To be fair, it is a very long-winded post. I think it’s not an uncommon use case, though, and so deserved a robust sketch of the desired solution; Farmville and chat are sideshows, and what the people left on Facebook are really there for are the Walls.

There are some excellent apps out there, and by and large they look and work better than commercial apps, IME. So I disagree with the assertion that I have to stay with commercial software.

What I was asking for, in my post, was not which apps have better UX than Facebook, but rather which of the very many OSS, federated (although, not necessary for my use case), self-hosted platforms fit the specific use, and ideally with a straightforward iOS mobile app. Doesn’t have to be pretty; just has to be able to quickly take and post photos to a private channel/community/wall.

Circles really is quite nice in all respects. I think they’re hindered by their choice of backend. I’ve been using Matrix for years, and key management has always been a hot mess. I wouldn’t be surprised if the issues we encountered were related to Matrix’s god-awful and buggy PK negotiation & management process.

The Energy Star program had been around for around 15 years at that point

And, for computers, was almost exclusively limited to monitors. In 2009, the Energy Star specification was version 4.0, released in 2006. In that specification, the EPA’s objective was to get 40% of the computers on the market to have power management capabilities 2010 – 40% by the year after Bitcoin was introduced. Intel’s 2009 TCO-driven upgrade cycle document mentions power management, but power use isn’t included in any of the TCO metrics.

All of the focus on low-power processing units in 2009 was for mobile devices and DSPs. Computer-oriented energy savings at the time was focused on processes, e.g. manually powering down computers or use of suspension and hibernation - there was very little CPU clock scaling available for desktop computers – you turned them off to save power. DVFS didn’t become widely available – or effective – until 2006, and a study published in 2009 (again, the same year Bitcoin was introduced) found that “only 20% of initiatives had measurable targets.”

So, yes: technically, there were people thinking about these sorts of things, but it wasn’t a common consumer consideration, and the tools for power management were crude: your desktop was on and consuming power – always the same amount of power – or it was off. And people did power down their computers to save energy. But, like I said, if your desktop was on, it was consuming the same amount of energy whether you were running a miner or weren’t. There was a motto at the time bandied about by SETI@home, that your computer was using energy anyway, so you might as well do science with the spare CPU cycles. That was the mindset of most people who had computers at the time.

Mine is 3-pronged:

1. btrfs + snapper takes care of most level-1 situations, and I take a snapshot of every /root change, plus one nightly /home snapshot. but it’s pretty demanding on disk space, and doesn’t handle drive failure; so I also do
2. restic + USB drive, which I can cram way more snapshots onto, so I keep a couple of weeks of daily snapshots, one monthly snapshot for a year, and one snapshot per year, going back several years. I currently have snapshots from my past 3 computers on one giant drive. However, these drives can also fail, and won’t protect me from burglary or house fire, so I also do
3. restic + BackBlaze. I just take a nightly snapshot for every computer and VM I manage. My monthly B2 bill is around $10. The VMs don’t change much, and I only snapshot data and config directories (only stuff I can’t spin up fairly quickly in a container, or via a simple install command), so most of the charge comes from a couple of decades of amateur digital photography, and an archive of all our digital music (because I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend weeks re-digitizing all those CDs).

The only “restore entire system b/c of screwing up the OS” is #1. I could - and probably should, make a whole disk snapshot to a backup drive via #2, but I’m waiting until bcachefs is more mature, then I’ll migrate to that, for the interesting replication options it allows which would make real-time disk replication to slow USB drives practical; I’d only need to snapshot /efi after kernel upgrades, and if I had that set up and a spare NVME on hand, I could probably be back up and running within a half hour.

Fair. He says he’s a religious person, and he’s not that either, but Fundamentalists eat that shit up.

the practice of deliberately wasting enormous amounts of energy for the purpose of being able to prove that you’ve wasted enormous amounts of energy.

C’mon, that’s being disingenuous. Back when Bitcoin was released, nobody was giving a thought to computer energy use. A consequence of proof-of-work is wasted energy, but a focus on low-power modalities and throttling have been developed in the intervening years. The prevailing paradigm at the time was, “your C/GPU is going to be burning energy anyway, you may as well do something with it.”

It was a poor design decision, but it wasn’t a malicious one like you make it sound. You may as well accuse the inventors of the internal combustion engine of designing it for the express purpose of creating pollution.

That’s bullpucky. Trump is not pro-2A, and the bump-stock extension was passed under his administration. As with most things, his position is vague, but mostly catering to monied special interests, as evidenced by how his administration approached 3D printing (the gun industry can’t make money if people can print their own guns at home). In any case, he’s certainly not been a vocal 2A defendant, it doesn’t come up in his rhetorical rants, and his record while in office was wishy-washy at best. This hasn’t made a single iota of difference to his base.

2A is a key issue for many people, but it’s specious to claim it’s the issue that’s deciding a large number of flippable votes. NRA symbols are usually stuck next to a Confederate flag sticker, and that tells you all you need to know about that topic.

The best proof of advancements in the field of AI is Zuckerberg himself. He looks more and more like a real human every time I see a new picture of him.

Yes, PeerTube doesn’t have monetization, but Hickock45 in particular is in trouble because of all the sponsorship they’ve gotten from other sources. They aren’t being shut down because they’re a gun channel, but because they get sponsorship from gun businesses, which they promote in their videos.

I don’t know what Hickock45’s revenue stream looks like. But they say themselves, at issue is YouTube saying that mentioned sponsors can’t be gun-related. What’s really shitty about Hickock45 is the decade of content that has always been acceptable to YouTube, and which now is retroactively at risk because of the sponsorship rule changes.

My feeling is that if H45’s external sponsors are so valuable, they could make a go on PeerTube. Or, if YouTube’s revenue is so good, they can drop mentioning the external sponsors. I’d rather they just move everything to PeerTube, old content and all, and give YT the finger. But I suspect that’s too costly for them. And there’s no way they can go back and re-edit a decade’s worth of material to remove all sponsor mentions; that’s patently absurd.

Don’t worry. It’ll get overridden and approved when it gets to the SSC

So many Far Sides come to mind.

So… you’re saying I shouldn’t be using my 45-70 as my home defense gun?

The top YouTube comment hit the nail on the head, though: the problem is that 49 million people didn’t watch the Carolina rally.

Bonus if it can edit .sc files, a-la the best spreadsheet editor, sc-im.

Brown people.

Me too (basic, AIT, & stationed at Ft. Beginning :-( ).

This does not surprise me at all. It’s a huge base, and full of unsavory types; all of the communities around Benning were full of businesses doing just barely legal activities designed to separate young males from their paychecks. And so. Much. Drugs.

For anyone who hasn’t been in the Army, the infantry is where they put you when you’re too dumb to pass the ASFAB - a sort of SAT you take when you enlist. The higher your score, the more options available to you. The infantry are the jarheads of the Army, but with less discipline. Even smart infantry guys are dumb in that they had other options and voluntarily chose 11B. I was one of those, and there were far smarter guys than me in my unit; one guy had gone through seminary school, decided at the end -with the equivalent of a four-year degree - that he didn’t want to be a priest, and had joined the army and chose the infantry. People are messed up. Anyway, Benning is the home of the infantry, and it’s enormous, and full of a lot of guys who were there because they had few other options in life.

IME, crime was pretty rife, maybe less so on the base, but certainly around the base. And while my experience matches your’s WRT the military-grade weapons, these are handguns any civilian could buy. Considering how many went missing, my guess is that there’s a supply sergeant somewhere who was accepting shipments of new weapons and “misplaced” a box, and recorded receiving one less box. Or, maybe it was indeed someone with access to a supply depot full of still-boxed handguns who just walked out with one.

The security you described was absolutely spot-on for issued weapons; my guess is these were stolen from a supply shed somewhere, and that it was months or longer before an inventory turned it up as missing.

Hugo isn’t a server, per se. It’s basically just a template engine. It was originally focused on turning markdown into web pages, with some extra functionality around generating indexes and cross-references that are really what set it apart from just a simple rendering engine. And by now, much of its value is in the huge number of site templates built for Hugo. But what Hugo does is takes some metadata, whatever markdown content you have, and it generates a static web site. You still need a web server pointed at the generated content. You run Hugo on demand to regenerate the site whenever there’s new content (although, there is a “watch” mode, where it’ll watch for changes and regenerate the site in response). It’s a little fancier than that; it doesn’t regenerate content that hasn’t changed. You can have it create whatever output format you want - mine generates both HTML and gmi (Gemini) sites from the same markdown. But that’s it: at its core, it’s a static site template rendering engine.

It is absolutely suitable for creating a portfolio site. Many of the templates are indeed such. And it’s not hard to make your own templates, if you know the front-end technologies.

It depends on how you want to write. If you want to use a web interface, WriteFreely is decent. If you like your text editor, Hugo is fantastic.

:shrug:

It’s trivial to host yourself, and super light on resources. Personally, I don’t use it; for blogging I write markdown and rsync it over to the server where Hugo picks it up and turns it into a blog. Now that I think about it, I should probably go shut my WriteFreely down. I have a few pages on it, but I hate web app interfaces, so I didn’t put much content in it.

Sourcehut is for-profit. You pay them to host your data, to provide public access, to run mailng lists, to run CI build servers… you’re paying for the services. But the source code is OSS; you can download and run your own services, all or just a few. The “paying them to host the software for you” isn’t the issue, right? It’s not that someone is charging for hosting and maintenance (and, ultimately, salaries for the people working on the software), but whether or not the software is free, and whether you can self-host.

I like your point about finding repos. I think it’d behoove all of the bit players to band together to provide one big searchable repo list. Heck, even I, who hates github with a smoldering passion, have enough sense to go there first to search for software; that’s just the nature of a hegemony. The stumbling of the attempt to create a common VCS hosting API (ForgeFed) is lamentable, but getting adoption would have been a uphill battle even without the rumored in-fighting and drama.