reflection:

there was a time in my life where i was obsessed with high-density/high-performance computing. having command of hyperscalar clusters and workstations that could scorch the earth was a deeply embedded part of my work and research years ago.

over the years i realised that i didn’t require access to these sort of things to conduct research and work. in fact it became quite the antithesis to my philosophical belief system. in the past my work focused on space-time complexity and performance measured in sub-ms. when i look back at how much energy was consumed to experiment, my head falls low.

in addition, by becoming dependent on this tier of machinery i created multiple fail points in my toolchain since we designed systems that had an inherent requirement for massive power and scale.

in the end, it felt like having a raptor system to open chrome.

these days i’m quite pleased with my thin/low-power thinkpad i procured for nearly nothing. funny how things work out as you grow older

28h32m

divide by your day wage and determine how many iphones you can buy.

lessons from xx years of self-hosting:

• build a community, not userbase
  
• bots cannot predict human folly
  
• you don’t need 42u of metal to serve a website
  
• communities grow best slow and organically
  
• quality > quantity
  
• automate as much as possible
  
• have your system(s) tell you what’s up || down
  
• add service(s) slowly, understand attack surface(s)
  
• sandbox || isolate pids and services when you can
  
• when stress > fun, revisit self-hosting

recently i’ve been rebuilding many of my workflows striving for efficiency, less key-hopping, less mouse-travel, and overall lower resource consumption. have been changing notes with @mckinley@twtxt.net on this who’s penned an excellent primer on watching online videos like a pro using free software

if you like youtube or other video content but don’t want to fuss with a browser and want to minimise tracking definitely give it a read. i’m adding some bits to my own workflow based on his work. really love where this is going.

tails 5.0 is out

excited to know that it’s been rebuilt off of bullseye which brings the distribution in parity with debian 11 stable.

experience seems to be better so far.

cc: @mckinley@twtxt.net

@prologic@twtxt.net furnace

@mckinley@twtxt.net was just looking at this the other day, dropped it into swarm and it worked a-okay.

been here for a few months and have met some really amazing people. thanks for having me. makes me feel at 127.0.0.1

@prologic@twtxt.net have you considered changing the weekly call time so you and the .au folks aren’t smoked tired and the rest of the group can be half-way awake?

| question the operator, not the machine. for human failure is absolute

• redacted: these old things don’t work, want them?
  
• me: i’ve no room for salvage
  
• redacted: buy you lunch to clear this out?
  
• me: i’m at your front door
  

couple of bad drives replaced. now alpine linux

if it feels too complicated, it likely is.

seems the pod call went on with @screem@yarn.yarnpods.com working out the pwa css problems. i think we should push this as a branch today.

@tkanos@twtxt.net i just realised. when i had li, we were connected. the internet is indeed a smol world.