Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@Rairii@social.nano.lgbt @flaki It wasn't, but droves of developers believed it was due to the marketing and nobody checked. Everything was priced in tiny quantities like GB of traffic and MB of storage for a reason...

@cephie The whole "consumption of ultra-processed foods results in health issues" feels a lot to me like the usual "being poor is bad for your health" in a trenchcoat.

I've not read all of the studies that it references on this point, but every single study I've read like it in the past is basically just observing a correlation without being able to highlight *why* it happens (and never talking about the role of poverty), so I'm highly skeptical of such studies by default.

@madcap @katnjiapus I have personally not found any value in it from a security perspective; if you're going to be using your SSH access for server administration, then your account will functionally have to have root access anyway (password-based escalation is really easy to keylog by a hypothetical attacker...) so it mostly just adds an extra step for any administrative command you want to run.

That extra step *can* be desirable to reduce the chance of making destructive mistakes yourself, as an extra confirmation step; though it doesn't protect you from all failure modes. But that's not really a security thing so much as a slightly inconvenient usage safeguard.

@madcap The problem is that these are complex questions to answer without a lot of background knowledge and experience in server management - how would one know if their IP often changes if they haven't already been doing server stuff for a while, for example?

So providing a list with "niche" recommendations that the recipient is then supposed to choose from, is usually the opposite of helpful, and just becomes overwhelming - it still doesn't tell them what they should or shouldn't do, it just creates more questions they now need to figure out.

(The usual heuristic applies here - as soon as you're saying someone could "just" do something, you should take a step back and ask yourself what this actually entails, and whether it is as easy for someone else as it is for yourself.)

I don't know the exact background and experience of @katnjiapus, but given that they ask specifically for a checklist, I would assume that they are looking for a list of "things they definitely should be doing, so they can be confident that it's set up right even if they're just starting to do server stuff and aren't familiar with it yet".

And to be clear, this is not really about you specifically, I see a *lot* of tech folks having this tendency to frontload all the information (relevant or otherwise) when someone asks a beginner question, but that's really something we should all unlearn if we want to have any hope of having people run their own services. Focus on the certainties, add the nuances later.

@liketechnik@chaos.social Yeah. Going from the history described on Wikipedia, it sounds like the whole thing is built on "treating correlation as causation"? It's not clear to me how this classification ever became a scientifically acceptable basis to build research on.