scrubbles

scrubbles , 1 day ago

Costs is the key thing. People know it's nice, so people move here, and costs go up. Expect 2000/month rents, and that's the low side in some areas

scrubbles , 1 day ago

I was just thinking yesterday how the rest of the country's conservatives look at Seattle as a burning liberal hellscape, but we actually have a lot of conservatives here. What do the conservatives here think when fox news says that capital hill is still under riots?

scrubbles , 1 day ago

Edgy McEdgerson is checking in!

scrubbles , 1 day ago

This was exactly my experience. Freaked myself out last year and decided best thing was to dive headfirst into it to figure out how it worked and what it's capabilities are.

Which - it has a lot. It can do a lot, and it's impressive tech. Coded several projects and built my own models. But, it's far from perfect. There are so so so many pitfalls that startups and tech evangelists just happily ignore. Most of these problems can't be solved easily - if at all. It's not intelligent, it's a very advanced and unique prediction machine. The funny thing to me is that it's still basically machine learning, the same tech that we've had since the mid 2000s, it's just we have fancier hardware now. Big tech wants everyone to believe it's brand new... and it is... kind of. But not really either.

scrubbles , 1 day ago

Which is why as an engineer I can either riddle with a prompt for half an hour... Or just write the damn method myself. For juniors it's an easy button, but for seniors who know how to write these algorithms it's usually just easier to write it up. Some nice starter code though, gets the boilerplate out of the way

scrubbles , 1 day ago

By then the startup ceos will have made their money and ran though. Just like Blockchain

scrubbles , 1 day ago

Learning about Gerrymandering was one of the first times I noticed cracks in our democracy.

I grew up in the Midwest, and I truly thought America had done it. We solved corruption and bad governments, why wouldn't the rest of the world want to know how to do it right?

Gerrymandering proves the absolute worst of our system. Corrupted officials carving the worst possible areas to make sure the person they want to get elected is elected - and the only time we get to change them is once a decade - when the same committee decides again.

scrubbles , 2 days ago

For group things I don't think it's bonkers. Mostly because that gives everyone time to make sure that specific time to work. Honestly to me that says they really want you to come, I'd be flattered.

For just my SO and me it's different though. Usually rough idea forms about a year out, with us formalizing and time off about 6 months out, and booking about 3 months out

scrubbles , 2 days ago

who would have guessed streaming services are expensive and non-trivial to run. "We'll just build our own, we'll make much more than licensing it to Netflix!"

scrubbles , 2 days ago

I know that the answer is yes

I mean, there you go, and all of the above. I'd add in a pretty large fire risk too. I hear my battery backups kick in regularly, and we're talking about enough power to equal a large appliance (at least in my case). It's 100% worth it to move them to a grounded outlet.

scrubbles , 2 days ago

Yeah it's pricey, very pricey, but the risks are just too high for a home not to be properly grounded anymore. Homeowners have had 50 years to do it, it's time to get it done.

scrubbles , 3 days ago

Then getting mad when we call them out on their trolling

scrubbles , 3 days ago

Right? Failed by who's standards? For me, I'm pretty goddang happy here. I get enough content, I don't feel constantly anxious or angry, the people are generally pretty nice. Is OP deciding it failed? Or are others?

scrubbles , 3 days ago

Lol dude got the exact things wrong about Lemmy - clear they haven't spent much time here. Fediverse is NOT privacy focused, in fact it's the opposite. You blast your content out to everyone. The only privacy is your username, and that aint much. It's user owned, that's the saving grace, that corporate doesn't own it. We sacrifice fake corporate privacy for open standards.

scrubbles , 3 days ago

Oh so you're saying all Reddit users literally eat babies?

/s. The vitriol on that site was just exhausting.

scrubbles , 3 days ago

"displace". Techbro talk for "save investors money and cut jobs while providing a worse service"

scrubbles , 3 days ago

That's great! Unfortunately for every one of them there's 4x more who gladly would

scrubbles , 2 days ago

They are, but I'm still disheartened. Googlers tried to take a stand last year and they immediately paid them all off

scrubbles , 4 days ago

Congrats! Going from Texas to Portland, think about transit going into it. In the right mindset for less commute, but play your cards right and maybe you won't even have to drive to work!

scrubbles , 5 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

Oh man if you don't recognize xkcd... You're in for a treat reading through them all

scrubbles , 3 days ago

Literally relevant XKCD!

https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/pictrs/image/bd05d783-17b1-4a28-9618-7460a107ae73.png

Enjoy, friend, it's one of the longest running and best webcomics. https://xkcd.com (His books are great too)

scrubbles , 5 days ago

I really like the GPL license for that reason. Take it, use it, be merry. But don't you dare use it in a closed source project, and you have to give me credit

scrubbles , 5 days ago

Exactly right there with the not worrying. Getting started can be brutal. I always recommend people start without worrying about it, be okay with the idea that you're going to lose everything.

When you start really understanding how the tech works, then start playing with backups and how to recover. By that time you've probably set up enough that you are ready for a solution that doesn't require setting everything up again. When you're starting though? Getting it up and running is enough

scrubbles , 5 days ago

Nothing proves a backup like forcing yourself to simulate a recovery! I like to make one setting change, then make a backup, and then delete everything and try to rebuild it from scratch to see if I can do it and prove the setting change is still there

scrubbles , 5 days ago

I remember the hardest part about studying in college was that no one taught me what studying was, and never showed alternatives. Movies just showed people reading the book and looking stressed, so that's what I did. It wasn't until later that I learned studying could be quizzing yourself, doing example problems reading over homework to see what you did well or didn't do well, or listening to lectures again, or anything.

I wish we prepped kids more for college.

scrubbles , 5 days ago

Exactly the same. Everyone told me I was so smart in High School, I'm so incredibly smart, I never needed to study. College hit and I failed my first year. Big fish, small pond for sure.

High School (and college probably) should have set up time for teaching me how to study, and high school teachers (and my parents) needed to back off saying how smart I was. Or at least back it up. "I'm glad this stuff comes so easily for you, be ready for college though, because you'll be surrounded by people just like you, and they're expecting even more"

scrubbles , 5 days ago

You can, but you do have to buckle down, and I know that's a cliche. It took me 6 years to get a 4 year degree. 1st year I partied too much, and I wasn't emotionally ready. 2nd year I went to a smaller school, a 2 year college and it made a huge difference. Smaller classes, more one on one time with the professors. by the time I finished the 2 year school I was finally ready for a 4 year.

I had moments though. I thought about dropping out early on. I remember talking to a mentor saying I'd be fine if I did, and that I had tried. They looked me squarely in the eyes and said "Bullshit. I know you could have tried harder". That hit me hard. I was surrounded by parents who supported me and said I probably did everything, to have someone call me out like that, it really hit me hard.

You can do it - if you really dedicate yourself to it. College is not easy. It's not fun. I have nightmares about finals even now, a decade later. But I don't regret forcing myself through. I wasn't an A student, I was a solid C student, but it was worth it.

scrubbles , 7 days ago

WD Red has always been my go-to, and in the last 8 years of homelabbing I haven't had a single one fail. Blues and Greens are not build for NAS operations, and you'll see them fail. Toshibas I haven't had a single one make it past a year, except for their gaming drives.

If you want the shortcut, the WD Elements usually go on sale at Best Buy regularly, and they're always a WD Red or White, which will also work. All of my drives have been one of those. You just shuck the internal drive out of the enclosure

scrubbles , 7 days ago

I'm a homeowner and can say this meme is extremely accurate. Up zone cities!

scrubbles , 8 days ago

Boooooo.

Also if it's not called "The quest for more money" than they should all be ashamed. More than they already are.

scrubbles , 8 days ago

(instance admin here, but for a small one) woof well, for me, I agree, but I wouldn't use that wording.

Lemmy for sure isn't a plug and play site. Setting it up took leaps and bounds, learning way more about nginx than I ever really cared to, and figuring out documentation that was very clearly out of date. Very little logging or error messaging exists to help with that problem.

Very little errors exist at all, it's very much a "happy path" project. That's why we get constant spinners everywhere, because when an HTTP error occurs there's no actual error message. (Come on guys, just add it to your standard HTTP messages, if statusCode < 200 || >= 300 then show a toast message).

But yeah, the moderation tools have to be the worst. Lemmy has an amazing development group that's separate from the main developers who have patched together a good set of tools, from automods to CSAM and illegal scanning, huge props to them - but these issues are routinely ignored by the main devs. I was shocked, honestly shocked that when we were under CSAM attacks that there was not an immediate roundtable of the head devs to try to solve the problem officially. Here was a problem that 99% of countries would immediately and gladly throw us, the instance admins, in jail over and they just handwaved it away. In fact, I don't know that there was ever an official post about it, or even that there are things coming to help with it.

I love Lemmy and being here, and the devs have done a great job at building this platform for us, but we're at a critical point right now. It's no longer software that is just fun side projects and building stuff that looks cool, it has some real issues now that it has a real userbase. I'm definitely one to say "But it's FOSS, and other people can pick up and submit a PR" - but it also says something when the head devs just completely ignore a massively huge issue with it.

Bugs and caches and that sort of thing I can overlook. Those I can wait on and see them get smoothed out over time. Actual issues that could land me in jail or get the feds to beat down my door? Those I kind of expect a fast response.

So, I'll say I'm extremely conflicted. I want to host lemmy long term, and I'm happy to bring the fediverse to a few more people, but the csam attacks really altered my view of the devs.

Edit - because my favorite manager said "Bring me solutions, not problems" a few things that would really help immediately -

• Integrate db0's CSAM checker natively, more or less a plug and play option, or a checkbox. His checker sits at an endpoint. The admin page of lemmy could easily have you plop in the endpoint and it would start checking
• Have an image management portal, with capabilities to:
  • Auto remove images after X time (to help with ballooning storage costs)
  • Perma-delete images and users (maybe blurred too if the CSAM checker flagged it, so I don't need eye bleach) (Edit again, 0.19.4 might have fixed this, I need to upgrade so I'll see)
  • Federating image purges, so one purge on one server will force purge it on everyone else's
  • ~~Disabling of caching other server's images ~~ (Edit again, I see 0.19.4 just dropped which has this, so this is good). This way I'm only responsible for my own users.
  • View images that are not related to a post (DM'd messages that I'm hosting, or people just uploading images to my site)
• Bring in a logging system into the UI itself, so I can keep tabs on the error logs. I can pipe them somewhere, but this would be a major plus as an admin

scrubbles , 7 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

I was not handling it fine, it was generally chaotic, and in the Matrix chats I remember it being chaotic, for both attacks. Luckily by the second one we had db0's tooling to help a bit more, but there still many of us who were exposed to the images. We lost a lot of instances during those two attacks from admins who justifiably didn't want to take on the risk.

I completely understand how crazy it was, but the lack of response from you guys was disheartening, it really did make me wonder if I should continue hosting or if I should bail out. Ultimately, I decided to stay obviously, but had to do some hard extra steps, like reducing privacy and registering with the feds for CSAM.

So like I said, I'm torn. I respect you guys for everything you do, but that was a moment where all other development should have stopped to immediately address a real problem, and while you think a roundtable would have just been feel good, I think we could have kept a lot of instances online if it had been done. Assurances that yes, new changes are coming, and official suggestions like "Here are the endpoints to delete the images", or nominating db0 or someone as the person in charge of the outbreak. It was honestly a scary time, and for us owners who accept a lot of risk, for many of them it was too much.

Anyway, I have a habitual case of foot in mouth disease, so it was immediately after posting that comment that I heard about 0.19.4, and immediately felt stupid. I tried it last night but I kept getting timeout errors and something about "Could not get user's /inbox" or something, I'll try 0.19.5 today. Thank you for bringing additional mod tools, they've been hugely needed. I know they're not glamorous to make, but they keep the communities healthy and strong.

Edit: 0.19.5 also failed. I wrote up a github bug on it, until then I unfortunately have to stay on 0.19.3
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4850

scrubbles , 7 days ago

I fully understand that, and I explained it in my reply to nutomic. It's not that I wanted to just pile on, but rather at an emergency like that, an all-stop would have been justified in my opinion, to stop all work and go into emergency "What can we all do to stop this and prevent it". All other issues were secondary in that moment compared to stopping CSAM, and it didn't feel that way. They added it to the pile of issues, and I'm glad to see changes came out, but in that moment I didn't see much if any support from them

scrubbles , 7 days ago

This is what excites me the most. There are huge potentials for plugins, and I think it'll ease some of the strain from the core engineers. Most of the "ideas" I see posted really could be plugins. Things like badges on posts, verification of links, etc etc could all be plugins that individuals could make. The problem with developing against the core repo is that you have to learn and understand the core repo, so you don't fuck up something else in some other place accidentally. Plugins are a neat way where we can say "I'm a function that does one thing, just do the thing here, and then do what you need to with that data"

scrubbles , 8 days ago

The all feed. They knew mods in communities were removing their spam posts, so they created communities they could post constantly to and all viewers would see them

scrubbles , 8 days ago

Same here, and I get weird dirty looks. I've heard of people getting verbally assaulted wearing them, my go-to line ready is "I'm sick, I didn't want to get people like you sick, but if you don't care..." starts to pull down mask

scrubbles , 8 days ago

I always wear them in airports. Airplanes I have stopped caring, but airports have so. many. people.

My story is I was in Denver, sitting in a chair. This was long before covid. The only chair left was one by those moving walkways in the middle of their concourses. I was sitting there reading and some guy literally turned to his right and just sneezed directly in my face. Wet drips literally down my cheek. He just casually rolled away on it, never said anything. I was sick the next day.

Fuck that guy, fuck gross people. Mask won't protect me against that, but ffs if your sick just wear one.

scrubbles , 8 days ago

people so easily triggered that a person wearing a mask makes them have to yell at someone

scrubbles , 8 days ago

Yeughh, I'm sorry, it's the absolute worst. I begudgingly understand if you need to fly when you're sick, after all - what if you get sick while on vacation? Most people can't just not go to work for an additional 2 weeks while you recover, and buy a hotel room for that long. At the very least though get a mask and just keep it contained.

Sure I have an immune system, it doesn't mean I want to use it when I'm going on vacation!

scrubbles , 9 days ago

I'm sure they will be slightly inconvenienced for the duration of a single meeting

scrubbles , 13 days ago

This is the same guy who said full auto driving out of beta in 2 years 10 years ago and that we're going to be living in Mars in 2. Skeptical is an understatement

scrubbles , 12 days ago

Why would I call it wasting? It's funding the worthwhile part of my life, and it does a great job at it. I've been on several vacations already this year. I get to live where I want to. I have a great family that I love spending time with. To allow that I have firm limits with my job of 40 hours a week, then I go home. I enjoy several hours every night with them, and on weekends we usually go out and do something fun.

You keep trying to convince me I'm not happy, and I assure you I'm very happy with my lifestyle. If other people want to work more, more power to them. I don't understand it, but I guess do what you enjoy. I don't enjoy working - I enjoy my personal time. So I found a job that pays me well, respects my time, and every day promptly at 4 I clock off, and I enjoy my evening. Whatever work there is will be ready for me at 8am.

There are always things that get in the way, sometimes I need to work the occasional night, there's a deadline, I've missed a few weekends - but I always take the time off the following week to make up for it. Your younger years are gone in a blip, these times become memories quickly. I have many fond memories of trips, time with loved ones, friends, and even coworkers. You know what I don't remember? Projects, deadlines, and meetings.

scrubbles , 12 days ago

That sounds like a great gig! Great office life, and a ton of PTO (for American standards). Although I will say, I've been in small startups. The beer and alcohol is fun - but the startups grow. It's all fun until someone who doesn't drink joins, or someone develops a problem. Keep an eye on those two issues, about 3 of the 4 startups I've been at one of those has happened.

scrubbles , 12 days ago

Homer Simpson, the scene where his brain explains how 25 dollars can buy many peanuts, but made into a meme that says "25,000 dollars can buy many sneakers"

scrubbles , 12 days ago

Money can be exchanged for goods and services

scrubbles , 7 days ago

Implication was that you stayed there overnight, and didn't have to worry about needing clean clothes