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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 16th, 2024

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  • Yeah the SFFs and uSFFs are great for consuming low power.

    I’ve got a couple m910q’s that I bought for htpc purposes but honestly I might be better off putting the thick ones on htpc duty. Just gotta work out some kinks with how they handle suspend when hooked up to a TV.

    They’ve really shot up in price…I bought two for 130 shipped (total) with i5-7500T and 16gb back around last Halloween. I’m seeing singles not specced as well for the same price

    The tough thing about uSFF is that they usually don’t have any PCIe slots…so if you need a second NIC, or want to upgrade to mGig, you can’t, or they have to be over USB 3.


  • This.

    I look for corporate desktops that are off-lease or EoL. Big fan of Lenovo M series. 6th/7th gen still have lots of life left in them and plenty of power for most homelab tasks.

    Anything much newer than that will consume less power per core (usually) but will cost more up front and probably be more expensive to put upgrades into (i.e. DDR5). Anything much older than that won’t be worth the performance per watt. By the time you put a 7th gen through its paces, you’ll be ready to upgrade and have a much clearer look at what you want/need.

    Right now I’ve got 3x M710s forming a kubernetes cluster, and another running opnsense only.

    Kubernetes was built on top of VMs in proxmox, but I’m thinking I will move them to metal.

    I also have what was my PC down in the basement, with proxmox, running a TrueNAS VM and a Bazzite VM for GPU passthrough and Sunshine, but I’m gonna reclaim those guts, put a spare 6th gen with DDR3 and run TrueNAS on metal. Then I’ll have my PC back.


  • The idea of literally re-writing history in real-time seemed absurd back when I first read it,maybe like 15 years ago.

    Nowadays, between media conglomerates (social and legacy), search engines, and now LLMs (as the next tier), being owned by a handful of extremely rich people who have shown time and time again that they want nothing more than to exert control over people…it’s entirely possible.

    Easy, even.

    Federated platforms aren’t immune to it. Bot army’s swarm reddit and lemmy alike, just as they do mastodon and X. Federated platforms have a bit more capability and interest to fight it, but it really is an arms race at this point.

    And also spez (fuck u/spez) would love to suck Dons tiny scarred and pruney cock. If only spez weren’t like 30+ years too old for him.


  • especially because it seems very unlikely they’re storing the media exclusively locally.

    Oh like hell they are.

    Remember in “The Dark Knight”, when Fox and Wayne Enterprises made the high-frequency generator that turned everybody’s cellphones into an echolocation device?

    I kinda feel like Zuck has a room in one of his houses with a big wall of monitors just like Fox had. And he just sits there, channel-surfing, with a 50gal drum of lotion by his side.

    Except Zuck’s don’t self-destruct. Sadly. A small bomb wrapped around the brains of anybody who bought one of these things would come in quite handy.












  • There’s been a push in IT (and I assume other industries as well) towards inclusive-language.

    Part of that is moving away from phrasing that has non-technical historical connotations…like using “leader/follower” or “primary/secondary” instead of “master/slave”.

    But another part is also getting away from catagorizing things as good/bad on a white/black spectrum. We no longer blacklist things, we denylist or blocklist them. Likewise we no longer whitelist things…they get allowlisted or permitlisted. We don’t have white-hat/black-hat hackers…we have defensive/offensive, or blue-team/red-team.

    Afaik it’s still okay to refer to plugs and prongs as female and male, as that is referring to biological sex moreso than gender. But yet, people gasp when I refer to plugs that have a sheath over them as “uncircumcised”.



  • There’s been a notable uptick in supply chain attacks coming from the odd FOSS dependency.

    Fortunately the FOSS environment as a whole, ironically, reflects the best aspects of a “free market” in the capitalist sense. If a package is no longer maintained, or poorly maintained, or the maintainer is a douche/Russian asset, it forks and many users jump ship to the newer package.

    Users have full transparency into how the sausage is made. Everybody does.

    So if exploitable code is discovered, it can just as well be discovered first by a defensive researcher (non-inclusive term: white-hat) or offensive researcher (black-hat).

    And if an offensive researcher discovers it first, they have a choice:

    • Use it and risk being spotted. Once discovered in the wild, patching is only a matter of time.
    • Sit on it and hope a defensive researcher doesn’t find it.

    Submitting bad code to a project in itself though. Some new user with no reputation is going to be heavily scrutinized putting a PR on a large/popular project. And even with a good reputation, you’re still putting the exploit code out there in the open and hoping none of the reviewers or maintainers catch it.


  • Not to be pro-corporate/anti-repair…but I feel I have to play devils-advocate here…

    That sounds like a legal and security nightmare.

    If you just give binary blobs and no sources, there’s no way to maintain the code/device long term. As exploits continue to be found in upstream dependencies, the hardware continues to become increasingly insecure.

    But if the source needs to be released…I imagine that there are heaps of proprietary code that is still in use on “active” devices even after another model goes EoL…so if that code is released, there’s instantly thousands of nefarious eyes on it.

    On top of the regular zero-days that are found out when a popular product reaches EoL.

    I think that’s potentially a lot to ask of users. Will your technically-challenged great-Aunt switch to post-support build when her phone hits EoL, or will hackers be able to remote control her banking app and take away your inheritance before the community can even patch it (assuming there’s enough community support out there for an 8-year-old Galaxy A-series…)

    Then there could also be licensed code that would need to be released as well…hence the legal nightmare.

    Not saying it’s impossible…in fact, I greatly agree with your stance and stated position. Just saying that there are some blockers on this epic.