You can’t properly hate somewhere until you’ve lived there…

If you think you’ll be safe, then go. Travel broadens the mind, even if you go with preconceived ideas.

Just built a new pc, the first for a few years but probably the 20th or so I’ve made in total. This one’s a home server, replacing an HP ML110 Gen 9. It’s running proxmox with a dozen linux vms and is performing very well so far.

• Ryzen 5700X
• ASUS TUF Gaming B550M-PLUS, AMD B550 (Full linux compatibility)
• 48gb of ddr4 (32 new, 16 re-used)
• 2tb nvram (I have a nas for bigger storage)

Cheap PSU, half a case nailed to a wall (seriously. I keep it in a cupboard). A fanless gpu just to get it booting. Stock cpu fan and that’s about it. Idles at around 50 watts, which is less than half of the ML, and is almost silent.

Not sick, no. But if I know it’s AI, it does have less value to me. It can still be an amusing distraction if it was cleverly prompted, but there’s no thought gone into the generation.

Real art reflects not only the technical skill of the artist, but the effort they put in, their life experiences that made them look at something in a particular way, and their soul. No matter how good AI gets technically, it’ll never have that. But maybe it will be able to fake something that’s almost indistiguishable, like how lab grown diamonds can only be told from natural diamonds by someone with many years of experience.

Why do you view it with such horror? Do you see it as the start of AI taking over everything and the end of humanity?

I’ve been a computer gamer since 1980 and, apart from a really excellent few years playing Unreal Tournament in a clan in the early 2000s, have entirely played solo.

Like others, I have a life. People don’t get upset online if I get called away from the PC for a while. Or upset IRL if I’m focusing on a team game instead of them.

I’m not waiting around until we’ve got a group together. I’m not getting angry at a team-mate for accidentally fragging me. I’m not apologising for accidentally fragging someone else. I don’t have to put up with someone else’s childish taunting, or racist/offensive views. I don’t have an over-sugared twelve year old screaming into my ears because they found the fire button.

I would like more big open-world games that have a decent solo-first experience, but otherwise this way fits me nicely and your message only reinforces that for me.

I’m not a developer at any of these sites, but a couple of guesses:

1. They genuinely think relative dates are a more user friendly experience.

2. They know they serve old content, but want it to appear relevant. I’ve seen social media do this on several platforms where they obscure the date entirely on content that is not very fresh. This can be frustrating when you’re searching for an answer to a technical question and do find advice, to only find out after trying it that it refers to a version of the software that’s now very out of date.

3. SEO. Tricks like this might help the page rank higher in search engines. (I don’t know, I’m not an expert and SEO annoys me, but it feels like something designers might do to trick the engines)

Neither is a technical reason, it’s going to be about design, marketing and aesthetics.

Ublock will block what’s displayed, but not show you the actual. Something like UserScripts would allow you to extract the dates from the html and display them, or perhaps some css tweaks to change how things are displayed. But these would need tailoring for every single site you want and be liable to break if they change anything on their end.

Alternatively, you may wish to search sites for their Accessibility settings, or explore software that tries to do this for you - or even contact the sites and ask them to make the dates more readable on accessibility grounds.

Nice. It’ll be good for most of the world to not have to rely on an increasingly unstable US export market for cpus.

Never heard of it, but isn’t it the case that if it is shut down, that group of people will just move elsewhere as they have before?

Was that in the 60s/70s, Irish / UK?

That’s fun, but it’s just a third party summary of your posting history, not what Reddit is using.

We run self-hosted versions of both Gitlab (ce and enterprise versions) and Gitea.

They’re very different things, but broadly what you say is correct. Gitea is lighter, it comes as a single binary and is really fast in operation. For most people, most of Gitlab’s featureset will never be used.

Keeping them up to date:

Gitlab has repos for most distros, so updating is really just letting it update alongside the OS. But it does that every two weeks and is very noisy about reminding all users the second that a new release has dropped. (So I get a bunch of emails about this critical new release) Features seem to change quite often.

Gitea has no repos, and doesn’t self-update. However, I’ve written a script that checks and if it’s a new version, then it’ll download the new version and replace the single binary.

Both are pretty reliable at not introducing breaking changes when updating, I’ve not had many issues.

Same. I bought a second hand set of Wahl clippers for £4 from a charity shop after spending two hours and £5 having a bad haircut done professionally.

That was in about 1992.

They’re still going strong and I’ve not paid for another haircut since, nor wasted a second travelling to or waiting around for one.

Profits before ethics.

Shame, I expected better of them.

I do it with my wife. For us, it’s a way of:

• Learning about the other’s day and what they do - whether that’s work or pleasure. I think that’s a big part of being in a relationship.
• If something’s happened that has made one of us happy/sad, sharing that helps us support the other. It also lets them know when there’s something going on that might affect our relationship. Even if they can’t help, it’s good to know there’s a problem so they don’t think it’s about them when I’m unduly quiet or down.
• As someone who sometimes doesn’t understand things obvious to others, it can be handy for a second opinion, or ask what they thought was meant. It also helps me post-process the day’s events and square them away.

If I didn’t have an SO, I’d probably do the same with my dog; although it might be a bit more one sided.

We’re very keen on ours in England too. Re-enactments are a big community and some take a lot of trouble to be accurate. (Apart from Derek who forgets to take off his digital watch)

I think it has a genuine part to play in bringing history to life, especially when done in old castles where kids especially seem to really ‘get’ it. History is often taught very badly - dry, dull and boring - sitting in a classroom being spoken at with a long list of names and dates. Anything that makes it more interesting has to be good.

The alternative is burying history, isn’t it? And that’s a dark path to tread, my friend. A very dark path.

aka, Leo

AI doesn’t produce anything new.

Most humans don’t, either.

It is a democracy, yes.

The government is elected to represent its people. Annoying to us as it is, a tiny percentage of people [1] signing an online petition does not represent the people. There are an awful lot who think this new law is a good thing. [2]

[1] Yes. Fight me on this. 404k signatures out of 70million population = 0.58% opposed this enough to sign it.

[2] Mostly parents imo, and people who don’t understand the significant fraud risk involved. Those who haven’t been impacted yet, and those who enjoy other people being upset. Yes, I think this is a stupid law and the methods used even worse, but that doesn’t stop a democracy being a democracy

so something like RAID 4, 5, 6, or 10 is a great start.

Sorry - whilst most of your advice is great, this is a bit misleading.

• RAID 4 is very rarely used. It’s not a particularly safe or efficient use of striping, and was replaced by 5 shortly after it was invented.

• RAID 5 itself is now strongly discouraged for large arrays. (Google, “don’t use raid 5 for large arrays” for literally millions of pages explaining this, but it basically boils down to; “If a drive fails, the chance of a second drive failing whilst rebuilding is very high”)

But 6 is good if you’ve got enough drives and 10 (1+0) is also a fairly well regarded method for arrays of equal-numbered arrays.

I’m confused that you’re talking of buying 20tb SSDs - you must be very rich. Spinny drives are more usually used in homelab archive RAIDs since they are more cost effective at large size and RAID offsets some of the slowness associated with them. I’m going to assume you meant HDDs not SSDs, but the advice applies to both if I’m wrong about that.

Yes, you will want to RAID them. That gives some protection against individual drive failure, and yes, absolutely that is a concern. Whilst the chance of drives failing these days is less than it was, they still do fail without warning, even when relatively new, and because of the bigger sizes, the consequences are greater.

The alternative to RAID is JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Drives) which means lots of individual drives being presented, each with their true size, in multiple shares. Most folk don’t want that.

What RAID level you choose depends on:

1. How many drives you fit. 4+ is good, and “more smaller” is better than “fewer larger” for safety, although the compromise is an extra 10watts or so of power per drive.
2. Current best practice; Don’t use RAIDs 0 or 5 on large arrays. (0 means exponential increase of data loss. 5 is strongly discouraged due to rebuild times of large disks) 6 is good if you have enough disks. 1+0 (mirrored and striped) is reasonable, and the choice I made for mine.
3. The hardware you’re using. Whether a linux PC or a bespoke NAS tool. Whilst the RAID levels are similar, the tools used vary a lot.

Notes:

• Also, be realistic about the space you need. Don’t over-size. Plan for 3-5 years growth, by then you’ll be wanting to change because of speed changes or drive failure.
• Some raid types slow down writing of data, some speed it up. Most are much faster at READing data.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels gives some explanation of the types.
• Google for “RAID CALCULATOR” for lots of free websites that allow you to see what space different sized drives give you with different RAID levels.
• Do not omit a strong backup strategy. RAID only protects against some types of hardware failure. A lightning strike, fire, rogue bios or software update, the host dying with an incompatible raid system. Buy disks for backups that aren’t in your RAID. (Good branded USB 3 disk and caddies are sensible). Automate backups if you can. Backup only what’s not easily replaceable.
• I wrote some thoughts on backups here.

No. The older I get, the more things I realise that I know nothing about. You might learn one thing, but that knowledge leads you to three more things that you didn’t even knew existed. Ignorance is exponential that way.

I do miss those childhood years when you thought your parents had all the answers and all you had to do was to ask.

And I miss the teenage years when I knew everything and all the answers were absolute black and white.