Effective immediately, I will be moving all my project's documentation from Discord, to the frozen food review section of walmart.com.

Users under 18 are a small fraction of Discord’s userbase, and an even smaller fraction of their paying userbase. What they actually want is to be able to say that their users are (mostly) human so that their data is more valuable to AI companies, which helps valuations in their upcoming IPO.

Guess it was inevitable that they’d try to cash in, but we all really should have stuck with open protocols.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/875309/discord-age-verification-global-roll-out

@djchateau @millie @obsidian sadly, I've never seen an Electron app that wouldn't behave like a drunk elephant in a porcelain shop

I'm tired of large companies tightening their holds over my communication, relationships, data, and social life.

I set my Discord profile picture to a QR code I made that points to this website (technically it's archive.is version). I like it because it encapsulates a lot of the things I take issue with about Discord.
https://usemumble.neocities.org/

I have backed up my Discord DMs using this:
https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter

I also backed up the Discord Servers that I own or help maintain.

Here's how you can reach me.
Socially:
Here on Mastodon
@lizzie.coffee on BlueSky (I rarely check this)
Privately:
Signal: morattisec.7331
Privately, group DMs:
Matrix: lizzgo@meowy.tech
Email:
me@lizzie.coffee

Just started GMing a dnd campaign.

We barely made it out of the tavern after session 0 before a sparring match between two PCs killed the sorcerer. We did learn the valuable lesson about the price and availability of potions at level 1. Also why maybe at least one of the two clerics might want a heal.

Went to a cafe after work, purchased a bag of coffee and a Mocha, then sat to read and butcher Dutch before my night class.

If this is what getting old is like then I’ll have some more please

@rmogull with or without headers and user-agents?

“pandoc for the people”, the pandoc wasm web-app, is now available at https://pandoc.org/app/
It allows to run any kind of document conversion that pandoc supports in the browser. The documents never leave the computer, thus ensuring *full privacy*.
Conversions to pdf are done via Typst.

#pandoc #wasm #typst

@crow @0x76 nice 啦

Setup my blog today, and made my first post detailing a Nix flake that I include on all my nixosSystem builds that sets some sensible defaults

Check it out: https://blog.xvrqt.com/nix-defaults.html

#nix #nixos #rust #flakes #programming #coder #hacking #crows

https://youtu.be/ZdM-iNpv3nU?si=6BQKBkP90nHXH8Ht

Someone made #Git for #Minecraft builds. Crazy.

my partner is currently referring to computers as "domesticated rocks"

@hacks4pancakes in my opinion, it’s because these companies are trying to push people to complete their “labs” or CTFs to create ‘hacker’ datasets they then sell to AI companies.

TryHackMe is similar and has had their community call them out on it.

Theres a lot of marketing money telling them that this is the way they will get a job if they’re serious.

not pictured is my kolourpaint program crashing and I had to redo my art lmao

The fact that Google Gemini generated content performs better for SEO ranking is so awful. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc

Google's ability to self-rig SEO rankings with their browser, android ecosystem, search, search algorithms, and then ad delivery networks is so clearly evil and hard to prove due to closed-source algorithms.

It's one of those things that a person participating in AI will point at and say "look, AI can perform better than a human and replace jobs!" They might not be wrong in this case, but it's because of statistical rigging and terraforming. It pushes participating and paying for insider algorithmic manipulation. Something businesses, content creators, and the end-users all lose in, and we as a society then have to live with.

To create something that does well (with broad audiences aka advertising) you will need to play the statistical, whitewashing, sanitized, and soulless content creation game.

Enjoy some #mspaintart idk

@cxiao @416365416c @dangoodin

I think that NOT making those, “this is how you self-host” guides is the worst option. IMO the real solution is to get technologists so comfortable with self-hosting that they can host for their communities and helping them build the social structures to keep them going.

To get to that level, we need to have technologists care enough to try and are comfortable enough with the technologies and paradigms to do it. They also need to be willing to deal with people asking about uptime or questions of trust which excludes quite a few introverts. Beyond a certain scale, you need to worry about not get sued for hosting content that breaks laws.

This means in the US that if someone from the supported community gets hacked or is secretly hiding CSAM/illegal material it’s a huge problem. Especially if the admin(s) aren’t behind a legal structure like an LLC or nonprofit that an admin could be liable for damages personally. That’s partially why things like the Nivenly foundation exist https://nivenly.org/about/

Even for Mastodon instances, most users do not donate to those running it because they see it as something they can get elsewhere for free. The capital costs of running on our own hardware continues to get worse as storage, RAM, and other computing equipment gets artificially expensive due to the same megacorps we wish to break away from. This is a major reason why most the folks who do self-hosting are either students getting a job or already employed in the industry and have trust issues because they’ve peered into abyss.

If I were to wave a magic wand I would try to popularize “self-hosted reliability clubs” at key community meeting places like local libraries and universities. Libraries and uni’s are underrated because they have meeting rooms, and ability to get textbooks or research papers for reference material. Even better if they can let you use a room or storage facility for the computers. Then I would try to convince local government entities or the library/uni itself to allow you host a mirror of their static websites as a “disaster response” protection and maybe even throw some budget at you to subsidize the costs. Throw in some LoRA nodes and connect with other clubs doing the same thing and you basically have a small local data center or region that can actually host things for their community.

That’s the kind of thing we really need imo but asking anyone but a senior system admin to accomplish the above is hard task and most of them are burned out.

@ChrisMayLA6

have rubbish broadband connections (or none at all)

The gov.uk team has done phenomenal work to make their infrastructure work well on low bandwidth links. I tried some of their sites using a simulated 28.8 Kb/s link with 2s latency and they were quite usable (TLS handshake was very slow). So I don’t necessarily agree with that part of the criticism (it’s almost certainly true for people not using that infrastructure), but the social aspects are spot on. Especially people not having access to trustworthy client devices.

EDIT: I picked 2s latency because that’s what I got on the first phone I owned that supported Internet access. It used GPRS. There is still one GPRS network active, being paid a lot of money to keep smart meters working, but I don’t think they sell to consumers. Mobile Internet will have both faster speeds and lower latency than I tested, but I wanted to see the worst case. And TLS with multiple round trips for the handshake is really slow on that link.

Cryptography challenge for anyone willing to undertake it: Wii U discs, much like GC/Wii prior, seem to use a non-standard scrambling algorithm for their raw sectors. So far we have been unable to break it.

Two sectors are here: workupload.com/file/3v6vzgRYZHh

When descrambled correctly, the first should simply read "WUP-P-AMKP-00-410EUR-0" followed by all zeroes, and the second should be all zeroes.

My shipment of 110tb drives (88tb after raid6) arrives soon!

What should I do with all the storage space since someone else is running the Plex/Jellyfin in our site-to-site?

My ideas so far:
- Cache for Nix packages we collectively use
- Self-hosted GitLab and NextCloud
- Offer a LAN NFS RAM to the poor folks who didn’t buy RAM quick enough
- PXE boot or something idk

I am taking suggestions