A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.

I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.

  • 10 Posts
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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2021

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  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.detoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldWolfstack?
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    2 days ago

    Yes. With other projects, I often found it is problematic. Like Claude come up with lots of advertisement text, but the software doesn’t even do a fraction of it. Or the install instructions are made up and nothing works… So I usually advise for caution once a project has a wide disparity in claims, stars and signs of actual usage… But I can’t tell what’s the case here, without a proper look. It definitely has some red flags.

    I appreciate people being upfront, as well. Ain’t easy. Just try to install and test it before advertising for the project.


  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.detoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldWolfstack?
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    2 days ago

    Yeah, they’re transparent about AI usage. There’s a small paragraph at the bottom of their README.

    I mean the website sounds like AI text. The repo is fairly new. Only 1 issue report about how something doesn’t work, zero PRs and seems it’s a single person uploading commits… I’d wait a bit before deploying my production services on it 😅 They’re making a lot of bold claims in the README, though.


  • I think so as well. The computer isn’t really good to “use” it. That’s more the category for experiments. Or teach people how to install Linux. Or a computer museum corner and you put vintage games on it. Or just recycle it.

    And a box with RAM sticks collecting dust isn’t useful either. Put whatever is compatible into other computers, and then try to sell and recycle them. Seems 4GB DDR3L RAM modules still sell for 1 to 4€ on eBay?! So maybe you can make a few bucks to invest in other projects for the kids.


  • I found some info here: https://ageverification.dev/

    But that’s difficult to read, very technical. And mostly written from the user perspective. It looks to me like they’re (for once) trying to come up with a proper solution. Everyone can be an Attestation Provider, Relying Party or repurpose the white-label App. At least in theory. It’s all specified and in the open. And then the European Union contributes some list of trustworthy Attestation Providers (governments, banks, mobile network providers…)

    I think due to the project structure, it’ll be more like the Covid-Certificate App, which could be customized by every member state and it’s theoretically possible to use it as one uniform solution.

    So unless there’s some certification for “Relying Parties” which I missed while skimming the documentation, I’d say in theory it’d be possible to use it on a technical level. Of course it’s still a preview so the EU has lots of opportunity left to mess it up.


  • Thanks for the nice conversation.

    Now that OP is inactive, I can also spoil the surprise: My link further up was Rick Astley singing: Never Gonna Give You Up.

    It’s safe to click. I just figured since OP isn’t listening to answers, I’ll give them some video to learn -hands-on- about videos on the Darknet.

    If someone had clicked the link, they’d get the opportunity to learn how fast or slow a video loads. And how it (likely) first requires the user to lift some security measures or videos won’t load at all. (At least my browser does, there’s no JS and then NoScript also complains about the media file.)

    We and other people in the comments pointed that out in the proceeding conversation. But nobody clicked the link anyway. I always have the feeling the groups of Threadiverse users and people with the capacity to surf the Darknet are pretty much disjoint groups. But it’s really nice to once and again talk to someone with some more knowledge and/or first hand experience. 👍


  • HDDs have plenty failure modes. You might get SMART warnings. Or maybe you don’t and fails a bit more spontaneously. I had harddisks do that nasty clicking sound because something’s wrong with the heads. And sometimes I could still read data from the other areas of the disk. Sometimes it would refuse to read anything. And sometimes a HDD just works and the next moment it won’t spin up again, or the controller is dead.

    I think the only reliable method is backups.




  • I think we’re somewhat on the same page here.

    That means going through an exit node […]

    I2P doesn’t have exit nodes. Once you load content from outside the network, that won’t be via I2P, only chance is to get it directly via another connection. For example your default internet connection. So either the browser or operating system is configured to block that. Or you’ll leak your IP.

    Then you didn’t have ‘Safest’ mode enabled

    Yeah, that’s why I said, use a dedicated browser for that. Something preconfigured to not allow any of that.
    Yet better: Use Tails like recommended by Snowden.

    Those are called bugs and they do happen […]

    I’m not so sure about this… Is “safest” mode really all you need? And does it reliably deal with 100% of the attack vectors? Last time I tried it wasn’t too good for example against browser fingerprinting (which doesn’t reveal an IP, but might be bad as well). And there’s a million ways from WebRTC, to trying to get the IPv6 address if all you did is configure an IPv4 proxy, DNS leaks, browser plugins, the webfont system does a lot of weird things, all the things done to do multimedia are very complex and might offer side-channels, I recently learned how to extract some information with CSS alone, no JS needed… Does “safest” really do a 100% job? I mean what I’ve done until now is to discourage people to mess with their browser settings themselves because it’s (a) easy to make mistakes or miss something, and (b) I wasn’t sure if that setting even does all the heavy-lifting without going into detail with all the other changes for example TOR browser bundle has?!

    I’d need to look it up but I think there’s a lot of opportunity without resorting to 0-days.

    EDIT […]

    Yeah, I think that’s why good (and easy to use) pron sites you’d “recommend to people” aren’t really a thing on there.

    And there’s the other thing that horny people might just click “allow” on something, because their brain is currently not in logical thinking mode.


  • First, this was an I2P link not a Tor .onion link. They are different, non-interoperable anonymity protocols.

    True. I wasn’t sure what people use to access I2P sites.

    first the whole point of Tor and I2P both is that nobody knows your IP address. Not even the website operator.

    Sure. And then they load some resource via the clearnet and get your IP address anyway. Or use WebRTC, or one of the several other methods to squeeze an IP out of a browser.

    Lastly, if you’re taking the trouble to use Tor or I2P in the first place – turn off javascript.

    And now your porn site doesn’t show videos anymore 😁 I have a hunch, this is one of the two reasons why there aren’t any good porn sites around… Despite OP not liking that answer…


  • I think you need some Agent software. Or a MCP server for your existing software. It depends a bit on what you’re doing, whether that’s just chatting and asking questions that need to be googled. Or vibe coding… Or query the documents on your computer. As I said there’s OpenClaw which can do pretty much everything including wreck your computer. I’m also aware of OpenCode, AutoGPT, Aider, Tabby, CrewAI, …

    The Ollama projects has some software linked on their page: https://github.com/ollama/ollama?tab=readme-ov-file#chat-interfaces
    They’re sorted by use-case. And whether they’re desktop software or a webinterface. Maybe that’s a good starting point.

    What you’d usually do is install it and connect it to your model / inference software via that software’s OpenAI-compatible API endpoint. But it frequently ends up being a chore. If you use some paid service (ChatGPT), they’ll contract with Google to do the search for you, Youtube, etc. And once you do it yourself, you’re gonna need all sorts of developer accounts and API tokens, to automatically access Google’s search API… You might get blocked from YouTube if you host your software on a VPS in a datacenter… That’s kinda how the internet is these days. All the big companies like Google and their competitors require access tokens or there won’t be any search results. At least that was my experience.


  • Yeah. If you’re clever you use some TOR browser bundle or something like that to access the Darknet. Not only for security. You also void your anonymity / privacy once you use just any random regular browser.

    The Darknet is a bit of a mixture of people who use it for legitimate purposes, people who tinker around, and some shady people and trolls. So you’d expect some chance of someone trying to use JavaScript against you, or leverage other browser techniques to leak your IP etc… It’s not a frequent thing by any means, but it’s a possibility.