I’m the administrator of kbin.life, a general purpose/tech orientated kbin instance.

  • 1 Post
  • 429 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 29th, 2023

help-circle




  • When I was talking about memory, I was more thinking about how it is accessed. For example, exactly what actions are atomic, and what are not on a given architecture, these can cause unexpected interactions during multi-core work depending on byte alignment for example. Also considering how to make the most of your CPU cache. These kind of things.


  • I’d agree that there’s a lot more abstraction involved today. But, my main point isn’t that people should know everything. But knowing the base understanding of how perhaps even a basic microcontroller works would be helpful.

    Where I work, people often come to me with weird problems, and the way I solve them is usually based in low level understanding of what’s really happening when the code runs.


  • I’ve always found this weird. I think to be a good software developer it helps to know what’s happening under the hood when you take an action. It certainly helps when you want to optimize memory access for speed etc.

    I genuinely do know both sides of the coin. But I do know that the majority of my fellow developers at work most certainly have no clue about how computers work under the hood, or networking for example.

    I find it weird because, to be good at software development (and I don’t mean, following what the computer science methodology tells you, I mean having an idea of the best way to translate an idea into a logical solution that can be applied in any programming language, and most importantly how to optimize your solution, for example in terms of memory access etc) requires an understanding of the underlying systems. That if you write software that is sending or receiving network packets it certainly helps to understand how that works, at least to consider the best protocols to use.

    But, it is definitely true.


  • I’ve used IPv6 at home for over 20 years now. Initially via tunnels by hurricane electric and sixxs. But, around 10 years ago, my ISP enabled IPv6 and I’ve had it running alongside IPv4 since then.

    As soon as server providers offered IPv6 I’ve operated it (including DNS servers, serving the domains over IPv6).

    I run 3 NTP servers (one is stratum 1) in ntppool.org, and all three are also on ipv6.

    I don’t know what’s going on elsewhere in the world where they’re apparently making it very hard to gain accesss to ipv6.





  • There’s a certbot addon which uses nginx directly to renew the certificate (so you don’t need to stop the web server to renew). If you install the addon you just use the same certbot commands but with --nginx instead and it will perform the actions without interfering with web server operation.

    You just then make sure the cron job to renew also includes --nginx and you’re done.





  • When you post in a thread you get an ID for that thread. When you post in a different thread you get a different id.

    That’s what I said. You don’t need any ID to federate the messages. If you reply to a comment the nesting is based on the comment/post ID and not the usernames.

    You couldn’t track a users posts after the fact, and I think that’s kinda the point.


  • Not so sure that’s true though. If you look at a 4chan threads in some boards, you can recognize the individual anonymous’ from the ID next to them.

    I suspect it’s using either a cookie, or the IP address to track a user and while not storing that info, generating an ID hash from perhaps a unique ID for the thread + their details.

    No reason you couldn’t federate using the same. But, even without that, each post and comment has a post ID and replies would be tracked that way. Just, you’d need to remember which replies were your own.

    The home instance could store for a thread some info about posts/comments from an IP or cookie too and highlight them. But that info wouldn’t be federated.

    I actually don’t think it’d be a problem, really. But, is this something missing from our lives? I’m not so sure.


  • I mean, while they can block most things, to give people a usable experience they’re going to allow http and https traffic through, and they can’t really proxy https because of the TLS layer.

    So for universal chance of success, running openvpn tcp over port 443 is the most likely to get past this level of bad. I guess they could block suspicious traffic in the session before TLS is established (in order to block certain domains). OpenVPN does support traversing a proxy, but it might only work if you specify it. If their network sets a proxy via DHCP, maybe you could see that and work around it.

    I did have fun working around an ex gf’s university network many years ago to get a VPN running over it. They were very, very serious about blocking non-standard services. A similar “through” the proxy method was the last resort they didn’t seem to bother trying to stop.


  • I mean I could have used the GDPR (still a thing in the UK, at least for now). But didn’t see it as worth it. It really wouldn’t be worth the risk selling data that was deleted from a GDPR request.

    I don’t know that they’ll risk using the data from deleted posts/comments though anyway. Most comments and posts will be deleted for a reason (moderation, or otherwise mistakes) and as such, likely isn’t going to make the best training data really.

    It’s far easier to just sell the live data and be done with it.


  • I think there were historically interoperability issues, and there used to be (my version of mbin is quite old), and maybe still are issues federating dislikes (which stems from the way they were seen in kbin, which straddles both thread based and mastadonesque sides of the fediverse). But overall there’s aren’t the larger federation issues there used to be.

    Right now, the choice mainly comes down to the interface you prefer, and if you perhaps want a limited ability to work with mastadon type posts. Since you can follow mastadon users and see their posts within the mbin interface.