Skip Navigation

PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]

@ PorkrollPosadist @hexbear.net

Posts
64
Comments
1078
Joined
6 yr. ago

Hexbear's resident machinist, absentee mastodon landlord, jack of all trades

Talk to me about astronomy, photography, electronics, ham radio, programming, the means of production, and how we might expropriate them.>

  • Join the Pledge to boycott lemmy.world! [GenAI]

    Jump

  • I feel there needs to be a more nuanced federating system, wherein rogue admins can be banned from interacting with an instance and its users without splitting the whole fediverse apart.

    The core of the problem is that someone must hold the keys to the server, and this person has absolute power. They can change the software, they can manipulate the database, and they can observe every piece of information which passes through their hands. These capabilities, though ripe for abuse, are prerequisites to operating such a system (privacy can be improved with E2EE, but it is not a panacea).

    The Fediverse model already does a lot to limit the capabilities of administrators like this. Administrators hold absolute power only over communities and users which are hosted on their servers - beyond that, their power is limited. There is nothing an admin can do to prevent users on third party instances from interacting with one-another.

    At the end of the day, this is fundamentally a social problem which requires social solutions, not technical ones. The solutions will take the form of social organization and governance, not a technical feature where the users can theoretically ban the person with root access to the server.

    Communities are a natural unit of organization to take up, but the Reddit model of consumer-focused communities does very little to build social cohesion. Owning a 3D printer or a bicycle does not make you a member of a community. Posting Neofetch screenshots of your Archlinux machine does not make you a member of a community. A community is a place where you actually recognize and connect with the people you're interacting with, rather than just gathering around an avatar like moths to a flame. Like maybe it starts out talking about bikes, but all the off topic shit, the gags, the ways the hobby intersects with the real world through shared experiences are what make a community. The way members navigate controversies (or things which are dead simple, but spun into controversies for external reasons) make it a community.

    If the subreddit or Lemmy community were deleted tomorrow, can you contact any of the regulars on other platforms? Can you get the ball rolling on re-establishing it elsewhere? If it is truly such a shallow thing where you don't even know any of the other members, it is hardly a community, and it hardly has the strength to navigate these dilemmas. On the other hand, if the social cohesion is there, people will have established reputations, and trust can be placed in them. They can actually organize this type of platform migration in the event it becomes necessary (or when the writing is on the wall) and bring people with them.

    If you're not there yet, the best thing you can do is host some regular ice breakers. Take a hypothetical 3D printing community. Instead of just being a sink for "look at the model I downloaded from Thingiverse and printed" or "look at the machine I just unboxed" posts, have a weekly "what projects / mods are you working on"? thread. Get people talking about what they're doing instead of just posting photos of the product they bought. It might start slow depending on the subject, but it gets people talking about UNIQUELY interesting things, and then you'll always recognize the person who's designing flyweight battle robots or the person who converted their machine to print chocolate.

    Then you'll know who to hit up when the admins are fucking around.

  • Trump says US has "captured" Venezuelan President Maduro and his wife in "large scale strike" - latest

    Jump

  • This sentimental attachment to the Constitution shared by many Americans is ultimately self-defeating. We choose to bear this 250 year old sclerotic republic like a yoke around our necks. We look at the innumerable harm it unleashes on people inside and outside of its borders as the consequences of misleadership, instead of taking Stafford Beer's advice and reaching the conclusion that the purpose of a system is what it does.

    When public approval for the institutions chartered in Articles I, II, and III are all deeply underwater, the path to judicial reform is sealed off for a generation, and the path to constitutional amendments is completely impossible (requiring the approval of no less than 78 state legislatures), it is time to consider that this thing is a liability. It cannot be fixed or restored in any meaningful sense without producing the outcome you see in front of you today. If you want a different outcome, you need to build the system differently.

    Take some of the good bits. The Bill of Rights is a good start (but only a start, and woefully insufficient for our age). But don't shackle yourself or your political movement to this sinking ship. Don't be the last person wringing your hands about the desecration of a document that nobody has taken seriously for generations.

    Get rid of the bicameral legislatures. The Founders explicitly wrote that these were created for undemocratic purposes. Get rid of the lifetime appointments. Get rid of all the explicit exceptions granted for putting down uprisings and slave rebellions. Explicitly prohibit the private consolidation of media and material resources. There is a lot of garbage in this constitution that we could get rid of. It is not a magical document by any stretch of the imagination.

    Otherwise we play this game where we wait and see for five generations whether or not the situation of media monopolization or partisan gerrymandering can be marginally improved. We don't have time for this shit.

  • Executives of largest US teachers union overrule members vote. Refuse to sever ties with the ADL.

    Jump

  • Despite the committee voting not to sever the relationship with the ADL, the NEA called on the organization to evolve in some of its policies.

    Motherfuckers think we live in Whoville and that they can convince the Grinch to embrace the spirit of Christmas.

  • LA Times reports that Palm Springs bomber had an account on Lemmy.world

    Jump

  • Slop. @hexbear.net
    PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net

    Retrospective: u/ChanceHappening attempts to motivate Redditors to scalp our domain

    old.reddit.com /r/Anarchy4Everyone/comments/1in78oa/anyone_want_to_do_some_praxis_and_buy_tankie/
  • Locked

    4-days account describes Lemmy as toxic on /r/RedditAlternatives

    Jump

  • Where are the centrist and right leaning spaces? As far as I can tell, they’re almost completely empty.

    You're in it, buddy.

    Also:

  • hexbear @hexbear.net
    PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net

    Mod statement on the lionization of Luigi Mangione

  • Bulletins and News Discussion from October 21st to October 27th, 2024 - Swimming Back To The Titanic - COTW: Moldova

    Jump

  • This is a sign that the United States is entering its Gorbachev era.

  • ["Listeria, Imma let you finish..." news] E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald’s quarter pounders has killed one person and hospitalized 10, with 49 cases identified so far.

    Jump

  • BDS actually stands for Bypassing Digestive Syndromes.

  • The entire internet is getting ruined to safeguard Israeli propaganda

    Jump 
  •  text
        
$ whois lib.rehab
Domain Name: lib.rehab
Registry Domain ID: f265d2b186ee4f149136727a11e3155c-DONUTS
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.dynadot.com
Registrar URL: http://dynadot.com
Updated Date: 2024-07-30T13:43:50Z
Creation Date: 2023-06-15T13:43:25Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2025-06-15T13:43:25Z
[...]

    The registration probably lapsed (because it was a meme domain) and somebody snapped it up in June 2023

    While I'm at it, chapo.su also lapsed (but I doubt someone is going to bother stealing that. You need to apply and provide ID to the Russian state to register those domains. You can't just plug a credit card number into godaddy).

  • The entire internet is getting ruined to safeguard Israeli propaganda

    Jump

  • 4: building a physical mesh network to link nearby computers together over fast links (BATMAN for no se vende mesh here in LA)

    5: developing a mobile adhoc mesh routing protocol that can setup a usable internet using only smartphones that interoperates with the fixed mesh noted in 4 (this will likely replace BATMAN, but is also a research problem and would represent a novel capability)

    I think there is a strong tendency to put the cart before the horse when it comes to mesh networking. People imagine how cool it would be to have widespread mesh networks, but setting up a digital radio doohickey accomplishes nothing if there is nobody listening on the other end. We need social organizations first. Then, communications technology can be built to serve the needs of these organizations. It is very much a local organizing problem. The tech does not circumvent this.

  • The entire internet is getting ruined to safeguard Israeli propaganda

    Jump

  • There are secondary / tertiary methods of contact. People have accounts on other platforms like Twitter, Matrix, Telegram, Discord, Mastodon, Reddit, etc. There are other watering holes people can regain contact. The community would be utterly fractured, but such was the case when Reddit dropped the hammer on us. I think our past experience served well. Establish a life raft. Gather the troops. Plot a course forward.

    That said, we were relatively lucky last time. The regime of censorship has sharpened significantly in the past four years since then. If the US government were to lean on Hexbear's ISP (or domain registrar), a life raft on a service like Discord would fold like a house of cards (not to mention being 100% wiretapped). We would need more robust options. There is the Matrix server, but it is tied up with the same infrastructure. The people who use it have accounts distributed among various Matrix servers though.

  • The entire internet is getting ruined to safeguard Israeli propaganda

    Jump

  • No. We lost lib.rehab See for yourself.

  • Do Kamala and the Dems want to lose?

    Jump

  • I don't think so. They are technocratic institutionalists through and through, and Trump is a threat to the stability of these institutions. This is what it looks like when the Democrats are TRYING to win. They just have absolutely run out of gas.

  • "It was kind of like finding a dead body."

    Jump

  • lmao

    This is a perfect example of how China and TikTok are a threat to the US. China controls TikTok and can promote a "trend" of stealing Harris/Walz signs so that idiot kids will do that and indirectly favor Trump. They literally have a horde of moron kids who will do anything that is put in front of them if it's framed correctly.

    This is why I sincerely believe genocide is our immediate future. These people think that their side can do no wrong and their "enemies" have no value.

  • The entire internet is getting ruined to safeguard Israeli propaganda

    Jump

  • They will turn the screws on the hosting providers if (and when) it comes to it.

  • I'm in Twubble 🫨

    Jump

  • Your software will run in the pod. Your software will eat the bugs.

  • I'm in Twubble 🫨

    Jump

  • Ntopng seems useful. They're really trying to push licenses for "enterprise" features, but the "community edition" is available under the GPLv3 license and allows you to track throughput to remote hosts. Not sure how much of a performance impact it makes.

  • I'm in Twubble 🫨

    Jump

  • Do scrapers download whole videos?

    I don't know, each one is designed for a specific purpose. Some people might scrape for archival reasons, some might do it for AI training data, some might do it to build analytic user profiles, some might do it for academic reasons, some might do it to build search indices. I can't think of a great reason to just download all the videos, but people do really dumb shit when someone else is paying the bill.

    I don't know where to begin for traffic monitoring like that. HetrixTools?'

    Unfortunately I don't have any great recommendations here. I'm looking into this myself. Ideally you'll want a tool that can monitor the network interface and aggregate data on bandwidth per IP or MAC. That will at least give you an idea if anything seems egregious. (if it is by IP, it could be a large number of machines behind a NAT though, like a university or something). ntopng has piqued my interest. I might try it out and report back.

  • I'm in Twubble 🫨

    Jump

  • Going by the server stats, that's 10% of the uploaded media, which should be pretty good I imagine (assuming a fraction of videos are popular and get a lot of requests while most videos don't get many views at all).

    I guess another potential thing to look for is if people are deliberately trying to DOS the site. Not quite bringing it down, but draining resources. I could imagine some radlibs or NAFO dorks trying something like this if they caught wind of the place. Could also be caused by scrapers (a growing problem on the Fediverse and the Internet generally, driven by legions of tech bros trying to feed data to their bespoke AI models so they can be bought out by Andreesen-Horowitz).

  • I'm in Twubble 🫨

    Jump

  • I'm in Twubble 🫨

    Jump

  • How much of this is between TankieTube and end users / peer instances vs. back and forth between TankieTube and the object storage provider? I don't know how they're measuring this, but if they are combining upload and download together as "traffic," then you are getting dinged twice for every video TT proxies (download from object storage, upload to end user - and traffic between data centers can rack up FAST). If a lot of round trips are being made between TT and the object storage provider, you might be able to alleviate this somewhat with caching (requiring more local disks) on the instance. Ideally, you should cache as much video as possible on the main server granting whatever headroom is needed for postgres etc. and fetch from object storage only on a cache miss.

    Alternately, depending on the object storage provider, it might be possible for end users to download the media directly from them (using HTTP redirects or a CNAME record), but object storage usually meters bandwidth and charges for it (may be preferable to getting shut down, but also may be EXPENSIVE depending on the host).

    If none of this is sufficient, you might need to look into load balancing / CDN. I know jack shit about this though, I just run a Mastodon instance and keep any media requested from object storage cached on the VPS for 7 days. It does not make optimal use of the disk, but it is sufficient for the use case (MUCH smaller media files, and heavily biased by the user interface towards recent posts).

  • memes @hexbear.net
    PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net

    New Trolley Problem Dropped

  • libre @hexbear.net
    PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net

    FreeCAD 1.0 Release Imminent

    blog.freecad.org /2024/09/10/the-first-release-candidate-of-freecad-1-0-is-out/
  • libre @hexbear.net
    PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net

    Caca Labs

    caca.zoy.org /wiki
  • memes @hexbear.net
    PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net

    Spices

  • Games @hexbear.net
    PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them] @hexbear.net

    Just finished the Strawberry Jam intermediate lobby. 🥳