guitars are real

Hi, sorry I just saw this. “SFF” is short for “small form factor.” It’s just industry jargon for “a small PC.” They tend to be designed to use less power which makes them a good fit for home servers. Pretty much any line of PC sold to businesses, like Dell Optiplex or HP EliteDesk, will have small form factor variants.

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Shout out for ODROID, their product revision cycles take too long (lmao why are they still selling a 32-bit chip that was an iffy investment back in 2013), but when they drop new stuff, it tends to be great.

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Bonus: there is a literally endless supply of used x86 SFF hardware from large institutions, so unlike SBC’s, there’s no special, weird supply chain managed by an English educational nonprofit that could just suddenly decide to not sell to the public for years at a time.

Counterpoint: with some subject matter, you don’t need nuance or subtext. Hence why IB remains, in my opinion, his greatest work. It’s one of the few subjects where you don’t need nuance so the good technical aspects of his filmmaking doesn’t just wash out in all the blood and gore. All you have to do is cook up a story in the Trek universe where his filmmaking style would be an asset (hint: have the story revolve around killing fascists), don’t give him complete control, and make him work in tandem with Star Trek old hands like Brannon Braga or Jonathan Frakes and I honestly think you’d end up with something good.

Personally, I think Star Trek is good enough that it deserves more and more interesting film treatments than it’s gotten. Tarantino Trek would upset a lot of people just because it wasn’t an anodyne feel-good PG movie, but if it was good, we could end up with other, better directors doing even more interesting things with Trek.

I didn’t say give him full artistic freedom!

Because you can only tell so many stories when literally all of your characters are required to be so narrow and flat it becomes a matter of debate and discussion when they do or say anything that would make them seem like real people.

I still maintain that a Quentin Tarantino Trek likely would have been the greatest Trek film ever made (not a high bar though). Come on, imagine Inglourious Basterds set during the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. But the rights holders have always been Trek’s biggest enemy because for the most part they just want to make something safe that will get people viewing, when what’s great about Trek is how expansive the universe is and how much room there is to tell stories of every kind. Literature about the far future, whose entire point is how expansive and diverse that far future could be, shouldn’t be so stylistically narrow that people get their knickers in a twist when Picard swears. But since it is, we can never have something as good or even just interesting as Quentin Tarantino Trek.

“You punched me! Picard never punched me!”

Yeah to this day Windows probably still makes a better workstation OS overall. I use Linux on everything cause I like it, and everybody always expects me to tell them to switch, but I only do that if I think there’s a chance it’ll be a good experience for them.

Well, you see, nobody else is saving anymore, so we have to save for the rest of you obsessively saves page

Encrypting your disk only provides at-rest protection, meaning there are entire swathes of physical attacks it provides zero protection against. Tons of stuff a malicious actor can do during runtime with physical access that you’d never notice. it quite literally only protects against thugs smashing your door in and physically walking away with the disk.

So if you’ve painted yourself into a corner with a baby’s first config, what you can do to step up your level of data protection (until you can redo your setup properly) is creating an encrypted filesystem or filesystem image (use fallocate to create a large empty file, then connect it to a loopback device, encrypt with LUKS, and use it as a virtual filesystem), rsync your data directory to it, and then unlock/mount it at boot under the directory where Nextcloud is configured to store your data. It’s god-awful, but this should be more or less transparent to Nextcloud if you do it right, and then at least your data directory gets at-rest encryption, and tbqh if someone is smash and grabbing your hard drive they are probably more interested in your data than they are your OS config.

I wouldn’t say this is an acceptable or preferable alternative to FDE, but it sounds like you’re still figuring out the best ways to set these things up, and this will get you more protection than none. But, realistically, you should probably not worry about it too much and should think about the security of your setup as a learning exercise/study in best practices.

or maybe it’s trying to highlight that it’s also secure?

I wish more content creators would upload to PeerTube (or something like it). I get it, there’s no instances with good monetization options, it just sucks we’re all stuck in various walled gardens because of how expensive video delivery is.

Exactly, It’s a commonly cited example from Manufacturing Consent because he broke it down really well there. But everybody who just read Chomsky for the first time then goes out and tries to correlate every single front-page story with the back-page story it’s supposed to be covering up, like they’ve only ever used a single propaganda technique or being predictable wouldn’t undermine the value of the propaganda.

You know, I appreciate Chomsky, but his work is mainly intended to get you reading and thinking more on your own than to give you all the answers. Not everything that happens in the news media is a distraction from something else just because he broke down that one propaganda trick really well. Sometimes, events stay glued to our screens because they really are the main propaganda event of the day, and they really do want you to spend all day and all night thinking about it.

In this case, Israel needs tons and tons of people frothing at the mouth supporting genocide, and Palestinians are needing just as many, if not more, to consider that genocide may be wrong, and they’re playing tug-of-war in the media. That’s all I’m seeing.

It was a really bad look to scramble to get him back once he triggered a mass exodus. Having him at the helm is either so dangerous for AI safety they had to push him out with a bureaucratic coup, or it isn’t. Doing that severely hurts their credibility on multiple levels (did they really not realize how popular he was within the company and that the price was going to be some of their top researchers?) and after pushing him out the way they did, they should hardly be surprised that Microsoft hoovered him up before the weekend was even over. Why would they give him a few days to process the betrayal and maybe come back around?

After this, we shouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft suddenly starts sabotaging OpenAI until it has no choice but to sell itself off to MS, at which point Altman gets all his toys back.

Stuff like this is why I never took their safety mission all that seriously. It was going to bump up against the business imperatives before long, and given the level of interest business has in AI… what else was the outcome going to be other than corporate sabotage and malfeasance?

Hate that Altman guy, he’s Zuckerberg with more important technology, but somewhere in the mix of articles I read one of the board members complained that “this board is not the group of people you want to see spearheading AI safety.” Yeah, I guess not!

The most useful philosophy I’ve come across is “make the OS instance disposable.” That means an almost backups-first approach. Everything of importance to me is thoroughly backed up so once main box goes kaput, I just have to pull the most recent copy of the dataset and provision it on a new OS, maybe new hardware if needed. These days, it’s not that difficult. Docker makes scripting backups easy as pie. You write your docker-compose so all config and program state lives in a single directory. Back up the directory, and all you need to get up and running again with your services is access to Docker Hub to fetch the application code.

Some downsides with this approach (Docker’s security model sorta assumes you can secure/segment your home network better than most people are actually able to), but honestly, for throwing up a small local service quickly it’s kind of fantastic. Also, if you decide to move away from Docker the experience will give you insight into what amounts to program state for the applications you use which will make doing the same thing without Docker that much easier.

I like that conclusion, nice and simple. If the current regime/system collapses (I’m not 100% sure it will, but I think it’s likely enough it’s worth thinking about seriously), the solarpunk post-capitalist dreams a lot of people have can only come either as a niche within a neo-feudalist system, or after thoroughly and decisively replacing capitalist social relations with something more advanced and better that works so well there’s no room/support to bring back older, more oppressive social relations. Or rather, any pleasant, independent subsistence-level enclaves that develop will later be subjugated and integrated into whatever regime develops in the aftermath. If people don’t get together and figure out a new system of production that can replace capitalism, we will have neofeudalism. Do you want redneck warlords? Because that’s how you get redneck warlords.

Call those new relations whatever you like, but without something to fill in the gap and keep us moving forward, we will fall back into older, worse social patterns after everything collapses.