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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • DVI and HDMI are actually the same video signal. Which is why adapters are so cheap.
    DP can carry an HDMI encoded signal (and thus a DVI signal), which is why DP->HDMI and DP->DVI adapters are so cheap. It’s called DP Dual Mode or Multi Mode or something like that.
    I haven’t encountered a device that outputs DisplayPort that cannot output the Dual Mode HDMI encoded signal as well.

    HDMI/DVI->DP is an active conversion - ie it is re-encoding it. Which is why the converters are significantly more expensive.

    However, it’s all digital. If the signal quality degrades, it will be very obvious because it stops working (sparkles on a black screen, lines, flashes, all sorts).


  • I will say that a good scammer will circumvent a lot of the “earning trust” stage.
    Through social engineering or just sheer luck, they will catch you at a time when your guard is down and they will manipulate a sense of urgency.

    “Hi mom, my phone fell in the toilet and I really need it for work tomorrow. I’m using a friends phone right now, all my bank access was on that phone. I’m so stressed. Can you send me $800 via (dodgy website) so I can buy a new phone and get to work”.

    Instantly hits on an emotional pressure point. Adds a huge sense of urgency, with good reasons for an untrusted number and a dodgy payment method, and makes it seem difficult to corroborate with the mom’s kid.

    “Hello, this is your real estate agent. Unfortunately there has been a complication with the purchase of your new house. Due to extra fees, $10,000 needs to be transferred to X by midnight, otherwise the banks will reject the purchase/mortgage/whatever. Sorry for the out-of-hours contacts, I’m currently in (city) on other business and not in the office”

    Another hugely stressful scenario. Massive sense of urgency with a disastrous deadline.
    People don’t buy houses every day, and may not be fully aware of the process. They might take this as an unexpected but legit part of the process.
    Obviously, this requires significant social engineering to set the scam up in the first place (knowing someone is buying a house and roughly when). But the payout can be significant.

    The biggest piece of advice I can give is:
    If someone is applying a sense of urgency on any decision: STOP.
    Take a breather, think about the scenario. And then contact “the person/company” via another way through means you research yourself.

    If it’s on the phone, ask for a case number, Google the company and phone them directly. By text or email, same thing. Find their phone number via Google.
    If it is legitimate, an extra 30m isn’t going to harm anything. Especially if you say “sorry about that, I wasn’t sure if it was a scam or not”.



  • I can tell you that big data centers likely have a 4 year hardware cycle, where it is all under warranty and service contract.
    After which, it gets sold to refurbishers who refurb it and resell it. Or the datacenter may repurpose it for labs, OOB hardware, or donate it to schools.

    A lot of smaller companies don’t need the latest and greatest, and are quite happy running old 2nd hand hardware.

    Even after they are done with it, there are plenty of hobbyists that will buy it. I have a couple 8 year old servers that run absolutely fine for what I need.

    Old servers are also kept around as parts for companies that refuse to update old hardware (and will just keep buying spares, or like-for-like replacements).
    The last step is ewaste, where the good stuff gets boiled in acid to extract the gold, or whatever they do.

    The only things that are generally destroyed during hardware cycles are the storage, and that’s normally for compliance reasons.





  • Never mind flaky internet, what about people that do events?

    Things like PowerPoint presentation machines, VJ systems, video servers (for massive multiscreen playback).
    You can’t go into a field for a festival and expect reliable internet.
    You can’t go into a theatre and expect reliable internet, especially when 3k+ people turn up.
    There are a few systems that run OSX, but Apple’s hardware doesn’t give you as much control as something like an Nvidia Quadro with sync cards. 99% of the big shows will be ran from Windows OS


  • I used to use pfSense. It’s great.
    I recently moved to opnSense… And I think it’s better.
    Both are good, both are BSD, both have similar settings (tutorials are mostly interchangeable)… But opnSense just does it better, updates more frequently, nicer UI etc.

    If you are talking to yours ISP, it’s worth getting a bridge modem, and settings details for your own router.
    This modem will turn “isp” into ethernet, then your opnSense/pfSense can make the actual connection. This means it gets the public IP directly.







  • This is how mixr - or whatever it was called - died out.
    They bought in a couple big streamers expecting the rest to follow.
    But what makes twitch so good are the smaller communities.
    They often play niche games, have their own fantastic history, raiding each other, nice people, nice streamer interactions.

    Some streamers I know have talked about kick. Apparently they are offering a 95% split.
    I know twitch is probably extremely inefficient, but if twitch is struggling with a 50/50 split, how the fuck can kick maintain a 95/5 split? And if you move your entire community to another platform, just for that platform to die?

    YouTube is probably in the best position to rival Twitch.
    But their live stream system and discovery is severely lacking


  • I personally use cloudns as DN server. It’s fine. It was good before a lot of other services were developed. No idea what the kids are using these days. But cloudns gives me full control over records, decent enough interface, 2fa, and has an acme/letsencrypt API.
    I buy the domains from whomever, and change the NS records to cloudns. This bit is messy, but I also have geo-located domains that only some registrars can manage.

    Cloudflare is well known, and have their own registrar.
    I’m sure Amazon has similar.
    I’ve heard namecheap can be decent.
    Like I said, no idea what the cool kids are using

    I feel like this gets asked a lot on homelab and selfhosted over on reddit. Some google-fu will probably help.




  • It sounds like you are describing new user experience.
    And I understand, coming from Reddit, how this can be a shock.
    However, that’s how Lemmy works.
    Similar to how twitter users got a shock moving (or trying to move) to mastadon.

    The very nature of the fediverse works better with more instances, where a single instance has fewer users and the communities are more focussed.

    Beehaw hasn’t “blacklisted everyone from…”. They’ve defederated. Whilst it may seem similar, it’s more nuanced. And that’s what a lot of people don’t understand.
    Block-listing all users from lemmy.world from interacting with beehaw would be an amazing ability. That would put beehaw in a read-only state for users on lemmy.world, whilst still allowing beehaw users access to lemmy.world.
    Unfortunately, the current admin/mod tools do not allow for that. And manually dealing with the huge influx of toxic users (posting death threats, illegal porn or trolling) was taking too much time.

    Besides, the lemmy.world admin is working on custom tooling to deal with this issue. Because it is their users causing this issue, and it is their problem. And there is no higher authority - there are no Reddit admins to say “stop brigading”.
    Shitjustworks, last I heard, weren’t responding to communication.
    I have no doubts that beehaw will refederate as soon as Lemmy.world sorts their mod issues, or the Lemmy framework allows for more nuanced mod tools.

    You have to remember that Lemmy is young.
    It’s been around for a few years, but the shear scale of what is happening now is less than 2 weeks old