Investing in a server with mass storage would "pay for itself" in less than a year, compared to what I'm currently renting (I'm low key scared to look up the prices of DDR5 RAM and NVMe drives though). Since I plan to maintain TankieTube "forever", it seems like the best option.

I'm so ready to ditch BackBlaze because their timeout errors are causing ~90% of the current problems with the website (external storage move failures and buffering problems).

I have plenty of experience assembling computers and the thought of building a server is really fun, but I've never used colocation before.

Questions/Thoughts/Concerns:

1. Do datacenters let you walk inside to maintain your own server? There is a datacenter in my home city, which would be convenient, but using it would effectively soft-doxx my location. Right now "Burgerland" is as specific as I publicly reveal.

2. If I ship the server to a more remote location, how would I replace failed drives? Is that a commonly provided service? Would using a datacenter within ~2 hours driving distance be the best compromise between accessibility and location obfuscation?

3. Is paying with Monero an option? Is it a good idea? Could I mail replacement drives directly to the datacenter without revealing my home return address?

It looks like I'll need NVMe drives in something called the U.2 form factor (instead of M.2) in order to enable hot swapping. TIL.

Astronaut on the beauty of space

Tweet | Video

https://www.righto.com/2023/01/inside-globus-ink-mechanical-navigation.html

https://xcancel.com/adamjohnsonCHI/status/2031803611127107843

https://xcancel.com/LegalizeRats/status/2023128879129669673

“Belka” and “Strelka”, Soviet space dogs after landing. USSR, 1960.

The amount of people in the notes to this post (and any other space dogs related content) being surprised that Belka and Strelka or some other “dogmonaut” survived starts to concern me. Surely you guys know that most of the space dogs survived their journeys and went on with their doggy lives? Certainly you understand that getting the living creatures into the space and safely bringing them back was the point in these experiments? Like, you all get that these dogs were sent into space as part of the programme aimed at safely getting a human cosmonaut there, and Soviets weren’t just launching puppies to their deaths for the fun of it? You don’t just baselessly extrapolate Laika’s fate on all of them, right? Right?

Anyway, in case you get worried or upset looking at the space dogs’ photos, please know that most of the space dogs survived their journeys and went on with their doggy lives. They were sent into space as part of the programme aimed at safely getting a human cosmonaut there. Getting the living creatures into the space and safely bringing them back was the point in these experiments. Belka and Strelka definitely survived their flight, Strelka had puppies (one was gifted to JFK), and they both lived well into the old age.

i forget her actual name(it translates to little star) but the last of the dog cosmonauts before gagarins flight ended up being adopted by gagarin and his wife and he often spoke about being grateful for her contribution

That would be Zvozdochka. She was also named by Yuri Gagarin. Here’s a picture of her with her friends sourced from a Russia Beyond article that manages to misidentify all 4 dogs (correct labels added to bottom of photo added by me)

Source

^Source^

NATO officers and an elite detachment of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were destroyed in the Odessa region. This was stated in his telegram channel by the coordinator of the Nikolaev underground Sergey Lebedev.

According to Lebedev, four strikes have already been carried out in Ilyichevsk (Chernomorsk) since 14.30 today. "There have already been about twenty ambulances," he noted. The strike was on a base with basekipazhny boats, how many of them were destroyed is still unknown.

Lebedev writes:

The ship with back-up and military equipment was unloaded, the impact was on the unloaded cargo too… A certain elite detachment of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which was trained by British submariners focused on sabotage, came under attack. The British were also eliminated, 8 officers were among the dead foreigners. How many dead Ukrainian specialists died is not yet known. But we are talking about dozens.

At least two dead foreigners are US officers, he added.

It is noted that the Russian Armed Forces also struck at the port of Odessa.

"Please doxx yourself to continue"

For the longest time it would force me to log in to watch "restricted" videos, but now that's not enough.

It gave me a fourth option of "verify by email address" but that didn't work.

https://theprint.in/tech/60-80-of-twitter-accounts-posting-on-russia-ukraine-war-bots-90-pro-ukraine-finds-new-study/1114878/

The study is from 2022.

Bot accounts were identified using Indiana University’s Botometer — a software which helps identify a bot account.

Twitter changed its API on 2023-03-31 and made the Botometer no longer able to function.

According to the researchers, 90.16 per cent of the accounts tweeting on the Russia-Ukraine war were “pro Ukraine” and only 6.80 per cent were “pro Russia”.

The pro-Russian humans were the most convincing and influential cohort.

“The ‘ProRussia Not Bot’ account group has the largest outward information flows and significant flows to a range of other groups, having a positive information flow into both ‘ProUkraine’ and “Balanced” account groups, observed the researchers.

This means genuine pro-Russia users have the ability to influence more users on Twitter than genuine users who are pro-Ukraine.

IMO this is likely because they know facts which most people have been shielded from due to the strict, authoritarian censorship regimes imposed by Western countries, which they excuse as "combating Russian propaganda". Liberals don't actually know things.