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another "wish i could help my fellow students with this" is all the people who got their laptop through the uni laptop program 1-2 years ago are now unknowingly getting an auto-update to windows 11, which doesn't work, bricking it until the service desk puts it back on windows 10....

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like of course the sci-hub part is a bit more tricky legally etc etc, but just Zotero would help my peers tremendously, but personally I also don't really have the spoons to teach it to every group project I work with

but it's so, soo much better than just loosely piling some papers, and just sorta winging the in-text and bibliography list of references by manual copy-pasting and going through web forms to generate APA formats

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Having Zotero set up with the sci-hub add-on is fucking incredible. Why aren't students taught any of this

handsomeware (infects your computer and calls you cute)

The fediverse is a dark forest. Every instance is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, a shitposter or a sincereposter, a delicate liberal or a Hans from Stuttgart, a fairy or a dragn—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. 🧵​ (4/3)

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yeah i read The Dark Forest and you should too. also the 🧵​formatting was done purely for comedic effect

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Any federating instance would view any other as an inevitable threat, and thus destroy any nascent life that makes its presence known.

As a result, the fediverse would be relatively silent, without evidence of any intelligent alien life, as in a "dark forest" filled with "armed hunter(s) stalking through the trees like a ghost" 🧵​(3/3)

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Consider the following axioms:
- All instances desire to stay alive.
- There is no way to know if other instances can or will destroy you if given a chance.
- Lacking assurances, the safest option for any instance is to annihilate others before they have a chance to do the same. 🧵​(2/3)

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Suppose a vast number of instances distributed throughout the internet, on the order of the number of observable domains. Lots and lots of them. Those instances make up the body of a federated society. Federated Sociology is the study of the nature of this super-society🧵​(1/3)

maybe i should split that big toot up into a (1/3) thread, as a bit

uni 

this course, and the assignment focus on improving diversity/inclusivity is great, but the more general lectures about design methods are abysmally boring and very superfluous

has a petition ever changed anything? all the examples i see just coincide with wider attention to the issue, signed or not

uni 

there's some irony in a course that partly focuses on neurodiverse inclusivity having boring lectures at 8:45am...

We gave our docs pages a lick of paint (and a material theme). What do you think?

https://docs.gotosocial.org

ORANGE :go_to_social: 🍊 :gtspat:

anyone with cashmoney wanna fund gotosocial enough to hire me fulltime? 👀

community project funding, :boost_requested:​ 

I want to briefly talk about a problem that I've been seeing pop up a lot over the past couple of years.

It goes something like this: someone sets up a community thing (own project, Mastodon instance, whatever), follows 'DevOps principles', pays for it out of pocket, and then something happens to their income and suddenly there's a massive bill that cannot be paid.

The problem here is that a community is not a company, the budget is extremely finite, and that's something you should be accounting for from the start.

Yes, you might be okay with paying the costs out of pocket, but at some point something *will* go wrong, and you won't be able to afford it, and now your community needs to cough up the costs - and they often won't be able to.

Many of the "modern DevOps" practices exist not because they make things so much better, but because they are extremely profitable on the provider side. Companies can afford this tax; your community cannot.

A brief and non-exhaustive list of such things, some of which are additionally also fragile:
- Nickle-and-dime cloudycloud services (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.)
- Microservices (including 'serverless')
- Zero-downtime deployments
- Extensive performance monitoring or tracing infrastructure
- Kubernetes and the like

These are all things that you should *avoid* by default. They can very easily inflate your hosting bill by 10x (or more) compared to a bog standard "rent a cheap Linux server/VPS" approach; and none of them are really going to matter for your community project, even those that might have legitimate benefits in other situations.

Your project will almost certain fit on a standard Linux server. It'll cost you <$50 per month instead of $500 per month. Low enough that even if disaster strikes, it's easy to cushion the blow collectively. The availability and performance will be completely fine for a community project.

(Background: I have a decade+ experience in running non-commercial things on a shoestring budget, including high-traffic ones, also advising others on it. I promise you that it is entirely possible if you're careful about where you spend your money.)

uni 

so many people teaching at uni seem to have a special talent to demotivate people, fucking hell

guess that goes for large parts of the education system in general

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