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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Hey, something I can maybe help with.

    Flatpak IDEs on the main system are not very useful for development. I got rid of mine entirely. I am developing firmware so it might be a bit different from your case, but what I did in have a single arch distrobox where I could install everything embedded-dev-related that had to work together (JLink, nordic tools, code-oss, etc…) on that. Then a few standalone debugging tools like STLink and Saelae logic2 could be installed to the home folder by default and Code could still find them from the distrobox (but they could be installed in the distrobox also). It doesn’t even need to have an init system, but I ran into a few problems like having to manually chmod usb devices to give STLink access. Udev rules are also hit or miss in /etc/udev/rules.d, e.g. the STM udev rules just don’t work, but nordic does.

    High storage consumption is likely negligible (or at least nitpicky) since storage is so cheap nowadays. Your SSD doesn’t care if it has 15GB or 20GB of system programs, especially when development codebases and SDKs, games, and media will likely make up 90% of space and almost never share libraries even on traditional systems.





  • It is funny because electric motors have nearly unlimited* torque depending on the kind. If you have thick enough power cables and winding conductors, you can just keep pushing it harder to get more torque.

    It is like the thing they are very good at, besides sound levels, double or triple the efficiency, low/no maintenance, simpler with less parts, no emissions, etc…

    Literally the only good thing about combustion engines are their fuel source energy density.

    I think the problem is that motorheads see the enshittification of the auto industry as a whole and just say it’s because of electric motors because it happened right about the same time as EVs started coming out and try to push back on the wrong thing.


  • That only solves maybe one of the listen problems. Whatever instance you have, you still have to get and serve media to other viewers and instances. The only problem that this solves is potentially CSAM spam/moderation.

    Let’s say it was a cell phone, it could handle maybe 2 concurrent transcoding streams before stalling out and people running into buffer times (which makes them leave).

    If every person had their own tiny, low powered servers, then you could have max like 5 concurrent transcodes on any instance in all of peertube for old laptop or desktop computers. Assuming an average of people have a 100/30Mbps connection (which is true in much of the world outside of major cities, or even lower), then that would be absolutely maxing out at 10 concurrent viewers if everyone is running AV1 compatible clients (which is not the case) and more like 6 concurrent viewers per video at h.264. Those estimates are at low bitrates also, so low quality, absolutely no slowdown from your ISP, and absolutely no other general home or work-from-home use. In reality it would be closer to 3-6 concurrent viewers per instance (not even per video)

    Still not even counting storage which is massive for anyone that creates more than a couple videos per year.

    My point is just that it is an extremely difficult and costly problem that is not as simple as “more federation” like in text and image-based social media because of the nature of video, the internet, and viral video culture. Remember, federation replicates all viewed and subscribed content on the instance (so the home instance has to serve the data and both instances have to store it)


  • Yep. I have posted on stack overflow exactly 3 times. One time it was marked as duplicate and referenced to something that was not even the same topic. One time I had too much detail and debugging done for the classic knowitalls to come make a smartass remark and was completely ignored. The final time I got one comment, addressed it, and that person was never heard from again lol.




  • Just a few thoughts as to why it hasn’t taken off:

    Video is multiple orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive to serve than text or even audio.

    • Your server needs a great upload speed which is not achievable for on-site home servers for most people in the world

    • Your server has to have at least one dedicated encoding GPU (no raspberry pis or Intel nucs if you want any meaningful traffic)

    • Your server has to have a ton of storage, especially if you allow 4k content to be uploaded, which while much cheaper than before, is still expensive. Here in the EU, reliable storage is around 300€/12TB for drives, which fills up very fast with 4k videos or if you try to store different resolutions to reduce transcoded loads.

    • Letting random people upload video onto your instance is significantly harder to moderate than text or photos. Like think of the CSAM spam that was on Lemmy when it started in taking many new users…

    • The power usage (and bill) of the server will also be much higher than without peertube because of constant transcoding

    The cost, both financial and server taxation-wise is simply too great for me, and many others to setup a peertube instance.

    Regardless of how easy it is for people to create on peertube, someone has to bear the cost of hosting it. That is cheap-ish for Lemmy or mastodon, but there is a reason YouTube was a loss leader for a long time for google, and many streaming services restrict 4k video.

    That isn’t even getting into compensation for the content makers.



  • But on this threat model? Why would it not be good?

    It has to physically accessed on the PCB itself from what I gather.

    There are 2 “threats” from what I see:

    • someone at the distribution facility pops it open and has the know how to install malware on it (very very unlikely)

    • someone breaks into your home unnoticed and has the time to carefully take apart your vacuum and upload pre-prepared malware instead of just sticking an IP camera somewhere. If this actually happens, the owner has much much bigger problems and the vacuum is the least of their worries.

    The homeowner is the other person that can access it and it is a big feature in that case.





  • I started using activities instead of virtual desktops with 2 desktops each.

    Separate wallpapers, separate start menu favorites, separate panel pins, etc… Plus you can hide activities not in use to keep it tidy. I used to use virtual desktops more, but I think of it now as a 2D grid. Vertically activities very organized and for each you can switch horizontally where organization doesn’t matter as much.

    Activities are great except there is a bug where the little wallpaper previews won’t show with the default, batch resized and renamed wallpapers.