Solar Bear

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Whatever you get for your NAS, make sure it’s CMR and not SMR. SMR drives do not perform well in NAS arrays.

    I just want to follow this up and stress how important it is. This isn’t “oh, it kinda sucks but you can tolerate it” territory. It’s actually unusable after a certain point. I inherited a Synology NAS at my current job which is used for backup storage, and my job was to figure out why it wasn’t working anymore. After investigation, I found out the guy before me populated it with cheapo SMR drives, and after a certain point they just become literally unusable due to the ripple effect of rewrites inherent to shingled drives. I tried to format the array of five 6TB drives and start fresh, and it told me it would take 30 days to run whatever “optimization” process it performs after a format. After leaving it running for several days, I realized it wasn’t joking. During this period, I was getting around 1MB/s throughput to the system.

    Do not buy SMR drives for any parity RAID usage, ever. It is fundamentally incompatible with how parity RAID (RAID5/6, ZFS RAID-Z, etc) writes across multiple disks. SMR should only be used for write-once situations, and ideally only for cold storage.




  • The games will still be designed by humans. Generative AI will only be used as a tool in the workflow for creating certain assets faster, or for creating certain kinds of interactivity on the fly. It’s not good enough to wholesale create large sets of matching assets, and despite what folks may think, it won’t be for a long time, if ever. Not to mention, people just don’t want that. People want art to have intentional meaning, not computer generated slop.



  • Solar Bear@slrpnk.nettoFediverse@lemmy.mlThreads and the Fediverse | Kev Quirk
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    8 months ago

    The only difference between Tumblr and Facebook is size. Facebook isn’t uniquely evil; it does exactly what any corporation would do at that scale. The systems that molded Facebook into what it is would also mold Tumblr or anything else into the same abomination.

    I would respect principled opposition to megacorps even if I think it’s still misguided in this instance, because at least that’s overall based. But all of the discourse focuses on the specific wrongdoings of Facebook as if any other corporation wouldn’t have done exactly the same thing in their position. It feels very kneejerk.

    I want to federate and use it to destroy their platform. The biggest problem with the periodic social media “migrations” that always fail is that it creates a fragmented diaspora. Take Twitter as an example. When the big migration off Twitter was supposed to happen, some went to the Fediverse, some went to Threads, some went to BlueSky.

    You know what happened? After a few weeks, most of them went back to Twitter, because that was the only common place between them, where they knew they could all meet and communicate. If Twitter was forced to federate with all other platforms, it would have been snuffed out by now. But if that was even proposed, everybody would have a kneejerk reaction, because Twitter bad. Nobody is thinking of the big picture.


  • Solar Bear@slrpnk.nettoFediverse@lemmy.mlThreads and the Fediverse | Kev Quirk
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    8 months ago

    I find it kind of strange that people seem so hesitant about it

    I simply want the Fediverse to be a proper alternative option for social media access, not just another secret nerd club. We have enough of those already. That requires not completely closing off access to the things the typical person will want to access. I want all social media to eventually be interoperable like email is, preferably on the ActivityPub standard and not whatever centralized bullshit BlueSky is trying to cook up. That is the only way we’re going to break the corporate stranglehold on social media.

    Put simply, if you make people choose between our platform and the large corporate-backed platform with orders of magnitude more users, they will choose the corporate platform almost every time. And I think that’s a bad outcome for all involved.


  • If you’re waiting for Jellyfin to run some kind of relay like Plex, you’ll be waiting a long time. That takes a lot of money to upkeep, and the demand for people who self-host FOSS and then want to depend on an external service is very minimal, certainly not enough to sustain such a service. I’d recommend just spending a weekend afternoon learning how to set up Nginx Proxy Manager and being done with it, the GUI makes it very easy.



  • Solar Bear@slrpnk.nettoRetroGaming@lemmy.worldWhich controller did you start with?
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    9 months ago

    You may already know this now, but I want to post it for those who don’t because it’s really cool and way ahead of its time.

    That was for the VMU, the visual memory card. It stored your game saves but also some games had minigames you could play directly on it, often with bonuses in the main game. In the Sonic Adventure games you could take care of chao and such on it. That thing ate batteries like candy though.


  • Solar Bear@slrpnk.nettoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldTv box recommendations?
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    9 months ago

    I will have an OG Xiaomi Mi Box and it’s absurd how over the years it went from a purely functional media device to a complete shit show covered ads. Genuinely disgusted me every time I turned the TV on. I couldn’t stand it anymore, I had to tear out the launcher with ADB and replace it with FLauncher.

    I wish Kodi wasn’t such a pain in the ass to deal with, especially for YouTube. We really need a new FOSS media center application. Until then, at least FLauncher works for now as a simple app switcher for a handful of Android apps.




  • I very recently started using borgbackup. I’m extremely impressed with how much it compressed the data before sending, and how well it detects changes and only sends the difference. I have not yet attempted a proper restore from backup, though.

    I have much less data I’m currently securing (~50gb) and much more uplink bandwidth (~115mbps) so my situation isn’t nearly as dire. But it was able to compress that down to less than 25gb before sending, and after the initial upload, the next week’s backup only required about 100mb of data transfer.

    If you can find a way to seed your data from a faster location, reduce the amount you need to back up, and/or break it up into multiple smaller transfers, this might be an effective solution for you.

    Borgbase’s highest plan has an upper limit of 8TB, which you would be brushing right up against, but Hetzner storage boxes go up to 20TB and officially support Borg.

    Outside of that, if you don’t expect the data to change often, you might be looking for some sort of cheap S3 storage from AWS or other similar large datacenter company. But you’ll still need to find a way to actually get them the data safely, and I’m not sure if they support differential uploads like Borg does.




  • While that isn’t false, defaults carry immense weight. Also, very few have the means to host at scale like Docker Hub; if the goal is to not just repeat the same mistake later, each project would have to host their own, or perhaps band together into smaller groups. And unfortunately, being a good programmer does not make you good at devops or sysadmin work, so now we need to involve more people with those skillsets.

    To be clear, I’m totally in favor of this kind of fragmentation. I’m just also realistic about what it means.