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nieve

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Fediverse users should be able to have private chats with each other, that not even their instance admins can snoop on. This encryption should be accessible to mere mortals, without sophisticated training or discipline.

E2EE seems like it should be table stakes in 2025, but it's just one or two people making it happen.

I liked linuxbrew up until it set up python in a way that broke a lot of apps for me. I keep meaning to give it another try, but there are only so many hours.

The best modern reason to have as much swap as RAM is to make hibernation to disk more reliable, but a lot of people don't use that anymore. It's more reliable because the kernel doesn't have to work as hard to find space to write the system image to.

The thing I never hear mentioned is when your home ISP (or say your favorite cafe's) is known to use your traffic data for marketing purposes or sell it outright. I trust Mullvad farther than I trust my ISP. I could switch ISPs, but my only option is Comcast and they're even sleazier.

David Weber actually wrote a series once where aliens (actually humans) hollowed out the Moon (dumping the material into the sun) to use the rest as camouflage for a Moon-sized spaceship hiding from other aliens (actually aliens). It was pretty clearly him taking the p*ss on the entire topic, but it's seen multiple editions and I believe is still in print. I guess there's something about the idea that attracts some people?

For me everything about rsync.net was great except for the throughput. It didn't matter which continent, isp, or operating system I tested, I couldn't get past single digit Mbps and sometimes had trouble reaching that. Support tried moving me to another server, but the problem persisted. Other than that I was pretty happy, but it was completely infeasible to store PostgreSQL backups there, much less server & laptop backups. Every now and then I consider going back in case they've fixed the root problem.

Binance is fucked 4 years ago

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/13/crypto-exchange-binance-temp...

"Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, paused withdrawals of the stablecoin USDC on Tuesday while it carried out a "token swap." USDC withdrawals were resumed about 8 hours after Binance first announced the pausing of withdrawals. Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, tweeted on Tuesday that the exchange is seeing an increase in withdrawals of USDC."

Strategically timed 8 hour stoppages are not a sign things are going well.

As another data point a smallish community that I do moderation for (roughly 6k messages a day) has very large amounts of blatant trolling come from M247-hosted VPNs. Walls of slurs, regurgitated Russian propaganda about Ukraine, rape & death threats, etc. Most of these don't seem to be Mullvad VPN hosts. It's to the point that we've talked about blocking M247, but it doesn't seem feasible.

Every now and then I'm reminded of what could have been when someone submitted a patch to Dreamwidth (probably easily ported to Livejournal) that provided a bi-directional NNTP gateway that allowed posting. The Dreamwidth devs quite reasonably ended up regretfully rejecting it because there was no-one in the dev community who could maintain it, but sometimes when I'm reading through a community that generates 5000 messages a day I'm reminded that I could have had real kill files and proper tracking of new messages. Even close to 30 years later I haven't found anything as efficient for forums & such as a good newsreader was for netnews.

On the other hand my linux Thinkpad has worryingly high numbers:

    Available Spare:                    100% 
    Available Spare Threshold:          10%
    Percentage Used:                    6%
    Data Units Read:                    123,210,825 [63.0 TB]
    Data Units Written:                 59,502,097 [30.4 TB]
    Host Read Commands:                 1,335,288,785
    Host Write Commands:                740,649,667
    Controller Busy Time:               3,494
    Power Cycles:                       3,069
    Power On Hours:                     5,339
    Unsafe Shutdowns:                   155