When I was 16 I was a little shit. Went to a school where there were loads of posh, upper-middle class kids who desperately wanted to try weed but had absolutely no way to get it. My friend and I sold them so much random shit that wasn't weed. Once we scraped this outer layer of soft, brown matter off a wooden park bench that had been in the rain, rolled it into a ball and said it was hash. We got expelled, but not because of that - just because we were idiots.

I have strictly instructed my family, including my wife, that if I ever develop alzheimers I want to be euthanized. If I am sufficiently lucid at the point of diagnosis I will have no problem overdosing on something and going out in peace.

I'll admit it's anecdotal, but it is absolutely my experience having worked in tech for 15 years.

Maybe "dominated" is an extreme word, but I would put money on "over-represented".

This is really what I'm hoping for. Threads has not launched well, Twitter is on the brink of collapse, Reddit is in the midst of enshittification, and Facebook is only used by old people.

Tiktok, Snap, and Insta are still absolutely huge, but there is a definite pick up in pace of people adopting the fediverse. There is hope.

Dating apps are toxic as it is, and the fact that most of them are basically days mining operations at this point makes it even worse (this also heavily impacts the overall ux). I have a friend who has worked for multiple dating app companies and it sounds awful.

I think an open source one that respects user privacy would be amazing, but honestly would likely be useless, as barely anyone would use it because people don't really care about privacy, and select dating apps purely based on user volume.

In addition, and although this is gradually changing, tech and therefore tech-related interests such as data privacy and FOSS are still overwhelmingly dominated by cishet white men, so I can't imagine such an app having even the most basic, binary requirements in terms of diversity.

Operating systems are for casuals. My user interface is Assembly.

Install gentoo

It's constant and relentless. I am what some people call "gifted" but it never really feels that way. I have a good job that bores me to death and a battle so hard all day to make it work. I'm good at lots of different things, from programming, to music production, to writing, to building things, but I can't devote any meaningful amount of time to any of them, and I neglect all the important aspects of my life. My physical and mental health are fucked, I'm in debt for no good reason, and at this point I think my adhd meds make it worse, but if I don't take them I'm basically in a comatose state. It's honestly no wonder that we're statistically likely to die 10 years earlier than average.

I just grab them off ebay. SAS drives are almost exclusively used in enterprise servers, so there's fuck all demand for them on the used market. Buy a cheap PCIe SAS controller card and you're good to go.

I use Unraid which doesn't care at all about what types of drives you use, so you can mix and match into one huge array. I have 8x SAS and 2x SATA drives in one array.

Thanks very much! Yeah it's kind of endearingly ghetto, but I'm really happy with it.

I mainly installed the screen as an easy way to see what's happening during boot, so I don't have to lug the server into the other room and connect it to a monitor when I make changes to things. I'm planning on setting up a stats readout so it's useful the rest of the time - things like network status/traffic, disk/cpu utilisation etc.

I've found used SAS drives really cheap. Averaged around £6 per tb.

Well... Most of it has a case.

You know it. The second best way to make things attach to things after zip ties.

I used it to self-medicate for my ADHD for years. It calmed down all the noise in my head and allowed me to have one train of thought at a time. It also made me high, which was nice. I'm the end, it became a crutch for dealing with the hard aspects of life, and fucked with my brain chemistry a lot. I ended up a paranoid wreck, developed severe anxiety and stopped. Now I enjoy it occasionally but if I smoke too much it makes me feel depressed for days afterwards.

Hard disagree. Nobody is above this stuff. Thinking you aren't vulnerable is a good way to become more vulnerable.

This isn't a plug, but it is a link to an article I wrote for exactly this reason. I tried to succinctly explain why privacy matters with real work examples and precedent.

https://emilsmith.pro/articles/posts/2023-06-29-practical-tips-for-protecting-your-data-ditching-google-and-why-it-matters/

Cambridge Analytica was a company that used machine learning algos on Facebook user data to target hyper-specific political propaganda to many small segments of voters, rather than few large segments. They spent years testing and refining their process in the developing world in preparation for deployment in the West.

Steve Bannon was the VP. As soon as they pulled off Brexit, he left to head up Trump’s campaign using the same techniques.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica

Let's not forget that they were fined $5 billion for deliberately misleading users about how their personal data was used in regard to the Cambridge Analytica scandal that effectively swayed over 200 elections all over the world, including both Brexit and Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

Seriously, everyone seems to have forgotten about that shit and it's fucking insane.

I actually really like this take. Maybe this is just social media growing up, becoming more focused and self aware. The fediverse is currently super rough around the edges, but it really knows what it is. That's more than can be said for pretty much any of the big social networks.

I'm so down for an open, transparent Internet with focused communities and small websites.