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l72

1,616 karma · joined September 6, 2018

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l72··on Fastpotify
Wow this is amazing. I can't believe shoutcast still exists too!! I have fond memories of hosting a shoutcast stream at very low bandwidth over dialup!

There seems to be a few decent apps in F-droid and lots of stations with no ads and very specific genres like just depressive black metal!

l72··on Fastpotify
Regarding Bandcamp, I find following small labels to be a great way to find new music. Small labels tend to release music of similar style and quality. They often also have deals on bandcamp where you can buy an entire label's discography for crazy cheap, like a hundred or so albums for $50!
l72··on Maiao: Gerrit-style code review workflow for GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, others
I wish git worked like some of the other dvcs (bazaar/breezy). The default merge type from a branch should be a merge commit and git log should only show the first parent (commits directly on the current branch).

This gives you a very clean log on main (it only shows commits directly on this branch). There is no need to squash, rebase, or anything else. And if you want to dig down into individual commits that happened on a branch, you can!

This can be a bit replicated by forcing a merge type of merge and setting an alias of log to "log --first-parent", but since that isn't the default, that isn't what you see when you look at the commit logs on platforms like github.

I never understood why git decided to show a flat list of every commit that happened, even if the commit originally happened on a separate branch.

l72··on Finger: the 1971 social network that never died
icculus [1] (who ported a bunch of games to linux), still uses finger [2]

  [1] https://icculus.org/~icculus/
  [2] https://icculus.org/finger/icculus
l72··on Tracking down the 16-year-old WAL-reset SQLite bug
As a user, I really don't care for magic links. The whole, start the log-in process, switch context, wait for email (sometimes up to a minute), click on it, have it open a new tab in a different window than where I started is just a pain. I feel like I spend half my day logging in to services these days.

The only time I like magic links is for services where I am "not really a user". For example, an appointment reminder for my doctor where I need to validate my insurance. Great, send me an email 24-hours before with the reminder and a magic link, as I don't want to think about an account there.

l72··on Qwen3.8-2.4T
> In particular, Qwen3.8-Max is the official version based on Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B with more features, such as vision input & non-thinking support, 1M context length by default, official built-in tools, etc.

That is unfortunate, that the open weight model doesn't have vision support or the 1M context length...

l72··on A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website
I don't look at the logs of my personal site very often as it is a static site, but just went to check, and yeah, it's almost all ai crawlers. Note sure what is going on here, but I hope this isn't really anthropic:

  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:31 -0700] "GET /secrets.json HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:31 -0700] "GET /credentials.json HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:31 -0700] "GET /secrets.yml HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:31 -0700] "GET /service-account.json HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:31 -0700] "GET /key.json HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:31 -0700] "GET /config/.env HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /service_account.json HTTP/2.0" 404 366 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /serviceAccountKey.json HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /firebase-adminsdk.json HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /Dockerfile HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.github/.env HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /firebase-service-account.json HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.docker/config.json HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.npmrc HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.boto HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.s3cfg HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.svn/entries HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.htpasswd HTTP/2.0" 404 346 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /terraform.tfstate HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /docker-compose.yaml HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.vscode/launch.json HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.ssh/id_rsa HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.ssh/id_ed25519 HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.ssh/id_ecdsa HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.ssh/authorized_keys HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai" 
  34.124.XXX.XXX - - [07/Aug/2026:07:55:32 -0700] "GET /.ssh/known_hosts HTTP/2.0" 404 343 "-" "anthropic-ai"
l72··on CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026
Yeah burned discs wore out much earlier but it depended a lot on the brand. Fry’s great quality brand (or whatever it was called) did not last long. But my memorex and verbatim still work fine after 30 years of mistreatment!
l72··on CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026
Agree with the siblings. I have hundreds of CDs in binders. They have lived in the unconditioned storage, very hot and humid attics, and on the floorboards of cars and for the most part, very few have any issues. It is quite incredible.

But storage is cheap so also rip it and burn an additional copy in case!

l72··on CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026
I like vinyl (any physical media, i still listen to new bands that only release on cassette) because it is cumbersome and purposeful.

You have to flip through a collection and make a conscious decision on what to listen to. You don’t get to just skip skip skip so you tend to pay attention and listen to the full album.

I get the convenience of streaming and love it when I’m on the go or need background music, but it is a totally different experience.

l72··on CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026
A friend in his 40s had a 90s birthday party so I burned some mix CDs as party favors.

Those CDrs were 20 years old and have been sitting in a hot, humid attic for the last 10+ years, but still recorded fine.

The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car!

Also, I don’t think k3b or any of the other software i tried has been updated since 2005, but it all still worked great!

Most importantly, one of my friends brought it home and his 8 year old was so intrigued by it she came over and we burned a bunch of mix cds for her and her friends! I have no idea if her friends had anyway to play them, but she enjoyed making hand made cover art for each friend.

When I was in the attic looking for blank cds I came across a few other spindles of burned cds. Both mixes from my formative years and a bunch my wife had kept. Those times were magical and I few like kids have missed out.

l72··on I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself
This is surprising to me and the exact opposite of what I want for a few reasons:

1. I don't like surprise breakages. I am not prepared to fix a service my family uses midday on a Tuesday when I am working since it auto updated. I'd like to specifically make sure I have dedicated time and plan if something is going to go wrong.

2. My family HATES when things change. I try to run LTS versions of things, but annoyingly, some software like nextcloud doesn't have LTS version. One of the things my family likes the most, is that the stuff I host isn't constantly changing like commercial products. Having google photos change or netflix have a new interface randomly is very, very frustrating for them.

Since my homelab is completely internal, I avoid quickly doing updates (unless it is a critical security issue), and definitely avoid doing major version upgrades unless there is good value in it.

l72··on Fox to buy Roku
As someone who has canceled all my subscriptions and just uses Jellyfin for 100% of my content, what are some good options besides a Roku?

I would love to have hardware like Roku, but just run a jellyfin client, with no need to even have Internet, just access to my jellyfin server on my local network.

It would need to be family approved as I don't need another project. I am not interested in AppleTV or a Google device (unless it can be 100% degoogled).

Has anyone ever successfully gotten things like CoreELEC/LibreELEC to work well?

I wish jellyfin would just sell some hardware, preloaded with a great jellyfin client. I'd pay a premium for it to help fund software development.

l72··on Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
You can always use something like this [1], which will make sure any file removed on the command line via rm (or other utilities, like git rm) ends up in the trash instead

[1] https://github.com/faratech/trashd

l72··on Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release
I’ll agree with some parts of this as I have some big issues with parts of systemd. But writing service files with systemd is so much better and having a unified interface into logs is really really nice.
l72··on Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release
I think it is amazing that Linux has reached such an audience that the knowledge of what windowing or desktop system being used is unknown.

But at the same time it makes me a little sad. Part of the draw of Linux was being able to understand what was under the hood and how to bend it to your will.

I’m hope the community doesn’t lose sight of that in trying to gain new users.

People often talk about the year of Linux or what success is, and in my opinion, Linux had achieved success by 1996.

Trying to pull a casual user from windows or Mac OS is a worthy goal, but that shouldn’t be the end all be all metric.

l72··on Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release
I worked at a company that had a powerful legacy software that was meant to be configured once and run full screen.

At some point it needed a custom interface and the ability to reconfigure itself on the fly.

Adding in a GUI was not a reasonable option.

We ended up writing a GUI (in gtk) then using Xembed to embed the other process and communicate via a Unix socket.

What would have been a major rewrite (and likely a port to a different language) ended up being a few a days project and worked beautifully.

It really showed me how powerful X11 really was.

l72··on Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release
When switching to Wayland I lost a lot of custom interactions. I’ve learned to live without them but I still miss them.

For example I was a big user of devilspie for placing windows in certain locations, on certain desktops, marking windows as sticky, or marking them as different types of windows.

I am still a heavy user of pidgin (I know I know but I’ve even written my own protocols for it). I really liked being able to place it in a certain position as a certain size, mark it as sticky, put it below anll windows, and mark the buddy list as a utility window. This places in the background, removed borders, and doesn’t include it in alt-tab or window list when you do the expose type of thing. Then I had a global key binding to bring it to the front of all windows or drop it back of all windows.

As far as I know, none of these paradigms even exist in Wayland and I’ve had to deal with less useful options or completely change my interactions which is unfortunate.

l72··on It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12
I know nothing about this, but they do seem to have a gamepad: https://frame.work/products/8bitdo-ultimate-2c-wireless-cont...
l72··on California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash
That’s like saying movies should have to rate every scene so a 7 year old can watch the “safe” parts of an R movie?

If a site is really mixing so much content (like Reddit) then they should really be separating their sites into different subdomains.

l72··on California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash
Every app submitted to the App or Play store already has to do this. If parental controls are on, then users cannot download those apps.

The only hard part for the web is that a site could lie since there is no gatekeeper, but some black lists can help with bad actors.

l72··on Jira Is Turing-Complete
We approach tickets that match with our development strategy. A ticket is tied to and represents a branch of code. When that code is merged the ticket is done. It cannot be reopened, you open a new ticket and link it and there will be a new branch.

I know everything that is in our main branch by looking at jira.

Product mangers and executives often want a very different view or workflow and it is hard to bend jira to work for everyone. Jira would need to have things like parallel workflows on a ticket and that would just get confusing and complicated.

l72··on Jira Is Turing-Complete
I find the problem is that engineering wants one work flow, product wants another, another department wants theirs, and so on.

As a CTO I have declared that Jira is owned by engineering and it is our developers’ process.

l72··on The quiet renovation at Bitwarden
I’ve found being able to share passwords with my spouse very valuable which we couldn’t easily do with keepass. Also the syncing strategy on iOS is a disaster and corrupted my wife’s keepass db causing her to lose everything.
l72··on The Quiet Renovation at Bitwarden
I mean does it? I have set it up before but I just set it up for my new small office team. I already had an internal server and WireGuard vpn in our office and it took 2 minutes to create a quadlet to run vaultwarden and a few more to configure it. The “hardest” part was training the team on how to use collections.
l72··on The quiet renovation at Bitwarden
It’s a bad strategy. I am capable so I host an instance of vaultwarden for myself and spouse (only available via our vpn)

But when friends and family ask for my recommendation I send them to Bitwarden and they pay for the service.

If it wasn’t for vaultwarden and the clients being open source I would not be using it nor recommending it.

I’d probably still be using keepass with manual sync and when friends and family ask for suggestions I’d probably shrug and say I don’t trust any of them.

l72··on The fun has been optimized out of the Internet
For me, what has really changed is the feeling of having community on the Internet.

In the 90s, I had:

    Instant Messenger with people I knew
    IRC channels for interests
    Forums for specific topics
    A Web Ring for my James Bond website
Back then, the Internet felt like an actual place I went to. I would sit down at the computer, dial up, and enter a space that had boundaries. When I was done, I left, and that separation made the time I spent there feel focused and real. You couldn't take it with you, and that was a feature, not a bug.

In the 2000s, we had:

    Social Media (Facebook), where you actually talked to people you knew and shared experiences with them
It hadn't yet become a content distribution machine. It was still a tool for connection.

All of this still exists, but it just doesn't feel the same. I don't think it's simply because I grew up, or because I'm looking back with rose-colored glasses. And I don't think it's just because these spaces became ghost towns as people consolidated into a few large networks. The architecture changed. The Internet stopped being a destination and became a layer on top of real life that never turns off. Somewhere along the way, the business model shifted from helping people talk to each other to extracting as much attention as possible, and you can feel that in every interaction.

Maybe that's why something is missing.

Facebook now has too many connections, and is just designed for resharing and getting people to doom scroll. There's no real interaction with your friends anymore. It became a broadcast network pretending to be a living room.

On Reddit, I feel like the community is way too big. I don't know who I am talking to and have no connection with anyone on there, even for things that should be local, like my city's subreddit. It feels less like a neighborhood and more like a stadium where thousands of people are shouting over each other.

Hacker News feels the closest to a community, but it is still too big. I have never made a single personal connection here, so I don't even know what I am contributing to. It all just feels faceless and bland.

We still have "Instant Messaging", but my biggest issue is they are pretty much all tied to a phone and "always online." I have zero interest in having a long back-and-forth conversation on that medium, especially now that there is no status of the other people. Back in the day, you were online or not online, and that boundary created a kind of ritual. A conversation could actually be instant and FOCUSED because you both showed up to the same place at the same time. Now it's just a slow conversation over days that randomly interrupts what you are doing. The persistence feels more like an obligation than a hangout.

Most forums feel dead. IRC just isn't the same anymore, and I really dislike being locked into Discord or other proprietary platforms. Matrix bridging has been a godsend, but isn't perfect. I know these small communities haven't completely vanished, but they have been buried. In the old days, you found them through webrings and serendipity. Now you have to dig for them on purpose, and most people never will. My long time friends don't use them anymore, so they aren't useful in connecting to people I already have relationships with.

The Internet just doesn't feel connected or fun anymore.

Don't get me wrong, being able to do research and find information on the internet is better than it has ever been, and I am grateful for that. But the Internet seems to have split in two: it became an incredible tool for finding information, and a terrible tool for sustaining relationships. The Internet was touted as a place for connection, and I feel like that part is long gone. Or if it still exists somewhere, it's hiding in small corners that the algorithms never show us, while the rest of the web is optimized for engagement instead of actually being together.

l72··on Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons
I have Raynaud's which causes loss of circulation in my fingertips even when the weather isn't that cold (so even in a car with the heat on). Then this happens, touch screens do not register correctly, and I end up having to use a knuckle or do what my sister does and use the tip of the nose
l72··on The feed doesn't know you, and YouTube refuses to let you browse
I find youtube's interface so incredibly frustrating and hostile. Even when I know what I want to watch, I find it very hard to actually get to it. On their Roku app, search for The Daily Show, and try and watch the latest clips. It doesn't show them in that order and browsing the clips is frustratingly hard. Their web interface, especially mobile, is equally as bad.

I've given up on trying to use youtube's interface and now just rely on recommendations + rss (via freshrss) or tubearchivist to keep me up to date and organize the videos.

l72··on City Learns Flock Accessed Cameras in Children's Gymnastics Room as a Sales Demo
The problem isn't having cameras. Its that these cameras should be closed circuit with data residing locally, not being sent to a 3rd party that has full access to the video streams, and who processes them, combines them with other parties, resells data from them, or hands them over without a warrant!
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