It’s also worth mentioning that sockets aren’t a real layer, because they’re just an API at the OS level (they’re an abstraction to let application developers use TCP/UDP/etc.). ALSO, in some interpretations, everything above Layer 4 is debatably just the application layer. There’s not necessarily a clean separation between the presentation layer and “application layer” in all applications. That said, the 7 layer model is still useful as a teaching too, but knowing these extra details will give you a more complete understanding (and be less confusing).

Samurai Showdown is a decent fighter

I used pfSense for years and switched to OpenWRT. I highly recommend OpenWRT. pfSense is kinda trash IMHO. I tried to set up traffic shaping, so I could play games while my roommate was watching Netflix, and it just doesn’t work as advertised. I tried like 20 different configurations for the traffic shaping, following all the documentation, guides, countless forum threads, etc, and none of it worked properly when you actually test it. At the end of the day, I concluded that nobody understands how to configure traffic shaping on it and even the developers didn’t realize it was broken.

OpenWRT, on the other hand, just works better out of the box, and has the right level of customizability for home use. It has a way better ecosystem around it where you can download extra packages with GUIs… it’s just much nicer to use, and doesn’t have the QA problems I had with pfSense.

I like that this looks like OG Steam.

DirectX 5, that brings back some memories lol. That’s when 3D started to get serious and it felt like there was a lot of innovation happening quickly (competition with 3dfx’s Glide?).

I’m late to the party here, but did you consider just paying for Mattermost? If it meets your needs, and your organization has 250 people, the cost for licensing is going to be relatively small compared to your IT budget (right?). They have “contact us” pricing, which means you can negotiate it.

As others said, spin down the drives when they’re not in use. Make sure power saving is enabled on the drives and tune them to spin down after some appropriate amount of time. (hdparm lets you customize it on Linux)

Consider also sleeping the NAS when not in use. You can try using Wake-on-LAN to remotely wake it up when you need to use it. Saves on electricity and heat! You could also sleep it on a schedule, in case you need to be online for backups to run at particular times.

Licensing representation matters

It doesn’t, because they’re the copyright owners. Think of their software as dual licensed: They run it themselves under a proprietary license, under which they reserve all rights. That has nothing to do with the AGPL version that they license to you. The AGPL doesn’t take away the rights they have as copyright owners, nor does it preclude dual licensing.

(Are you a bot? Your reply is written like ChatGPT, and it has that self-defeating logic that ChatGPT has sometimes… eg. you wrote that you disagree with me, but then parroted the exact thing that I said.)

This is flat out wrong. If you’re the copyright owner, you’re not licensing the code to yourself. The AGPL is the license under which they’re making the open source version available to YOU. The version they run themselves is proprietary.

Look into DeltaChat

The original AC was good for (imho) it’s road feel and huge quantity of user content like tracks, cars, and mods (SRP and LA Canyons are great.) The overall product itself was really amateurishly produced IMHO (eg. shitty launcher) and inconsistently polished, although everybody looked past that because the in-car experience was better than anything else at the time and the mods make AC a blank canvas. Whatever you wanted to get out of AC, you could do with mods, and there’s no other racing game with that flexibility. That’s why everybody loves it.

The broader physics in AC never really did it for me, as a Dirt Rally fan. BeamNG is at the cutting edge of physics and playability, and going back to AC physics from BeamNG is pretty tough. That said, I am super excited there’s a new rally game and will definitely pick this up if it’s half decent. With a little love, I’m sure they could do a make their physics model feel decent for rally. I hope they have some decent damage modelling because AC’s poor damage modelling made even tiny impacts totally unphysical (imho).

(I haven’t tried AC Evo or AC Competizione though so it’s possible the physics model has been improved… can anyone chime in on that?)

Super insightful, thanks. Didn’t think about any of that.

I don’t disagree with you, but you’ve put some thought into this so maybe you can help us understand your logic and rationale more.

as soon as they deem profitable

What’s profitable about losing sales of adult games?

Also, what leverage do these groups have over banks and payment processors? If you have leverage over Visa and MasterCard, some of the most profitable companies in the world, I could imagine doing way more nefarious things than this. I just don’t get it. Some random group in Australia has leverage over Visa and MasterCard - American companies - is that what we’re saying here?

Those are things that should be handled by a government in defence of the public interest of everyone

I think you might have too much faith in government. Facebook and YouTube shouldn’t be hyper-polarizing brainwashing machines either, but here we are 20 years later and governments have done jack shit to address that. If anything, we’re going the wrong direction - Governments are seeing that and the TikTok model as tools they can have at their disposal to suppress dissent. But ironically, I think YouTube and many other platforms quietly accept that if we want to live in a somewhat harmonious society, we can’t leave it to the government to make all the rules. (eg. YouTube banning vaccine misinformation and disinformation during a public health emergency.)

On a tangent here, maybe the only potential upside from this situation with Steam is that horrifically misogynistic waifu simulators aren’t going to be 1 click away from the new Call of Duty. Seriously, Steam is just full of super gross anime shit that kids shouldn’t see, but the main audience of the platform is kids. The way Steam puts that content beside everything else is really gross and they really should get called out for that.

This law sounds good in theory, but there’s a lot of lawful content that is really undesirable (scams, spam, deepfakes, hate speech, etc.) and platforms need to be able to deal with that. The law isn’t fast or flexible enough to keep up, and every country has different (or laughable) definitions of some of these things.

The YouTube community guidelines are a pretty good overview of whatever shady shit people are trying to pull these days: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9288567?hl=en

That you misremembered the generation of Nintendo console that Quake 2 was on makes this the perfect chefs kiss millennial boomer comment, lol.

You need that SRE team you said you don’t have. :)

I’m sold on the sales pitch for it, but deflect.ca resolves to a Hetzner box in their Washington DC datacenter. I have a 112 ms ping to it from Toronto.

How do you sell a CDN when your own website is hosted out of the country at a PoP that’s that far away?

I totally understand. It sucks that there’s not really any options in between these two extremes.

If I can ramble a bit more - forget the Anycast bit. If you run your own DNS server(s), you can just configure them to respond based on the geographic location of the requester. PowerDNS is pretty easy to set up for this. You could run your own DNS just for the image domain. You basically run PowerDNS authoritative server, set up your zones and the geoip stuff, then slap dnsdist in front of it to be publicly exposed. dnsdist has anti-DDoS features and loadbalancing in it, in case you need it down the road.

Since it’s just for static images, you can have a higher TTL so you don’t need to worry about distributing the DNS servers. (ie. the DNS lookup might not be super fast since it could go across the country, but it doesn’t matter since that lookup is only going to happen every TTL period on each client, which can be high.)

One suggestion to consider for Lemmy.ca is to move your images and other easily-cacheable content to a different domain or subdomain, to give you more flexibility.

eg. If you serve your static assets off of lemmyimages.ca, then you can have only that behind a CDN, Cloudflare, or some other hosting with DDoS scrubbing. It gives you more flexibility to cope with various situations.

2tb a week isn’t much (6 mbps on average?). It’s pretty easy to set up nginx as a caching reverse proxy and spin that up on a couple of VPSes, but the annoying bit is you need to anycast your own IP address space in order for it to be functional as a CDN.

I’m not aware of any Canadian-owned CDNs either… OVH has one but they’re pretty crappy as a company. Beware of whitelabelled CDNs too, even some of the CDNs provided by big cloud hosting companies are actually whitelabelled from another company.