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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • People can help you, but there is a way to ask, and learning how to ask is part of learning the OS. We are fascinated by problems actually.

    The problem is that people come and say things like “I tried to setup a fleegbat server and it doesn’t work!” and so for the helper it becomes a process of pulling the information out of the asker in a long and painful process of interaction and we just move on. Users who say things like “here is the error message I’m getting when I try to start up my fleegbo server, anyone understand this?” get way better help.

    Those who really want to learn it come to understand these things, those who just want to do something neat and not work their ass off will complain that it’s too hard.

    Those who do the work are rewarded in many ways. I drove a dump truck ten years ago, now I make twice what I used to, working with people who aren’t racist sacks of shit. They were my motivator to learn, I was tired of being among pigs every day.


  • JTode@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldIt's Hard to Stay Motivated
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    1 year ago

    I will be one of many saying this: if you want to self-host you need to learn Linux. It can be done, but this is not like taking a pottery class and you don’t really get to show anyone, the only people who will understand are people who are also able to do what you do. It’s rewarding on many levels, but pleasure and sociality are not among those rewards. :>


  • It’s mostly about using every last one of the cpu cycles efficiently, which is old school think from the days when 640k was supposed to be enough for anyone. When I was a wee tyke in the 8bit era we had machines that did graphics, but they were for launching games from a terminal/console.

    There are many servers with GUIs, primarily Windows servers, and there’s probably web or GUI interfaces available for every useful service you can run which will be handy in some contexts, but there’s a kind of speed and simplicity you can get with a good console that no gui can touch. Hard to explain unless you’ve done some work.


  • GenX here. Spotify came long after my youth. It came during my regression into second childhood.

    TLDR: You don’t need a spotify/tidal/whatever, a personally curated collection of music is awesome and not being able to instantly play anything is not a death sentence. It can make things more fun by introducing things like anticipation.

    I was once a music-obsessed child whose only access to most music was the random chance of hearing it on the radio. There were a few magical tunes that I wasn’t sure what album they were from or even who it was that would sometimes come in from the universe and give me a lift.

    Then my mom got me a Woolco stereo for a birthday, 6th or 7th I think, and I now had the incredible ability to buy a 45 for a small amount of money - my allowance covered at least one, I remember, with money leftover for a large stash of candy to last out the week - and be able to hear any (one) song I wanted, anytime (that I was near my stereo). At used record stores I could get whole albums.

    At some point I discovered that some record stores (I’m talking mall record stores in Saskatoon here, not hipster record shops on the lower east side) had a sort of 45 backlog, a section of older hit records you could still order, with a book you could look through for titles. Back then, it was understood that sometimes one hit tune was all an act was ever gonna have, and there was not a need to shove 9 remixes down your throat as an excuse to pump you for the price of an LP.

    When you bought an LP, you got this 12" square of cover with it, big enough for detailed photos of the band, or lyrics, sometimes you’d even get a gatefold sleeve (so four broadsides instead of just two in full color, occasionally they would do this even without a second LP being included). Sometimes even high concept stuff, like Styx’s “Kilroy Was Here” in the mid-80s, a concept album which featured still shots and narrative segments of a 20-minute movie the band had shot of the Science Fiction storyline, which was a response to the various shenanigans of the political establishment of the time. These included the Satanic Panic, which has been thoroughly explored in podcasts in recent years, along with Tipper Gore’s P.M.R.C., which started with she heard Prince do Darling Nikki and by the end had elevated Frank Zappa, Dee Snider and John Denver as an unlikely triumvirate of free expression champions who spoke eloquently and with no uncertainty as to their message against this nascent fascism, and which I believe was the real reason Al Gore lost his election.

    Anyone who loves music or freedom remembered.

    Anyways I remember on many boring car rides where all I got was, you know, Aerosmith for the billionth time, that I wished there was a kind of car radio that you could just tune in by artist name and song and it would just play anything. As I saw it, we had telephones that I could talk to our relatives in other places with, why couldn’t I just tell the radio station what song to play electronically as well?

    And about forty years later, we did indeed have that. More or less. All we had to do was murder the idea of music as art that is worth paying the artists for. We can quibble over rates and such, say this streamer only shaves the skin down to a few quivering nerve endings whereas Spotify skins the artist alive, but we all know that flogging the artist until they have no skin left is not the way to produce great art.

    So I got off. I’ve started to collect up my old physical collections as flac files, which my phone has plenty of room for. I make playlists like I used to make mix tapes to entertain myself on my drives.

    Now in my case I can point to having spent about $20 in 90s-00s money on most of the albums I’ve amassed so I just put it together how i could. I bought LPs, I bought cassettes, I bought CDs and I even bought some itunes downloads, and in many cases I did it twice for the same record over the years. In other cases I never bought the record, sure. Some of those allowance weeks I bought blank tapes instead of 45s OR LPs.

    But basically, pick the artists you actually like who are working and signaling that they need help, and make a point of sending them some money. Buy a shirt, buy a physical media, LPs are still a lot of fun but pretty pricey. But just, take your music into your hands and your hard drive. Don’t stream anything. Carry it with you. Figure out how much space you’ve got on your phone, or get an SD card for it. Phone doesn’t have an SD card? You picked a bad company to buy from I guess, cause now you’ve started to play the game of triaging.

    In the 80s, if I was going out of town for the weekend to camp or whatever, I had to decide how much collection to carry with me. Do I just bring a few mixtapes? Do I bring a box of tapes to cover every musical necessity? Do (gasp) just listen to the radio? It was a whole part of your packing, deciding what music to have at the ready and what to not be able to play if you don’t think of it now. It was a game you played with yourself. Later on it was burnt CDs, then CDs full of MP3s when the stereos got smart enough. But same game, until Spotify “solved the problem” by just making everything available everywhere, at a price you won’t believe (because someone’s been skinned to get that price, and it wasn’t the scumbags at the head office, I assure you).

    Get off the streaming. Take your music into your hands. Build a collection of your favorite music and cherish it. Support artists directly. Stop pretending that paying for a streaming service is doing anything but murdering music as art and making you lazy in the soul.



  • Once I was in my teens and handing my money over to the tobacco industry because that made me very badass, I had a lighter, and what you would do is, first, you hold the flame up to the point where the spoon meets the stem and then yank the stem off so you get a long skinny bit of plastic off it. Then you’d snap off the “M” at the top, hold your lighter up to it until just starts to melt, and then stick it onto the upside-down spoon thing.

    Toy mouse!




  • No, but that radio station should definitely be shut down and handed over to the ICC, just like Facebook and Zuck.

    By your silly analogy, I would have a problem with all the physical equipment manufacturers that Facebook buys their servers, switches, etc from. It’s not about the equipment, actually, it’s about allowing the operator of that radio station to continue operating the radio station, and not just that, continuing to listen to a station operated by that broadcaster in a different market, because in your market it’s all car ads and vaccine denial instead.

    Try again.




  • Oh dear, you have creeped my history and identified that I am neurodivergent, and therefore have identified the pretext to reject my thesis without bothering to really engage with its implications. Well played, you sure got that sucker.

    I am afraid you are off base though, I have put bipolar in front of my various practitioners many times, and they tell me that while they do see things that resemble a cycle in the things I say to them, the problem seems to be that neither my manic phases nor my depressed phases (last one was about ten years ago and lasted twenty years or so) were sufficiently destructive to my functioning to be diagnosable.

    That said, I am halfway through clearing a ~300m forest path on my property today, and intend to have a fence up a week from now, so who knows, maybe you and I are both correct and the doctors are wrong.


  • Lol I knows baby, I knows.

    In the end we must all rise up or go under, all together is how it ends up either way. I do try to buy my clothes at the thrift, which is easy since I never had the choice to be fashionable; wrong body type, which also meant I have frequently been faced with the choice in life to either buy ugly and ethically compromised [edit: also expensive, really expensive] clothing, or just go naked with my body that everyone finds utterly disgusting, went the reigning social narrative of the era. The world is a real bastard.

    That said, anyone who makes sure to like all their grandpa’s Facebook posts, I would ask you to ask yourself this:

    Do you think your grandpa cherishes every single one of your Facebook likes as much as a single phone call?

    Or do you think your grandpa is there because he was also told that he had to be there now, if he wanted to connect to his family?