sylver_dragon

But, the coupon says, “half off”!

Have you considered just beige boxing a server yourself? My home server is a mini-ITX board from Asus running a Core i5, 32GB of RAM and a stack of SATA HDDs all stuffed in a smaller case. Nothing fancy, just hardware picked to fulfill my needs.

Limiting yourself to bespoke systems means limiting yourself to what someone else wanted to build. The main downside to building it yourself is ensuring hardware comparability with the OS/software you want to run. If you are willing to take that on, you can tailor your server to just what you want.

Short answer: yes, you can self-host on any computer connected to your network.

Longer answer:
You can, but this is probably not the best way to go about things. The first thing to consider is what you are actually hosting. If you are talking about a website, this means that you are running some sort of web server software 24x7 on your main PC. This will be eating up resources (CPU cycles, RAM) which you may want to dedicated to other processes (e.g. gaming). Also, anything you do on that PC may have a negative impact on the server software you are hosting. Reboot and your server software is now offline. Install something new and you might have a conflict bringing your server software down. Lastly, if your website ever gets hacked, then your main PC also just got hacked, and your life may really suck. This is why you often see things like Raspberry Pis being used for self-hosting. It moves the server software on to separate hardware which can be updated/maintained outside a PC which is used for other purposes. And it gives any attacker on that box one more step to cross before owning your main PC. Granted, it’s a small step, but the goal there is to slow them down as much as possible.

That said, the process is generally straight forward. Though, there will be some variations depending on what you are hosting (e.g. webserver, nextcloud, plex, etc.) And, your ISP can throw a massive monkey wrench in the whole thing, if they use CG-NAT. I would also warn you that, once you have a presence on the internet, you will need to consider the security implications to whatever it is you are hosting. With the most important security recommendation being “install your updates”. And not just OS updates, but keeping all software up to date. And, if you host WordPress, you need to stay on top of plugin and theme updates as well. In short, if it’s running on your system, it needs to stay up to date.

The process generally looks something like:

• Install your updates.
• Install the server software.
• Apply updates to the software (the installer may be an outdated version).
• Apply security hardening based on guides from the software vendor.
• Configure your firewall to forward the required ports (and only the required ports) from the WAN side to the server.
• Figure out your external IP address.
• Try accessing the service from the outside.

Optionally, you may want to consider using a Dynamic DNS service (DDNS) (e.g. noip.com) to make reaching your server easier. But, this is technically optional, if you’re willing to just use an IP address and manually update things on the fly.

Good luck, and in case I didn’t mention it, install your updates.

No, because your vote won’t encourage investment in flipping the State. I agree that the current duopoly sucks. I was an ardent Bernie supporter and would very much like viable third parties. But, the DNC isn’t going to be looking at those third party votes. They need to believe that the Democrats have a chance of winning before they will invest in a State. If all they see are protest votes, then they won’t see a viable path to them winning and they will continue to ignore the State.

Ya, it sucks, but we really do need to just keep holding our nose and pulling the lever for the Democrat in the general election.

If you are in a deep red state, it will seem that your vote won’t matter. Because it mostly won’t. However, the way States vote changes over time. The closer the vote totals in a State, the more likely the National Democratic Party is to invest resources into building up and promoting candidates in those States. That sort of thing can shift the needle, if slowly. Keep in mind that California voted Republican from '68 to '88 (source) but shifted over time.

It sucks to vote and feel like you’re just pissing in the wind. But, each vote moves the needle just a bit more and maybe, eventually, things will swing.

Reddit is (no longer) Fun.
Like others, the API change was the final straw. I used Reddit is Fun (RIF) for years, even paid for the full version, because both the official Reddit app and the mobile web interface were terrible. I was also using the old web interface with the Reddit Enhancement Suite, and that went on “maintenance mode”. Overall, Reddit just reached a point that the enshitification was getting to be too much for me to stomach. So, here I am.

I suspect Politico fixed it. When I first loaded the page, it had the same image you see in the thumbnail. And that’s was what prompted my comment. Looks like they updated the page and it’s now an appropriate image.

Story about Belgian F-16s.
Picture shows US F-35.
Guess the AI’s came for Politico’s editors first.

People being assholes over it is dumb, but I can’t say I would want one. I saw one recently at my local grocery store and I couldn’t stop thinking how poorly built it looked. It just seemed like the fit and finish of the body panels was kinda bad. I got an overall feeling like it was something put together by a couple of teenagers in metal shop.

The answer to that will be everyone’s favorite “it depends”. Specifically, it depends on everything you are trying to do. I have a fairly minimal setup, I host a WordPress site for my personal blog and I host a NextCloud instance for syncing my photos/documents/etc. I also have to admit that my backup situation is not good (I don’t have a remote backup). So, my costs are pretty minimal:

• $12/year - Domain
• $10/month - Linode/Akamai containers

The Domain fee is obvious, I pay for my own domain. For the containers, I have 2 containers hosted by the bought up husk of Linode. The first is just a Kali container I use for remote scanning and testing (of my own stuff and for work). So, not a necessary cost, but one I like to have. The other is a Wireguard container connecting back to my home network. This is necessary as my ISP makes use of CG-NAT. The short version of that is, I don’t actually have a public IP address on my home network and so have to work around that limitation. I do this by hosting NGinx on the Wireguard container and routing all traffic over a Wireguard VPN back to my home router. The VPN terminates on the outside interface and then traffic on 443/tcp is NAT’d through the firewall to my “server”. I have an NGinx container listening on 443 and based on host headers traffic goes to either the WordPress or NextCloud container which do their magic respectively. I also have a number of services, running in containers, on that server. But, none of those are hosted on the internet. Things like PiHole and Octoprint.

I don’t track costs for electricity, but that should be minimal for my server. The rest of the network equipment is a wash, as I would be using that anyway for home internet. So overall, I pay $11/month in fixed costs and then any upgrades/changes to my server have a one-time capital cost. For example, I just upgraded the CPU in it as it was struggling under the Enshrouded server I was running for my Wife and I.

Unfortunately, yes. There have been a lot of efforts to shift the energy mix in the EU away from Russian oil and natural gas. But, the effort has been slow and has meant rising costs. Also, by removing Russian production from the supply side, prices will invariably increase. Ukraine does have to balance the damage that can do to foreign support, against their war aims. Personally, I think it’s pretty selfish of the EU and US to ask Ukraine not to strike those resources. It’s essentially the US/EU saying, “more of your people need to die, so we can save money.” It’s a really crappy thing to ask.

War is logistics. If the Russian war machine can be starved of fuel and money, the machine will grind to a halt. It’s just a question of, can Ukraine cause enough damage to Russia’s oil infrastructure fast enough to survive the advantages Russia has in manpower and equipment?

I mean, the US could do that, but it’s kinda pointless. Ukraine would just be buying them with money that the US Government gave them in the aid package. It would mean the US Treasury moving money from the “aid going to Ukraine” column to the “US DoD budget” column. Sure, some of the aid is structured as loans. However, the President has the power to forgive half of those loans by the end of the year and the next President will have the power to forgive the rest of those loans in 2026. Unless the war suddenly ends and Ukraine suddenly finds a shit-ton of money somewhere, those loans are just going to be forgiven. As there is just no way they will ever be paid back.

Handy Infographic from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO):
.

• Total Federal outlays: $6.1 Trillion
• Federal Social Spending
  • Social Security: $1.3T
  • Medicare: $0.839T
  • Medicaid: $0.616T
  • Income Security Programs: $0.448T
  • Total Social Spending: $3.203T

Math warning:

(3.203T / $6.1T) * 100% = 52.5%  

So, not quite the previous poster’s 55%, but pretty close. There is also an “Other” column which likely includes other social spending and may have gotten us to that number. But, it’s enough of a mixed bag, and way too much work, to try and pick it all out.

While the US could certainly adjust it’s spending in a lot of good ways, the idea that the US spends “nothing” on social programs is provably false. These numbers also get weird and much harder to pin down when we look at State level taxes and spending. Many years ago, I dug into education spending in the US. And while Federal Education spending is a drop in the bucket, the actual number is pretty large, because it’s considered a State responsibility and each State spends large amounts of money on it.

For example, my home State of Virginia budgets $29.9 Billion for “Health and Human Services” this Fiscal Year 2024 and $25.0 Billion for “Education”, those two line items eating up about 62% of the State budget.

Considering that Congress just (fucking finally) handed the President a whole lot of money in “Presidential Drawdown Authority”. I suspect the conversation is going to go a whole lot like:
US DoD: We bought all these former Soviet shit-boxes to prevent them being used by Russia and to build goodwill with Kazakhstan.
US President: Hey, look at all these former Soviet shitboxes the DoD has sitting in inventory. We don’t need these. I’m giving them to Ukraine who can find a use for them.

US Federal Law does NOT require that bills only deal with a single issue. So, a single bill could send aid to Ukraine, outlaw hats and declare Tuesday, “puppy kicking day”. And that would be fully within the US Constitutional method for passing Federal laws. All that matters is that the exact same text is passed in both The House of Representatives and The Senate and is then signed by The President. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff around it (veto process, and filibuster), but the ELI5 version is both houses of Congress pass the same bill and the President signs it and thus it becomes US Federal Law.

There will, of course, be a whole other process around the law being challenged in the Courts. ByteDance will undoubtedly challenge the TikTok ban in Court. And that will take years to fully wind it’s way through the system. And the courts may issue an injunction, preventing the law from being enforced, until the decision is made. Basically saying, “nope Federal Government, you cannot enforce this until we say so”. Personally, I would expect that in this case. So, don’t expect TikTok to leave the US any time soon. Note that, this can be done to part of a law (again, I would expect this) and not the whole law at once. So, this won’t imperil US aid to Ukraine, Israel or Taiwan. It just means that we’re likely to see the bounds of US Federal Government power tested a bit. Does the US Federal Government have the power to unilaterally kick a company out of the US? I’d bet on “yes”, especially with the ties to national security. But, I could easily lose that bet.

He just wants a bit more Living Space.

Yes, yes it has. And it’s directly because Russia engaging in exactly the type of expansionist wars NATO was set up to stop.

While embarrassing, the environment in which that happened was entirely different. You had Regan and Gorbachev actively working to improve relations. And no one was actively trying to blow up Soviet infrastructure. You’d think the Russian air defenses would be a bit more sensitive to small aircraft coming from Ukraine in this environment.

The West is perfectly fine supporting genocide so long as you only do it in your own country or in a country The West is not interested in.