Gruselbauer

There is no feasible way for me to agree more with this.

I very much belong to those negatively affected by this phenomenon. I'd wager many a HN commenter is. My RSS feeds are a carefully crafted web of information, as much of a not-echo chamber I can create. From stuff I don't agree with on almost anything - Breitbart and its national counterparts, neocon blogs, libertarian thinktanks - to sources I think of as pretty neutral - like the simple feeds of press conglomerates just feeding headlines - to the stuff I agree with vehemently and thus view as most dubious, I get it all, all day, all the time. Even syndicated across devices. I'm very rarely the one to ask "what are you talking about?" and constantly the one to explain topics. It's okay, being the AP of your social circles isn't the worst role to fill.

But it does something to you, doesn't it? I feel like my view of this world has darkened over the years. I'm only thirty years old now and I feel like we're headed for disaster on a dozen different concurrent tracks. My view of man has become shrouded in a perpetual gloom, my idea of a future a cycnical dystopia.

I know that isn't fair or true, but it's become increasingly hard to think otherwise.

I'm doing the same with a couple of containers and my experience is pretty much the opposite. What containers are you using, if I may ask?

I'm using jwilder's nginx rproxy container, the let's encrypt helper container for that plus half a dozen Web apps on a VPS. Among those Weechat, two instances of vanilla nginx, rutorrent, dovecot, mattermost, nextcloud and a test environment for my Python tinkering. Works like a charm. Upon bringing up a new container, I supply the desired subdomain and my letsencrypt user data, the container comes up and uses SSL plus automatically renewed certificates.

My Docker experience so far - in a private, limited, very much not production environment - has been "virtualisation light" all the way.

I think of Docker as a somewhat extended chroot, to wrap my mind around it.

Aren't the horrors of legacy and the lines of tech hipsterism often blurry though? I was born late, I often look at things older than me for an understanding where stuff came from. But then I have to help out my boss' friend debugging this 15yo Microbus-centered DOS-Application running on a SuSE machine from just after the invention of fire, and I don't regret growing up on BASIC as much.

On one hand, I get it. Especially the popular channels on Freenode or places like the Arch Linux forums can get swamped with people who could not care less for rtfm'ing. Ungrateful, entitled, obnoxious folk, robbing people of resources and time who're putting in work for free, at least in a lot of cases. Sucks. I usually get splendid answers from these sources because I don't even bother unless I have a specific question or error, logs to back it up maybe. Yesterday I had somebody on #Openvpn help me with an issue in three lines. Nice.

But if the snark is heavy without being warranted at all, it more than pisses me off. It reflects poorly on whatever you're representing and it's just bad communication. If all you have to offer is a lmgtfy.com Link, don't bother. Those immune to that train of thought won't, the others already have.

In Germany, we used to have a VK-like social network aimed exclusively at university students that was big before Facebook even appeared. To this day I have no idea how that died so fast and hard, and how Facebook managed to overtake it when it hadn't even translated the interface. Ze English izn't zecond nature to all ze Germans.

Did check it out. Absolutely amazing project and if anyone still reads through this chat, absolutely what a modern IRC experience should be like in my view. Effortlessly does a lot of the things people on here like about Slack.

I like WeeChat as a client, it's fast and lean and works inside the tmux session that pretty governs my digital life both private and professionally. Alas, it's not always accessible. Getting Putty to reliably work with tmuxed ncurses apps is a nightmare for example, imho.

Glowing Bear solves this brilliantly. It looks great, you get features like inline display of media and is easily secured with certificates from Let's Encrypt.

Thank you, devs. This'll make my "newly discovered FOSS projects of the year" list for sure.

Absolutely not. It's got a bit of an edge without seeming like something an angry teenager came up with - murder.im or so, "Riot" doesn't have only inherently negative associations -, it's short, easy to remember... it would've been a great name for many software projects, but especially for collaborative, communicative software I find it to be a stellar choice.

https://www.glowing-bear.org/ introduces pastebin for IRC. And a ton of other Slack-esque features. Generally very great software.

Does it still work if you've got WeeChat customised or does it need to be vanilla? I'd like to keep using it from a shell while on a decent machine, but would absolutely not mind the option to connect from mobile clients.

It's a wonderful name, indeed. "Let's riot!", I totally approve.

First off, I don't believe there's anything even remotely wrong with being a nerd. Quite the opposite. I do hang around in channels focussing on a diverse range of topics, from various freenode foss-channels to torrent trackers to radical politics and also, yes, shadier communities.

I just believe that even the most benign, non-techy use of IRC poses demands that are incompatible with the vast majority of users today. But that's a strength to me. IRC is filled to the brim with some of the smartest, most creative, exciting people I could think of.

> but I don't think I can recommend it to anyone who isn't already probably using it

I wouldn't recommend it to my friends, who were hard enough to get off WhatsApp and into Telegram at least. To my parents, who have trouble enough running Skype. To the girlfriend, who's happy with Snapchat. IRC, even at the very basic level with a GUI or Web client, demands things from users I don't consider realistic to expect from them.

I'm very happy with it the way it is though. Just saying that I won't waste time recommending Arch Linux as a desktop OS to friends who have trouble keeping a Windows install useable for six months.

Well, yeah. When I was a teenager my group of friends used to use a QNet IRC chat for communications. Most on mIRC and such clients. Today it's pretty much all nerds. I do enjoy IRC, and pretty much live inside my tmux session, but I don't think I can recommend it to anyone who isn't already probably using it.

I really cannot say anything either way on BM, having never been on the same continent and all. I do respect your point, violently creative energy is a spontaneous phenomenon to me, something that emerges on the fringes and gains momentum inversely proportional to its factor of acceptance. I for one, ex *-addict turned sysadmin with a few stories from the darker corners of life, have found that to be generally the case, but there are exceptions every now and then. I know very little about BM, people here only rarely have heard of it and of those nobody ever went, so one person tells tales of a drugged out Sodom & Gomorrha kind of place, others of a syndicalist camp, others again of pretentious Silicon Valley guys letting off steam playing the bohemians for a week. Don't know what is true, no immediate plans to find out.

What I strongly, absolutely, vehemently dispute is that David Foster Wallace killing himself was anything but the worst hit English literature took, ever. Guy wouldn't have been as sharp and witty and beautiful without a long standing relationship with pitch black despair, but man how I wish he'd have lived to produce an oeuvre of Pynchonesque dimensions.

Some kind of throttle would be a good idea, in that case. A gigabyte a day is unacceptable for some of us.

LastPass + 2FA here. I remember one diceware-style master password, the device creating the 2FA tokens has never even entered it, much less the app for LP. 16-100 character randomised alphanumeric+special passwords for every account, no need to remember a single one. Their browser extension is really good, too.

Oh and the passphrases for my PGP and SSH keys. Also stored in my LP vault.

Can I be bothered to care more than that? Nope.

Oh guys, thank you so much for new food for my vim-addiction. I'd hesitate to call myself anything but an interested beginner, so it's always very welcome to learn new stuff. I distinctly remember running vimtutor the first time as a teenager fresh of whatever Windows came before and thinking 'goddamn, whyyyyyy is this hot mess so popular among my mentors and idols?'...

Quite some years later, I don't think I could ever do without vim. Not saying that emacs wouldn't probably fill the same role, editor wars considered and all. I just had somebody tell me to pick an editor and get good with it, some blog or forum posting made me go with vim and it's been one of my favorite pieces of software since.

To contribute a little bit, what I've really come to learn recently is the 'hybrid line numbering mode' that was added with 7.4 iirc. When you add both. set relativenumber

set number

to your .vimrc, you get relative numbers for all lines except the current, which is displayed as absolute. Helped my navigation game a huge deal. Just in the unlikely case anyone here hadn't heard of it.

I know. But that's really where I, personally, make the decision to not care. Group chat with two dozen mates equals stupid banter, exchange of memes, lately some pictures of the young ones everyone seems to suddenly have, recaps of school day mischief. I don't say anything there I wouldn't say in a crowded room and neither does anyone else.

For something as deviously criminal as 'you got pot man?', the private chat function is alright.

Obviously the 'nothing to hide' fallacy is nonsense, but so is pretending every communication warrants the highest security parameters at our disposal.

Signal is a nice app, have it installed among pretty much every other messenger. But none of my friends, colleagues and coworkers use it. I have one contact out of almost a thousand on there. The desktop client only runs in a browser, Telegram can be open on all kinds of devices and synch up (ncTelegram on a VPS where pretty much all my communication is relayed, in my case)...

I know all the criticism, from the question of why they had to cook up their own crypto and nonfree server to the Russians behind it. It's still the best app I could sell to a lot of people who're not even close to tech literate.

Absolutely true for older generations, but among those under, say, forty years of age, the 'I don't have anything to hide' fallacy is alive and well just as anywhere else.

I'm German and it's been a huge ordeal to get my closest friends to migrate to Telegram at least. Signal was debated, but the lack of a good desktop client killed it. XMPP and IRC and all, not with these guys.

Germany has some vocal proponents of privacy ideals, like the Chaos Computer Club, but we also have politicians who pull the very same crap as anywhere else.