Speaking from my own experience… Lots of people try to cobble together information and try to learn something quick. To varying degrees of success… But it’s a bit of a hit and miss sometimes. And you don’t necessarily learn it the proper way or the right way around if you go by the random order your questions arise.

I think one of the most efficient ways (and least time-consuming in the long run) is still good old books. They’re mostly written by clever people. And they come with the information curated. And laid out in the correct order, so you’ll get the basics first and then the stuff building on top of that. So you don’t need to waste a lot of time jumping back and forth and get entangled because you don’t really know you’re missing some basics while learning some advanced concept.

It’s not easy either. I mean first of all you gotta find some book that matches your learning style. And then I regularly struggle with the first few chapters because I kind of already know 70% of the stuff, yet not all of it. So it’s tricky to hit some balance between brushing over things, and not missing important information… But it gets better after that.

But I think more often than not, it’s the proper way. And since it’s curated and all, it’ll save time in the long run.

(I can’t really compare it to the AI approach. I’ve used AI to look up documentation for me. But never used it to learn any more complicated concepts. So I don’t have any first-hand experience with that.)

Yeah, I think the correct sticker on a PSU would be something like 80 Plus Ruby?! Everything else comes with 80+% efficiency at 20% rated load. Which is 200W for a 1000W PSU. And there’s no guarantee on what happens below that, so it might very well be utter garbage at a home server power draw of 20-30W.

You never know without looking up the datasheets. Though, back when I built my home server/NAS, I failed to find a good one. I got a PicoPSU and a 12V power brick instead. Not sure if that’s still a thing. But I remember it was a lot of work to find proper and efficient components. And it doesn’t make any sense to put in all the effort (and money) and then burn all the saved energy, and then some more, in an average PSU.

Some MiniPCs, NUCs and even computers also come with fairly efficient power supplies.

I got a power-efficient mainboard and PSU. I think that’ll be the lion’s share. And I don’t have any unnecessary stuff like a GPU or extra stuff connected.

I ran powertop and adopted the recommendations to set the various buses, peripherals and devices into powersave mode. That does a few Watts here and there. CPU of course is also allowed to save power when idle.

And then I made the harddisks spin down after 40min of not being used. Or something like that. So they’ll automatically spin down at night and when I’m not using them. As spinning hdds consume quite a lot of power if you have multiple of them and compare it to the 15-20W or so the rest of the computer uses. The operating system is on a SSD.

I’ll just open them up to the internet via an nginx reverse proxy. Make sure sign up is disabled in the applications, and something blocks people from brute-forcing passwords. Pretty sure Nextcloud comes like that per default. And I’ll do updates. And see if I can run stuff in containers or seperate users so in the unlikely case something happens, access to one of my services doesn’t compromise the entire server.

Lots of other people use VPNs though. Like Wireguard, Netbird, Tailscale…

Yeah, it probably needs to be a coding agent with some thinking and planning and a feedback loop. Or you’ll end up in a situation like me.

Just don’t do it like me and think copy-pasting stuff from ChatGPT would do it. It’s not good at writing Nix configuration at all. And it doesn’t have a solid understanding either, of all the concepts in the background. Like not being able to execute binaries, what it takes to adapt something without the FHS, the intricacies of Python… Which options are real or just made up…

Ah great. Yeah, the entire premise of it is: you get to “program” your experience instead of clicking on some install buttons.

You can temporarily just install something in your shell: nix-shell -p firefox-esr

How would I know how to program in a certain package or setting without internet?

I guess the easiest way, and what all people do is just use https://search.nixos.org In doubt, use your phone 😅
You can also install “nix-search-cli” to search for packages. or “nix-option” to get info on options. However, I’m not sure how you’d end up in a situation without internet and wanting to change the configuration. I mean the moment you want to compile and install anything, it needs access to Github or wherever the code is stored. And if you don’t compile it yourself, it will pull it from the NixOS cache, which is also on the internet. So you can’t do anything. And the times we had a DVD to install software are long gone. So it’s probably down to some rare exception when you’re on the train or airplane, want to prepare something to apply later?! I don’t think there’s a good solution except the two CLI tools and maybe a local copy of the documentation / handbook.

And in my experience, the NixOS documentation isn’t great. It’s either there and straightforward. Or it’s a lot of searching stuff on the Wiki, forum… Using GitHub search with an appended: “language:nix” to see if someone already came up with a config. Or I’ll end up reading the code. That is for more advanced things, or niche stuff. It’s a bit similar to the overall experience of NixOS (in my opinion). Either things are super straightforward and mostly done for you to configure with 3 lines of code. Then there’s a fine line of stuff that’s moderately complex. And all the things not covered can get very complex and much more involved.

If it’s just you, and you’re fine with the regular login… Just disable signup and don’t add more authentication mechanisms like oauth/openID.

I’m using nginx as a reverse proxy as well. For now, I added a lot of “deny” directives to ban all the address ranges from Tencent, Alibaba, OpenAI. It’s not a 100% solution, but works well enough for me. I’m mostly worried about AI crawlers causing too much load on my server. And it stopped since, so I don’t think I’m gonna need Anubis and all these extra things in front if my applications. If you like you can look into solutions like a web application firewall like Crowdsec.

How long have you been using Linux, so on the one hand you still keep thinking about Windows. And on the other hand you already progressed to an Arch derivate, use BTRFS, snapshots, a non-standard bootloader and all that stuff?

I like NixOS. But it’s really for people with too much spare time to learn new programming languages, abstract concepts and weird quirks. It’s great. But sometimes you’ll also do a simple nixos-rebuild switch and it’ll greet you with 4 pages of gibberish. Or you’ll spend 3h packaging some weird Python stuff, because you can’t just install and run it like on a regular distro 😅

Sure. I guess what I meant is, you (or someone) need to ask… In my layman’s understanding of religion (in general), it should be there for the people. And there should be someone around for random individuals to ask “Hey, I’m having this situation in my life and I’m not sure which is correct. Can you tell me? Or can you refer me to someone with enough background to do so?”

IMO, if religion claims absolute authority, and to know what’s the correct morals on earth… It better have answers for these questions.

But sometimes you need to ask?! At least that’s what I think. I mean Free Software is around for a mere 45 years, and doesn’t have that much of an organized lobby. And the other side better avoid a definite answer to the question, as it could be negative.

I don’t know the correct answer. Maybe it’s more nuanced than a binary opposition, or depends on other factors? Or - how we construct our technology is not involving God’s judgement, and it’s more about what we do with it? Or it is haram? I bet there’s a lot of computer programmers out there working for some companies, who’d need to be told if it were. To me, all that selling of personal information, and manipulating the people and the world by algorithms for some corporate interest feels 0% ethical. All I can say is whatever intuition God gave me(?) regarding what’s right and wrong, tell me that one is wrong. And we should do better with technology that shapes our modern world. But my opinion isn’t funded in scripture at all. I’d tend to just handle it like other exploitative gains for business, which aren’t right. But that still doesn’t really answer if the 4 essential freedoms of free software are mandated. I mean even back then, property and contracts were recognized. So it could be completely fine to license software as a product without source code?!

I’m not a Muslim, but aren’t there scholars around to answer those questions? As far as I know you’d need a mufti to provide you with that kind of answer to the question. Not a random person from the internet. As it’s a bit complicated and we won’t find direct references to Free Software in 1400 year old scripture. But we have text on trade, and knowledge. Which are related to what computer software is.

Pretty sure back then we didn’t even call it piracy. It was a normal, and perfectly legal thing to do. I remember my uncle and parents copy songs to casettes so 10yo me could listen to my favorite songs on my casette deck. We shared audiobooks with the neighbourhood kids (without copying them). We made mixtapes for the car stereo. And a new mixtape for every road trip. We also “pirated” the TV. Have the VHS record the Star Trek episode because I wasn’t home on thursdays at 4pm. Or record some awesome blockbuster movie to re-watch it later.

Latest changes in the EU are part of the NIS-2 directive. My private German domains don’t show a lot of detail and it’s been like that for many years.

Judging by the github repo, it’s the very basic cousin, written (vibe-coded) in Python. It doesn’t do planning or anything, just preface your command with a system prompt telling your model it’s a coding assistant. And gives it tool access to read and write files. And execute commands.

And seems no human uses it, there’s no interactions like bug reports, PRs or people who star and like the repo.

Did you forget the body text? Or is this some bug? Looks like a question here, and like an AI fabricated tutorial in the original version of this cross-post.

Start simple, then work your way up. Construct a static website with HTML. Learn how to navigate folders on a (remote) server, so the Linux commandline. Learn how to install software and where to find the configuration and logfiles. Then install some webserver and make it serve your first website. You can do all of this on your own computer. And after that you can learn how to install other web applications, how to reconfigure your webserver to act as a reverse proxy.

So start with basic webdevelopment first, then do Linux, webservers, and then once you got the basics you can do more advanced apps, containers and all the stuff.

Not sure which book to recommend. But I often recommend https://yunohost.org to people who just want to run webservices. It does most of the complicated stuff for you and you just need to click install for software in YunoHost’s catalog. You just need to learn a few basic things about the internet, because it’s fairly easy to use.

Not sure if you broke out of the Matrix here. OP’s reply contained an em-dash, started with an affirmation. Follows the rule of three. I’d say there’s still a high likelihood it’s an AI which “claims” the code went through review.

Agreed. If we had some law like this (but consistent, and how computers work, and universal, but still mandating this is the pursuant source of this information) it’d be the one thing with potential to free us from these other nefarious child safety laws.

The amiunique.org is nice, by the way. I haven’t fooled around with these tools in a while. Thanks for the link. I wish it’d provide me with some form of actual fingerprint, though. I mean it kinda seems it has 100% precision on my regular browsers. And already me preferring German and then en-GB over other English rats me out 100%?! And then I do niche things like use Linux 🤣 But with all the green text, there is no information on it’s recall… So it’s a bit meaningless for tracking purposes?! Could be the case some of all of these many datapoints change with a new tab or new browser session and they lose me all the time, because they’re too specific/sensitive. Maybe I’ll look up browser fingerprinting again and how good it actually is. I mean achieving a 100% green score isn’t difficult. I could just hand out some increasing id number with every page load and that’d satisfy the requirements and be 100% unique as well. However, the interesting part would be whether they can track me somehow, and recall the same number on following page loads by me. That’s the way round it needs to be for tracking (in practice). But that’s not really a part of what’s displayed on amiunique.org

I struggle a bit to agree with this. I mean you’re kinda right? But at the same time, we shouldn’t care for privacy because we don’t have privacy is kind of a circular argument. Which kinda makes it an invalid one.

I definitely agree the privacy thing is a red herring here. It is one of the many things to consider. But it’s far down the list compared to other more important matters. (Due to the specific approach taken.)

That is for this specfic law. It’s a very different situation with other approaches. Like Discord wanting to scan your ID and use it, and leak it to hackers and third parties. That one is concerned with privacy a lot. I mean a browser fingerprint can be used to manipulate me. A copy of my ID can be used for identity theft and all kinds of nefarious things. So it’s definitely part of the overall conversation.

actually closer to 1 bit of information

Yeah, I’m just a bit pedantic about the maths so we know what privacy means. 1 bit is still a large number, I guess. We’re still adding 280.000 people we can distinguish, or a small city worth of people.

I would note that the law forbids third party transmission of this data.

Yeah, I’m not so sure about that. First of all the groups OS provider and application developer aren’t mutually exclusive. For example if your OS has an app store, you could be required to do both at the same time. Share info with third-party app developers and not share info. That’s probably why there is an exception in there. But that exception looks like an easy exploit. If my app displays ads, of course the ad network can’t do non-kids-safe things to kids either. So I can forward that info to Google Ads. I can probably also forward the info to other services which do networking and user authentication or have some sort of internal state stored about my users. I bet if I had a legal department, I could come up with a good case to share that info with a lot of third parties.

In the end I kinda agree with your premise. I do think this is the single best approach I’ve ever read at regulating age-related stuff. I mean it’s not really an honest attempt. This wasn’t written to help kids and teenagers. It was written and lobbied for so Mark Zuckerberg’s company can shift responsibility on other people… But… I think the rough idea behind it is sound. The operating system and app store is the correct place for parental controls. We should be provided with parental controls. And they should look like what likely was the attempt here. Just an input field, attestation - no verification. And everything to stay local and not forward data to third parties or services.