Just a stranger trying things.

  • 12 Posts
  • 316 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • I don’t understand in what circumstances anyone would like to use link shorteners? I can only find reasons why not to use them:

    • subject visitors to surveillance
    • destination under the control of a third party (potential for ransom for the author, like we see here, and potential of ads for visitors like we see here)
    • obfuscation of the actual destination
    • how long will the redirect be valid for? It could be deemed unviable for the company to continue support of the redirect, thus rendering the destination inaccessible from all places where the shortened link is used.
    • more…?




  • One thing which I find useful is to be able to turn installation/setup instructions into ansible roles and tasks. If you’re unfamiliar, ansible is a tool for automated configuration for large scale server infrastructures. In my case I only manage two servers but it is useful to parse instructions and convert them to ansible, helping me learn and understand ansible at the same time.

    Here is an example of instructions which I find interesting: how to setup docker for alpine Linux: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Docker

    Results are actually quite good even for smaller 14B self-hosted models like the distilled versions of DeepSeek, though I’m sure there are other usable models too.

    To assist you in programming (both to execute and learn) I find it helpful too.

    I would not rely on it for factual information, but usually it does a decent job at pointing in the right direction. Another use i have is helpint with spell-checking in a foreign language.


  • Regarding photos, and videos specifically:

    I know you said you are starting with selfhosting so your question was focusing on that, but I would like to also share my experience with ente which has been working beautifully for my family, partner and myself. They are truly end to end encrypted, with the source code available on github.

    They have reasonable prices. If you feel adventurous you can actually also host it yourself. They have advanced search features and face recognition which all run on device (since they can’t access your data) and it works very well. They have great sharing and collaborating features and don’t lock features behind accounts so you can actually gather memories from people on your quota by just sharing a link. You can also have a shared family plan.







  • It’s unfortunate that you react like this. I don’t claim to be an expert, never have. I’ve only been asking for evidence, but all we get to are assumptions and they all seem to stem from the fact that allegedly the CIA has indirectly funded Signal (I’m not disputing nor validating it).

    The concern is valid, and it has caused a lot of distrust in many companies due to the Snowden leaks, but that distrust is founded in the leaks. But so far there is no evidence that Signal is part of any of it. And given the continued endorsement by security experts, I’m inclined in trusting them.



  • They have to know who the message needs to go to, granted. But they don’t have to know who the message comes from, hence why the sealed sender technique works. The recipient verifies the message via the keys that are exchanged if they have been communicating with that correspondent before or else it is a new message request.

    So I don’t see how they can build social graphs if they don’t know who the sender if all messages are, they can only plot recipients which is not enough.