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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I both agree and don’t about the certification.

    Most of the reason we have certifications and the like is not actually to prevent harm to the user of the product, it is for managing liability. If you make a product and it causes harm that creates a litigation risk and companies try to avoid being sued because it reduces profit.

    In the open source community people want to make good things. They want to solve a problem by making the software or hardware they are working on. It isn’t about the profit motive, it is about making something good because you want that thing to exist.

    Under that set of motivations I think certification can still be useful, but it is much less important than it is for companies making a profit. You don’t need to balance the drive to make profit against the risk of causing harm because the profit motive is not involved.


  • Medical equipment. The software for medical equipment is super arcane stuff, locked behind patents and licensing that only serves to drive the price up. For someone in a less economically powerful country the cost is increased and the quality of care is reduced massively by this licensing. If an open source version of the software for things like an MRI, CAT scanner, ultrasound, and so on could be made it would enable the updating of old hardware to keep it running longer and also make repairs much more affordable. I also think that internal defribulators would benefit enormously from being open source as under the current system they are hackable and can be exploited to wirelessly trigger a shock which can be fatal.

    Also consider continuous glucose monitoring and insulin pumps. By combining those two technologies you can essentially make an artificial pancreas and make diabetes much more manageable. The hurdle here is not technological, it is legal. The thing that has slowed down the production of an artificial pancreas is software licensing and legal risk management, nothing technical. Consider this applied to the possibility of a continuous allergy monitoring device which could detect anaphylaxis and administer adrenaline, or maybe markers of a seizure approaching to trigger a much smaller dose of an anti epileptic medication. All unavailable because the development of that technology would not be feasible under the current licensing and liability system we have.

    To be clear, I am not saying any of these cure the underlying condition, just that if medical software (and ideally hardware) was required to be open source more of these tools could be developed to help people live better lives independently and safely, and at a lower cost.



  • I have tried Umbrella and CasaOS and they are really very similar. That said, learning to use portainer allows you to understand the underlying technology of docker much better and also allowd you to do cool things like making a stack of containers that work together and saving that stack in a single config file. The GUI of Umbrel and CasaOS are basically the same and they only differ a little in their internals, so I would say switching shouldn’t be too hard, but if you have found yourself struggling to get something working on CasaOS you will probably have the same issue on Umbrel.

    The web interface with all the links to your services can be achieved with things like Homarr and you can manage storage on the back end with Open Media Vault or something similar to make things more accessible. If you can have your data files accessible on a single BTRFS or similar partition with folder level sharing then you can have files hard linked between your downloading application and your media serving application, say Deluge and Jellyfin. The files download in /share/Downloads and then on completion get linked into /share/Imports and Jellyfin can manage moving them into /share/Movies or /share/TV as needed, and the same would go for something like Subsonic or AudiobookShelf.

    Personally I have a wonderful set up with AudiobookShelf which syncs to my phone ereader. I can have books for my ereader with all the metadata and it is accessible via WiFi so I can just pick a book and get the epub delivered directly, no Calibre or USB cable required. It also works nicely for the audiobook side by letting me tell a whole series to download to my phone so I can listen back to back without worrying and I can always make space if I need to by clearing things out. Oh, and I can set my default listen speed to 2.0x and that carries over on other devices, so I don’t have to constantly fuss with it.

    Overall, super fun, I would recommend learning about Portainer if that appeals to you, maybe consider setting it up on an old laptop and playing with it there, and if it works out nicely then you can redo your server and get it all working nicely there.




  • Honestly I would not recommend doing it without any backup, but if you can directly connect your internet to any computer or use your phone for tethering then you aren’t really as vulnerable to a problem and should be OK.

    The default set up should actually work fairly well but need you to set up the wireless security and so on. If you use the exact same details as your current WiFi then all your devices will just reconnect and save you a bunch of time. Also the performance of something like a basic TP-Link router is probably not enough to do a lot of extra fun stuff like a VPN or file sharing, so just focus on getting the basic things up first.

    Also, take a backup of your current settings in the TP-Link router and get a copy of the firmware now, before you do anything else, so you can revert without having to get everything from another source. Good luck!


  • Skibidy Toilet acts as a shibboleth, a marker of in group status. This is similar to 67 in that the internal meaning is not important, the reference identifies the group it applies to and also pushes away those who do not belong. The use of the term brainrot to describe Skibidy Toilet is missing how it is used.

    That said, brainrot does exist. Content which only serves to keep you on platform mindlessly consuming with no curation or decisions from you, the viewer. TV has this effect when you just watch because it is on, say flicking through channels, or when the content is specifically built to create emotional investment without payoff or informational gain.

    Cable news is a perfect example of it, constantly raising the stakes without ever actually delivering on making you informed and able to react to the news. “If it bleeds, it leads” journalism is all about keeping your attention on the same page the ads are on, waiting with bated breath for the next update to the story. But most stories don’t actually impact you at all. Someone shooting up a school in the USA is a terrible, awful thing. Such a horror that serves no purpose. But is that my business half way around the world? No. That is meaningful to the people in the local area, those who vote in local elections to change policy. It helps nobody for me to see the details of how a shooter planned their killings, not to learn their names or see their faces.

    TikTok and similar video platforms have perfected this with the feed. They show videos and measure how much of each video you watch as well as how long you stay on platform per session. They tweak your feed to increase your overall watch time and bit by bit teach you that the next little dopamine hit is just around the corner, just one more video away. This is reflected in YouTube Shorts and other platforms and has been shown to be incredibly effective at keeping people on platform for hours at a time.

    So what can we do to reverse/heal brainrot? It seems the best thing is to stop using these platforms. Stop engaging with things that are emotionally engaging but ultimately useless. If you can’t effect it then it is unwise to know too much about it. Knowing there is a war in Ukraine and that Russia is the aggressor is enough to decide whether you should donate money somewhere, so watching videos of people who have been killed in the street is not going to make your donation more effective, nor will it change your decision. Know enough to make a choice about sonething then move on. Learn about your political positions enough to vote correctly then find out who is a good candidate in your area and vote. Learn which groups are being oppressed most and decide what you will do about it, but don’t get dragged down by how bad everything is. Knowing it is sufficiently bad to demand action is not only enough, it is the limit of what you should consume.

    Next find engaging things that take concerted focus and time. Ideally they would be things that build gradually, like a skill or a story. Try to avoid things with the red flags of dopamine hacking, so loot boxes, flashy level ups, random drops, and so on. If you can make a comparison to gambling it is a warning sign. Go for longer, slower things. Ideally make something, like with knitting, 3D printing, or cooking.

    I would also recommend using RSS feeds to simplify your intake of news and so on. Find reasonable sources and get their feeds for the topics you care about and put them into a feed reader. Have it set to update once per day, but no more. This puts a cap on the news the same way an old school newspaper did, by giving you a current snapshot fixed in time with no further minute by minute updates. Measure how long you spend reading feeds per day after a week or two and decide if you are happy with that. If you aren’t remove the feeds you get the least from.

    But by bit this slows things down and kills the brainrot, returning your attention span and helping you reclaim your peace.