Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

  • 20 Posts
  • 1.18K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: October 4th, 2023

help-circle
  • QUIC works hand-in-hand with HTTP/3’s multiplexed connections, allowing multiple streams of data to reach all the endpoints independently, and hence independent of packet losses involving other streams. In contrast, HTTP/2, which is carried over TCP, can suffer head-of-line-blocking delays if multiple streams are multiplexed on a TCP connection and any of the TCP packets on that connection are delayed or lost.

    SCTP was going to do that too. It hasn’t seen much uptake.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Protocol

    Features of SCTP include:

    • Delivery of chunks within independent streams eliminates unnecessary head-of-line blocking, as opposed to TCP byte-stream delivery.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoComic Strips@lemmy.worldMMOs
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    13 hours ago

    checks the sidebar

    I mean, the community rules do explicitly permit NSFW comics (it does say that they should be flagged NSFW, which this isn’t).

    • Any comic that would qualify as raunchy, lewd, or otherwise draw unwanted attention by nosy coworkers, spouses, or family members should be tagged as NSFW.

    I just…I kinda have a hard time looking at that and saying that someone would get in trouble over viewing it at work, and in any event, I don’t think that “sexed up” is inappropriate, given the rules that the mods have written; they’re clearly fine with lewd material.

    From what I’ve seen, the series constantly has fan service, but I must say that I really don’t hold with trying to drive the guy off for posting them.

    That being said, like I said, if there are enough people who enjoy them and enough people who are upset about them, maybe doing a new community would make sense.


  • tal@lemmy.todaytoComic Strips@lemmy.worldMMOs
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    13 hours ago

    Are people complaining about the actual submitted content in the comics or just about the author’s personal views? I mean, if it’s the content in the comics, I…guess I could understand having a !sexycomics@lemmy.world or something if some people consider the above to have too much skin — I don’t think I’d call it NSFW. It doesn’t bother me, personally.


  • Honestly, a lot of people are probably posting in !selfhosted@lemmy.world when their questions really are better-suited to another community. Not just on hardware, but on other technical questions. I don’t think that it’d be a bad thing if they posted in the other places.

    However.

    End of the day, you need to split up a community when either (a) the traffic is too much of a firehose of content to be able to identify the most-interesting stuff, which isn’t the case for me for this at all or (b) there’s too much unrelated stuff showing up and people are getting a lot of stuff that they don’t want thrown at them. I think that there’s enough overlap between the interests and knowledge of most of the subscribers here and what’s covered that it’s probably not producing a lot of stuff that they aren’t interested in or where their knowledge isn’t relevant.

    Like, we have a handful of video-game-specific communities, but they see so little traffic that just using general-purpose video gaming communities like !games@lemmy.world still works pretty well. Maybe some genre-specific communities, like !shmups@lemmus.org.

    I think that if we, say, grew the Threadiverse userbase by a factor of ten, then some of the higher-traffic communities that exist now really should split up. But as it is, I personally am not too fussed about having more-centralized stuff from a user standpoint. As things stand, I tend to say “I’d like to have more traffic in the communities I’m in” than “there’s too much traffic and I need help in filtering it down”.


  • tal@lemmy.todaytoxkcd@lemmy.worldWhy is the sky blue?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    edit-2
    1 day ago

    In astronomy, you first enjoy three or four years of confusing classes, impossible problem sets, and sneers from the faculty. Having endured that, you’re rewarded with an eight-hour written exam, with questions like: “How do you age-date meteorites using the elements Samarium and Neodymium?” If you survive, you win the great honor and pleasure of an oral exam by a panel of learned professors.

    I remember it vividly. Across a table, five profs. I’m frightened, trying to look casual as sweat drips down my face. But I’m keeping afloat; I’ve managed to babble superficially, giving the illusion that I know something. Just a few more questions, I think, and they’ll set me free. Then the examiner over at the end of the table—the guy with the twisted little smile—starts sharpening his pencil with a penknife.

    “I’ve got just one question, Cliff,” he says, carving his way through the Eberhard-Faber. “Why is the sky blue?”

    My mind is absolutely, profoundly blank. I have no idea. I look out the window at the sky with the primitive, uncomprehending wonder of a Neanderthal contemplating fire. I force myself to say something—anything. “Scattered light,” I reply. “Uh, yeah, scattered sunlight.”

    “Could you be more specific?”

    Well, words came from somewhere, out of some deep instinct of self-preservation. I babbled about the spectrum of sunlight, the upper atmosphere, and how light interacts with molecules of air.

    “Could you be more specific?”

    I’m describing how air molecules have dipole moments, the wave-particle duality of light, scribbling equations on the blackboard, and…

    “Could you be more specific?”

    An hour later, I’m sweating hard. His simple question—a five-year-old’s question—has drawn together oscillator theory, electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics, even quantum mechanics. Even in my miserable writhing, I admired the guy.

    The Cuckoo’s Egg



  • change the default SSH port

    Any port scanner — take nmap — is going to turn this up. $ nmap -p0-65355 <hostname> takes a little longer than checking a single port, but what’s the threat that you’re worried about? Someone brute-forcing a password? That’s going to take a hell of a lot longer than that, and you use strong passwords that will make that wildly impractical, right? A zero-day remote exploit in OpenSSH’s sshd? If someone gets one of those, they probably aren’t going to waste it on you.

    SSH is also trivial to fingerprint as a protocol. Here’s me running netcat to my local SSH instance:

    $ nc localhost 22
    SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_10.0p2 Debian-7+deb13u2
    ^C
    $
    

    It ain’t rocket science to identify an SSH server.

    I personally think that port-knocking isn’t a great idea and just adds hassle and brittleness to something, but I’d do a port-knocking setup before I tried running sshd on a nonstandard port.

    If you honestly don’t trust SSH, then okay, fine, wrap it with a VPN or something with real security so there’s another layer (of course, that raises the issue of whether you trust the VPN software not to have remote exploits). Or have one host that you can reach and bounce from there to another host or something.

    There are ways that I’d say are useful to try and secure an SSH instance. Use keys rather than passwords. Whitelist user accounts that can be connected to remotely.

    But anyone who is likely to be a real risk to your system is going to be able to find an ssh server running on a nonstandard port.


  • tal@lemmy.todaytoEmacs@programming.devExporting from orgmode
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 days ago

    If it’s something other than org-self-insert-command — if you don’t mind sharing, posting what command it is running might help — you could unbind it. I used to use global-unset-key in old versions of emacs:

    ;; Emacs 21 uses M-g for facemenu, which I never use; better to make
    ;; it goto-line, as in later versions
    (if (< emacs-major-version 22)
        (progn
          (global-unset-key (kbd "M-g"))
          (global-set-key (kbd "M-g g") 'goto-line)))
    

    I’m not really familiar with keymaps, but I understand that there are a couple ways of binding keys, so that may or may not work.

    But I think that that’s probably not actually what you want to do. There’s probably some other mode binding _ to another command, and it’d be better to ask it to not bind to it (and maybe not even to be loaded, if you don’t like that mode).

    If you hit C-h k _, the name of whatever it’s bound to should give you some hint — usually, emacs commands tend to start with the name of the package, by convention. C-h m will also list your active modes, which might also tell you what the mode is.


  • tal@lemmy.todaytoEmacs@programming.devExporting from orgmode
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 days ago

    First off, while I like using org-mode for my own private documents, I’d recommend against it for use with other people for pretty much anything other than maybe emacs software. The problem is that org-mode is a continuously-evolving format that only really emacs fully implements, though there is some partial implementation by, say, vim and some other packages. That’s not great for an interchange format, since one can’t really expect other people who might work with the document to be emacs users.

    I’d be more-inclined, if one wants a pure-text-friendly format that will be exported to some sort of formatted form, to use something like AsciiDoc.

    But, okay. Set that aside. Say you definitely want to use org-mode. I don’t know how you’re doing the export, but you might try using Pandoc instead of emacs, which has its own implementation of org-mode and can export to PDF; people using Pandoc could use other editors. My guess is that Pandoc’s implementation most-likely doesn’t support executing code in the first place, which might indirectly avoid the problem in the first place.

    I’m not sure what you mean by underscores making text lowercase. I regularly type underscores in org-mode.

    EDIT: Maybe you have some other mode you have active making underscore do something special? You might hit C-h k _ in org-mode to see what the underscore key is invoking. On my system, it’s org-self-insert-command.


  • You probably want visual-line-mode. You can flip it on with M-x and then visual-line-mode to try it out.

    C-h f for visual-line-mode:

    visual-line-mode docs
    visual-line-mode is an interactive native-comp-function in
    ‘simple.el’.
    
    (visual-line-mode &optional ARG)
    
    Inferred type: (function (&optional t) t)
    
    Toggle visual line based editing (Visual Line mode) in the current buffer.
    
    When Visual Line mode is enabled, ‘word-wrap’ is turned on in
    this buffer, and simple editing commands are redefined to act on
    visual lines, not logical lines.  See Info node ‘Visual Line
    Mode’ for details.
    Turning on this mode disables line truncation set up by
    variables ‘truncate-lines’ and ‘truncate-partial-width-windows’.
    
    This is a minor mode.  If called interactively, toggle the ‘Visual-Line
    mode’ mode.  If the prefix argument is positive, enable the mode, and if
    it is zero or negative, disable the mode.
    
    If called from Lisp, toggle the mode if ARG is ‘toggle’.  Enable the
    mode if ARG is nil, omitted, or is a positive number.  Disable the mode
    if ARG is a negative number.
    
    To check whether the minor mode is enabled in the current buffer,
    evaluate the variable ‘visual-line-mode’.
    
    The mode’s hook is called both when the mode is enabled and when it is
    disabled.
    
    The info node in question
    16.23 Visual Line Mode
    ======================
    
    Another alternative to ordinary line continuation (*note Continuation
    Lines::) is to use “word wrap”.  Here, each long logical line is divided
    into two or more screen lines, or "visual lines", like in ordinary line
    continuation.  However, Emacs attempts to wrap the line at word
    boundaries near the right window edge.  (If the line's direction is
    right-to-left, it is wrapped at the left window edge instead.)  This
    makes the text easier to read, as wrapping does not occur in the middle
    of words.
    
       Word wrap is enabled by Visual Line mode, an optional minor mode.  To
    turn on Visual Line mode in the current buffer, type ‘M-x
    visual-line-mode’; repeating this command turns it off.  You can also
    turn on Visual Line mode using the menu bar: in the Options menu, select
    the ‘Line Wrapping in this Buffer’ submenu, followed by the ‘Word Wrap
    (Visual Line mode)’ menu item.  While Visual Line mode is enabled, the
    mode line shows the string ‘wrap’ in the mode display.  The command ‘M-x
    global-visual-line-mode’ toggles Visual Line mode in all buffers.
    
       Since word wrap and line truncation (described in the previous
    section) are contradictory, turning on ‘visual-line-mode’ disables line
    truncation.
    
       In Visual Line mode, some editing commands work on screen lines
    instead of logical lines: ‘C-a’ (‘beginning-of-visual-line’) moves to
    the beginning of the screen line, ‘C-e’ (‘end-of-visual-line’) moves to
    the end of the screen line, and ‘C-k’ (‘kill-visual-line’) kills text to
    the end of the screen line.
    
       To move by logical lines, use the commands ‘M-x next-logical-line’
    and ‘M-x previous-logical-line’.  These move point to the next logical
    line and the previous logical line respectively, regardless of whether
    Visual Line mode is enabled.  If you use these commands frequently, it
    may be convenient to assign key bindings to them.  *Note Init
    Rebinding::.
    
       By default, word-wrapped lines do not display fringe indicators.
    Visual Line mode is often used to edit files that contain many long
    logical lines, so having a fringe indicator for each wrapped line would
    be visually distracting.  You can change this by customizing the
    variable ‘visual-line-fringe-indicators’.
    
       By default, Emacs only breaks lines after whitespace characters like
    <SPC> and <TAB>, but does not break after whitespace characters like <EN
    QUAD>.  Emacs provides a minor mode called ‘word-wrap-whitespace-mode’
    that switches on word wrapping in the current mode, and sets up which
    characters to wrap lines on based on the
    ‘word-wrap-whitespace-characters’ user option.  There's also a
    globalized version of that mode called
    ‘global-word-wrap-whitespace-mode’.
    
       Only breaking after whitespace character produces incorrect results
    when CJK and Latin text are mixed together (because CJK characters don't
    use whitespace to separate words).  You can customize the option
    ‘word-wrap-by-category’ to allow Emacs to break lines after any
    character with ‘|’ category (*note (elisp)Categories::), which provides
    better support for CJK characters.  Also, if this variable is set using
    Customize, Emacs automatically loads ‘kinsoku.el’.  When ‘kinsoku.el’ is
    loaded, Emacs respects kinsoku rules when breaking lines.  That means
    characters with the ‘>’ category don't appear at the beginning of a line
    (e.g., U+FF0C FULLWIDTH COMMA), and characters with the ‘<’ category
    don't appear at the end of a line (e.g., U+300A LEFT DOUBLE ANGLE
    BRACKET).  You can view the category set of a character using the
    commands ‘char-category-set’ and ‘category-set-mnemonics’, or by typing
    ‘C-u C-x =’ with point on the character and looking at the "category"
    section in the report.  You can add categories to a character using the
    command ‘modify-category-entry’.
    

    I have something like this in my init.el:

    (defun my-text-mode-hook ()
      (flyspell-mode t)
      (visual-line-mode t))
    
    (add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'my-text-mode-hook)
    

    So that when I’m in text-mode, visual-line-mode also comes on automatically by default.

    It doesn’t do so in things like programming modes, where one doesn’t want that sort of thing.

    (I also turn on checking for misspelled words in text-mode, and highlighting of them, which is what flyspell-mode is for.)




  • Yeah, I thought about changing it, but…the problem is that while the base game is playable now for $0, the overwhelming bulk of the game’s content is in expansion packs. Like, I don’t think that people really buy and play just the base game; it’d be more like a demo.

    EDIT: A similar game might be DCS. I mean, yes, technically the base game is free, and you get (checks) a WW2 fighter and a Soviet ground-attack jet. But…basically that acts as a demo, and everyone is going to go out and get at least their favorite aircraft, and most of those aircraft cost about as much as a full-priced video game does. Hell, a couple of them are $80 each.






  • The WordPress plugin marketplace has a trust problem.

    I think that the problem is really broader — that for any system, be it Linux distros or browser plugins or AI Python packages or NPM packages or whatever — even trustworthy software can change ownership. Most users are probably not monitoring those changes and are not in a position to evaluate the impact of those changes.

    Some of that can (and probably should) be handled by compartmentalizing software, limiting the effect it can have, though that has some costs of its own. But I don’t think that that’s going to handle everything.