FoxAndKitten

So what's going on is the adversaries continuously hitting the lemmy.world server. On its own, a DDOS like that would be manageable - they're much more defeatable these days

But they found request paths that run expensive db functions, giving them enough bang for their buck to make an impact, even tucked behind cloudflare.

As for mitigation, cloudflare and a larger server help, but ultimately lemmy needs some refactoring - right now it's very liberal with the database calls. It needs to divide those up and get more granular with API calls, look at what can be optimized on the DB side, maybe do some caching/memoization... Basically, it needs to become a more mature piece of software in a hurry

Going further, there's things like horizontal scaling - there's even thoughts of how we could leverage the nature of the fediverse to share the load through federation.

I'm a dev, I don't know much about administration so I'm not sure how you could help, but there's plenty of work to go around. I think a database expert would be the most useful right now.

There's messing with configs to tune everything for better performance - that's out of my expertise, but I'm under the impression that there's some significant gains to be had there

If it's in your wheelhouse, you could look at different technologies that might give better performance - the current stack seems like it was chosen mostly with ease of development in mind, if you could make a strong argument for changing some of it out it might get traction.

As far as cyber security in general, if you want to get started - step 1 is basically locking things down, and then setting up monitoring tools and getting experience with them. Basically reading logs taken to the next level. I'm pretty sure they have that handled here, but this problem will never go away

North America, South America, central America, the Pacific islands... The list goes on.

This isn't some kind of metaphysical crap, they respected the land so it would provide for them. Respect in this context means you're mindful of what you take, and you plant the seeds to help more grow down the line. You hunt the herd, but you also chase off predators and make sure it stays healthy.

Some of them didn't have to take food with them when they traveled, because over generations they stocked the forest with edible plants. They knew how to, but they often didn't have to plow the soil because their ancestors artificially selected for the environment into being great for humans

They surrounded themselves with food forests. The uneaten food draws in animals too, making for easy hunting. No worries of depleting the soil, you don't have to work the land, you just walk around and gather what you need

It's very efficient and probably what humans did in most places that had good conditions. You get to spend most of the day on your hobbies and hanging out. They had trade networks from Argentina to the Pacific Northwest. They had advanced math and their technology was moving at a reasonable speed. They had hundreds of thousands of people, and plenty of room to grow

Farming has one advantage - a small group working their asses off can feed a much larger group. That let's you field big armies with bupply lines, and then you can turn the "savage" land into farmland, and extract profit from it while denying their food source

Their situation wasn't unique, every indigenous people either had forest gardens or managed herds of wild animals. They even had empires like the incas and the Maya, who were able to build roads, pyramids, and floating cities with huge populations

That's why they started wars when people started killing buffalo for profit and leaving the meat to rot - they were willing to share because they had more than enough due to generations of work, and profiteers slaughtered their food source for no good reason. It wasn't moral outrage, it was an extensional threat

They rejected the idea of ownership of the land because it wasn't theirs to exploit, it belonged to future generations. And that's why our generation is fucked, because capitalism isn't about efficiency, it's about maximization

That's how she goes. Things get worse bit by bit, then all at once

It's how systems fail

On one hand yeah, I'd look at us pretty dimly from the outside

On the other, we've been kinda fucked. Our mental health is in the gutter, we're unable to make connections the way every other generation could, we're missing all these milestones like buying a house and having kids and older generations keep telling us it's our fault.

Even as far as voting, we've been fucked. Previous generations had a choice - we get an ultimatum

They just keep gaslighting us.

We don't have the money, we don't have the power, but we do have the numbers and as a group we're not ok... Frankly, there's no way this ends well. It's hard to comprehend how the powers that be haven't realized that and thrown us a bone now and again

Huh... I'm a huge proponent of brushing your tongue (it doesn't take much, just a brush with a scraper on the back makes a big difference). I've never really tried washcloths, but now I'm going to give them a shot

On the flip side, my skin is weird. I get hives for literally no reason, I tried one of those plastic poofs and it makes me itch like crazy.

🤞

IDK if you can convince it to run on Linux, but I've been pretty happy with paint.net lately

It's basically a newer project like gimp. It's got the core abilities and appearance of Photoshop. Feature wise, it's less than gimp or Photoshop, but what it has works decently well

Most importantly for me, the UX is much better than gimp... Not as good as Photoshop, but I find stuff is usually where I'd expect it to be

Obviously it's built on .net, so theoretically it could run native on Linux... Not sure if anyone has done the work to make that actually happen

Biden was old in 2020, he was old in 2016 too. So was Trump.

Nominating younger options would be great... Except we have 2 parties who have special rights and few restrictions - they can straight up throw out nominations if they want, and they've convinced the public at large that 3rd parties aren't an option

We need ranked choice voting desperately.

Personally, I also think all votes should be write-in. If you don't know which office they're running for and can't spell your candidates name correctly, you haven't met a very low bar of education on the topic. Maybe your vote shouldn't count

Oh for sure with valve - they're still a company and they're certainly capitalist, which basically means they'll get more cold and ruthless, and it means they're making money for someone else through their labors

That's still anarchist though - no ruler, not no rules. They don't get told what to work on or how - the threat of getting let go (with a reasonable chunk of severance) doesn't make it not anarchist. Neither does the fact they don't get to keep their profits

You can mix and match systems - you can have pure anarcho-capitalism or anarcho-communism, although by operating in a predetermined framework it's not really pure anarchism

The ranking system doesn't take much away though, team roles are aren't assigned, they're ad-hoc. And with software we don't have the same hierarchy within a team unless there's a massive gap in skills/experience. You can't code what you don't understand after all - leadership is more about communication. You might have an architect designing the big picture and a team lead coordinating, but even in strict chains of command, programmers usually write tasks as a group then choose their task from what needs doing and what they feel confident in

But anyways, it might've been transformed to be more corporate over the years (I dug into all this a decade ago), but it was certainly designed to be anarchistic - that doesn't mean good, not exploitative, in any way fair or equal... Just that the group functions through the individuals autonomously working towards the groups goals

More than that - it would strain the nascent communities

Already we've started to see it with defederation - admins don't truly grasp the level of seriousness it represents, and are using it as a mod tool. It's one thing to use it against bots and malicious nodes, it's another to use it like a ban hammer

Plus, if you go on different servers, the experience is like a different site. Sh.itjust.works feels like shitpost central (not a criticism), lemmy.world feels like Reddit from a decade ago, lemmynsfw.com feels like a porn site built for tens of thousands and used by dozens.

I think it's great - half the draw of the fediverse is finding a new home, soon I'm going to start trying out some small servers and hopefully get to know some people alongside my accounts replacing the endless posts of Reddit (but with better quality IMO)

If a big wave comes all at once, it'll change the culture overnight. Small servers might close registration to preserve what they have, bigger ones might grow into it, but it also might be enough people to give the entire fediverse the feel of Reddit refugees

Once the culture becomes more stable, we're more likely to teach them the Lemmy way rather than rebuilding Reddit... It'll change no matter what as it grows, but the more gradual and organic the growth the healthier the community

There's a Linux phone by pine, people on here seem to like them a lot. I wanna get their $30 watch and $200 tablet when I get some cash - it seems like they make all the things I've always wanted, super hackable Linux hardware in a nice form factor and low price

The specs on their phones don't look amazing, but the cheapest one is $100 - low enough I might give it a try if I like their other stuff. Now, if only they'd make a hud that drives your phone without shooting for head tracking... Just something you can read and scroll with

I can't edit in the app I'm testing out, but I'll add a qualifier after hearing the pejorative connotations (I literally first heard the word last week and am looking for context)

I'd love to hear the take on the definition of the term tankies by someone who believes others would push the term on them

Fair enough, a pejorative term for what exactly though? The most nuanced answer I've gotten is from a proponent of communism who pointed at the authoritarian bent to it... Which seems super weird to me.

The way I see it, a bureaucracy has more leeway in allocating goods the higher up you go, which is very literal administrative capitol - it's totally in conflict with the core concept of Marx, which is a person getting the fruits of their own labor, and no one getting to milk others (which is really the only way to get much inequality)

I'm a lot more critical of lennonists. While on the surface it imitates capitalism's ability to optimize production (and with a more aligned goal, minimizing scarcity instead of maximizing the supply-demand equation), it also reintroduces the alignment problem. As you scale up, individual action and ideological beliefs become blips in the data, and the super organism created through humans arranged in the structure.

Individuals have a perverse incentive to maximize their own authority, the number of people under them, and the scale of their operations - by doing that they appear more meritocratous and are more likely to move up the hierarchy. Eventually someone gets the idea to fudge the numbers, and since the metrics are too complex to spot this in a spreadsheet, the most widely selected for skill to move up the ladder is to distort (or spin) the numbers so an individual appears to be serving a greater need than what actually exists.

Lennon's theory is great, the more centralized the distribution, the greater the potential for optimization - but it ignores the emergent properties that appear when humans form an entity too complex for individual humans to grasp the full picture. You can reign in the worst excesses through watchdogs and harsh punishments, but ultimately that just becomes another layer for power to concentrate. You can keep layering and slow down the rot, but it's a fundamental alignment problem - either you purposely concentrate the power in a person or group and regress to autocracy, or you constantly keep adding layers of checks and balances (which eats away at the efficiency gains)

So I see a fundamental contradiction here, which is why I can get behind techno-communism with intelligent agents running the show, or I can get behind decentralizing the system and creating something more anarchistic (or ideally, both), but Lennon always seemed to me to be a smart architect given a problem with a scale and an urgency beyond his abilities

Or am I missing something fundamental?