Love what these guys are doing.

There’s also a mainboard case, so you don’t need the whole laptoppy thing at all if you don’t want to

https://frame.work/gb/en/products/cooler-master-mainboard-case

Spez was a total musk fanboy during the early Twitter changes and said that he used him as an inspiration when changing Reddit’s api, breaking all the decent phone clients. I don’t doubt he’ll do anything to join the big boys club.

Surely it’s up to the advertisers to choose where who they pay money to use?

Centralised social media did, and is, doing extremely well by most metrics.

Such as censorship (everywhere). shadowbanning (X), ownership by an egomaniac slyster (X), blue badges (X), and being ganged up on (reddit). i’m ignoring platforms for addicts such as tiktok, youtube, and instagram.

You seem to be under the misapprehension that these large social media companies are operating for your benefit.

A strange notion to hold.

We tried centralization and doesn’t go well.

Well, no. Centralised social media did, and is, doing extremely well by most metrics.

We can build our ivory towers and feel happy and safe within them, but it doesn’t change the fact that we’re not missed and the above probably like that we’re not there pointing out its flaws.

s/reminder/warning/

It’s not that we “hate them” - it’s that they can entirely overwhelm a low volume site and cause a DDOS.

I ran a few very low visit websites for local interests on a rural. residential line. It wasn’t fast but was cheap and as these sites made no money it was good enough Before AI they’d get the odd badly behaved scraper that ignored robots.txt and specifically the rate limits.

But since? I’ve had to spend a lot of time trying to filter them out upstream. Like, hours and hours. Claudebot was the first - coming from hundreds of AWS IPs and dozens of countries, thousands of times an hour, repeatedly trying to download the same urls - some that didn’t exist. Since then it’s happened a lot. Some of these tools are just so ridiculously stupid, far more so than a dumb script that cycles through a list. But because it’s AI and they’re desperate to satisfy the “need for it”, they’re quite happy to spend millions on AWS costs for negligable gain and screw up other people.

Eventually I gave up and redesigned the sites to be static and they’re now on cloudflare pages. Arguably better, but a chunk of my life I’d rather not have lost.

Atlassian is shit for forcing us into the expensive cloud for a shit product.

I feel your pain. Or rather, I felt it once and am now freed!

We were big into Atalassian when they announced they were going cloud only. We had on-prem versions of Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket

We pretty quickly said “Fuck that”, mostly because we have an on-prem policy for IP protection.

I was pretty happy to spend some time searching for replacements, mostly because it was my job to apply upgrades to these steaming, tottering piles of badly written java horseshit. They looked pretty, but the upgrade process was convoluted and quite often failed terminally. I still think that the difficulty of upgrading the hosted versions was a driver towards cloud only, mostly because it exposed how shite the things were and how many complaints they must have got for offering an on-prem product that was so hard to maintain, despite looking pretty.

I take some pleasure that the Atlassian share price is now half what it was before they did this.

(If anyone was interested; Confluence and Jira were replaced by Youtrack. Bitbucket by Teamcity. Both by Jetbrains, both much easier to upgrade (Teamcity is web-based one-click), and our licencing costs are about half what we paid to Atlassian)

And that despite charging for it, they fill many versions of it with adverts, install without asking bloatware and crap paid for by other companies to shove down your throat, and also sells your personal information to (checks) at least 801 third parties.

Oh look, a speedbump.

Same goes for any storage.

I personally think it’s down to cost and planned obsolescence. The bearing is so soft, it’s clearly sacrificial. There’s a lot of dust from the eroded part, and the spindle was still as new. Even though the part is cheap and fitting it is quick, most people wouldn’t know how - and calling someone out to do it would cost more than half the price of a replacement dryer.

Can’t be heat - ball bearings, even just steel ones, are fitted to engines and car wheels. A dryer gets hot, but not that hot - and even if it did, ceramics are available. Same with diameter - if it’s too small you just increase the spinder size.

Why don’t they have proper ball-bearing bearings on the drum instead of just a bushing?

I had to replace mine last week. Okay, it’s been a decade of zero maintenance, and the part only cost a tenner, but still - if this was a decent bearing it would be fine.

I think it depends on your instance. I can, from lemmy.ml

Traccar - a GPS tracker.

It tracks devices around on a map and records stats about them. Used by fleet managers to monitor thousands of vehicles simultaneous, and also people like me with just two. The interface is a little quirky, but otherwise it’s a very solid and capable program. It shows a web map with live positions of the devices, battery state, speed, direction and other datapoints.

My wife and I like to know where the other is because we both do dangerous shit solo. (She horseriding, me motorbiking, and we’ve both got health conditions). I get notifications when she enters any number of geofences, and can see where she is at any time - and vice versa. This has eased anxiety for both of us.

Initially we used Life360 which is a nice and easy app to use. Then we found out that they sell your information to actively work against you. Not just basic stuff for advertising, but your driving habits, speed, style, accelleration rates - to car insurance companies so they can raise your policy costs, or potentially deny your claim entirely. (Just one reference but there’s heaps more)

So we went self-hosted. Traccar is free and I keep our information private. Install a small app on your phone and register it, and done. Or it integrates with dozens of commercial and open source tracking systems.

Disclaimer - not involved with the project, just a user and a fan.

(Just noticed my wife’s left her phone behind when she went off riding… I guess no system’s perfect!)

Agree. I use it just for GPSLogger - the best tool for logging and sharing comms ever written. So good, Google made it impossible to list on the play store, and F-droid allows me to continue using it easily.

Centralisation isn’t inherently bad. It has many benefits from a technical perspective. Remember that none of these social networks got popular through not offering people what they wanted, and the vast majority of people do not want biased or hate filled sites.

But centralisation does give a lot of power and influence to the few, and so far, they have all been found wanting when it comes to not being evil.

Yes.

Evidence suggests that X is a hate site run by a fascist.

Meta isn’t quite there yet, but heading in the same direction.

America is not the Western world.

It does, however, control a lot of the Western World’s media, and there’s a clear agenda to make people frightened.

It’s clear Trump wants to control all social media within the US.

1. Musk took twitter and turned it into a far right hate speech platform
2. Zuckerberg has a private meeting with Trump. Next day donates $1m to the inaugural fund. Facebook, Instagram and Threads remove fact-checking in the US and Zuckerberg. There’s some very odd fuckery afoot with left searches that are blamed on a technical glitch.
3. Tiktok is threatened with closure. They suddenly align themselves with Trump and the lights stay on.
4. Google’s boss, Sundar Pichai, is lauded and given a seat of honour at Trump’s inauguration. It’s clear there are established links there.
5. Reddit - I don’t know, but Steve Huffman has a /serious/ adoration of Elon Musk and is fond of money and power. If it’s not already in the fold, it will be soon.

I’d put money on that we’re already seeing left and anti-trump messages suppressed, and algorithms adjusted to promote division and discord - not just in the US, but globally. We’ll be seeing platforms other than the above attacked and inflitrated constantly by bots and AI. We’ll reach a point where you literally will be talking to yourself if you are against this. Your messages will just disappear to the point where you question your own reality. Shadowbanned online. Is Lemmy safe? No, not remotely. Decentralisation helps somewhat, but when the heavy guns are laying down suppressing fire from bot armies and destablising agendas - or even just being ruled illegal for some made-up reason, decentralisation doesn’t allow you to fight.

Jim Morrison said, "“Whoever controls the media controls the mind. The media is the message and the message is me.”

The aim here is obvious, and it’s not new. The method is just adjusted for modern day. And truth? Say goodbye to that sucker.