Just some Internet guy

He/him/them 🏳️‍🌈

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  • 95 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • For the most part, it’s just like how you learned to be good with a controller: experience. The more you use the mouse the better you get. You brain just learns that this amount of movements equals roughly this distance moved on the screen.

    For a lot of people, disabling mouse acceleration helps with precision. By default there’s an acceleration curve, so you move the mouse faster and the cursor goes even faster, disabling it makes it so the cursor tracks the mouse precisely. It can make it harder to do a 360 though, as acceleration can help get the speed needed. Dial in your sensitivity settings to where it feels comfortable for aiming, because if you make the sensitivity too much for the 360 it’ll be really hard to aim with any sort of accuracy.

    There’s a rhythm game called Osu! if you want to stress test your mouse accuracy.




  • I think it counts. You always have the option of taking your data with you and go elsewhere which is one of the main points of self-hosting, being in control of your data. If they jack up the prices or whatever, you just pack up, you never have to pay or else.

    Also hosting an email server at home would be an absolute nightmare, took me 10+ years to get that IP rep and I’m holding on to it as long as I can.

    I have a mix of it: private services run at home, public ones run on a bare metal server I rent. I still get the full benefits of having my own NextCloud and all. Ultimately even at home, I’d still be renting an Internet connection, unless you have a local only server.


  • The language itself has gotten a bit better. It’s not amazing but it’s decent for a scripting language, and very fast compared to most scripting languages. TypeScript can also really help a lot there, it’s pretty good.

    It’s mostly the web APIs and the ecosystem that’s kinda meh, mostly due to its history.

    But what you dislike has nothing to do with JavaScript but just big corpo having way too many developers iterating way too fast and creating a bloated mess of a project with a million third-party dependencies from npm. I’m not even making this up, I’ve legit seen a 10MB unit test file make it into the production bundle in a real product I consulted on.

    You don’t have to use React or Svelte or any of the modern bloated stuff nor any of the common libraries. You can write plain HTML and CSS and a sprinkle of JavaScript and get really good results. It’s just seen as “bad practice” because it doesn’t “webscale”, but if you’re a single developer it’s perfectly adequate. And the reality is short of WebAssembly, you’re stuck with JS anyway, and WASM is its own can of worms.

    And even then, React isn’t that bad. There’s just one hell of a lot of very poorly written React apps, in big part because it will let you get away with it. It’s full of footguns loaded with blanks, but it’s really not aweful if you understand how it works under the hood and write good code. Some people are just lazy and import something and you literally load the same data in 5 different spots, twice if you have strict mode enabled. I’ve written apps that load instantly and respond instantly even on a low end phone, because I took the time to test it, identify the bottlenecks and optimize them all. JavaScript can be stupid fast if you design your app well. If you’re into the suckless philosophy, you can definitely make a suckless webapp.

    What you hate is true for most commercial software written in just about any language, be it C, C++, Java, C#. Bugs and faster response times don’t generate revenue, new features and special one-off event features generate much much more revenue, so minor bugs are never addressed for the most part. And of course all those features end up effectively being the 90% bloat you never use but still have to load as part of the app.



  • Yeah but you can still add third-party repos if you don’t like the official ones, like the FUTO repository.

    The F-Droid app and the F-Droid repository are two different things and don’t have to be used together. So if you don’t want to submit your app to F-Droid for them to build and sign, you can use a third party repository without needing a whole new app.

    It’s still not federated, but it is distributed which makes more sense for an app store.


  • Why does everyone tries to shoehorn the fediverse into everything? I swear it’s becoming the new bitcoin.

    F-Droid supports additional custom repos. Anyone can already host their own custom repo with their apps on it. Failing that, you can still sideload APKs fron your web browser.

    Only the reviews part of it could use being federated.

    Could such a platform serve as a foundation if the Fediverse community ever developed its own federated operating systems?

    How would a federated operating system even work? What is it gonna federate and where, and for what purposes?




  • It’s hard to give concrete advice without knowing the specs or the software you want to run on this, but for tiny Linux systems there’s Buildroot so you can compile just the bare minimum you need and not use a distro at all (unless you could Buildroot as a distro). This is what OpenWRT uses to build all the router firmwares among other things.

    For something that would go in a car that seems pretty ideal to me. Skip initializing things you won’t use, make something that boots to GUI in 3 seconds. When you want to update the software you flash it as a new firmware image, no on-device installing or anything.

    Depending on what you run, ideally you’d skip Xorg/Wayland and use the framebuffer directly. But if you need to run a more standard environment, that’s what things like Cage are designed for. Single app, always full screen. It’s called a kiosk environment.


  • Is it directly exposed over the Internet? If you only port forward the VPN on your router, I wouldn’t worry about it unless you’re worried about someone else already on your LAN.

    And even then, it’s really more like an extra layer of security against accidentally running something exposed publicly that you didn’t intend to, or maybe you want some services to only be accessible via a particular private interface. You don’t need a firewall if you have nothing to filter in the first place.

    A machine without a firewall that doesn’t have any open port behave practically the same from a security standpoint: nothing’s gonna happen. The only difference is the port showing as closed vs filtered in nmap, and the server refusing to send any response not even a rejection, but that’s it.


  • Proton is Wine but tweaked for the sole purpose of running games, so it packs a bunch of extra stuff needed to make games run well together.

    Usually there’s also a long list of per-game tweaks and changes to make sure it runs, it’s all preconfigured so you press play in your launcher and it works. Not need to change settings whenever you want to play a game.

    You can still use regular Wine but you’ll have to set up a bunch of stuff yourself, and eventually you run into a game that needs a different version of something that breaks another game, you get into prefix management and it’s a mess. Or oh this game runs better when we pretend to be Windows 7 but this one works best with Windows 10. Proton just does it all for you, every game gets its own space with all the correct settings from the get go, and you just launch into the game and play.


  • Honestly a VPN that doesn’t support Linux at least through manual connection settings, run away. All reputable and even the sketchier VPN providers support Linux, because that’s what the privacy crowd uses, not supporting it implies those aren’t even the target user base at all. It’s a red flag. It’s not a VPN for privacy or getting another country’s Netflix.

    I’d trust Norton about as much as my ISP, so unless you use public WiFi somewhat often, it doesn’t add much value, just the downsides of captchas everywhere. They’re probably analyzing the traffic to map out malware campaigns and such, which would make sense but isn’t very private.

    The business model of antivirus companies is fear, and they sell the solution to that fear. They have a VPN because people assume VPN means more security, of course they’ll sell you one. At best they block known malware domains and IPs, which is utterly useless on Linux anyway.

    If you want a VPN get a real VPN.


  • As for bandwidth and server costs, with gigabit fiber and faster getting more and more common, a lot of “just starting” streamers could comfortably support 100 viewers at 10 Mbps quality straight off their home Internet. Fewer viewers? Stream in full 4K 120Hz at 50 Mbps do your friends if you want.

    PeerTube has the advantage of WebTorrent, so an average channel doesn’t have to cost too much in hosting fees. Plus it’s all legal content you own so those are fully legal torrents. It’s also good for ISPs because they might have to transport that video just a few blocks across instead of all the way to the closest Google/AWS/Cloudflare datacenter and back.

    I get 500 Mbps unmetered on this $40/mo server, I think it could comfortably handle a couple thousand subscribers before I’d have to scale up, possibly a lot more with a healthy pool of WebTorrent viewers.


  • I think there’s also a big shift in people (in this case the viewers) being more willing to consume content from someone on a different platform they’re used to.

    For a long time, YouTube, Twitch and TikTok were mostly good to their users. If you weren’t on one of those platforms they weren’t even willing to watch you, because they couldn’t use their Twitch emotes and shit, you’re the “weird guy that just have to use the shitty platform”.

    And then they all enshittified, causing people to be increasingly more aware of the existance of the alternatives, but most importantly willing to use them when they encounter them. Now when you see a PeerTube link, you don’t think “slow and always buffering”, you think “oh finally something not on YouTube with ads on top of the creator’s Brilliant/Manscaped/$foodDelivery/$sketchyEnergyDrink. Now you see a PeerTube link and it’s like " yay it’ll just work even with my VPN on and ad blocker”.

    That makes it viable for creators to even try to use those services. The enshittification is so bad, it’s worth paying for the platform you broadcast on, manage your own sponsors and ads. Manage it like a real business, be independent.

    People are mass switching to Bluesky and Mastodon, people are willing to try and accept alternatives, and aware of the importance of competition and independence.


  • Proof of work is what those modern captchas tend to do I believe. Not useful to stop creating accounts and such, but very effective to stop crawlers.

    Have the same problem at work, and Cloudflare does jack shit about it. Half that traffic uses user agents that have no chance to even support TLS1.3, I see some IE5, IE6, Opera with their old Presto engine, I’ve even seen Netscape. Complete and utter bullshit. At this point if you’re not on an allow list of known common user agents or logged in, you get a PoW captcha.



  • I was totally above 13 or had parental consent when I went to forums in the early 2000s. I totally wasn’t actually 9.

    It’s wild to me this concept disappeared? It’s literally never been a good idea to reveal you’re a minor online. The laws are against you. Companies don’t want to deal with a curated minor experience, even less so in the current times. If they do, you get the crappier version of things.

    The worst thing to happen to the Internet is when Facebook normalized using your real name and real info online.


  • It’s not impossible, been running my own email server for about 10 years and I inbox pretty much everywhere. I even emailed my work address and straight to inbox. I do have the full SPF, DKIM and DMARC stuff set up, for which I get notices from several email provides of failed spoof attempts.

    Takes a while and effort to gain that reputation, but it’s doable. And OVH’s IPs don’t exactly have a great reputation either. Once you’re delisted from most spam databases / old spam reputation is expired, it’s not that bad.

    Although I do agree it’s possibly one of the hardest services to self host. The software to run email servers is ancient and weird, and takes a lot to set up right. If you get it wrong you relay spam and start over, it’s rough.