he/him. LARPer, Nerd Organizer, Web Dev.
Mastodon admin, joeterranova@leftist.network
Not the CNBC guy but I’ve got Nihilist Stock Market advice🌻

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Correct. Splitting hydrogen from water is quite energy intensive. Burning hydrogen into oxygen to make water releases energy, but not as much energy as it takes to split the hydrogen off in the first place. The reason to use hydrogen fuel cells is that the extra energy needed to generate the hydrogen is still far better than the carbon output and costly materials needed for making and charging a battery. Batteries need rare earth metals, and they lose their charging ability over time. Splitting water into hydrogen creates “potential energy” from the later creation of water again, making it a useful, clean way to store electricity.

    Same as the plans for using cranes stacking concrete bricks to store electricity. It takes more electric to stack them than is produced by unstacking them. But it’s a clean way to store potential energy, and far more efficient and sustainable than a battery.


  • It’s hard to overstate the psychology behind the github profile. As a developer, your github profile shows that you’re actively developing, whether it’s for open source projects or for work projects. My previously company used a private gitlab install, which meant only my open source work showed up on github. My current company uses github, which means my profile shows green all the time.

    We’re a small company, but the github costs are a drop in the bucket. As others have said, it’d take something truly federated, or a crazy price jump from Github, for me to consider moving. It’s free for my open source projects, it’s a small amount for my company, and I have a public profile I can point to whenever I’m discussing my development.




  • Right. I have boxes full of software I bought once, and I have the license to use it forever. But it’s for Windows XP or older. I’d need emulators or WINE to run it now, and it’s not really worth it. For some of it I even paid for a “lifetime” of updates, but that stops working out when they stop updating it. I apparently live a lot longer than 90s and 2000s software companies. Just let me pay for major versions again with a guarantee of updates for X years, and price it according to those expectations.

    37Signals is the company that made Basecamp, and they talk about hosting the software yourself, so presumably they are writing web software that would often be SaaS and letting you host it. So it’s great that you’ll be able to get it for one time purchase. But it definitely needs updates, as libraries change versions, new security flaws are uncovered, obviously for bugs, etc. Buying web application software is only as useful as the length of the updates included. Them providing the source is better, but since that’s not open source exactly a community couldn’t really work together to continue updates themselves.


  • The global south is largely a terrible place because of the wealthy north. Especially the US. First they had to throw off their colonizers. Then they had to suffer the punishments of their former colonizers. Then the US took it upon themselves to attempt to overthrow every socialist leading government in the western hemisphere, elected or not, and replace them with a dictator. Then in the Western Hemisphere the US War on Drugs have made Mexico, Central, and South America a war zone run by cartels.

    So yeah, much of the world is much worse to live in than the US. Mostly because of the US. Western Europe is still a far better place to live.



  • My solution is more complicated but doesn’t require switching browsers

    1. I run a tor client on my home server in docker, the same place I keep my vpn access, torrenting, etc
    2. I run a socks proxy on my home server, that sends all requests through the tor network (and a different socks proxy for when I want to use the VPN)
    3. On my desktop and laptop, I use the FoxyProxy firefox extension (SwitchyOmega on Chrome). I setup the socks proxy (proxies) on it, using URL patterns.
    4. When I go to a .onion link, FoxyProxy uses the pattern, and sends the traffic over my tor socks proxy

  • There just isn’t. It was great in the same way the British Empire, the French Empire, the Spanish Empire, the American Empire, were “great”. Big? Yes. Powerful? Yes. Forces of mass oppression and murder? Also yes. Praising Imperialists is going to win no favors.

    The Bolshevik revolution was a blood bath of royals, but that was because Russia was the only major power to make it out of the revolutions of 1848 without losing their absolute monarchy. Russia still had friggin peasants prior to the Bolsheviks.

    If the USSR hadn’t gone the route of “permanent revolution” (ie permanent authoritarian government), there could have been a past to look bad fondly on. But instead the boot changed color, and they decided to make their neighbors learn of their peaceful ways, by force.




  • I have a VPN that I pay less than 100 a year for. Here’s some examples of what I use it for:

    • Free movies. Each of those movies would be at least $5 to rent and more to buy. If I could even find them.
    • Pirating TV shows for streaming services I don’t have. For a long while, almost everything was on Netflix, so I didn’t need to pirate shows. Now with everyone making their own streaming service, it’d cost me $50+ a month just to get access to all the different shows I want to watch. I have Netflix, and Amazon Prime, and I have access to HBO and Disney. But I don’t have: CBS All Access, Apple TV, etc etc. There are a ton of platforms where there’s only 1 or 2 shows I want to watch. I can pirate them instead.
    • Pirating TV shows for streaming services I do have. There are streaming services I have that my friends and family can’t access, especially because of Netflix’s new location restrictions. So often I’m subscribed to torrent RSS feeds for shows to put on Plex for my friends, even though I’ll end up watching them through the actual streaming service.
    • Breaking through geo-restrictions on streaming sites. I’m a pro wrestling fan, but I don’t have cable. In the US it’s very hard to watch AEW without cable, because they have an exclusive deal with Warner Brothers. Eventually they might go on HBO Max, but in the mean time the only way to stream them is over Fite.TV, which is restricted to outside the US. I can VPN to England, then pay $9 for all the AEW weekly shows, with no commercials. I can also access a bunch of wrestling pay per views for half the price as in the US.
    • Pirating audiobooks. Often the only place to get an audiobook is Audible. I don’t want to pay a subscription, the books are expensive, and I don’t want to deal with DRM. Instead I can just download them.
    • Pirating retro game ROMs. I have a raspberry pi with RetroPie on it, a handheld abernic retro console, and a ROM cartridge for my N64. Instead of having to buy the same retro games over and over for new consoles, I can just download the ROMs and use them on very cheap retro consoles. Many of the games I wouldn’t be able to buy at all, outside a flea market for 80 bucks

  • On Mastodon, like kbin and lemmy, locally posted images are hosted locally, and remotely hosted images are cached locally. This can cause a lot of storage. But you can run an automated cron that will clear out cached images older than whatever you want, like a month. Then the local cached storage is at a minimum, and if someone wants to view the image again, it’ll get fetched. I don’t know if kbin and lemmy have this feature, but they should. It’s probably not the locally uploaded images that’ll take up a ton of space, it’s caching all the remote ones that will.






  • This. I was a redditor for 14 years. I was a moderator, I ran reddit meetups in Philly and Jersey. I have a badge on my profile for working with one of the admins 13 years ago to add /r/friends/comments, for use in a 3rd party app for Ubuntu (the kind that will now be dying). I was there for the Digg migration, Secret Santa, Global Reddit Meetup Days, Reddit Gold, Reddit Mold, Team Periwinkle, I was Snapped. I run a subreddit, different_sob_story, that was literally a meta subreddit about bad reddit posts.

    Did I have a reddit addiction? Yeah, probably. But it was a large background in my life, for 14 years. If there’s a famous reddit moment, I was probably there for it. I had 2 real life relationships, because of reddit. I made a good chunk of my real life friends through reddit. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

    So yeah, it’s a lot. And some redditors will get over it quicker than others. Bear with me; My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, And I must pause till it come back to me.