Spyke

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EVs Could Last Nearly Forever—If Car Companies Let Them

I understand the sentiment... But... This is a terribly reasoned and researched article. We only need to look at the NASA to see how this is flawed.

Blown Capacitors/Resistors, Solder failing over time and through various conditions, failing RAM/ROM/NAND chips. Just because the technology has less "moving parts" doesn't mean its any less susceptible to environmental and age based degradation. And we only get around those challenges by necessity and really smart engineers.

The article uses an example of a 2014 Model S - but I don't think it's fair to conflate 2 Million Kilometers in the span of 10 years, vs the same distance in the span of the quoted 74 years. It's just not the same. Time brings seasonal changes which happen regardless if you drive the vehicle or not. Further, in many cases, the car computers never completely turn off, meaning that these computers are running 24/7/365. Not to mention how Tesla's in general have poor reliability as tracked by multiple third parties.

Perhaps if there was an easy-access panel that allowed replacement of 90% of the car's electronics through standardized cards, that would go a long way to realizing a "Buy it for Life" vehicle. Assuming that we can just build 80 year, "all-condition" capacitors, resistors, and other components isn't realistic or scalable.

Whats weird is that they seem to concede the repairability aspect at the end, without any thought whatsoever as to how that impacts reliability.

In Conclusion: A poor article, with a surface level view of reliability, using bad examples (One person's Tesla) to prop up a narrative that EVs - as they exist - could last forever if companies wanted.

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Downsides of self hosting fediverse from homelab / locally?

On a technical level, user count matters less than the user count and comment count of the instances you subscribe to. Too many subscriptions can overwhelm smaller instances and saturate a network from the perspective of Packets Per Second and your ISPs routing capacity - not to mention your router. Additionally, most ISPs block traffic traffic going to your house on Port 80 - so you'd likely need to put it behind a cloudflare tunnel for anything resembling reliability. Your ISP may be different and it's always worth asking what restrictions they have on self-hosted services (non-business use-cases specifically). Otherwise going with your ISP's business plan is likely a must. Outside of that, yes, you'll need a beefy router or switch (or multiple) to handle the constant packets coming into your network.

Then there's a security aspect. What happens if you're site is breached in a way that an attacker gains remote execution? Did you make sure to isolate this network from the rest of your devices? If not, you're in for a world of hurt.

These are all issues that are mitigated and easier to navigate on a VPS or cloud provider.

As for the non-technical issues:

There's also the problem of moderation. What I mean by that is that, as a server owner you WILL end up needing to quarantine, report, and submit illegal images to the authorities. Even if you use a whitelist of only the most respectable instances. It might not happen soon, but it's only a matter of time before your instance happens to be subscribed to a popular external community while it gets a nasty attack. Leaving you to deal with a stressful cleanup.

When you run this on a homelab on consumer hardware, it's easier for certain government entities to claim that you were not performing your due diligence and may even be complicit in the content's proliferation. Now, of course, proving such a thing is always the crux, but in my view I'd rather have my site running on things that look as official as possible. The closer it resembles what an actual business might do, the better I think I'd fare under a more targeted attack - from a legal/compliance standpoint.

meta

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Instance admin updates + Blahaj

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I'm in agreement here, and given Blahaj's trigger-happy nature when it comes to defederation, I'm not sure I care all that much.

I've seen them defederate so many other instances for "wrong-think" and I don't think Snowe should feel like he's in the wrong here.

It's only a matter of time before they defederate from my own instance, tucson.social, because I don't think 100% like them. I apparently support trans genocide because... checks notes... I don't think that doxxing far right reactionaries/extremists is an effective tactic for garnering sympathy and building a movement.

Yup, that's it. Apparently that opinion makes you a Nazi sympathizer in these circles.

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good luck little buddy, see you in 5 years

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He did this thing where he unified his shell history across thousands of hosts - it was super handy given our extensive use of Ansible playbooks and database managment commands. He could then use a couple hotkeys to query this history within a new open document. Super handy for writing out shell command steps or wrapping things in a bash script you're working on. Unfortunately I don't really have a link to HOW to do this, I just remember thinking "Oh my god, that would save me SO much time".

Nowadays, I just have this giant document with hundreds of our runbook commands and enable Github Copilot to make it SUPER easy to do the same thing without establishing an SSH session in the backend.

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The Future is NOT Self-Hosted

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Hi! This is what I'm trying to do with tucson.social. Wish the city would get back to me. I don't want to own/operate Tucson.social alone perpetually. Lol.

It would allow me to expand to a lot more community services outside of social media, chat, and Meetup platforms.

There's dozens of us! Dozens!

linux

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The end of Linux Gaming Central

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I mean sure maybe 10 years ago. But most static sites like blogs and such can fit entirely on a cloudflare page worker under the free tier. Or heck, even the free allotment on AWS S3 or other object storage providers.

I mean, perhaps this isn't a static site and it's built on some sort of CMS and has a postgres database in the background. In that case it probably runs around $5 to $10 a month.

Of course, this all presumes that the person setting this up is fairly savvy about the offerings available. I see a lot of people making silly decisions in this space, thinking that they need some full fat virtual private server, when all they really need is an object storage bucket behind a DNS c-name.

gaming

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What are peoples thoughts on games requiring always online? How does it affect your enjoyment of those games?

Honestly? I used to not care. I usually have internet connectivity and have at least one backup method of getting online.

But now my father is psuedo-homeless and there's so many games he's missed out on because his Van/RV didn't get enough cell signal to work.

After that I understood the problem in a far deeper way.

Games were accessible to me as a kid, not because I could afford them, but because I could just pop in my neighbors CD (and enter their CD key if needed) and be off to the races! If I were to grow up poor now, it would be miserable.

Always-online "single player" games, huge downloads, and if you happen to avoid all that you STILL need to check in online occassionally to use your own Steam Library.

I mean, if 15 year old me existed today, I'd still be pirating things but it would be through a network of friends with Blu-ray burners and good internet connections.

These days, I try to buy on GOG only, and only their non-DRM titles. Then I can throw them onto a samsung t5 and sneaker net it to my dad without worrying if Steam/Origin/Blizzard/Epic will get in the way.

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How can the Fediverse protect against AI slop?

Hi there! Admin of Tucson.social here.

I think that the only way the fediverse can honestly handle this is through local/regional nodes not interest based global nodes.

Ideally this would manifest as some sort of non-profit entity that would work with municipalities to create community owned spaces that have paid moderation.

So then comes the problem of folks not agreeing with a local nodes moderation staff - but that's also WHY it should be local. It's much easier to petition and organize against someone who exists in your town than some guy across the globe who happens to own a large fediverse node.

This model just doesn't work (IMO) if nodes can't be accountable to a local community. If you don't like how Mastodon, or lemmy.world are moderated you have zero recourse. For Tucson.social - citizens of Tucson can appeal to me directly, and because they are my fellow citizens I take them FAR more seriously.

Only then will people be trusting enough to allow for the key element to protecting against AI Slop. Human Indemnification Systems. Right now, if you wanted to ask the community of lemmy.world to provide proof they are human, you'd wind up with an exodus. There's just no trust for something like that and it would be hard to acquire enough trust.

With a local node, that conversation is still difficult, but we can do things that just don't scale with global nodes. Things like validating a person by meeting them to mark them as "indemnified" on a platform, or utilizing local political parties to validate if a given person is "real" or not using voter rolls.

But yeah, this is a bit rambly, but I'll conclude that this is a problem that exists at the intersection between trust and scale and that I believe that local nodes are the only real solution that can handle both.

android

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PSA - If your Pixel no longer connects to your wifi after the most recent update - disable WPA3 on your router.

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No kidding, my Pixel graveyard is too damn big... I wish other phones had nearly the AI/Assistant features that Pixels had because I definitely don't want to switch to the Apple ecosystem and found the OnePlus experience flawed, while the Samsung experience feels bloated.

I'd go with a Fairphone, but for some reason it's impossible to get "officially" here in the U.S.

autism

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Is your safe food healthy?

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A safe food is anything that an Autistic person can eat when they are experiencing a sensory issue flare up. These foods will usually have a person's preferred textures and flavors. I've seen folks on other threads say things like "Bread and Butter" or a PB&J - usually things like that.

I think most people have "safe" foods, but don't realize it. Example - Chicken Noodle soup is still popular with folks who come down with a cold even if they never get sensory flare ups.

So I suppose the question for those who aren't sensitive to sensory information (like myself), it's - "What do you eat when you feel sick and don't want to eat anything?"

For me it's still a broad range of things. Sometimes it's Japanese Curry and Rice, other times its Indian Sambar (Reeeaaaally clears the sinuses).

I do tend to steer clear of oily dishes like Szechuan Eggplant (and a lot of other Ameri-Chinese dishes as well) when I'm feeling sick or sensitive, though.

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Demand ad companies take security seriously first and maybe we'll talk.

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I used to subscribe to YouTube premium as of just a few days ago. Even without the ads. There was something very seriously wrong with the suggestion algorithm.

I was getting cartel violence videos, and dead animal videos. Never watched one before in my life. Yet. YouTube seems to think that I should want to watch this crock of shit. This started coming up about 6 months ago. Until now I've been reporting each video as they come up. But that doesn't seem to help at all.

At this point I think YouTube is a danger to society - if it's recommending cartel violence videos to me unsolicited, what are they suggesting to my nieces?

I have completely nuked it from my life. Almost all of the YouTubers I like are on Nebula or Floatplane so it doesn't feel like I'm missing much.