That may have been the intention but I doubt it ever worked as effectively as they claimed it would. Besides, it will probably cost at least 1 AI data-center of carbon emissions to continuously surveil all these people with TPMS sensors, so the argument could be made that you’re actually reducing carbon pollution at this point by removing yours.

Anything you post on the internet is public knowledge forever. End of discussion. Most people won’t care at all, in most cases almost nobody or perhaps even literally nobody will ever even see it, but the harder you try to hide it, the more the Streisand Effect will magnify it until eventually everyone knows about it.

Anyone telling you they’ll delete your data from the internet without clarifying that it is in fact impossible, is at worst deliberately lying to you usually for their own benefit, and at best making a promise they literally have zero ability to keep.

I would hope that Fediverse services will never lie to you and tell you your data is deleted, because it can’t be.

I’m going down the rabbit hole and people are forced to queue up for what I’m assuming is the equivalent of a serial key?

Not quite. A serial key is permanent, it lasts forever, although some software did try to use online and update services to identify bad serials this was trivial to block, because it’s essentially trying to backpedal a valid key into an invalid one. It only needs to be valid once, then you make sure to block anything that invalidates it afterwards (usually blocking the update servers at the DNS level), job done.

That’s different from a token. Tokens use something along the lines of at least rolling-code type security, similar to how your car keys or garage door opener keep generating new codes so someone with a scanner can’t just record the code it uses once and then have that be copied and replayed over and over again indefinitely. The trick with a token like this is that you need to keep updating it or it becomes invalid after some timeframe or number of uses. Hence the online activation. That’s required to get your next token or set of tokens.

They would be. That’s why you don’t tell them. If you’re treating your insurance company as your friend not an adversary, you probably don’t understand how their profits grow year over year.

I’ve been driving for 30 years. Do you want to guess how many times that’s happened to me?

Meanwhile, I’ve apparently been living in a totalitarian surveillance state for at least a few years now, and you know how many times that’s happened to me? I’ll give you a hint, it’s more than the number of times I’ve run over a nail causing me to drive around on low tire pressure without knowing it.

I’ll drink a cuba libre to that!

I agree that quadlets are pretty ugly but I’m not sure that’s the ini style’s fault. In general I find yaml incredibly frustrating to understand, but toml/ini style is pretty fluent to me. Maybe just a preference, IDK.

Systemd killed my father, but it’s okay because he was Darth Vader anyway.

I think ActivityPub is closer to the right answer than ATProto, and ActivityPub’s issues (though many, as the author notes) are more manageable in the long run. I think the article makes a good analysis of the fundamental differences, but is a bit glib in referring to Piefed’s topics and discussion merging as a “joyful mess”. It’s not a mess at all. It’s making order out of the chaos, and it’s the right way to build on top of ActivityPub into something that is actually fluid enough for users to actually use.

Mailing lists were built on top of federated email in much the same way, and they formed enduring, resilient, well-structured communities, some that continue to this day (the LKML being perhaps the most notorious)

I think ATProto makes creating enduring communities too difficult, and BlackSky illustrates that perfectly. The author’s criticism of ActivityPub, on the other hand, seems to be that it makes creating communities too easy, and this results in a “mess”. I disagree, I think the mess is a necessary and inevitable part of having community. Communities are messy. They fracture and schism, they rejoin and reshape themselves. That’s normal. It is the responsibility of the software to make sense of the mess and make it presentable, and with ActivityPub, that is not only possible, it is happening. Piefed is the present example. I expect there will be more examples, and a wider variety of them, as the ecosystem continues to develop.

I think the biggest thing that ActivityPub still needs is better portability, for both users and communities, to allow moving servers more seamlessly. The “Personal Data Server” of Bluesky is not a bad concept, although I don’t love their implementation. I think ActivityPub can find a way to handle portability even better, but it doesn’t seem like it’s been a priority, and that’s fine. But it will need to happen eventually.

I think it’s a fair criticism. The combat/random encounters are generally the most tedious part of any jRPG but certainly FF in particular. There are some really unique and interesting random battles or areas where the constant battling is intense and exciting rather than annoying, but they are rare.

Overall though, I think the rest of FF7 more than makes up for it. I can certainly understand not being able to get past that though, although I’m curious how far you got. The game goes through a lot of different “stages”, which is one of the things I like about it, but it means the gameplay while you’re stuck in Midgar is quite distinct from the open world, and becomes distinct again once you get access to the Golden Saucer, or the airship, or into Midgar again.

FF has been steadily turning from actual role playing games where the gameplay was once in the driver’s seat and the scenes and story add spice and flavor, to vaguely interactive “cinematic experiences” where the story being endlessly shoved down your throat is the purpose, and the gameplay is just a repetitive distraction from the real novelty which is the crazy stories and cutscenes they come up with.

Ironically FF7 itself was probably the beginning of that trend, thanks to the ability of Playstation CDs to hold so much FMV compared to the limits of ROMs at the time. They dove in headfirst and never looked back, and that came to define the franchise from that point forward. 3 Discs of FMV was pretty over-the-top for their first release on the platform, but the franchise’s addiction to relentless cinematics never waned, it only increased. And the relegation of gameplay being put in the passenger seat, then the back seat, then the trunk, then dragged behind the vehicle to its inevitable death as the art and story become the sole focus became more pronounced with each new entry in the series.

I loved FF7 (and 8, and somewhat less 9, and even 10, and 12 have some redeeming qualities) but the steady and continuous trend away from compelling gameplay towards visual spectacle is abundantly clear.

I haven’t played an FF game since 12, remakes or otherwise, and I don’t plan to. I’ve read the writing on the wall, and I see who they’re making games for, and it’s not me. Maybe it’s other people. Maybe it’s themselves, I don’t know. All I know is it’s not me. I have no interest.

Split DNS typically refers to splitting the DNS results of a single, existing DNS server depending on who asks it, which is not what you want here, because that same server would be serving both external clients and internal ones and would need to differentiate between them.

You want an internal DNS server JUST for your own LAN, and its full-time job is very simple: to have all your local machines pointed at it for DNS, then it will either pretend it’s authoritative and return the proper local IPs for whatever name you ask it for that’s supposed to be on the local network, OR it forwards any other requests it doesn’t consider itself “authoritative” for onwards to your Adguard or other DNS provider to get a real authoritative external IP in response.

The very simplest option for a bare-bones, basic DNS server that will do what you need is dnsmasq. Here is the default sample config for reference. Simply leave all “dhcp” related settings in the config commented out and you’ll probably also want to set:

• no-hosts (won’t use the /etc/hosts file)
• resolv-file (an /etc/resolv.conf style file that tells it what actual nameservers to use for all other queries)
• and either address=/sub.domain.tld/192.168.1.1 (for the subdomain and everything under it)
• or host-record=sub.domain.tld,192.168.1.1 for only that specific subdomain exactly

Then change all your local DNS servers to point at dnsmasq’s IP address (you typically would do this at whatever device is handing out IPs on your network with DHCP, for example the router)

I think that’s pretty much it.

To me, it makes sense for things that are simple to review, have clear, binary acceptance criteria, and little to no meaningful attack surface or dangerous failure modes. If you are trying to make an AI develop a bulletproof filesystem device driver or network stack you’re a fucking maniac and should be pilloried in the town square. If you want to throw an AI-generated github actions build script at me that’s perfectly fine and once I’ve reviewed it thoroughly it doesn’t bother me one bit if it’s AI-generated.

well obviously, all this proves is that copper wires are just as bad as wet mud. Every audiophile knows you need gold oxygen nitrogen purified wires blessed by a voodoo witch doctor.

Among several other things, yes, that is indeed one of my bugbears, I could name countless others too.

But like I implied it’s not just one specific bad decision for me, just the general attitude and direction of the developers. Not that they’ve lost the plot completely, but that they just have a specific plot in mind that diverges pretty significantly from mine and it is never going to satisfy me. Every time it updates the feeling grows that it’s always going to be a struggle to get the game I want to play out of Avorion’s future, that I’m always going to have to be plastering mods over top of the decisions I don’t like, and it’s just… exhausting.

That’s what indie games are for, instead of these absurd-budget blockbusters that often aren’t even fun, but also, the world just needs to be cheaper to live in. Games are first on the chopping block because disposable income for entertainment is always the first to collapse.

The purpose of the health check is to allow docker itself to talk to whatever service is running on the container to make sure it’s always responding happily, connected to everything it needs to be connected to for proper operation, and is not overloaded or stuck somehow.

Docker does this by pretending to be a web browser, and going to the specified “health check URL”. The key thing I think you’re missing here is that the health check URL is supposed to be a URL that, ideally, runs on your container and does some meaningful checks on the health of your service, or at the very least, proves that when you connect to it, it is able to serve up a working static page or login page or something (which doesn’t actually prove it’s working completely, but is often good enough)

Now, you’re probably wondering why this isn’t automatic, and the answer is because there’s no standard “health check URL” that fits all services. Not all services even respond to URLs at all, and the ones that do may have different URLs for their health checks, they may need different hostnames to be used, etc.

By setting health check URL to example.com, basically what you’re doing is constantly testing whether the real-world website https://example.com/ way over there somewhere is working, and as long as it is, docker assumes your container is fine. Which it might be, or it might not be, it has no idea and you have no idea, because it’s not even attempting to connect to the container at all, it’s going to the URL you specified, which is way out there on the internet somewhere, and this effectively does nothing useful for you.

It’s understandable why you probably thought this made sense, that it was testing network connectivity or something, but that is not the purpose of the health check URL, and if you don’t have a meaningful URL to check, you can probably just omit or disable the healthcheck in this case. Docker only uses it to decide if it needs to restart the container or alert you of the failure.

Check out the workshop for it too. The ship builder is extremely flexible and people create works of art with it, and it can make the game look truly incredible. Of course, things like battle-bricks and battle-sticks (or battle-bricks WITH battle-sticks) reign supreme at actual combat effectiveness not to mention cost effectiveness, so it’s sort of a tradeoff.

Avorion… like, don’t get me wrong, I’ve got 1,200+ hours in it, and on paper it still features literally everything that is like digital crack cocaine to me… but the updates and changes just keep going in directions that don’t interest me, at all, and even though they’re not explicitly bad per se, I find myself overwhelmed with disappointment about what the updates could’ve been, and I just become less interested, and end up playing less and less, to the point that I never even bothered installing it in 2025 and still don’t have it installed and when I do install it I generally just play it for a little bit and quickly become bored and disillusioned and end up going back to the X series or something to scratch the itch that it’s just not scratching for me anymore.

I deal with kubernetes daily for my job and it manages to melt my brain at least a few times a week. It’s not bad… it’s actually great… it’s just… a lot. Like, a lot a lot.

For what it’s worth, I do not use it at home, because I prefer to be getting paid when my brain is melting.