You've still got one of the only decent instances on lemmy. I'm obviously not over there much, but it understands life is fun.

"Most people don't have any cash in their 401k to buy the dip!"

Skill issue.

If you think about it, making housing impossible to afford is basically suicidal. People need massive wages just to not die of exposure so all costs must go up and basic jobs are unacceptable to anyone not living 64 men to a 400 sqr ft apartment.

That's more than I paid for all the major hardware upgrades I implemented this year, and I really went to town upgrading all my hardware!

I find that to be an innately hilarious statement. Forget about the politics for a second, it's just very amusing.

"Your cows are weak!"

[Admin mode] This is a log I was writing as I continued through.

We've finally at long last made it to the new server! (lol when I wrote that line I was so naive)

One thing I learned is that pg_repack will totally fill up your storage if it fails (as mine did during the time period of crashing all the time) -- hundreds of gigabytes of old tables that didn't do anything. It massively increased the time I took to transfer the database for no good reason. For anyone else running an instance, it's probably something to be aware of.

According to documentation, it can be cleaned up with:

\c pleroma

DROP EXTENSION pg_repack CASCADE ;

CREATE EXTENSION pg_repack;

In the case of my database, I got well over 100GB of drive space back immediately for no good reason. In terms of restoring the backup I made, it ended up sucking up huge amounts of time on dead databases.

So I wrote the above 7 hours ago. It turns out the restore isn't a linear process!!

It's a never-ending process.... I understand now why I failed on the previous process, I couldn't have actually completed the steps I'm waiting for -- 12 hours after I started.

It's a substantial upgrade in some ways. The SSD was SATA before, now it's nvme. The original CPU was a Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4570TE CPU @ 2.70GHz with hyperthreading disabled. The social container I have only has 2 of the 4 cores now, but it's on a AMD Ryzen Embedded R1505G with Radeon Vega Gfx

(The rest of the day passed) Holy moly, 20ish hours in?

(Several more hours in) I ended up calling it a failure 24 hours in, and went with a new way of looking at things: Instead, I upgraded the postgresql 15 to postgresql 16 and plan to just move the binary folders over.

This seemed like a great idea for the first hour... But it turns out slow machines are slow, so it took quite a while to migrate. Still probably the right idea.

Eventually the upgrade did finish, then I was able to just tar up the postgresql 16 folder and ftp it over to the new server.

Thankfully, this time it did in fact successfully transfer. I had one problem where it seemed the user didn't get created properly so I set the password and database permissions. Next, I had a quick issue where pleroma was exposing itself to the old IP address, but that was one line change in the config. Finally, after what felt like days without FBXL Social, things were back up.

One thing not related to the technical side of things, there were a few times where I had a thought and went "Oh, that's clever I should post that on -- oh nevermind I sure hope postgresql hurries up!"

So a few points afterwards:

1. Proxmox is really nice. Other than constantly whining about not having a subscription, it's really nice.

2. We're now doing automated backups to network attached storage, which is also really nice.

3. It's all just containers, so if hardware fails, I can fire up the same container on another proxmox machine which is (you guessed it) really nice. (I was going to try for High Availaibilty, but you need

4. Containers are really light, so I'm able to have individual containers for individual services which is (find another description bro) really nice.

5. Migrating large postgresql databases is friggin slow!

6. Using straight pg_dump to create a backup of your database is actually stupid, because my backup was 200GB. Once I used -FC the size went down like 75%.

7. pg_repack helps improve size and performance of postgres databases, but if it fails half way through you end up with potentially huge databases that don't do anything! That was the final straw that stopped me from the original migration. The server took a full day on re-indexing one table (I think activity visibility) and I realized the repack tables would probably be just as long or longer.

8. I should have cleaned up my database before trying to migrate in the first place.

One thing that's really funny -- the server that ran my reverse proxy, my nextcloud, my main website, the fbxl website, and fbxl social all at once now just runs a couple small things, and now it's sitting at 0.04 load. That machine crashing (ostensibly because it couldn't turbo anymore) was the thing that began this whole ordeal, and now it's basically idle.

Next for me will be taking a lot of my now idle or removed boxes and making them into tiny proxmox nodes so I can do all kinds of neat things on the fringes from one centrally managed system. No downtime required since nothing active will go down.

Still 0 fans in my entire empire of dirt.

To think, if only he'd decided to firebomb the russians instead.

But I guess the nice thing is tesla chargers don't shoot back, and nobody important would be nearby.

Inheritance taxes are actually a method that ensures the rich get richer and the middle class gets poorer.

Let's say you're a global megacorp buying up farmland. You don't die, ever, because you're not a real person but a legal construct.

Now let's say you're an individual who owns a small farm. You do die, because you're a human being.

So the global megacorp never has to pay any additional taxes on its property because it's an immortal legal construct, but the individual's kids have to sell the farm to pay the inheritance taxes. The global megacorp buys the farm.

The ultra-rich who want to keep their assets can also use similar types of loophole to prevent their assets from ever being taxed -- So the people who end up paying aren't the rich, but the poor and middle class who might have a little wealth to pass on but not enough to utilize loopholes similarly. For example, instead of passing on wealth, the assets can be placed in a shell company in a jurisdiction without inheritance taxes (pretty hard to do with a piece of land with a single owner, but quite easy for other forms of wealth accumulation)

Want to know a funny thing about Bill Gates and Warren Bufett who both claim they should be paying higher taxes? Those charitable organizations they created and funded hold their assets tax-free, and so their kids can get cushy jobs at those organizations, transferring the wealth without any inheritance tax -- and in the meantime they can have a direct outsized impact on governments that help them accumulate more power and wealth! Win/win!

I am forced reluctantly to give you guys the go-ahead to nuke Ottawa, Toronto, and Vancouver.

It's the only way.

I argue that anyone who is saying America is facing an "unprecedented constitutional crisis" needs to pick up a goddamn history book. Democratic saint FDR set up concentration camps for US citizens of a certain race. Abraham Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus and oh yeah just a little thing probably isn't even worth mentioning *started a civil war with half the country that killed significantly more than half a million people*. And those two are particularly notable, but not alone (and their presidencies were both marked with things far bigger than anything I've seen Trump to yet)

FDRs New Deal policies might make him a darling to the left, but they were also wildly unconstitutional and the only reason he got them through was threats against the Supreme Court that he'd just keep packing the Supreme Court until they complied. Of course they'd never do that tod-- just kidding the left made the same threats under Biden.

Andrew Jackson committed a genocide against the Native people by continuing their forced removal from their homelands in the trail of tears. Sure is a good thing something like that isn't exactly the sort of narrative the left would prefer we actually remember and never forget to justify their postmodern deconstruction of US History. Don't worry though, the Supreme Court overturned the decision -- And Jackson ignored that decision and kept doing it anyway. The thing Trump hasn't done yet, but apparently would be unprecedented if he did. I suppose we just forget what happened due to the D next to his name?

Some people say that Trump using military troops on US soil is unprecedented. Ignoring Lincoln who literally started a civil war, President Johnson and Eisenhower both used the army army to force school integration. I guess it's ok though since that made him a darling to the left. By the way, Johnson and Eisenhower aren't alone -- he isn't even alone since the beginning of the 20th century, when most fools history begins.

I'm not actually a partisan either -- I've criticized the Republicans for decades when they were in the wrong. But what I'm seeing is the epitome of writers not even being real people. Instead, they're just mindless speaker boxes recreating whatever soundwaves they're told to make without any regard for the contents of those sound waves. Every time you hear someone say "This would be an unprecedented attack on our democracy", that's simply false -- it's fully precedented. Trump could do all kinds of horrible things he hasn't done up to and including genocide and ethnic concentration camps, and it's precedented in the United States.

The histrionic lies only serve Trump. He's in office for a second term in large part as the boy who cried wolf getting eaten.

But the other thing is that it's actually true that Trump isn't really authoritarian. He had every opportunity in the 2020 riots that took place over 6 months to be truly authoritarian, and many people would have supported it -- including a centrist like me. People don't have the right to burn down cities, if the police can't stop it for 6 months then I fully support putting down such riots with lead bullets. Trump didn't do that, despite having every precedent to do so. Dozens dead, billions in property damage, entire city blocks taken over and declaring themselves autonomous zones separate from the US government (which is definitionally insurrection, by the way)

In some ways, of course the protesters on January 6th must have just assumed you could riot without consequence now -- they'd just watched 6 months of riots without consequences. Imagine their surprise when their riot suddenly faced all the consequences for the entire summer of love?

Now don't get me wrong: I don't think Trump is small government. I also don't Trump wasn't somewhat responsible for his loss in 2020. I also don't think Jan 6th was good at all. He's imperfect and even his supporters in virtually every faction agree about that. During his Joe Rogan interview, he actually talked about some of the ways his first term was imperfect, which is a direct contrast to his opponent in 2024 who couldn't think of anything she'd change. My core point is about lies against Trump and the fact that press who repeat such lies are not even human beings, they're just parrots repeating sound waves they're trained to make.

The UK is cracking down on "hyper masculine influencers"

I guess you're just going to have to come get me. I'm ready.

Yeah, you just have to ask: "How many of the Fortune 500 could you buy every year with one year's federal budget, and how much of that money goes to Fortune 500 companies, and why?"

Suddenly it becomes clear that you've got this 1000lb elephant on the bed, and it doesn't matter if you're the elephant or not you're going to be pulled towards it.

I don't really know, because by the time I turn around to check I've already looked at it. :p

It's an interesting idea though, I saw a YouTube video a few months back where the camera for the unreal engine was moved away from where it normally sits to some ways away, and as the player character moved around you could see the slice of the world coming into existence. It totally works in the unreal engine because you can only look at what you are looking at.

There are between 200 billion and 1 trillion galaxies and the universe. In other words, there are between 25 and 125 galaxies in the universe for every man woman and child on Earth today. The universe itself is unfathomably large. We believe that the age of the universe is about 13 billion years, and the current hypothesis of the universe is that reality races out to fill the void lacking in space and time at the speed of light, suggesting that the current universe is generally a sphere of about 26 billion light years across. If you were to look at a map of that universe, it would just look like a dull glow from all of the galaxies. And you might say "this is everything" and you would be right. As you start to zoom in, you might eventually start to see differentiation, so instead of a general Haze of galaxies, you might start to see the individual galaxies, and you might say "this is everything", and while you are missing the big picture you are still correct. As you keep on zooming in, eventually you zoom in on a single galaxy, and the tendrils of Stars look like they form lines in the sky, and if you were focusing on our own Galaxy you might say "this is everything", and you'd be right. As you keep on zooming in, you start to see the individual Stars, and you see all of those individual stars. There are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. As you start to get down to of you close enough that we can start seeing individual stars, you might see all of these individual dots of light and assume "this is everything", and you'd be right. So you keep on zooming, keep on zooming, keep on zooming, and eventually you make it to our solar system. Planetoids, asteroids, planets, moons, meteors, and vast distances. You look at all of these things, and you might say "this is everything", and you'd be right. Now from here, you might assume that we must be taking off to go take a look at one of those giant gas planets far from that massive Sun, but we're not, we're going to be heading for -- keep zooming in, keep zooming in, keep zooming in -- this tiny little clump of dirt called Earth. And for the purposes of visualization we're going to take the surface of that Earth and we're going to flatten it out into a map. So now you can see every continent, every ocean, and you might look at that and claim "this is everything", and you'd be right. But if you zoom in just a little bit more, you start to see the lines between nations, and they seem very important. As you zoom in, you start to see the major rivers, you start to see provincial lines or state lines, and these also seem very important, and you might proudly proclaim "this is everything!", and you'd be right. If you keep on zooming in, you'll eventually reach a city, and you can zoom in on that city, and see all the streets, and you can state "this is everything", and you'd be right. But if you keep on zooming in, eventually you're going to find your street, your neighborhood, and you can see where all the roads intersect in your neighborhood, and you might loudly proclaim "this is everything!" And you'd be right. And then you can travel down the street and look for your house, and open street maps happens to have individual buildings drawn, each individual house is placed on the map, and you will look at that map and you will think that you have finally reached it, you might finally say "this is everything", and you'd be right. But there's so much stuff that the map can't show. It doesn't show the people living in the house, it doesn't show the relationships between those people, you know inside of each person is an ecosystem of many different organisms which live in the gut. The yard is filled with soil which is filled with microorganisms, each speck of dust could contain all kinds of invisible organisms to the naked eye, and the yard is filled with them. Spots nobody thinks about, under the sink, there is a biofilm on the pipes and if you put that under a microscope every square millimeter is a fascinating story of biodiversity. And if you keep on going, you'll eventually reach the level that you can see viruses at, and there's a whole ecosystem of viruses and they behave in their own way we don't even think of them as life, and yet in some ways we consider them to be alive because of the way that they infect and spread to every corner of our Earth. And then you can keep on zooming in, and eventually orders of magnitude smaller you start to see individual atoms, and orders magnitude smaller still you start to see individual electrons, and nothing at this level behaves in a way that somebody who lives in the macro world would find remotely intuitive, but it follows its own set of rules, and you can keep on going to find subatomic particles that are even smaller than the atom, even smaller than the electron. and if there's anything smaller than that we don't know, because we can't measure that far. And you might think that that is everything, and it might not be we don't know.

So what does this view of the universe tell us? Before you answer that we need to understand, by the way, this is assuming that we are the only universe. Multiversal theory exists, and some theories exist that suggest that this is just the latest iteration of the universe and eventually everything will crunch down into another singularity that will eventually become another big bang and start a cycle again that's completely different from ours.

So the first thing is that there are unlimited pieces of information in the universe, and the idea that some laplace's demon could understand everything might feel realistic because we understand so much, but only if we don't understand how much there is to know.

There's a whole other layer of things that we haven't even explored yet, we have proven in a laboratory that energy is matter and matter is energy. We have managed to produce a very small amount of matter from nothing but energy. You took an overwhelming amount of energy to create that tiny piece of matter, but ultimately what that means is even the things we think of as real stuff are just a structured form of energy, and even though we understand that matter is energy we don't fully understand entirely how even that all works.

As something that looks like an aside for a minute, in World War ii, a cat's whisker radio was a very simple crystal radio where you would take crystal, and connect a couple of electrodes to it, and eventually be able to hear radio waves. Now, we knew that that worked, but we didn't really know why at all. And after the war we began investigating that phenomenon of being able to use a crystal to create a radio. Eventually, that led us to an understanding of semiconductors and it was also a major development in the field of quantum mechanics because you needed to understand the quantum mechanical systems in order to understand why the cat's whisker worked when the electrode was in one place but not another. Ultimately, this cat's whisker radio led the development of semiconductor such as transistors, which ultimately ended up leading to the development of microcomputers, and eventually the sort of incredible smartphones that we have today. The idea that placing a couple of electrodes on a piece of crystal relates to something as unimaginably complex as a smartphone is almost absurd, but it's true.

In this way to an extent, the scientific endeavor of the enlightenment has in a sense directly refuted the core conceits of modernity, that the universe can be understood rationally and logically, that everything can be measured, and once measured everything can be understood. Even within its own wheelhouse, modernity breaks down.

It's also important to note however, that pure relativism is also obviously incorrect. Every layer that we measure for the purposes of our thought experiment is absolutely and factually true. The fact that other things are also true doesn't change the fact for example that there is a planet called Earth in the solar system whose star is locally called Sol, in a relatively insignificant Galaxy called the Milky Way by many of the inhabitants of that Earth. This isn't a game of power, this isn't something to be constructed, notwithstanding the limitations of our models of viewing reality they are all absolutely true.

The fact that some places still have covid signs up shows how often those spots are actually cleaned post-covid.

>tfw gamers who haven't bought a physical copy of a game in 10 years go all-in on gamestop stock

I've got laptop that I need to set up to be as late as possible, so I'm trying out Arch to see if that helps.

Definitely gives me some lfs vibes. Not a lot of handholding compared to most distros.

I remember the advice "Just go outside" when I was trying to meet women. Honestly though, it's not that simple. If you go outside, you'll just be alone and outside.

And a lot of really good guys and good gals were busy doing the stuff they were supposed to do, so they never had a chance to learn how to do anything other than sit at home on twitch or sit outside in a lawn chair like a psycho wondering why the Internet lied to them and told them that if they go outside somehow they'll magically meet people.

It's really hard meeting people. It's possible, but it's not as straightforward as "go outside".

Thankfully I've been married for 15 years, so I don't need to meet women, but I remember it was really tough after I got out of college and got my first job, because I had to get out of my comfort zone.

I went outside every Friday, 2-3 times on Saturday, 2-3 times on Sunday, and once on Mondays because I go out with my son to the park every chance I get while the weather is good, and it's like a ghost world out there. We barely interacted with anyone all summer because we usually had the parks to ourselves.

The second last chapter of my book to my son, The Graysonian Ethic, is about how to meet women. Honestly, I doubt the little Casanova will need the help, He's growing up to be a really cool kid, but if you have no idea what you're doing at all then some strategies going into things are a good thing to have.

This one lady on youtube said "Guyyyyyys, just be huuuuman" and it pissed me off so much it's stuck with me. She was a blonde haired, blue eyed, gorgeous woman with a posh English accent. I don't use the phrase often unironically, but it's like "Check your privilege, lady". The romantic and overall social experience of any man who isn't actually a natural 10 is going to be so different than hers that giving advice is a bit like someone born a multi-billionaire trying to give tips on how to save money to someone who was born poor. "Well just take the money daddy gives you for a Porsche and invest in a business!"

You know, men trying to take dating advice from women is probably a big part of what creates incels. They go around "just being huuuuuuman", or "being nice" or "being yourself", and after following the advice as hard as they can they find themselves alone and start to figure they are incapable of ever meeting someone who likes them and get bitter and jaded with the world. In a different vein, the same happens to people who take rich people's advice about money and wonder why they aren't multi-millionaires because they stopped eating avocado toast every morning at Starbuck's. It's also like the boomers who don't realize that new graduate put out 100 resumes yesterday giving advice like "Just confidently shake the boss's hand and he'll hire you on the spot" -- no, that's not how things work anymore grandpa. Of course people get bitter when they hear this horrible advice and then try it and it doesn't work at all.