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u_tamtam

@ u_tamtam @programming.dev

Posts
30
Comments
610
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Telegram Sparks Outrage Over FAQ Changes Even as Key Language on Private Chats Remains.

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  • How it works (to simplify) is them giving up on matrix clients ever becoming performant and well behaving on handheld devices (because of the absurd complexity of the protocol), and, instead of doing something about that, just decided to shift the client logic onto the server and castrating the clients (esp. for offline features). It's also good short-term business because it makes hosting Matrix even more cumbersome and expensive, giving a compelling reason for the type of midscale/corporate deployments previously on the fence about their self-hosting costs (due to poor design and scalability) to just pay Element for that (while probably contemplating an alternative future).

  • Telegram Sparks Outrage Over FAQ Changes Even as Key Language on Private Chats Remains.

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  • Speaking about XMPP, compared to centralized services, at least the "who talks to whom" and metadata concerns in general are partially mitigated by not having all the metadata converge towards a single host, being able to selfhost, and being able to host behind tor/i2p/...

  • Telegram Sparks Outrage Over FAQ Changes Even as Key Language on Private Chats Remains.

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  • Other options for what exactly? Telegram practically has the same privacy and encryption guarantees as late 90's forums and bulletin boards. If you want to learn nothing from that, keep using a centralized nonstandard service deprived of end-to-end encryption!

  • TikTok Stacking Algorithms in Chinese Government’s Favor with Pro-China Content Originating from State-Linked Entities, Study Claims

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  • If you have the impression that there's a dominant, homogeneous "mass" sharing the same opinion, you are right there in the middle of an information bubble and a victim of those "algorithms".

  • Dhole Moments: Against XMPP+OMEMO - Dhole Moments

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  • I'm not a cryptographer, and so I can't really emit a judgement on the poster's abilities or reputation, but what's for sure is that this piece reads more like a bingo card of a person's favourite "crypto stuff" and how partially it overlaps with some characteristics of OMEMO, rather than a thorough and substantiated cryptanalysis of the protocol and its flaws for real-world usages and threats.

    Some snarky remarks remarks like

    OMEMO doesn’t attempt to provide even the vaguest rationale for its design choices, and appears to approach cryptography protocol specification with a care-free attitude.

    are needlessly opinionated, inflammatory and unhelpful, and tell more about the author and their lack of due diligence (in reaching-out to people and reading past public discussions) than build a story of what the problem is, why it matters, and how to remediate it.

    Don't get me wrong, I would love this piece to have been something else, and to reveal actual problems (which incidentally would have been a great boos to the author's credibility and fame, considering that OMEMO underwent several audits and assessments in the recent history, including by several state agencies in the German and French governments…), but here we are, with one more strongly opinionated piece of whatever on the internet, and no meat in it to make the world a better place.

  • What self hosting feels like (It's painful, please help 🥲)

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  • Matrix seemed interesting right until I got to self hosting it. Then, getting to know it from up close, and the absolute trainwreck that the protocol is, made me love XMPP. Matrix has no excuse for being so messy and fragile at this point. You do you, but I decided that it isn't worth my sysadmin time (especially when something like ejabberd is practically fire and forget).

  • Best way to host Nextcloud with Collabora Office?

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  • I don't think our views are so incompatible, I just think there are two conflictual paradigms supporting a false dichotomy: one that's prevalent in the business world where "cost of labour shrinks cost of hardware" and where it's acceptable to trade some (= a lot of) efficiency for convenience/saving manhours. But this is the "self-hosted" community, where people are running things on their own hardware, often in their own house, paying the high price of inefficiency very directly (electricity costs, less living space, more heat/noise, etc).

    And docker is absolutely fine and relevant in this space, but only when "done right", i.e. when containers are not just spun up as isolated black boxes, but carefully organized as to avoid overlapping services and resources wastage, in which case managing containers ends-up requiring more effort, not less.

    But this is absolutely not what you suggest. What you suggest would have a much greater wastage impact than "few percent of cpu usage or a little bit of ram", because essentially you propose for every container to ship its own web server, application server, database, etc… We are no longer talking "few percent" of overhead of the container stack, we are talking "whole new machines" software and compute requirements.

    So, in short, I don't think there's a very large overlap between the business world throwing money at their problems and the self-hosting community, and so the behaviours are different (there's more than one way to use containers, and my observation is that it goes very differently in either). I'm also not hostile to containers in general, but they cannot be recommended in good faith to self-hosters as a solution that is both efficient and convenient (you must pick one).

  • Linkwarden - An open-source collaborative bookmark manager to collect, organize and preserve webpages | July 2024 Update - New iOS App, Full Page Copy, User Administration and more... 🚀

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  • How does that compare to wallabag?

  • Best way to host Nextcloud with Collabora Office?

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  • I don’t care […] because it’s in the container or stack and doesn’t impact anything else running on the system.

    This is obviously not how any of this works: down the line those stacks will very much add-up and compete against each other for CPU/memory/IO/…. That's inherent to the physical nature of the hardware, its architecture and the finiteness of its resources. And here come the balancing act, it's just unavoidable.

    You may not notice it as the result of having too much hardware thrown at it, I wouldn't exactly call this a winning strategy long term, and especially not in the context of self-hosting where you directly foot the bill.

    Moreover, those server components which you are needlessly multiplying (web servers, databases, application runtimes, …) have spent decades optimizing for resource pooling (with shared buffers, caching, event scheduling, …). These efforts are all thrown away when run for a single client/container further lowering (and quite drastically at that) the headroom for optimization and scaling.

  • Best way to host Nextcloud with Collabora Office?

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  • That's… a tool in the bucket for that. But I'm not really sure that's the point here?

  • Best way to host Nextcloud with Collabora Office?

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  • I don't think containers are bad, nor that the performance lost in abstractions really is significant. I just think that running multiple services on a physical machine is a delicate balancing act that requires knowledge of what's truly going on, and careful sharing of resources, sometimes across containers. By the time you've reached that point (and know what every container does and how its services are set-up), you've defeated the main reason why many people use containers in the first place (just to fire and forget black boxes that just work, mostly), and only added layers of tooling and complexity between yourself and what's going on.

  • Hacktivists release two gigabytes of Heritage Foundation data (Project 2025)

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  • Would that make a difference?

  • Easy

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  • With only one having your interests at heart. An easy choice.

  • L’UE impose jusqu’à 38 % de droits de douane supplémentaires sur les véhicules électriques chinois

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  • Tu veux dire, après n'avoir rien fait quand le précédent dumping chinois a fait couler l'industrie photovoltaïque allemande ? Notre transition énergétique se porte en effet bien mieux d'un monopole et de nos capitaux confiés à une puissance à l'autre bout du monde...

  • OrcaSlicer V2.1.0 Official Release

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  • The UI of Prusa slicer is hot garbage though.

    I give orca/bambu the edge for "prettier on screenshots", but in practice, I don't find their UI paradigm to be more efficient nor convenient.

  • Web publishers brace for carnage as Google adds AI answers

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  • I'd like to share your optimism, but what you suggest leaving us to "deal with" isn't "AI" (which has been present in web search for decades as increasingly clever summarization techniques...) but LLMs, a very specific and especially inscrutable class of AI which has been designed for "sounding convincing", without care for correctness or truthfulness. Effectively, more humans' time will be wasted reading invented or counterfeit stories (with no easy way to tell); first-hand information will be harder to source and acknowledge by being increasingly diluted into the AI-generated noise.

    I also haven't seen any practical advantage to using LLM prompts vs. traditional search engines in the general case: you end up typing more, for the sake of "babysitting" the LLM, and get more to read as a result (which is, again, aggravated by the fact that you are now given a single source/one-sided view on the matter, without citation, reference nor reproducible step to this conclusion).

    Last but not least, LLMs are an environmental disaster in the making, the computational cost is enormous (in new hardware and electricity), and we are at a point where all companies partaking in this new gold rush are selling us a solution in need of a problem, every one of them having to justify the expenditure (so far, none is making a profit out of it, which is the first step towards offsetting the incurred pollution).

  • Use WhatsApp without a smartphone?

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  • You can always give a shot at using a third party client (possibly acting as bridge for other/better protocols, like e.g. slidge.im>xmpp or the buggy matrix equivalent), but you need to keep in mind that they will all require you to authenticate (and remain authenticated) using a smartphone, and that usage of 3rd party clients is forbidden from WA's terms and conditions (which may lead to your account being blocked/deleted).

  • Looking for Cloud Storage Replacement, but I don't like NextCloud

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  • How about nextcloud with only the bare minimum amount of plugins? Filles alone is pretty snappy.

  • Looking for Cloud Storage Replacement, but I don't like NextCloud

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  • Pydio used to be called ajaxplorer and was a pretty solid and lightweight (although featureful) solution, but then they rewrote the UI with lots of misguided choices (touch controls and android inspired interactions on desktop devices) and it became so horrendous, heavy and clunky that I almost forgot about it. I wonder if they reversed the trend (but from the screenshots it doesn't look so).

  • Looking for Cloud Storage Replacement, but I don't like NextCloud

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  • Aren't they not the same thing at all?