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Joined 19 days ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2026

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  • I agree with you that some understanding can be helpful (I actually 100% disagree and at the moment people should just rely on the input of others they physically pay for their experience and expertise to give them purchasing advice but that’s neither here nor there. The thread is predicated on the assumption that a person can become informed enough to make a good decision so me undermining the premise isnt helpful to people who already accept it. I’m basically in future perfect tense damage control.), but the thread can’t meet that need.

    Like I said and you agreed, the replies are ass. If a person knows so little they will buy something on the input of a public Internet forum with awful reply quality then how can you reasonably expect them to sus out the wheat from the chaff?

    There’s a person in this thread suggesting people buy voron 3d printers. Those are good printers but you need a 123 block and a surface plate to put one together right and it’s ~$700 for the kit. To what end? That’s an absurd suggestion for even a person who’s interested in 3d printing or who has dipped their toes in already.

    Someone said guns and ammunition. Which guns and what ammunition? There’s a wild variation in laws, availability and best buying practices from county to county and that doesn’t even touch on accessories and use cases.

    I could probably rip into every reply making an actual suggestion itt because without useful background information they are all just no context suggestions to panic buy.

    The point isn’t to make you feel bad but to make it clear that this is really just an undirected consumptive message akin to what the bush administration said explicitly to the American people after 9/11.


  • I know your hearts in the right place but this thread is worthless.

    What will be useful or necessary to one person will be a waste to another. Without understanding what each persons needs are nothing even approaching good advice can come out of the question.

    The availability of stuff and the regulatory frameworks that stuff and its users exist under are super variable. The thread staying up for longer than a week means it’s gonna be outdated advice that amounts to consumption churn.

    Plus it’s a really bad format to be asking in because the upvote/downvote system means that old outdated input will have the most votes and therefore rise to the top and be what people see and act on.

    Even if all that weren’t true, the general quality of the responses on lemmy as judged by a combination of replies and downvotes is dogshit. There’s a front page thread where someone says we should just get rid of blackrock and the reply explaining that their etfs are widely held by retirement funds and getting rid of that company would have serious knock on effects for the average person has a 1:30 ratio and someone directly replying saying “you have lots of downvotes so you’re wrong”.

    You would be literally better off making purchasing decisions by flipping a coin.










  • Tbh you should just get a mac.

    You can have privacy on them with a little less effort than on windows and they’re already decently secure. They can play cyberpunk and you already have the linux (bsd) toolkit. They’re already the kind of computer you like with the good trackpad etc.

    I would drop your “be European” requirement.



  • You’re barking up the wrong tree and fucking up your life by doing this.

    Split the streaming/gaming duty to a different device that can be operated in the way the user expects.

    Wherever you disconnect shutdown signals from will be relied upon by something down the road and you’ll end up with a weird messed up broken update when that happens.


  • Single party consent for recording in public (or in places a person could be reasonably expected to be recorded) is the norm everywhere I’m aware of.

    A private conversation would be one where you could claim that a person is expected to read a privacy policy to people but of course that would be preempted by the recording party following actual laws governing recording and would never be expected.



  • That’s only true for some environments.

    E: this is the first time I’ve read that blog post since it was published (or at least a long time ago) and there’s now a comment specifically referencing the actual behavior I observed in the wild when I tried to sub other things in for “normal” uses of dd:

    Nobody says: 2016-12-30 at 15:17

    cat /dev/cdrom > myfile.iso

    Works

    cat myfile.iso > /dev/cdrom

    Won’t – dd allows you do handle writes in various block sizes, so if a device can’t handle a one-byte write, cat could well end up writing your byte followed by zeros (and because of where the pointer now is, do it again for the next byte).

    Still, all your other points stand – nice piece.

    While that comment was written seventy years ago, in this age of people with questionable intent, capability and integrity rewriting system tools in rust there’s no better time to linger thoughtfully over cp or cat or any number of other commands that begin with the letter “c” before grabbing the ol’ reliable footgun whose fifty years of script backwards compatibility ensure that no one can get their dd replacement accepted in normal use until it behaves as expected.


  • Secure erase just drops the ssd controllers table of where logical blocks are in the physical memory and trims the disk. Which is good and you should do.

    That means a person would have to address the memory directly with flying leads or a bed of nails or something. Or have special software that makes the controller tell them what’s on each physical block and then put that data together into a bunch of files.

    If that worries you, do dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/<disk> before you secure erase.

    Then everything on the drive will be random static before the secure erase drops the block table and trims, so even if someone uses magic power to read the block contents directly they just get to see static.

    That has the benefit of speeding up the drive by resetting read fatigue at the expense of one layer of writes which is always worth it.




  • Make sure you also have dnssec set up.

    Even with doh set up, your computer reaches out to a dns server and trusts that server is what it claims to be. There are reasons and history that explain this behavior but there are also attacks that take advantage of it. Dnssec performs cryptographic identity verification to make sure you are asking the real dns server where Pornhub.com is as opposed to some on the wire or in the cloud interlocutor that might direct you to a website that looks alike or just sends you somewhere else entirely.

    Please read the following in the voice of Glenda the good witch from the wizard of oz, or SpongeBob, or some other character who is on your side and would never say something mean to hurt your feelings, because I am on your side and would never say something mean with the intention of hurting your feelings:

    A person who benefits from this kind of explanation would be best served by mullvad over any other vpn because it is much harder to misconfigure mullvad in a way that undoes your privacy goals.