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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Tl;Dr the protocol requires there to be trusted token providers that issue the tokens. Who do you suppose are the trusted providers in the Google and Apple implementations? Google and Apple respectively, of course. Maybe eventually there would be some other large incumbents that these implementers choose to bless with token granting right. By its nature the protocol centralizes power on the web, which would disadvantage startups and smaller players.




  • Not the person who made the comment, but here’s my understanding. A “third place” is somewhere you spend a lot of time when you’re not at home (the first place) or school/work (the second place). Third places such as community centers were vital to the civil rights movement in the 60s, it was where much of the movement’s meeting, debating and organizing took place.

    The Reagan administration systematically defunded any of these politically active third places that were receiving federal funds, probably because they were worried that they’d be infiltrated by those scary communists. They were so worried about what the organized people might do in the future that they did everything they could to kick the financial struts out from under these community organizations. In many cases this destroyed some or all of the local community benefits that those organizations were actually providing.

    This trend cut across the political spectrum too. The Clinton administration did its own wave of defunding, though I suspect that was more for economic (i.e. neoliberal) than political ideology. Combine the lack of community investment with the rise of the internet, and you arrive at the situation we have today where third places are becoming increasingly scarce. It’s hard for communities to develop and maintain a cohesive identity when there’s no longer any metaphorical “town squares” where the people in that community gather.


  • I think you’re referring to FlareSolverr. If so, I’m not aware of a direct replacement.

    Main issue is it’s heavy on resources (I have an rpi4b)

    FlareSolverr does add some memory overhead, but otherwise it’s fairly lightweight. On my system FlareSolverr has been up for 8 days and is using ~300MB:

    NAME           CPU %     MEM USAGE
    flaresolverr   0.01%     310.3MiB
    

    Note that any CPU usage introduced by FlareSolverr is unavoidable because that’s how CloudFlare protection works. CloudFlare creates a workload in the client browser that should be trivial if you’re making a single request, but brings your system to a crawl if you’re trying to send many requests, e.g. DDOSing or scraping. You need to execute that browser-based work somewhere to get past those CloudFlare checks.

    If hosting the FlareSolverr container on your rpi4b would put it under memory or CPU pressure, you could run the docker container on a different system. When setting up Flaresolverr in Prowlarr you create an indexer proxy with a tag. Any indexer with that tag sends their requests through the proxy instead of sending them directly to the tracker site. When Flaresolverr is running in a local Docker container the address for the proxy is localhost, e.g.:

    If you run Flaresolverr’s Docker container on another system that’s accessible to your rpi4b, you could create an indexer proxy whose Host is “http://<other_system_IP>:8191”. Keep security in mind when doing this, if you’ve got a VPN connection on your rpi4b with split tunneling enabled (i.e. connections to local network resources are allowed when the tunnel is up) then this setup would allow requests to these indexers to escape the VPN tunnel.

    On a side note, I’d strongly recommend trying out a Docker-based setup. Aside from Flaresolverr, I ran my servarr setup without containers for years and that was fine, but moving over to Docker made the configuration a lot easier. Before Docker I had a complex set of firewall rules to allow traffic to my local network and my VPN server, but drop any other traffic that wasn’t using the VPN tunnel. All the firewall complexity has now been replaced with a gluetun container, which is much easier to manage and probably more secure. You don’t have to switch to Docker-based all in go, you can run hybrid if need be.

    If you really don’t want to use Docker then you could attempt to install from source on the rpi4b. Be advised that you’re absolutely going offroad if you do this as it’s not officially supported by the FlareSolverr devs. It requires install an ARM-based Chromium browser, then setting some environment variables so that FlareSolverr uses that browser instead of trying to download its own. Exact steps are documented in this GitHub comment. I haven’t tested these steps, so YMMV. Honestly, I think this is a bad idea because the full browser will almost certainly require more memory. The browser included in the FlareSolverr container is stripped down to the bare minimum required to pass the CloudFlare checks.

    If you’re just strongly opposed to Docker for whatever reason then I think your best bet would be to combine the two approaches above. Host the FlareSolverr proxy on an x86-based system so you can install from source using the officially supported steps.



  • It depends who you’re comparing. For the average US or Canadian citizen, I’m sure you’re correct. If you look at income levels I bet it’s a different story. The poor and middle class (whatever’s left of it) have to wait, the rich have the option of paying out of pocket. If I wanted to have a whole-body MRI scan done, I could get one next week for $3200. Wouldn’t even need to be sick! Requires a referral, but you can “obtain one virtually from (their) physician partners” and you know their “physician partners,” aren’t going to turn away business.


  • As a Canadian, I’ll be the first to say that our system isn’t perfect. If you’ve got a chronic but not life-threatening condition, like a need for knee or hip surgery, you could spend a long time on a waiting list. There are certainly lots of affluent Canadians who opt to step out of that line to get treatment at private for-profit clinics, both domestically and abroad. There’s always a shortage of something. Qualified doctors, nurses, family practitioners, CT or MRI machines, etc.

    That being said, if you do have a life-threatening condition, the Canadian healthcare system can work pretty well. My step father had pneumonia Nov./Dec. last year, chest xray revealed something concerning beyond the pneumonia, by early January biopsies has been done, by February he’d started radiation, six or so weeks of that, then monitoring for a while and now he’s in remission. Everything moved fast, because he had a time-critical condition. Total cost to my family: zero dollars (setting aside costs for gas, parking, snacks for stress-eating, etc.). I couldn’t imagine a family going through the same situation in the US.


  • The issue is that I have a 4k monitor and my current card can barely handle my desktop, never mind a game.

    Try running games at 1080p (1920 x 1080), which is exactly 1/4 of 4K UHD (3840 x 2160). Your graphics card will only need to do 25% of the work but you shouldn’t get any resolution scaling blurriness because everything divides evenly. This isn’t so much for your current card, which probably just can’t keep up with newer titles. What you can do is look at 1080p performance of current cards, decide how much performance you need and how much you’re willing to spend, and that’ll narrow down the selection a lot.

    Coming from a GTX 760, almost anything current gen or current gen minus 1 is going to be a massive upgrade. It’s hard to recommend a specific card without some info on your budget. For example if you had a budget of $300 US I’d recommend an Nvidia RTX 4060 since it has the best 1080p performance within that budget, or alternately a Radeon RX 7600 if you’d prefer not Nvidia (e.g. if you’re on Linux, the Radeon driver story is a bit better).





  • All due respect to Michelle Obama otherwise, but I think she was flat out wrong when she said ‘When they go low, we go high’. It’s the paradox of tolerance applied to the political realm. How do you ensure a tolerant society in the face of intolerant people? It’s impossible if you’re not allowed be intolerant of intolerant people. How do you ensure that political discourse sticks to concrete policies and objective facts when your opponent refuses to engage with either but instead stoops to conspiracy theories and personal attacks? Also impossible if you’re stuck talking about difficult concepts and nuanced facts while your opponent is free to sling personal insults and cognitively sticky memes that may have absolutely nothing to do with reality.

    The solution is to apply social contract theory. Tolerance doesn’t have to be a rule that you’re not allowed to break. It can be a social contract instead, so when someone breaks the social contract by being intolerant you are no longer bound by the contract, freeing you to not tolerate their behavior in return. Similarly, sticking to policy- and fact-based political debate doesn’t have to be a rule you’re not allowed to break, it can be a social contract between political opponents. If the other candidate won’t debate policy or facts then you’re free of the contract, which means you’re free to say they’re weird. Which they very much fucking are. Once you get most of the figurative children out of the room, you can go back to making actual progress amongst the contract-adhering adults who remain.



  • MinuteCast from AccuWeather does exactly this. It looks at your location, looks at radar data for storm systems approaching your location, and estimates when precipitation will start at your location and how intense it will be. It’s generally pretty accurate, with some limitations. It seems to be pretty good for consistent rainstorms but it can get tripped up by pop-up thunderstorms, where the radar track can go suddenly from no rain to downpour. It doesn’t make predictions more then 2-3 hours out because past that timeframe it’s not easy to predict if weather will continue on its current track or change direction. Even with the limitations, I use it all the time. Mostly to tell if I should take the dogs out right away, or if I should wait an hour or two.





  • Jesus, what a bunch of needless “security”

    I disagree with this part. Ticket theft is an actual issue, there are lots of ways to get a copy of someone else’s barcode and either use it before they do or (more likely) sell it to someone else online. TicketMaster’s marketing is talking up the increased security to distract from their true purpose, which is of course to find more ways to take more money from fans. Of course it’s debatable whether the increased security is worth the decreased convenience for ticketholders. That is the inevitable tension when it comes to security, where any increase in security always incurs at least some cost in terms of convenience.

    This is all for personal data mining.

    TicketMaster might be selling user data, but I don’t think that’s their main aim. They want control of the resale market so they can take a cut when tickets are resold. Note how they don’t allow direct transfers between two mobile wallets, they only allow transfers using their app. That’s so they can monitor transfers. If they see someone transferring dozens or hundreds of tickets to many other TicketMaster users then that person is likely reselling and they can clamp down on their account. TicketMaster’s true intent is to force all resales onto their ticket marketplace, because that’s where they get to take a cut of resales.


  • Oh yes, I don’t mean to absolve them of any blame. They treated it as an expensive lesson, which is probably the best way for them to process it.

    Also while TicketMaster is going to sell this as being an “enhanced security” thing, it’s pretty obvious that increased security is only a side benefit for them. Their angle in this is getting more control over the tickets they sell. As long as there are many people who want to go than can physically fit in a venue, there will be a reselling market for event tickets. TicketMaster wants to take a cut of these downstream transactions.

    While the security of rotating barcodes does hinder outright scams, mobile wallets normally allow wallet users to transfer items like tickets to another user if the ticket issuer allows it. TicketMaster does not allow this for their tickets, of course, because it could allow someone to resell tickets while cutting TicketMaster out of the transaction. Currently TM allows transfers using their app, but I’m sure they monitor usage of the feature and clamp down on anyone transferring many tickets. In other words if you try to resell in bulk without using TicketMaster’s own platform (where they get to take a cut), they drop the hammer on you.