This is it exactly. I made a hard cut with Reddit, but I’ll admit to missing the sysadmin subreddit. The place was full of very smart, helpful people and also cranky. The PowerShell subreddit was another great resource. I haven’t been willing to go back, but those sorts of communities only exist when you hit a certain mass of people on a platform.

I’m starting to look at alternatives to NextCloud and ran across your post. I was curious if you were willing to answer a question about OpenCloud on Android, if possible. My primary use case for NextCloud is photo/video backup from my phone (Android). For a lot of years, I would take a photo and the NextCloud app would detect it and push to my server, without any manual intervention. This seems to be broke now and that may be a Google problem.

My question is, does this work on OpenCloud? Can I set it to automatically sync photos/videos and have them be auto-synced to my server? Not a scheduled sync, but “take a photo, app detects it, it’s synced to the server”?

Steam is certainly in a dominant market position. They had a large first mover advantage and have also done a lot of work to make and keep gamers happy with the platform. That said, I can understand companies being upset at the 30% Steam tax on sales. It’s a pretty large cut and other stores (e.g. Epic) have tried to compete based on that cost. The problem being that many games have massive Steam libraries and want to keep everything on one place and they aren’t really affected by the cost to the devs; so, without a significant reason to change, they won’t. It also doesn’t help that some competitors (e.g Epic) have been user hostile in the past and so don’t have a high level of trust. Steam has also built a lot of goodwill with power users for their work on Proton.

While I do think there needs to be healthy competition for storefronts, as long as Steam resists the temptation to enshitify their dominant market position, I don’t see them losing market share in any meaningful way. Perhaps it would be better if Steam were spun off from Valve, putting them Valve on equal footing with other devs. But, video games aren’t really fungible. It’s not like I’m going to say, “oh darn, Kingdom Come is too expensive, I guess I’ll buy Half Life instead”. They are just fundamentally different games and if I want to play the first one, I’m not able to get that by buying the second. So, the price of one of them isn’t really a factor in pushing me towards the other. Though, Valve might use Steam to push one game over the other, and that could be something that is a problem.

I’m in, though I’m curious what “turns you into a reptile” means. Does it just mean I become cold blooded. I’m fine with that, it just means I’m moving somewhere tropical. Do I grow scales and a tail? Certainly not ideal, but I could probably live with it, especially if the tail is prehensile and if I get claws in the mix. Do I get a really long, controllable tongue? Can’t think of any uses for that. Nope, none at all…

Attraction, sex and reproduction would be interesting questions as well. Do I still find human women attractive, or is my brain rewired to want a lusty argonian maid? What does my new plumbing look like? Are there others of my new species around for me to do the monster mash with?

But overall, yes I’d probably go for it. I don’t delude myself into thinking that I will somehow continue to exist after death; so, not dying seems like the better alternative. Sure, if the downsides are really bad, I can accept that death is a better outcome (e.g. you live forever, but have locked-in syndrome forever). But, living as a lizard person doesn’t seem too horrible.

Gotta have that progress bar, otherwise you might be tempted to <Ctrl>-C and you will be left with some of your software problems.

Yes, and you can probably get better performance with different block sizes. This is just what I used to fix drives as it was fast enough and I couldn’t be arsed to do any real testing to find the right speed. Also, my stash of drives was no where near homogeneous, so the right size for one type of drive may not have worked for a different type of drive. I also used the 4MB block size when imaging drives to have an ok-ish speed while not losing too much data if there were read errors.

For a physical machine:
for f in $(lsblk | grep disk | cut -d ' ' -f 1); do sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/$f bs=4MB status=progress; done

That will remove all your current software problems. You’ll have new ones, but the old ones will be gone.

Oh look, it’s Vietnam all over again. How long before the Administration manufactures evidence of an attack on a US Navy asset and uses that to justify “limited” operations on the ground?

You could try using Autopsy to look for files on the drive. Autopsy is a forensic analysis toolkit, which is normally used to extract evidence from disk images or the like. But, you can add local drives as data sources and that should let you browse the slack space of the filesystem for lost files. This video (not mine, just a good enough reference) should help you get started. It’s certainly not as simple as the photorec method, but it tends to be more comprehensive.

As @MelRose@lemmy.blahaj.zone pointed out, this seems to be a cover for c’t magazine. Specifically it seems to be for November 2004. heise.de used to have a site which let you browse those covers and you could pull any/all of them. But, that website seems to have died sometime in 2009. Thankfully, the internet remembers and you can find it all on archive.org right here. You may need to monkey about with capture dates to get any particular cover, but it looks like a lot of them are there.

Also, as a bit of “teach a person to fish”, ImgOps is a great place to start a reverse image search. It can often get you from an image to useful information about that images (e.g. a source) pretty quick. I usually use the TinEye reverse image search for questions like this.

Most of those US services (YouTube, Twitter, etc.) arose to fill a niche which was opened by expanding access and bandwidth. Take YouTube as an example, the idea of sharing a video on a dial-up connection was simply silly. Just downloading the contents of a 1.44MB floppy on a 14.4kbps modem took forever. Even when we got to a 56kbps modem, pictures could still be slow and GIFs were painful to download. It wasn’t until home DSL or cable connections became common that sharing a video was even close to reasonable. In that environment, we saw the start of media sharing services rushing to fill a previously unknown “need”. The most well known was Napster for music sharing, but we also saw the start of bittorrent clients. While not exactly legal, early music sharing and torrent sites showed that people wanted to be able to download media. And with sites like MySpace or GeoCities cropping up, it was apparent that people wanted to also create and share media. YouTube simply married up those two desires at a time where the technology could reasonably support it. And they have massively capitalized on the first mover advantage. With them also having Google money to scale the service, they now sit in a fairly privileged position in their niche.

I bring this up to say that, were US based services snapped out of existence, new services would arise to fill the gap. If you look at somewhere like China, where access to US services is highly regulated, they aren’t simply doing without, they are creating their own alternatives. TikTok is a good example, while it lacks the longer form videos of YouTube, it did provide media sharing in China. Were YouTube to be blocked at the Great Firewall, TikTok is in a good position to expand into the longer form videos. China also already has WeChat which fills much of the Twitter and FaceBook nice. Russia has VKontakte for those spaces as well. Basically, any place which isn’t well served by US based media giants has their own solutions to fill those gaps.

Western Europe (using EU as shorthand, though yes I know the EU isn’t all of Western Europe) has the issue of being closely linked with the US economically and culturally. US based services can operate in most EU countries with little friction. Sure, they have to figure out GDPR and Data Privacy issues, but that’s not a major barrier, despite US companies’ whining. So, given the size, first mover advantage and money behind the US based solutions, there hasn’t been space for reasonable EU based replacements. Why use some second rate EU based system, when the US system works so well, and the EU and US are such good allies and closely linked?

Of course, that last bit is changing (which is part of why you’re asking the question, no doubt). With the US Government going quickly off the rails, and US tech giants doing their damnedest to enshitify everything, the deep cultural links between the US and EU are starting to slip. There might now be space for EU based services to try to step in and replace services like YouTube or Twitter. And that’s the answer to your question. If those services go away, they will be replaced by something else. In time, they are probably bound to be replaced anyway. At one time everyone though MySpace was here to stay, these days I suspect some folks had to google it to figure out what the hell I was going on about. It may be a long time to come, but I’d bet on YouTube eventually being replaced. I have no idea what will replace it, but nothing lasts forever.

You’re one of those folks who are too stupid to understand probabilities and what polls are actually saying, aren’t you?
The polls in the run-up to the 2024 Presidential election were actually pretty good. The final aggregate error was right around 3.4 points [1]

Anyone who suggested that there was a clear favorite was lying about what the polls said. That’s not a failing of the polls, its a failing of the media reporting on the polls. Sure, there were some particular, individual outliers. The Anne Seltzer poll comes to mind. But, credit where it’s due, Seltzer published an outlier poll, because that was the outcome of the poll based on then methodology she had been using for a long time. Like with scientists publishing null results, it’s actually really important that such things are published and not hidden, but they are usually hidden.

Go talk to people in the real world, instead of reading articles written by fellow shut-ins, and realize that the narrative is FAR different for the average person.

Then plural of “anecdote” is not “data”. And quite the opposite here, if you’re out talking to people within your own social bubble, you’re far more likely to get a warped view of reality. This is one of the reasons polling is so hard, getting a truly representative sample of the population is hard. It is also likely a reason polls keep underestimating Trump. People with low social trust seem to favor Trump, and those same people are very hard to poll. They don’t often pick up the phone and often aren’t willing to divulge their political choices to strangers on the phone. So ya, expecting the polls to “miss” by 3-5 points, underestimating Republicans isn’t all that out of line.

My prediction is the Dems will pick up just barely enough seats to take back control of the House. Not a snowballs chance in hell of taking back the Senate.

This is funny, because this is very much an opinion which will have been informed by polling. It’s also what most analysis are coming up with:

• House
• Senate

Articles like the one posted by the OP are just pure hopium. Dems may make some gains this year, but a rational analysis of the current polling data tells a bleak story. They might get the House, the Senate is basically out of reach.

I can think of a couple of reasons off the top of my head.

You don’t say, but I assume you are working on-site with your work system. So, the first consideration would be a firewall at your work’s network perimeter. A common security practice is to block outbound connections on unusual ports. This usually means anything not 80/tcp or 443/tcp. Other ports will be allowed on an exception basis. For example, developers may be allowed to access 22/tcp outbound, though that may also be limited to only specific remote IP addresses.

You may also have some sort of proxy and/or Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) software running on your work system. This setup would be used to inspect the network connections your work system is making and allow/block based on various policy settings. For example, a CASB might be configured to look at a domain reputation service and block connections to any domain whose reputation is consider suspect or malicious. Domains may also be blocked based on things like age, or category. For this type of block, the port used won’t matter. It will just be “domain something.tld looks sketchy, so block all the things”. With “sketchy” being defined by the company in it’s various access policies.

A last reason could be application control. If the services you are trying to connect to rely on a local program running on your work system, it’s possible that the system is set to prevent unknown applications from running. This setup is less common, but it growing in popularity (it just sucks big old donkey balls to get setup and maintain). The idea being that only known and trusted applications are allowed to run on the system, and everything else is blocked by default. This looks like an application just crashing to the end user (you), but it provides a pretty nice layer of protection for the network defenders.

Messing with the local pc is of course forbidden.

Ya, that’s pretty normal. If you have something you really need to use, talk with your network security team. Most of us network defenders are pretty reasonable people who just want to keep the network safe, without impacting the business. That said, I suspect you’re going to run into issues with what you are trying to run. Something like SyncThing or some cloud based storage is really useful for businesses. But, businesses aren’t going to be so keen to have you backing their data up to your home server. Sure, that might not be your intention, but this is now another possible path for data to leave the network which they need to keep an eye on. All because you want to store your personal data on your work system. That’s not going to go over well. Even worse, you’re probably going to be somewhat resistant when they ask you to start feeding your server’s logs into the businesses log repository. Since this is what they would need to prove that you aren’t sending business data to it. It’s just a bad idea all around.

I’d suspect Paperless is going to run into similar issues. It’s a pretty obvious way for you to steal company data. Sure, this is probably not your intention, but the network defenders have to consider that possibility. Again, they are likely to outright deny it. Though if you and enough folks at your company want to use something like this, talk with your IT teams, it might be possible to get an instance hosted by the business for business use. There is no guarantee, but if it’s a useful productivity package, maybe you will have a really positive project under your belt to talk about.

FreshRSS you might be able to get going. Instead of segregating services by port, stand up something like NGinx on port 443 and configure it as a reverse proxy. Use host headers to separate services such that you have sync.yourdomain.tld mapped to your SyncThing instance, office.yourdomain.tld mapped to your paperless instance and rss.yourdomain.tld mapped to FreshRSS. This gets you around issues with port blocking and makes managing TLS certificates easier. You can have a single cert sitting in front of all your services, rather than needing to configure TLS for each service individually.

Large companies are already heavily involved in Linux. Based on this data some of the biggest contributors this year were Meta and Google. Both companies are at the forefront of enshitification of the internet, but they built their mountains of shit on a foundation of Linux.

Theoretically you could hit replacement rate by making everyone a millionaire but I don’t know how that could work.

I doubt this would work. Financially, my family is towards the middle of that chart now. We were lower when we had our first kid and only a bit improved when we had our second. And honestly, it was pretty touch and go whether or not we would have the second. Our first was a handful as a baby and it left us wondering if we could handle a second. Thankfully, he calmed down a lot (or we just got used to the new normal) by the time he was pushing 18 months. After we had the second one though, I fully embraced the “cut my nuts off” solution to birth control (vasectomy). I don’t regret that choice at all. None of that was ever about finances. It was simply about the fact that raising children is hard and takes a lot of time.

Ultimately, I think the decline in birth rates isn’t about finances or selfishness, it’s just a change in social norms. Society has spent decades training people to the “nuclear family”. Movies, TV, and other media has pushed the “2 kids and 1.5 dogs in a home in the suburbs” for so long, that people internalized it. So, folks who do want to have kids shoot for that. Having 4 or 5 kids is now seen as an oddity, rather than the norm.

There is also a much better acceptance of women as something other than a walking womb to be filled. We no longer look at an unmarried woman in her 20’s or 30’s as some sort of spinster to be shunned. Sure, negative stereotypes still exist (e.g. Crazy cat lady); but, it’s much rarer for fathers to be selling off their 16 year old daughters to 40 or 50 year old men as child brides to be kept barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen for the next 30+ years of their life. Women are expected to have full lives now, which may or may not involve raising children. As one might expect, many have taken full advantage of that and simply chose to not have any. This move from what amounts to sexual slavery to being treated as an actual person is going to mean there are fewer women having children and many of them delaying until they are actually old enough to make an informed decision about it.

Depending on which version of Sleeping Beauty you’re reading, this isn’t that far off.

So a couple possibilities come to mind:

1. Someone else has your password. Do you have kids and do they have access to devices which may have your Google account linked? You may want to change your password (use something long, hard to guess and unique).
2. Your local system is compromised in some way. This would be a really odd way for someone to use that access, but it’s always possible. Take a look at the apps and any browser extensions you have installed and make sure there isn’t anything you don’t recognize.
3. There is some sort of Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability which is being leveraged to subscribe you to stuff. I would expect Google to be better than to have an XSS on YouTube (they bought Mandiant a while ago, FFS). But, big companies doing stupid things is common enough. When you got the pop-up, was it in the YouTube app or a web browser. Did you have other tabs open? Other background processes from sketchy apps?
4. It is Google, them doing shitty things to their product (that’s you) for their customers (the advertisers paying for your eyeballs) is basically their business model. Don’t like it, de-google your life (warning: this is actually really hard).

But, but, docker, kubernetes, hyper-scale convergence and other buzzwords from the 2010’s! These fancy words can’t just mean resource and namespace isolation!

In all seriousness, the isolation provided by containers is significant enough that administration of containers is different from running everything in the same OS. That’s different in a good way though, I don’t miss the bad old days of everything on a single server in the same space. Anyone else remember the joys of Windows Small Business Server? Let’s run Active Directory, Exchange and MSSQL on the same box. No way that will lead to prob… oh shit, the RAM is on fire.