by my decently sized Plex server (23TB), immich, nextcloud, and various other small things like selfhosted bitwarden, grocy, ollama, and stuff like that.

I run all of my stuff off of a 6 bay Synology (more drives helps with capacity efficiency as double redundancy with 6 drives costs you 30% and I wanted to be protected against drive failures during rebuilding) with an Intel nuc on top to run plex/jellyfin transcoding using quicksync instead of loading the poor nas with cpu transcoding, I also run ollama on the nuc since it has faster cores than the nas.

Ah I have the same one! I got it before I got a countertop machine so it doesn’t get much use now that I have the gaggia classic

Either a hand pump with mechanical advantage or a lever-based machine with a long enough bar to make it easy - at least those are the manuals that I’m familiar with

It would be funny if a legal defense would have been using an n-sided 3d polygon that definitely isn’t a sphere. Is a tetrahedron legally distinct enough? How about a truncated isocohedron? Seems silly for the shape to matter.

Lmao the first thing that came to mind was the “is there anyone else you forgot to ask” meme with apple in between the user and app developer.

Not sure about Facebook since authenticating for private videos is a hurdle, but for my partner who uses a mac I downloaded open video downloader which is just a foss GUI for ytdl, it also keeps ytdl up to date which is a requirement for me since I don’t want to be called when it stops working. I think on windows you have to manually install msvc2010redist but besides that it seems to just work out of the box.

Wait you can train the Futo keyboard? I tried it a while ago and noticed the poor accuracy and decided to shelve it for a while.

Gotcha, that sounds like searx is a good option then. At first I thought you were giving a reason why searx isn’t a suitable alternative as the gp comment is downvoted a bunch.

Can’t you just not enable the Yandex backend if you’re selfhosting searx?

At least with radicle all the forks will still exist even if the authoritative copy is taken down. And even then I think because radicle is like BitTorrent, anybody who pinned the main repo would still be seeding it so it would be very hard to scrub it completely. The main challenge in using radicle is getting an active contributor with some reputation to maintain their copy on there. Otherwise there’s no momentum and nobody will pin the countless mirrors published by randos.

Either that or charging a micro transaction for loading the page. But yeah the goal is to make it cost a small amount that is insignificant to a regular user but adds up to a huge amount at the scale of a spam farm. And it’s also the same rationale behind hashing passwords with multiple rounds. It adds a tiny lag when you log in correctly but adds an insane amount of work if you’re checking every phrase in a password cracking dictionary using an offline attack because it adds up. (In the online scenario you just block them after a few attempts)