• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Yes, you’d damage the car’s electrical system. First of all it’s not designed to feed in energy through that outlet. It’s made to output energy.

    And most importantly: 24V is way too much. 2 times the intended voltage would fry most electronics. Your stereo, the power steering, airbags, … There is a good margin and car electronics are designed to be pretty robust, but you’re pushing it.

    I think they’re still fine because what happens is your car battery absorbs that extra voltage. But it’s really dangerous. On a sunny day you’ll charge your car battery beyond the 14V or so the chemistry can handle. And at that point it’ll degrade fast. The acid in there is going to start to boil, producing hydrogen, so in addition to a destroyed battery, you’re in for a small explosion if you’re very unlucky. And once the battery is gone it’ll start frying the cars electronics because now there isn’t anything keeping the voltage down.

    Get a switch that exclusively connects either the car or the solar panel to the bluetti. One switch that switches between two things, not an On/Off switch. And make sure it’s rated for the current.

    Edit: Or a relais that toggles between both. It can switch if there’s power on the 12V rail, and connect the bluetti to either or.










  • As of now all advice here is kinda missing the point or wrong… (Exept the one recommendation to do updates ;-) I wouldn’t use Cloudflare as it’s really bad for freedom, watches your traffic and most interesting things aren’t even in the free/cheap plans… You can’t restrict connections to the “Established state” or you can’t ever connect to your server… And SSH is a safe protocol. Just depends on the strength of your passwords… And yeah, opening ports is never 100% safe. Neither is using computers. They can be hacked but that’s not helping… And I’d agree using Wireguard or Tailscale would help. But you already said you don’t want a VPN…

    I didn’t have a proper look at the Forgejo Docker container. I’d say it’s safe. It’s probably using keys instead of passwords(?!) I hope they configured it properly if they ship it per default. And it’s running sandboxed in your Docker container anyways and not running a system shell on the machine.

    The issue with SSH is, there are lots of bots scanning the internet for SSH servers and testing passwords all day. Your server will be subject to a constant stream of brute-forcing attempts. Unless you take some precautions. Usually that’s done by blocking attackers after some amount of failed login attempts. This is either preconfigured in your Docker container (you should check, or watch the logs.) Or you’d need to use something like fail2ban on top. Or ignore the additional load and have all your users use good passwords.

    (What I do is use Git over https. That worked out of the box while ssh would have required additional work. But I also have lots of other ports forwarded to several services on my home-server. Including ssh. No VPN, no Cloudflare … I have fail2ban and safe passwords. I’m happy with that.)




  • It depends on the exact specs of your old laptop. Especially the amount of RAM and VRAM on the graphics card. It’s probably not enough to run any reasonably smart LLM aside from maybe Microsoft’s small “phi” model.

    So unless it’s a gaming machine and has 6GB+ of VRAM, the graphics card will probably not help at all. Without, it’s going to be slow. I recommend projects that are based on llama.cpp or use it as a backend, for that kind of computers. It’s the best/fastest way to do inference on slow computers and CPUs.

    Furthermore you could use online-services or rent a cloud computer with a beefy graphics card by the hour (or minute.)


  • Hmm, I get you. But I don’t think that’s what this discussion is about. I’m more concerned with the technical difficulties / impossibilities / inconsistencies with the approach. Less so if it should replace the current solution or a possible upgrade path. That’s something to worry about later. It’s more like I don’t think it’s going to work properly. It’s more combining the disadvantages of two different approaches.

    But I’m happy if someone goes ahead and does a better approach. I also see the shortcomings of the current solution. Maybe I’m being too pessimistic.


  • I really agree with your premise. Less responsibility on the server means less depending on it. We’d gain independence, could move accounts and do some more nuanced things. But I really think the less your own server or relay does, the more you’re prone to suffer from network outages, other servers becoming unavailable etc. So you’d need to duplicate everything no matter what to compensate for that. And you introduce lots of additional traffic by fetching all the hashtags from everywhere. Or you’d end up in the same situation as before where they’re subject of availability on your instance or perspective on the network.

    Plus you want unsubscribed old posts showing up and a perspective that’s independant of the chosen instance. So you basically need to replicate everything everywhere. And this introduces additional complexity and resource usage and your goal was to reduce that. (And federation becomes just an inconvenience and additional unnecessary work at that point.)

    It’s not that it’s technically difficult. We could do that. And you’re right by pointing at XMPP and Movim and stuff. But that also doesn’t solve most of the issues you outlined in your initial post. It’s even more narrow in how you rely on your own server and shaping your perspective on the whole network.

    And sometimes this is what we want. People do dedicated instances to a topic. For example a Mastodon server for IT and tech people. Of course you want IT related stuff to show up on your main page. And we sometimes want moderation and a place to have civilized discussions. Not a place of anarchy and shitposting like on 4chan. That requires some form of hierarchy or democracy. And at the end of the day the server operators are responsible for what content is shared (publicly) via their infrastructure…

    So I’d say you can’t achieve all your goals with ActivityPub. You need to think bigger. Maybe do away with federation altogether. Since federation is all about having different instances with a different focus and perspective on the same network. Maybe focused on a language or subject or sub-community of users, different rules and moderation. And you want more a unified perspective, everyone gets the same and less intermediaries. I’d say that is fundamentally incompatible with this form of federation and kind of out of scope. You probably want a network without that hierarchy. And that comes with different technical challenges and advantages.

    (And suppose we extended ActivityPub. Instead of separating and moving stuff to the client, we could imagine you install a Lemmy or Mastodon server/instance on your computer or phone. Along your browser. You’d have it all on your device and could configure it like you wanted. I’m not sure if that’d be a superior solution.)


  • I have Debian on my servers for a decade or so, and on several workstations. My past experience doesn’t quite reflect that. The Debian guys and gals have always been pretty quick with patching the vulnerabilities. Like outstanding fast.

    There is some merit to the bugfixing. But that’s kind of the point of Debian Stable(?!) Like in the meme picture of this post I don’t want updates each day. And I also don’t want the software on my servers to change too much on their own. I know my bugs and have already dealt with them and I’m happy that it now works seamlessly for 6 months or so…

    And that’s also why I have Debian Testing on my computer. That gives me sort of an unofficial rolling distro. With lots of updates and bugfixes. I mean in the end you can’t have no updates and lots of updates at the same time. It’s either - or. And we can choose depending on the use-case. (I think the blame is on the admin if they choose a wrong tool for a task.)