Mitch Effendi (ميتش أفندي)

hey all. i just wanted to drop in and say hello. i moved my account from Beehaw to my own self-hosted, single-user PieFed instance, but, i wanted to say how much i appreciate beehaw, it’s a real oasis on the fedi, still.

YouTube blew up the year I went to college and got access to a T3 line. 🤤 My school had pretty robust security, but it was policy-based. Turns out, if you are on Linux and can’t run the middleware, it would just go “oh you must be a printer, c’mon in!”

I crashed the entire network twice, so I fished a computer out of the trash in my parents’ neighborhood, put Arch and rtorrrent on it, and would just pipe my traffic via SSH to that machine. :p

Ah, and the short era of iTunes music sharing… Good memories.

Ah I am not sure. I just assumed it was W3C.

My unpopular opinion is that Flash was perhaps one of the greatest media standards of all time. Think about it — in 2002, people were packaging entire 15 minute animations with full audio and imagery, all encapsulated in a single file that could play in any browser, for under 10mb each. Not to mention, it was one of the earliest formats to support streaming. It used vectors for art, which meant that a SWF file would look just as good today on a 4k screen as it did in 2002.

It only became awful once we started forcing it to be stuff it didn’t need to be, like a Web design platform, or a common platform for applets. This introduced more and more advanced versions of scripting that continually introduced new vulnerabilities.

It was a beautiful way to spread culture back when the fastest Internet anyone could get was 1 MB/sec.

Honestly it’s a little staggering how much better web video got after the W3C got fed up with Flash and RealPlayer and finally implemented some more efficient video and native video player standards.

<video> was a revolution.

If you say so. I’m just trying to be helpful instead of offering scare quotes.

There is a cool self-hosted version of Perplexity out there now, called Perplexica. It can be configured to use Ollama (local inferencing) and your own, self-hosted SearXNG instance to do the actual search and collation.

I have been using it for a week and it really works.

Funkwhale works nice, but honestly, I am a big fan of just using mpd and piping the audio over a networked speaker, but I’m a simple boy with simple needs.

Finally, somebody looking out for the faceless among us.