The Hobbyist

Don’t give them ideas!

Running on prem is certainly possible, but requires a dedicated sysadmin team for anything serious. It is very important to be able to have availability guarantees and some expert you can count on to solve your problem with a phone call.

Related: Uber recognized how battery levels affect customer psychology in pricing but claims it doesn’t use it to hike prices for low battery devices:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/uber-phone-surge-pricing/

Same, I rocked a second hand GTx 680 from 2012-2013, which I upgraded to a second hand RTX 3060 12GB for a fantastic price, in 2024. Still rocking a DDR3 platform with the intel i7 4400K. And that’s more than enough for most games with nice graphics on 1680x1050 :) (display probably 15 years old too). Eventually, I will be looking for some other second hand components to upgrade the rest of the system, but it does everything more than well enough.

Remove unused conda packages and caches:

conda clean --all

If you are a Python developer, this can easily be several or tens of GB.

It seems Signal has already pushed out a fix for this, which was abusing the QR codes to actually link a device when it was presenting itself as a way to join a group.

Paywalled: https://www.wired.com/story/russia-signal-qr-code-phishing-attack/

I hear you, I always see this problem being solved by the link being in the description and the host saying “link in the description”. I hadn’t come across a situation where an audio only format was accessible and there was no way to interact with the content but in some corner cases it does make sense.

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.

I’m not convinced having a specific ruling targeting just tiktok would be a good move. I think I understand and side with all the reasons they are doing it: be it privacy, security and more. But they should not uniquely apply to tiktok, but to all apps. If suddenly there’s a Russian app, or a Nigerian app or a swiss app, any which for whatever reasons has security and privacy concerns, they should all be held to the same standards. Me no like double standards.

They may inadvertently focus on people who spoke against the new “pro free speech” of Facebook…

Well yes, but also no.

Whenever you search for a solution to your problem, it stems from the realization that something is a problem. But sometimes, you have a thing which has been done for a long time, it was a problem with no solution and you’ve had to accept that. How would you determine one day that things can be done differently and better without constantly reevaluating everything? It’s not realistic.

In my view, it is a perfectly reasonable question to ask “what problem does waydroid solve?” To figure out if you have that issue and you didn’t know of this solution.

Sorry, just my 2 cents.

People could be using WhatsApp if they cared about it, but they chose signal for a reason. And making signal weaken its privacy for the purpose of reaching more people is against everything they stand for.