Mama told me not to come.

She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.

  • 4 Posts
  • 2.19K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Sure, but those will usually be pieces of an app on the same host, not whole apps. Like for an inventory management app, you might have the auth server and its database on one host, the CRUD app and its database on another, and the report server, its database, and a replica of the CRUD db on another. And I use the term “host” broadly enough to include VMs on the same physical hardware. And these hosts will have restricted communication between each other.

    At least, that’s how I’ve seen it done.

    Self-hosters will generally run multiple full apps on one host. It’s a different setup.



  • Companies don’t typically host multiple containers on the same host. So having a different user for them is less important than securing the connection between machines, since a given biat isn’t particularly interesting. Attackers will still try to break out, so they have a backup.

    As a self-hoster, you typically do the opposite. You run multiple services on the same host, and the internal network isn’t particularly secure. So you should be focusing more on mitigating issues, and having each service run as an unprivileged user is one fairly easy way to do that.





  • If you have old parts, use those, it’ll probably overkill. Most server stuff isn’t very resource intensive, so a little goes a long way.

    If you’re buying something new, I’d recommend something small, like a Mini PC or an N100 rig. 16GB RAM is probably enough, and anything with more than 4 cores is probably overkill. A dedicated GPU is unnecessary, something with a modern-ish iGPU will be plenty to transcode video.


  • I don’t think that’s necessarily true. If the market is sufficiently free, you only need a handful of experts to look past the BS and inform the public. In the past, we called those people journalists, and they would hold bad actors to task.

    The issue seems to be that government has given in to moneyed interests and allowed them to shut down critics. If we had actual consequences, like jail time or confiscation of personal wealth for illegal behaviour, I think it would self-correct.


  • When most people refer to capitalism, they mean free market or laissez-faire capitalism. Many (most?) of the issues you mentioned require government to step in to occur. For example:

    • trusts - government structure to protect wealth
    • oligopoly - failure of government to prevent collusion (price fixing and whatnot are expressly anti-competitive)
    • regulatory capture - government must be complicit since regulations are typically a government thing

    I think government has a place in protecting the free market, but it needs to be restrained so it doesn’t get manipulated into destroying the free market. For example, a regulation could protect consumers, but it could also raise the barrier to entry and prevent competition from correcting the underlying problem.

    A lot of the issues stem from corporate welfare, where wealthy people are able to manipulate corporate structures to build their own wealth and protect themselves from liability. I think it’s largely those liability protections that encourage anti-competitive behavior. End the protections and courts can meaningfully punish corporations when they break the law.



  • It’s a natural byproduct though. Assuming a free enough market, you should have several people all supplying the same good. Some will compete on price, some on quality, and some on overall service.

    The problems happen when competition evaporates, either from regulations raising the barrier to entry, acquisitions, or resource scarcity. Capitalism assumes people are greedy and pits them against each other to provide better services to everyone. A lack of competition isn’t “capitalism functioning as intended,” but instead the opposite, it means something is preventing capitalism from working as intended.



  • The user agent tells the page what the browser is, so the page can tell whether you’re runnit Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc. The intent is for the page to change behavior depending on the browser since each have different capabilities (web standards change quickly). Unfortunately, pages rarely get updated in a timely fashion when browsers implement web standards so the engine check is frequently inaccurate.

    Changing the user agent means changing what web pages think you’re running. If a page uses an optimized API on Chrome and a slower one on Firefox because Firefox was slower to implement it, then you can get a speedup by saying your Firefox is Chrome. Some pages refuse to run unless it’s a specific browser, so lying can make those pages work.

    I hope that makes sense.