Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

  • 20 Posts
  • 3.73K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•How do you use VPN?English
    2·
    1 hour ago

    I have not used such a configuration, but I believe that it’s fine to have multiple WireGuard VPNs concurrently up, at least from a Linux client standpoint. I have no idea whether your phone’s client permits that — it could well be that it can’t do it.

    Your routing table would have the default route go to a host on one of them (and your Internet-bound traffic would go there), but you should be able to have it be either. Or neither — I’ve set up a WireGuard configuration with a Linux client where the default route wasn’t over the WireGuard VPN, and only traffic destined for the LAN at the other end of the WireGuard VPN traversed the WireGuard VPN.

    From Linux’s standpoint, a WireGuard VPN is just like another NIC on the host. You say “all traffic destined for this address range heads out this NIC”. Just that the NIC happens to be virtual and to be software that tunnels the traffic.

    EDIT:

    It sounds like this is an Android OS-level limitation:

    https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/261526/are-there-technical-limitation-to-multiple-vpns

    In the Android VPN development documentation you can find a clear statement regarding the possibility to have multiple VPNs active at the same time:

    There can be only one VPN connection running at the same time. The existing interface is deactivated when a new one is created.

    That same page does mention that you can have apps running in different profiles using different VPNs at the same time. That might be an acceptable workaround for you.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•How do we reduce toxicity on the Fediverse, and on the wider internet?English
    2·
    6 hours ago

    My own personal thoughts on things that might change to improve:

    • I’m pretty interested about the prospects for something like “curated lists”, where people can publish ban lists or “upvote lists” or something like that that users can subscribe to if they decide that they like a particular curation list’s material. Something that can leverage positive and negative recommendations more-readily. My understanding is that Bluesky has something along those lines.

    • Reddit originally was intended to rely on voting to do per-user recommendation. Over the years, it kind of drifted away from that. At the time I left, it still didn’t do that. I think that it’s probably also possible to create automated recommendations based on things like a user’s upvotes. I suppose that there’s some echo chamber potential here, depending upon how one votes.

    • I see a lot of people being negative on the Threadiverse, people that sound often depressed or something, but not really people fighting between each other that much. There are people who could be nicer, but in terms of interpersonal fighting, I don’t see that much. That being said, I do avoid some instances.

    • Beehaw.org has a relatively-restrictive moderation policy. That’s not what I personally prefer, but I will say that it has a fairly-upbeat set of discussions on its communities compared to most instances. It defederated with lemmy.world, but has not with lemmy.today (my home instance) and a number of others, so if you’re specifically on the hunt for more-positive conversation, you might investigate it.

    • My own personal belief is that making votes public has reduced the amount of “I disagree with you, so I downvote” stuff. It’s also possible that there are other factors going on, but I think that after lemvotes.org in particular became widely-available, the amount of what I’d call downvoting in discussions on controversial topics declined on here. There have been some instances that disallow downvotes entirely (beehaw.org is an example of an instance that does this).

    • From a moderation standpoint, there are some policies from Reddit subreddits that I think were generally successful. /r/Europe had a pretty hard “do not edit article titles” rule. This went further than I personally would have, as sometimes I think that adding context to a title could be useful, but that avoided a lot of issues where people would insert their personal positions into post submissions rather than in a top-level comment. I think that some form of that can be a useful convention.

    • On an directly-opposing note: I think that a lot of articles are clickbait (and some are ragebait, and the latter tends to drive unpleasantness). I’ve seen various proposals to try to let users submit alternate article titles and those be voted on or something like that. Maybe it’d be a good idea to let users submit alternate titles and mods pick from them or something like that. Reddit didn’t do that, but maybe things along those lies could be successfully done.

    • In general, I don’t think that Reddit got many things wrong. One thing I think it did get wrong was to change how blocking worked at one point from “I ignore all comments from a user” to “that user cannot respond to me”. The Threadiverse software packages presently work like “old Reddit”. I think that that’s a good idea. On Reddit, this change to how blocking worked resulted in a lot of people posting inflammatory content, then blocking the other user so that they couldn’t respond, so it’d look like the other user had conceded the point. Then the other user — now infuriated — would go start responding to other comments in a thread pointing out that this first user had blocked them. That never ended well.

    • We do have automated stuff to try to detect tone, sentiment analysis. This sometimes gets used to do things like identify users getting upset in automated calls and direct them to a human. It might be possible to automatically flag potential flamewars for moderators, to reduce the time until they get noticed.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•How do we reduce toxicity on the Fediverse, and on the wider internet?English
    4·
    6 hours ago

    Obviously, the internet has always been a toxic place, (the phrase “flame war” has been around for decades,) but it seems to have gotten so much worse over the last few years.

    Ehhh. I don’t know. I think that there are ways in which it’s gotten better and ways in which it’s gotten worse over time.

    I never really used any of the big social media sites that rely on automated recommendations to any degree. I understand that a major factor was that they measured user engagement, and what we found is that users are considerably more-engaged with content that enraged them than pretty much anything else. They tended to recommend material in that vein. I think that this discovery (as well as the ability to easily measure views on traditional-media sites) also encouraged ragebait to be posted.

    That probably is a step back.

    The Internet is a lot more diverse of a place than it once was. Back around, say, the 1990s, it was mostly university people, engineering types, stuff like that. A lot of countries had very few people online. You had fewer points of disagreement in a number of areas. But bring people with a wider variety of views into the situation, and you have more room for conflict, I think. I think that to some degree, that’s just intrinsic to having a more-diverse Internet, throwing all of humanity (or at least everyone that can more-or-less speak a language, which for English, is a lot of people) just means that people from different walks of life and social norms suddenly encounter each other, and, well, ideas clash.

    I feel like there is a real sense in which very negative worldviews are more-prominent, maybe partly because of media — and not just social media, but traditional media — favoring more-alarmist articles and titles. Doomerism, like. That’s not so much directly toxic, but I think that people who feel stressed-out tend to be less-pleasant.

    And the Internet permitted for forums and media chambers that are very much aligned with specific individual groups; it’s easier to live in echo chambers. The long tail — the Internet is so large and permits for so many niche environments that people don’t have to be exposed to broader views in society if they don’t want to. I think that that tends to let people demonize other people more-readily, if they don’t interact with them.

    On the other hand:

    Trolling (in the sense of trying to post provocative comments that would incite a flamewar) used to be very common on forums I’d used, like Slashdot. I don’t see much of that on the Threadiverse.

    Usenet permitted crossposting articles to multiple Usenet groups. Clients tended to default to respond to all of these. This resulted in people trying to crosspost articles between groups that had users with conflicting views (e.g. comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy and comp.sys.mac.advocacy) to induce conflict. That’s not how current Lemmy handles crossposting — instead, replies go to one community. (PieFed does merge discussions into a single page, though.)

    Widespread community moderation, which showed up on Reddit (and the Threadiverse, as it followed in its footsteps) has also improved things a fair bit. Usenet had efforts at tacked-on moderation that weren’t incredibly effective.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•When texlive is updated… (openSUSE TW, 2029 updated packages)English
    31·
    8 hours ago

    I just ran my routine update script. For the fourth time today. And I’m hit with 2029 updated packages.

    I mean, that’s kinda what you sign up for if you’re using a rolling release Linux distro, and I’m assuming, given the name, that tumbleweed is a rolling release?

    searches

    Yes:

    https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Tumbleweed

    The Tumbleweed distribution is a pure rolling release version of openSUSE containing the latest “stable” versions of all software instead of relying on rigid periodic release cycles. The project does this for users who want the newest stable software.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSUSE

    openSUSE[5] ( /ˌoʊpənˈsuːzə/) is a free and open-source Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE Project. It is offered in two main variations: Tumbleweed, an upstream rolling release distribution, and Leap, a stable release distribution which is sourced from SUSE Linux Enterprise.[6]

    I mean, sounds like they’ve got a non-rolling-release distro too, and that won’t hit you with all the updates.

    EDIT:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_release

    Rolling release, also known as rolling update or continuous delivery, is a concept in software development of frequently delivering updates to applications.[1][2][3] This is in contrast to a standard or point release development model which uses software versions which replace the previous version.

    A rolling release model is different from a staged or “staggered” rollout, in which an update is gradually made available to an increasing percentage of users for testing or bandwidth reasons.[4][5]

    An example of a rolling release would be Arch Linux, where new packages and updates roll in constantly, and significant changes to the distribution may occur at any time by the developers. This is in contrast to Ubuntu Linux, which has biannual releases, with the only major changes after a release being security updates or significant bug fixes.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Alright let's see pictures of your super nice rack-mounted, professionally installed labs. I'll start 🙃English
    4·
    9 hours ago

    I’m still not using one. The problem is that you’ve got two classes of devices that haven’t quite converged to what I want.

    UPS

    Traditionally, the purpose of UPSes isn’t to keep systems running (other than through very short outages). It’s to do one of the following:

    • Provide a small amount of buffer until a backup power system, like a generator, has time to come online.

    • Give the systems time to shut down cleanly. If the user is right there, they have time to save their work. This was particularly an issue before journaled filesystems became the norm, since an unclean shutdown in the era when Windows was using FAT, Linux was using ext2, and MacOS was using HFS had at least the possibility to corrupt your filesystem. They have the ability to report their charge level to an attached computer so that it knows when the battery level is critical and then software on it can start it shutting down. On Linux, the most-common software package to do this is Network UPS Tools, or NUT.

    These things don’t need a lot of capacity. They rarely get drained, so they usually use lead-acid batteries, which are heavy and don’t have many full charge-discharge cycles in them (but are pretty happy staying fully charged all the time). You can still get these. The lead-acid batteries are replaceable, though, so an old UPS can keep going for a very long time.

    Powerstation

    These are designed to keep attached devices running for a longer period of time. Unfortunately, they have a couple of important limitations for powering computer systems.

    • They do not normally have the ability to report their charge level. Irritatingly, they do nearly always have a voltmeter rigged up to some software to map voltage to charge remaining to drive a ‘charge remaining’ display on the device, and there are USB HID device classes for reporting charge levels to a host OS, but for some reason, powerstation manufacturers don’t seem to have an interest in making a powerstation that has the latter functionality. NUT does have a USB HID backend, which means that it can monitor and shut down a system if they’d expose it. I’d really prefer the ability to treat one of these as a laptop-style battery, as Linux (as well as other OSes) have the ability to hibernate on low battery. On Linux, these show up as /sys/class/power_supply/BAT*, and there’s lots of software to display charge information and act based on low levels…but AFAICT from looking around the kernel, there is no way to get the kernel to deal with a USB HID device reporting remaining charge like this as a BAT device.

    • Computer power supplies can only smooth out so much of an interruption in their power. Computers rely on something on the order of a 10 millisecond transfer time after AC goes out until the UPS needs to be running full-tilt. searches ATX PSUs apparently are only required to operate for 16 milliseconds without power. Other hardware attached may or may not actually deal well with interruptions, but obviously the shorter the transfer time, the better. It looks like line-interactive UPSes tend to do something like 3-6 milliseconds. The problem is that a lot of powerstations have a transfer time in excess of this.

    There are some LFP UPSes now, but these have their own disadvantages. They tend to be fairly pricey, and the batteries are often not replaceable, which means that unlike the old lead-acid UPSes, when the battery dies (which will take longer than with a lead-acid battery), the whole device is also going to the landfill.

    And lastly, you have the problem that while lead-acid batteries are pretty mature and prices are pretty stable, LFP battery prices are coming down (and sodium-ion might start competing with them for fixed batteries). If batteries are cheaper in the future, waiting means a better deal.

    I don’t currently run a UPS on my systems (though I have in the past). I kind of decided that if I’m going to run a UPS, I’m probably going to just bite the bullet and use the combination of a traditional lead-acid UPS and an LFP powerstation, with the UPS plugged into the powerstation. In that configuration, the powerstation provides provides the longer-running power, and the UPS deals with short transfer time and warning computer systems that power is about to go out. This isn’t perfect, because (a) your computing devices can’t see the remaining charge on the powerstation in an outage (b) at some point, one still has to toss the LFP powerstation, and (c) there’s a little extra hardware involved. However, it also has a number of benefits:

    • Lead-acid UPSes pretty much always have replaceable batteries. One can keep the UPS around, though the batteries will have to be periodically replaced.

    • The UPS will provide time for the system to shut down.

    • UPSes are designed specifically for this, and have short transfer times. You don’t need to worry the way one might about a powerstation having marginal transfer time.

    • You can get a lot of AC-related functionality in UPSes, like online capability (which will clean up the power, if you want), which isn’t generally available in powerstations.

    • You can upgrade the “powerstation”, even (if you want) doing a build-your-own thing with separate cells and an inverter and charge controller (which is generally more cost-effective for larger systems) down the line. These discrete-component systems are also a lot easier to provide human monitoring of remaining charge, since you can pick the components (and worst case, all you need to do is connect a voltage sensor that can talk to a computer to it), though they don’t integrate as nicely off-the-shelf with something like NUT as do traditional UPSes.

    I’m not saying that this UPS+separate-battery-system is the only route to take, but I spent some time banging my head on it, and wanted to share if anyone else is similarly thinking about the same thing – that there may be a good argument to have a traditional UPS and some kind of separate battery system.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Alright let's see pictures of your super nice rack-mounted, professionally installed labs. I'll start 🙃English
    2·
    11 hours ago

    Old system 76 machine from a while back. Its what is running a majority of my services for self hosting. Only one screw keeps the case together, since I get into the insides quite often.

    If you get bored and adventurous:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_case_screws

    Computer case screws are the hardware used to secure parts of a PC to the case. Although there are numerous manufacturers of computer cases, they have generally used three thread sizes.

    The #6-32 UNC screws are often found on 3.5" hard disk drives and the case’s body to secure the covers. The M3 threaded holes are often found on 5.25" optical disc drives, 3.5" floppy drives, and 2.5" drives. Motherboards and other circuit boards often use a #6-32 UNC standoff. #4-40 UNC thumb screws are often found on the ends of DVI, VGA, serial and parallel connectors.

    You might be able to get a box of thumbscrews in the appropriate diameter and go toolless. I’ve had a number of computer cases that ship with those (my current desktop case just uses magnets, doesn’t even have the thumbscrews). I have had a lot of less-than-ideal toolless things in the past, including poorly-designed toolless hard drive mounting stuff that wound up being a lot more work than the traditional tool-requiring stuff, but for the screws that keep the case closed, going toolless has always been a big win for me.