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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Interesting, I want to try some of these solutions.

    I set up luks on some of my selfhosted virtualbox instances to protect against physical theft, but power issues cause all too frequent restarts that are a serious pain to physically access.

    An ssh call in a script that could be remotely used to unlock and complete the boot would be so handy.


  • Eek, I’m moving towards nextcloud (and away from Google fast as possible). Is there a better all-in-one groupware + files + collab + office apps suite out there?

    It does appear that nextcloud’s devs are eyeballs deep in php tech debt, so their pace of development and integration has slowed.

    It’s so big that none of their FOSS components are going to be #1 on their own.

    Recently upgraded the version and had to allow untested app versions (which had just disappeared) because they hadn’t been updated yet. That’s a weird problem and yeah, I don’t really want to be beta tester everytime I try and open a document.

    They also don’t really have a nice docker compose based deployment yet.

    But I couldn’t be happier to be leaving google in the dust, so there’s that.





  • I’ve been self-hosting since the '90s. I used to have an NT 3.51 server in my house. I had a dial in BBS that worked because of an extensive collection of .bat files that would echo AT commands to my COM ports to reset the modems between calls. I remember when we had to compile the slackware kernel from source to get peripherals to work.

    But in this last year I took the time to seriously learn docker/podman, and now I’m never going back to running stuff directly on the host OS.

    I love it because I can deploy instantly… Oftentimes in a single command line. Docker compose allows for quickly nuking and rebuilding, oftentimes saving your entire config to one or two files.

    And if you need to slap in a traefik, or a postgres, or some other service into your group of containers, now it can be done in seconds completely abstracted from any kind of local dependencies. Even more useful, if you need to move them from one VPS to another, or upgrade/downgrade core hardware, it’s now a process that takes minutes. Absolutely beautiful.




  • This is wild, but I have at least one guess where they might be coming from with this idea.

    At one point I had to move out of a house that I owned for a while so I wanted to let it.

    People who want to rent can be super flaky and dishonest. Seriously 4 out of 5 or more are like this.

    They make appointments then don’t show up and ghost you. Or they call 5 minutes late to say they’ll be there in 3 hours.

    Or everything seems good until you do credit checks and find they were evicted from the last place and haven’t made a payment on their credit card for 3 years plus they have a felony conviction from a few years ago for beating up some guy.

    Or when checking their income is sufficient, their boss says yeah, they used to work here but not anymore.

    Potential renters never tell you this stuff until you already put hours into talking and going out to show the place to them.

    I’m just a regular guy with a job (who does pay his bills) so this takes a lot of time, fuck that noise.

    Basically charging people $5 will make them not come if they know they won’t qualify, saving everybody the time.



  • I think the fundamental problem with ipv6 is that it’s a bit more complex to learn than ipv4 and not universally deployed at the remote host/server level.

    New cloud companies who want to be competitive have to purchase ipv4 blocks at significant cost reducing their ability to compete with the incumbent players.

    So if you go 100% ipv6 at home, some percentage of the internet will be inaccessible to you unless you employ some workarounds.

    We’ll drop ipv4 quite fast once everything is up on ipv6 because nearly every modern network enabled device supports it.

    The only reason I think we’ve not gotten over the hump is because our alternatives are still easy enough to work with and nobody requires it.



  • Sales taxes vary based on city, county, and state rates. They can also be waived if you, the buyer, have a reseller permit or are purchasing for a non profit.

    It’s not underhanded and is annoying for sellers too because they have to know a lot about sales taxes as well. They could show you the price with local taxes included but then most customers would think their prices are too high comparing to other merchants.

    So the price shown on the product in a store or online is only what the merchant is selling it for. The price at the register is what the merchant is selling it for plus the taxes they have to collect (unless you’re excluded for the reasons mentioned above).

    The tax is a buyer obligation, not a seller obligation but sellers have to be an intermediary. So buyers should be educated about the tax laws that apply to them (in this system).

    The receipt should be clearly marked so you know exactly how much went to the product and how much went to tax. You can itemize and deduct your sales taxes from your federal income taxes if you’re so inclined to track it (and it’s a better result than the standard deduction)

    It’s more complex than a VAT system but enables local jurisdictions to levy taxes to pay for various things applicable to their area.

    🤷‍♂️





  • UBI is probably a good idea but it’s coming too slowly for anyone to rely on. Even if UBI is fully implemented, I suspect it will be life sustaining but not a life fulfilling. So humanity still needs to find purpose.

    It’s hard to imagine a scenario where someone cannot be trained to do something new. Isn’t that a core feature of humans?

    Next, how shall we define value? I argue that humans can always create some kind of value that machines cannot, even if only because a human is involved.

    We still value actual art over AI generated art. We value uniqueness and rarity. We value the faults that are inherent from things that are natural and organic.

    Tons of the jobs people did a hundred years ago in developed countries are now gone or have been streamlined down to require fewer people. Yet there are more people on earth now than there ever have been before and arguably worldwide hunger is at its lowest point. So somehow we have figured out how to survive despite vast amounts of automation already. It seems unlikely that our new “AI” tools are going to somehow dramatically disrupt this balance.