[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 6 points 2 months ago

Ohhh I get you then. Instead of checking against an author’s key, and building a distributed web of trust between trusted authors, you build a system that requires everyone collaborate on one shared chain of signatures.

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 5 points 6 months ago

No I know you’re being genuine.

So this is going to sound really weird, because I think you’re talking about the experience of debating troll farm accounts - understandably really frustrating - but I’m talking about the people, the voters, the weird family members you can’t talk about politics with any longer. (I have some of those - they’re in rural Illinois while I’m in blue-dot Omaha, I love them very much, and I absolutely hate that we can’t talk politics any more.)

But I think you need to give them more sympathy. (The IRL humans, not the online trolls.) The worst of them grew up in a system where they only see minorities as risks, because (a) brains look for patterns, for free, factory firmware, and (b) they don’t realize evil people set things up long ago so that minorities had things on Hard Mode. And maybe (c) fighting against your factory defaults takes work and practice.

Like, because TLOU is back on TV I’ll share something uncomfortable. S01E03 was really uncomfortable for me to watch. I was a nerdy kid, teased for being gay in high school when I was not and am not gay. So I have some homophobia I haven’t gotten rid of yet. I’m trying. But I still look away whenever men kiss. My wife doesn’t love that part about me, but she still loves me.

Do you give up on me because my journey isn’t complete there? Am I to be hated because I look away, lumped in with the people who vote against gay rights? Clearly not. Mostly because I’m clearly making an effort.

Some people who voted for Trump don’t wear red hats. They were on the fence and they went one way and not the other. And I promise they’re not the people you’re tired of debating. They deserve your positive thoughts. Don’t let the troll farms steal those thoughts. Please.

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 5 points 8 months ago

Yes you will make it easier for kiwifarms to create an ALPR network if you GPL it. Also social change activists, news stations, “news” stations, nosy neighbors, overseas companies interested in obtaining intelligence on US citizens, people who hate racing on public roads, neighborhood watch, people who want to make ALPR bans functionally impossible by making them indistinguishable from dashcams, people who want to make rich people sweat by tracking their movements.

If you don’t GPL it, you’ll demonstrate that a small team can create an ALPR system, so, they might think, why not give it a try?

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 6 points 8 months ago

I love this, and I’m definitely going to use it when describing enshittification to relatives. Kudos, genuinely.

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 6 points 9 months ago

Think of a Seedbox as a cloud service provider with convenience features focused on enabling piracy, by keeping the hardware in a jurisdiction that doesn’t care what you pirate and giving you one-click easy installation methods for apps that make piracy simple. But without going so far as “Thank you for your payment, download these specific media files here.”

You debatably have to be a techie. But by techie standards it’s very easy to use.

If you really hate piracy, I suppose you could pay for one for a month, get the identity of who you paid, and use one of the apps to host a shell script that listens on one of the few public ports you have access to, that answers every incoming connection with “this is a seed box operated by ABC, with cards payments accepted by LMNOP Inc in Athens, Greece.”

But the most common usage is running packaged software they let you run (like BT clients you can remote-control, sickchill, radarr, sonarr, Plex, etc.) or remote desktops or shells. Usually implemented as docker containers.

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 5 points 9 months ago

BBS software. Nerds always find a way. I guess if I have to be a sysop now…

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago

I host my own for mspencer dot net, used this 15-ish step walkthrough from linuxbabe dot com. Only maybe three instances of spam in two years, gmail and outlook receive my messages just fine, etc. (Successful spammers were using legitimate services, and those services took action when notified. Greylist delays emails by a few minutes but it’s extremely effective against most spammers because they never come back to retry messages after a few minutes, while legitimate senders will.) I don’t know if I would accept blanket advice against self hosting.

Fundamentally if your mail server can see the addressee, it can see the content. SMTPS encrypts both in the same channel. So at the point where you accept messages and store them in a mailbox, the messages have to be readable.

Encrypting them at rest isn’t something I currently do, but if you’re going to later serve those messages to an email client that expects to receive clear text, your server needs both the keys and the messages. They can be stored in different places.

Most of your needs could be met with full disk encryption on the box hosting Dovecot. If you’re worried about being compelled to decrypt, there’s always the deck of cards trick: The pass phrase for full disk encryption consists of a memorized portion plus the letters and numbers of the top N cards in this deck of cards you keep by the server. If someone were to shuffle that deck of cards, and the server were powered down, the encrypted volume would be impossible to recover.

I’m eager to learn what other Dovecot tricks people can recommend to improve security.

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 7 points 1 year ago

Married, we both work from home, and we’re in an apartment.

First, all of my weird stuff is not between her work and living room pcs and the internet. Cable modem connects to normal consumer router (openwrt) with four lan ports. Two of those are directly connected to her machines (requiring a 150-ish foot cable for one), and two connect to my stuff. All of my stuff can be down and she still has internet.

Second, no rack mount servers with loud fans, mid tower cases only. Through command line tools I’ve found some of these are in fact capable of a lot of fan noise, but this never happens in normal operation so she’s fine with it.

Separately I’d say, have a plan for what she will need if something happens to you. Precious memories, backups, your utility and service accounts, etc. should remain accessible to her if you’re gone and everything is powered off - but not accessible to a burglar. Ideally label and structure things so a future internet installer can ignore your stuff and set her up with normal consumer internet after your business internet account is shut off.

Also keep in mind if you both switch over so every movie and show you watch only ever comes from Plex (which we both like), in an extended power outage situation all of your media will be inaccessible. It might be good to save a few emergency-entertainment shows to storage you can browse from your phone, usb or iXpand drive you can plug directly into your phone for example.

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 6 points 1 year ago

Advice from most to least certain: If you want very long standby time (a reliably perfect first print after literally months of inactivity) and you have the space for an ugly cube of a printer, laser is the only option. Ink tank printers have unexpected wear parts, like internal ink sponges.

Black and white laser is stupid simple. Color laser “prints” four times in series onto an intermediate transfer belt (ITB) and then puts that onto the paper, still super reliable but bulkier, and your prints get watermarked with yellow dots because FBI or something. I’d go color.

Toner lock-in is becoming more common, not just for HP. If your page count is going to be low, just pay full price for name brand toner. If you don’t want to do that, like your use case could involve printing a single page or entire binders of paper between months of inactivity, read on.

Start your printer research by shopping for cheap off brand toner, get a sense for what they’re selling the most of and what that’s compatible with, and see what printers they support.

Some aftermarket toner just works, out of the box, because the printer isn’t crazy locked down. Those cartridges have normal sounding instructions. Some aftermarket toner requires you to transplant a chip from a first party cartridge, and their instructions include this. Avoid those printers.

And consider used printers. I have a used HP LaserJet Pro MFP M477fdw that I love, but I would never ever buy another HP printer, especially not one made later than this one. Be very careful before buying any HP printer, especially one made in the past 6-8 years. Even wear items (like the ITB) have modules with firmware and compatibility requirements, and I’m worried I could be one replacement component away from suddenly having a locked down printer.

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I’m not sure I follow. Why would a needle be reused? That’s never ok to do.

The pictured injector is single use. The weird workaround would never be ok’d by any doctor, and even if it was, a clean needle would be used to withdraw and administer medicine from the hypothetical medicine ampule for each dose. I’m not qualified to measure loose liquid medicine, and she’s on the second highest dose anyway.

A better design would be more like the pen used by the original senaglutide medication this is related to, ozempic. Screw on a disposable pen needle, dial your dosage on the twisty knob on the other end, inject, dispose of needle. But instead they deliberately designed this thing, with a latching device that starts squirting medicine with no way to stop it. If the user is not familiar with needles and jerks away, the needle comes back out but medicine is still squirting.

It’s a good medicine, except supply issues are making it difficult. My wife’s refill at the hospital pharmacy has been pending since end of February. It’s a weekly injection but her last dose was 15 days ago as of this morning.

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 6 points 2 years ago

Agreed. They are deliberately taking advantage of the fact that people don’t understand how autopilot is actually used in aircraft.

Sure, the most pedantic of us will point out that, with autopilot enabled, the pilot-flying is still in command of the aircraft and still responsible for the safe conduct of the flight. Pilots don’t** engage autopilot and then leave the cockpit unattended. They prepare for the next phase of flight, monitor their surroundings, prepare for top-of-descent, and to stay mentally ahead of the rapid-fire events and requirements for a safe approach and landing. Good pilots let the autopilot free them up for other tasks, while always preparing for the very real possibility that the autopilot will malfunction in the most lethal way possible at the worst possible moment.

Do non-pilots understand that? No. The parent poster is absolutely correct: Tesla is taking advantage of peoples’ misunderstanding, and then hiding behind pedantic truth about what a real autopilot is actually for.

** Occasionally pilots do, and many times something goes horribly wrong unexpectedly and they die. Smart, responsible pilots don’t. Further, sometimes pilots fail to manage their autopilot correctly, or use it without understanding how it can behave when something goes wrong. (RIP to aviation Youtuber TNFlygirl who had a fatal accident six days ago, suspected to be due to mismanagement of an unfamiliar autopilot system.)

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 6 points 2 years ago

It sounds like you’ve got enough familiarity with the whole development lifecycle, as applied to a smaller single-dev-sized project, that you’d be great as an SDE 2 at a larger company, ready within a few years to step up to Senior. There are companies with hundreds of developers who only rarely hire straight out of college, where your level of experience is exactly what they want.

(There are also companies with hundreds of developers who do hire straight out of college, and I’m not trying to disillusion recent grads.)

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mspencer712

joined 2 years ago