100% this.

If you did a venn diagram of ‘Worst possible implementation’ and ‘What Mastodon Did’ you’d just have a circle.

Don’t let it connect to the wifi/internet?

I mean, sure, you have to do the SD card shuffle, but it’ll guarantee you don’t end up having to deal with this.

If you have a more advanced set of network hardware (which it doesn’t sound like you do) you could add a firewall rule to block traffic from the LAN IP of the printer, or for something like Unifi, simply block internet access entirely. But, even then, if you screw it up now or in the future, surprise software updates will happen.

I had a discussion about using the Slashdot style voting rather than the Reddit style.

It not only has the additional tag, it has the max “upvote” display limit of 5, and the display code will expand and promote the best rated comments, while hiding the garbage.

I think comments on most forums would benefit from there being no ‘big upvote’ number to chase, as well as making the highest rated comments in a thread of say, 200, more obvious.

A lot of this reads like you have, like all of us will, just kinda gotten old and aren’t into or interested in the same things you were 20 years ago.

But, while the magic does wear off, you also went back to the same kind of locations an expected your new adventures to measure up to your past adventures, and that’s a recipe for disaster because comparison is the theft of joy. Maybe you need to go to somewhere dramatically different, like perhaps Africa or the mountains in Chile or Bolivia?

(Also you sound shockingly bitter and come across in text as more than a little grumpy, and people can pick up that aura so uh, some of this might also be on you.)

Sounds like a fantastic plan.

The handwringing about if we’re being nice enough to the alt right is directly contributing to why we have so much mess we’re now having to deal with. The approach seems sane to find music that’s very specifically nazi rock, so they’re being extremely limited in response, imo.

Screw em, kick them out of anywhere you find them, and then nail the door they used to get in shut.

The implication seems like, “we all talk to each other and if you lie to me you lose all of your accounts”.

Well uh, yes, in some cases, that’s exactly the correct interpretation.

A lot of tracker admins DO talk to each other, because this is a fairly small world, and yeah, nobody wants a shithead around so they’ll definitely let other people know who their shitheads are so they can be handled before they become a problem.

Nothing inherently wrong with that, imo.

Ah HP printer drivers, my favorite form of self-inflicted malware.

My favorite HP sucks story happened many a year ago. The boss’s shitty HP multi-function POS died, and we got him a nice Brother instead, and then went to uninstall the drivers.

Somehow, and the reason for this is totally unknown to anyone other than HP engineers, the driver ‘uninstaller’ decided that today’s hilarity would be that it was going to uninstall… everything.

After about 15 minutes of the drive churning away I got concerned, rebooted it, and found that nearly 75% of everything on it had been deleted by the uninstaller.

No fucking idea, but that was a fun thing to explain and then fix.

Yeah, for sure. SCSI died when SAS emerged, and that’s been basically 20 years now.

Any SCSI stuff left laying around is going to be literally a decade+ old and yeah, unless you have a VERY specific need that requires it (which really is just trying to get another few years out of already installed gear), it’s effectively dead and shouldn’t be bought for anything other than paperweights or for a coffee table.

nothing of value will be lost

I’d argue the opposite: there’s actually a lot of stuff out there that’s actually interesting: old-school lets-players who’d have done actual informative playthroughs of games. It’s kind of a dying art, but it’s also exactly the kind of content that’s going to get purged by this kind of action.

It’s interesting to spend, say, 10 hours watching some guy play Sierra games and actually talk through shit about the game and whatnot, and it’d be a shame to have that vanish.

But not entirely unexpected since that’s not profitable content in the way that the current morons babbling about bullshit reaction videos, totally-not-camgirls totally not showing their tits, and whatever other brainrot nonsense most of twitch is. (Also alt-right propaganda, but eh.)

Mismatch is trying to kill her brothers, who are tolerating it much like any brother anywhere tolerates their little sister being a pain.

MSA30

Unless my memory fails, that’s billion year old SCSI drives.

Do not buy billion year old SCSI drives, enclosures for SCSI drives, or uh, well, anything like that.

It’s going to use an enormous amount of power, perform slower than a single modern drive, and be prone to failure because well, it’s a billion years old.

That’s not something you want.

For bandwidth intensive stuff I like wholesale internet’s stuff.

The hardware is very uh, old, but the network quality is great since they run an ix. And it’s unmetered too so it’s probably sufficient.

Do you have a credit card?

If you do, Oracle offers a shockingly generous free tier of stuff. 2 little baby EPYC VPSes, a 4-core 24gb ARM instance, and a bunch of other sundries including 10TB/month of data transfer.

You can run a LOT of fediverse services on those free Ampere instances, and even something like GoToSocial will run on the little baby EPYCs.

And to just cut off the incoming dudes: yes, Oracle is a shitty awful company with shitty awful policies run by a shitty awful billionaire, but that’s no reason to not take free shit from them.

(And to the next group of people: I’m closing in on 4 years of free Oracle shit and they haven’t banned me, so I’m inclined to think all those stories are incomplete and they were doing something - mining, portscanning, hosting questionable shit, torrenting stuff, running a vpn that was abused - more than “nothing”.)

Universiality, basically: almost everyone, everywhere has an email account, or can find one for free. As well as every OS and every device has a giant pile of mail clients for you to chose from.

And I mean, email is a simple tech stack and well understood and reliable: I host an internal mail server for notifications and updates and shit, and it’s rapid, fast, and works perfectly.

It’s only when you suddenly need to email someone OTHER than your local shit that it turns to complete shit.

No no, you don’t understand!

He’s one of the good billionaires!

(/s for some of you, and for others perhaps you should reconsider why you feel the need to defend a billionaire, regardless of your opinion on video game platforms)

Now now, they’re not just inconsiderate assholes and leeches.

They’re inconsiderate nazi oligarch assholes and leeches.

Even following ‘beginner’ tutorials is hit or miss

It’s gotten worse than it even used to be, because more than half the “tutorials” I’ve run across are clearly AI written and basically flat out wrong.

Of course, they’re ALSO the “answers” that get pushed by Bing/Google so even if you run into someone who is willing to follow documentation, they’re going to get served worthless slop.

One thing I will give arch is that if there’s a wiki entry for something, it’s at least written by a human and is actually accurate which is more than I’ve found ANYWHERE else.

The only way you could make that worse is if Palantir bought them all first.

There’s no such thing as too much seeding.

Well, maybe the 85tb of Ubuntu 24.04 I’ve done is too much, but I mean, whatever.

(I’ve got basically everything I’ve downloaded in the last 7 years seeding, some 6000 torrents. qBittorrent isn’t the most happy with this, but it’s still working, if using a shit-ton of RAM at this point.)

And more fun, lots of laptops have really goofy routing. I’ve got one where the DP alt mode on the USB-C ports are on the dGPU, but the HDMI ports are on the iGPU. And the internal panel is on the iGPU unless you switch it to be on the dGPU because yay mux.

Why? I don’t know. Too much meth while laying the board out or something I guess.