So, I’ve been using Arch Linux ARM on Raspberry Pis for some “desktop systems” as well as for a janky-ass NAS solution, but that project is kindof dying. They go many months in a row sometimes without any package updates. It’s wild. And when people ask WTF is going on and offer beg to be allowed to help in some way, the admins lock the thread.

So, I’ve been looking to switch my Raspberry Pi’s to something that doesn’t depend so much on some “project” out there to be able to continue to use.

The main Gentoo project fully supports ARM. And even if it didn’t, it’d be a lot easier to use Gentoo without support than Arch.

Switching my main box (not a Raspberry Pi – it’s an x86_64 system) to Gentoo was basically for the purpose of trying out Gentoo again and evaluating whether I want to take the plunge and switch everything to Gentoo.

Aside from that, there’s SystemD which is yucky. (Yes, I know about Artix, but when last I tried it, it didn’t really feel “ready for prime time”. It depends a lot on the main Arch repos.)

Plus, I do kindof like the idea of “more control over my system(s)”. Configuring/compiling my own kernel (yes, you can do that on Arch, it’s much less “in the spirit of” Arch) to make it as minimal as possible and disable everything I don’t need. And of course USE flags are a plus if you want a light system.

Anyway, those are my main reasons.

Me too!

I used Gentoo almost exlusively from like 2003 to maybe 2012 or 2013. I switched to Arch about then. But quite recently I made the switch back to Gentoo on my primary box and I’m happy I did.

Only thing I still need to do to really make it long-term sustainable for my particular use is to set up a build server on my network. My “primary box” is in the room where I sleep and I need it dark and quiet when I’m sleeping. Can’t have MOBO color-shifting LEDs and fan sounds overnight. And I can’t compile something like Chromium in less than the 15-to-16-ish hours I’m awake in a given day. (And I’d prefer to compile it myself rather than using a binary package.) Hence the need for a build server.

• Completely nonsensical post content and title.
• URL in title which makes me think it might be spam/advertisement for catholicchemistry.com is.
• Literally nothing about the post is remotely relevant to the community it’s posted in.

Looks like hallucinating “aGeNtIc Ai” to me. The text itself is too clean to be stable diffusion or DALL-E or whatever, so I’m guessing it’s not exactly that, but it’s far too weird not make me think it might be some kind of misbehaving algorithm.

I haven’t looked at your post history yet to see if all of your posts are similarly nonsensical, so I still don’t know if I’m responding to a human.

To be fair, similarly nonsensical posts existed before AI. Maybe that’s just your thing. It’s definitely not really what this (or any other, really) community is for, however.

AI generated, maybe?

I’m not sure I’ve ever worn a pair of pants that didn’t do that. That’s just something pants do. To the point that nobody is going to see that and think you’ve got a boner. (Unless you do, of course, but even then probably only if you’re in a position that wouldn’t ordinarily produce that wrinkle/bulge or your boner is visible in a different spot than that wrinkle/bulge or something.) I wouldn’t worry about it. Even if you do some fancy tailoring to address it, I think what you’ll end up with will look worse than it would if you did nothing.

Hey, there’s the one I was looking for!

I want everything to be owned by myuser, group media

Wait, “everything?” Yeah, that’s probably contraindicated. You don’t want to be changing ownership of stuff in, say, /etc or /bin or whatever to your user. For the most part, stuff in those locations should be owned by root:root. If there are exceptions (things that should be owned by root:<something else>), the package manager will make sure they’re set as they should be.

Yup. Entirely possible. Blocking third party cookies might somewhat reduce sites’ ability to tell that you’re the same you on the same browser between VPN and direct connection, but even that isn’t any guarantee that Linkedin (and/or the ad providers Linkedin uses) and Spotify (and/or their ad providers) don’t know you’re the same user between VPN and direct. And if there’s some amount of collusion and/or purchase of user tracking info going on between those entities, even only first-party cookies are sufficient for them to be able to prove the link between your direct and VPN IP addresses. Even without any cookies, though, there are still browser fingerprinting techniques that are worth looking into if you want to know more about defeating that sort of tracking.

Anyone want to place bets on how long it is before Elon uses this as an excuse to whisper in Trump’s ear that he needs to classify the Fediverse as a terrorist organization? It’d conveniently shut down competition with Xitter (and other billionaire-owned social media sites) if Mastodon (and Lemmy and PeerTube and Diaspora etc) was shut down for “RaDiCaLiZiNg fErTiLiTy ClInIc BoMbErS” or whatever BS.

Challenge accepted.

Whew. My 586 is safe.

Last time I was tempted to use suid, it was in order to allow an application I’d written to listen on 80 and 443. Fortunately I found the capabilities way of doing that (setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' executable) and that was the first I ever heard of capabilities. I consider myself pretty Linux-savvy, but it was pretty recently that I learned about capabilities.

A few ideas:

• If it’s a hard drive, listen to see if you keep getting hard drive noises after the freeze.
• Try SSH’ing in to that box (or otherwise try making a network connection to it.) Just to make sure the system is actually freezing and it’s not just the graphics screwing up and not updating the display while continuing to boot.
• Delete/uninstall your AMD firmware. Or if you don’t have it installed, install it.
• If you’re currently booting in EFI mode, try BIOS mode. Or vice versa.
• Try booting with an incorrect “root” kernel parameter. My thought is maybe if it’s loading a module that’s causing issues, if it can’t get the root FS, it can’t load modules. If it doesn’t have the same issue, that will tell you something. (And if it does, that’ll tell you something too.)
• Try other distros’s live ISOs to see if you you can isolate anything that makes a difference.

I wonder if there’s a way to prevent people from even knowing that two different votes came from the same user.

What I outlined above should prevent anyone from knowing two different votes came from the same user… without specifically trying that user’s id on each. That’s what the salt (the comment/post id) is for.

I’ve personally been banned from one community for downvoting too consistently.

Votes should be anonymous.

I tend to agree, but the fact is that they aren’t anonymous. This tool just exposes the already-existing fact that Lemmy expressly does not guarantee anonymity for votes. The solution isn’t to not for the poster to not publish this tool. Believe me, such tools already exist in private even if none other than this one are published. Publishing this one only democratizes access to that information. (And not entirely, I don’t think. From what I’m seeing on the page, it looks like it still requires an admin account on an instance. Update: Actually, I’m not sure if it requires an admin account or not. Either way, though.) The solution is (if it’s possible) to make Lemmy itself protect voters’ anonymity.

The reason why instances know who has up/down voted things (rather than only keeping an anonymized “total” for each post/comment) is so it can prevent double-voting.

Maybe instead of usernames, the instances could store/trade… salted hashes of the usernames where the salt is the title or unique identifier of the post/comment being voted on? It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would allow the instance to figure out whether the currently-viewing or currently-voting user has already voted while also making it harder for anyone else to get that information. About the only way a tool could tell you exhaustively who had voted if that were how things worked that I can think of off hand is to try every username on Lemmy one-by-one until all the votes were accounted for.

(Of course, malicious instances could still keep track of usernames or unique user ids who up/downvoted, but only on the instance on which the vote was cast. Also, one downside of this approach would be increased CPU usage. How much? Not sure. It might be trivial. Or maybe not. Dunno.)

And there may be much better ways to do this. I haven’t really thought about it much. I also haven’t checked whether there is an open ticket asking for improved anonymity for votes already.

(Also, full disclosure, all of the above was written after only an extremely brief skim of the linked page.)

(One more edit. Something IHawkMike said led me to realize that the scheme I described above would allow instances to manipulate votes by just inventing hashes. Like, grabbing 512 bits of data from /dev/urandom and giving it to other instances as if it was a hash of a username or user id when, in fact, it’s not a hash of anything. Other instances wouldn’t be able to easily tell that it wasn’t the hash of a valid user id. I haven’t thought how to go about solving that yet. Maybe if it occurs to me, I’ll update this post.)

Congratulations, Google, you can spy on math now.

5318008

Clear.

5318008

Clear.

5318008

etc

I’ll take FOSS over the proprietary software we can be sure will do malicious things to us.

The only thing worse than reading documentation/tutorials about how to do things in GUIs is writing documentation about how to do things in GUIs. It’s just screenshot after screenshot. And following it is like playing a ScummVM game, only less fun and lots more alt+tabbing.

That’s awesome! Welcome to the club and don’t be afraid to explore your system and ask questions!