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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 28th, 2022

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  • My parents treated my device access something they had to keep a keen eye on. They were good at manually making sure I wasn’t sitting around having my brain rot, but their spying on what I was doing into my teens left me with some trust issues.

    They briefly tried to use technological solutions to control my access and monitor me, but all that served was to make me very good at circumventing them. Outsourcing parenting to a computer program doesn’t work, and kids notice when you try.



  • Typically no, the top two PCIE x16 slots are normally directly to the CPU, though when both are plugged in they will drop down to both being x8 connectivity.

    Any PCIE x4 or X1 are off the chipset, as well as some IO, and any third or fourth x16 slots.

    So yes, motherboards typically do implement more IO connectivity than can be used simultaneously, though they will try to avoid disabling USB ports or dropping their speed since regular customers will not understand why.




  • I build Linux routers for my day job. Some advice:

    • your firewall should be an appliance first and foremost; you apply appropriate settings and then other than periodic updates, you should leave it TF alone. If your firewall is on a machine that you regularly modify, you will one day change your firewall settings unknowingly. Put all your other devices behind said firewall appliance. A physical device is best, since correctly forwarding everything to your firewall comes under the “will one day unknowingly modify” category.

    • use open source firewall & routing software such as OpenWRT and PFSense. Any commercial router that keeps up to date and patches security vulnerabilities, you cannot afford.



  • hat’s a bad faith interpretation of “the people control the means of production”.

    I want you to consider the difference between the work needed to complete a task, and the work needed to manage a workplace: for one of those tasks, only the experts in that task can meaningfully contribute to the outcome, whereas for the other, everybody who is part of the workplace has meaningful input.

    I don’t know about your experience, but everywhere I’ve worked there have been people “on the ground” who get to see the inefficiencies in the logistics of their day to day jobs; in a good job a manager will listen and implement changes, but why should the workers be beholden to this middleman who doesn’t know how the job works?

    I’ve also had plenty of roles where management have been “telling me where to cut”.


  • It opens the door to more manufacturers since there is no ISA licence fees. While the AMD/Intel duopoly is being fairly competitive at the moment, it really doesn’t have to be. Only think back to how bad it was late 2000s to 2015.

    I imagine a plethora of core designers, soc vendors and platform creators filling their own niches; lowest cost, lowest power, HW accelerators, highest core count etc.

    I don’t see the raw performance of AMD/Intel being surpassed soon, just because of the sheer total R&D years each has, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other areas better suited to a different architectural approach.





  • NT is not the majority of windows code though; for windows to be multi architecture, all of windows needs to work with the new architecture; NT, drivers & userspace.

    For Linux, if an existing userspace application doesn’t work in aarch64, somebody somewhere will build a port. For windows, so much of their stuff is proprietary that Microsoft are the only ones able to build that port.

    Not because “windows bad”, just a consequence of such a locked down system which doesn’t have anything open source to inherit.


  • Memory safety is likely to prevent a lot of bugs. Not necessarily in the kernel proper, I honestly don’t see it being used widely there for a while.

    In third party drivers is where I see the largest benefit; there are plenty of manufacturers who will build a shitty driver for their device, say that it targets Linux 4.19, and then never support/update it. I have seen quite a few third party drivers for my work and I am not impressed; security flaws, memory leaks, disabling of sensible warnings. Having future drivers written in rust would force these companies to build a working driver that didn’t require months of trawling through to fix issues.

    Now that I think about it, in 10 years I’ll probably be complaining about massive unsafe blocks everywhere…



  • Setting up the PiHole device as a DNS server & DHCP server still won’t make all traffic flow through it, you need it to be a gateway for all traffic that isn’t destined for an internal subnet.

    To do that, you’ll need to set up your device as a router, with the necessary entries in iproute2 and iptables in order to keep lock out external connections without conntracks. You might be able to route to a turnkey container of some kind.


  • Are you trying to route your DNS queries through your VPN device or all of your traffic?

    Just your DNS queries is easy, set up the VPN as the default route for the device (using netplan or iproute2), then all queries from PiHole will go via that.

    All traffic is a bit harder, unless your PiHole device is the only thing between your regular devices and the internet.


  • They made a smart call that has probably increased the long term privacy of their users.

    People were using port forwarding to host illegal shit, and governments were getting pissed off about it. Mullvad has been able to prove in court that they don’t keep logs, but that’s not a perfect deterrent; a properly motivated government, perhaps if somebody is using Mullvad to host CSAM, might attempt to legally force Mullvad to put logging in and add anti-canary clauses.

    Preventing port forwarding keeps customers as consumers rather than hosters, and avoids this issue.