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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Is there any benefit at all

    Maybe! There’s at least some scientific evidence that chemical compounds in mushrooms can have medicinal effects.

    Bias disclaimer: I put a lion’s mane mushroom tincture in my morning tea because it may have a neuroprotective effect (source). My father’s father had dementia, my father is currently in a home with profound dementia, the chances it’s going to happen to me are very high. It’ll be years before I know whether lion’s mane mushroom will do anything for me (and even then you couldn’t claim anything from one data point), but I’m willing to try anything as long as it’s affordable and has at least some plausible evidence behind it. This isn’t the only thing I’m doing of course, I’ve also overhauled my diet (MIND diet) and lost 30 pounds (obesity is correlated with dementia).

    why can’t you make it your self by pulverizing dried mushrooms of the same variety they use into powder and making the coffee yourself?

    You absolutely could. Or, you know, just eat some of the same mushrooms. The benefit to dried products like Ryze, or tinctures like the one I use, are that they’re convenient, easily transportable and self-stable. I’ve cooked up fresh lion’s mane mushrooms several times, but not super often because they’re not in many stores in my area and tend to be pricey for the amount you get. I’ve also grown my own from a kit but that takes significant time and a little bit of daily attention to maintain optimal growing conditions. The tincture is convenient and relatively affordable as far as daily supplements go.


  • OpenAI on that enshittification speedrun any% no-glitch!

    Honestly though, they’re skipping right past the “be good to users to get them to lock in” step. They can’t even use the platform capitalism playbook because it costs too much to run AI platforms. Shit is egregiously expensive and doesn’t deliver sufficient return to justify the cost. At this point I’m ~80% certain that AI is going to be a dead tech fad by the end of this decade because the economics just don’t work now that the free money era has ended.


  • Tl;Dr the protocol requires there to be trusted token providers that issue the tokens. Who do you suppose are the trusted providers in the Google and Apple implementations? Google and Apple respectively, of course. Maybe eventually there would be some other large incumbents that these implementers choose to bless with token granting right. By its nature the protocol centralizes power on the web, which would disadvantage startups and smaller players.



  • I think you’re referring to FlareSolverr. If so, I’m not aware of a direct replacement.

    Main issue is it’s heavy on resources (I have an rpi4b)

    FlareSolverr does add some memory overhead, but otherwise it’s fairly lightweight. On my system FlareSolverr has been up for 8 days and is using ~300MB:

    NAME           CPU %     MEM USAGE
    flaresolverr   0.01%     310.3MiB
    

    Note that any CPU usage introduced by FlareSolverr is unavoidable because that’s how CloudFlare protection works. CloudFlare creates a workload in the client browser that should be trivial if you’re making a single request, but brings your system to a crawl if you’re trying to send many requests, e.g. DDOSing or scraping. You need to execute that browser-based work somewhere to get past those CloudFlare checks.

    If hosting the FlareSolverr container on your rpi4b would put it under memory or CPU pressure, you could run the docker container on a different system. When setting up Flaresolverr in Prowlarr you create an indexer proxy with a tag. Any indexer with that tag sends their requests through the proxy instead of sending them directly to the tracker site. When Flaresolverr is running in a local Docker container the address for the proxy is localhost, e.g.:

    If you run Flaresolverr’s Docker container on another system that’s accessible to your rpi4b, you could create an indexer proxy whose Host is “http://<other_system_IP>:8191”. Keep security in mind when doing this, if you’ve got a VPN connection on your rpi4b with split tunneling enabled (i.e. connections to local network resources are allowed when the tunnel is up) then this setup would allow requests to these indexers to escape the VPN tunnel.

    On a side note, I’d strongly recommend trying out a Docker-based setup. Aside from Flaresolverr, I ran my servarr setup without containers for years and that was fine, but moving over to Docker made the configuration a lot easier. Before Docker I had a complex set of firewall rules to allow traffic to my local network and my VPN server, but drop any other traffic that wasn’t using the VPN tunnel. All the firewall complexity has now been replaced with a gluetun container, which is much easier to manage and probably more secure. You don’t have to switch to Docker-based all in go, you can run hybrid if need be.

    If you really don’t want to use Docker then you could attempt to install from source on the rpi4b. Be advised that you’re absolutely going offroad if you do this as it’s not officially supported by the FlareSolverr devs. It requires install an ARM-based Chromium browser, then setting some environment variables so that FlareSolverr uses that browser instead of trying to download its own. Exact steps are documented in this GitHub comment. I haven’t tested these steps, so YMMV. Honestly, I think this is a bad idea because the full browser will almost certainly require more memory. The browser included in the FlareSolverr container is stripped down to the bare minimum required to pass the CloudFlare checks.

    If you’re just strongly opposed to Docker for whatever reason then I think your best bet would be to combine the two approaches above. Host the FlareSolverr proxy on an x86-based system so you can install from source using the officially supported steps.



  • It’s likely CentOS 7.9, which was released in Nov. 2020 and shipped with kernel version 3.10.0-1160. It’s not completely ridiculous for a one year old POS systems to have a four year old OS. Design for those systems probably started a few years ago, when CentOS 7.9 was relatively recent. For an embedded system the bias would have been toward an established and mature OS, and CentOS 8.x was likely considered “too new” at the time they were speccing these systems. Remotely upgrading between major releases would not be advisable in an embedded system. The RHEL/CentOS in-place upgrade story is… not great. There was zero support for in-place upgrade until RHEL/CentOS 7, and it’s still considered “at your own risk” (source).


  • MinuteCast from AccuWeather does exactly this. It looks at your location, looks at radar data for storm systems approaching your location, and estimates when precipitation will start at your location and how intense it will be. It’s generally pretty accurate, with some limitations. It seems to be pretty good for consistent rainstorms but it can get tripped up by pop-up thunderstorms, where the radar track can go suddenly from no rain to downpour. It doesn’t make predictions more then 2-3 hours out because past that timeframe it’s not easy to predict if weather will continue on its current track or change direction. Even with the limitations, I use it all the time. Mostly to tell if I should take the dogs out right away, or if I should wait an hour or two.


  • Anything that pushes the CPUs significantly can cause instability in affected parts. I think there are at least two separate issues Intel is facing:

    • Voltage irregularities causing instability. These could potentially be fixed by the microcode update Intel will be shipping in mid-August.
    • Oxidation of CPU vias. This issue cannot be fixed by any update, any affected part has corrosion inside the CPU die and only replacement would resolve the issue.

    Intel’s messaging around this problem has been very slanted towards talking as little as possible about the oxidation issue. Their initial Intel community post was very carefully worded to make it sound like voltage irregularity was the root cause, but careful reading of their statement reveals that it could be interpreted as only saying that instability is a root cause. They buried the admission that there is an oxidation issue in a Reddit comment, of all things. All they’ve said about oxidation is that the issue was resolved at the chip fab some time in 2023, and they’ve claimed it only affected 13th gen parts. There’s no word on which parts number, date ranges, processor code ranges etc. are affected. It seems pretty clear that they wanted the press talking about the microcode update and not the chips that will have the be RMA’d.






  • Jesus, what a bunch of needless “security”

    I disagree with this part. Ticket theft is an actual issue, there are lots of ways to get a copy of someone else’s barcode and either use it before they do or (more likely) sell it to someone else online. TicketMaster’s marketing is talking up the increased security to distract from their true purpose, which is of course to find more ways to take more money from fans. Of course it’s debatable whether the increased security is worth the decreased convenience for ticketholders. That is the inevitable tension when it comes to security, where any increase in security always incurs at least some cost in terms of convenience.

    This is all for personal data mining.

    TicketMaster might be selling user data, but I don’t think that’s their main aim. They want control of the resale market so they can take a cut when tickets are resold. Note how they don’t allow direct transfers between two mobile wallets, they only allow transfers using their app. That’s so they can monitor transfers. If they see someone transferring dozens or hundreds of tickets to many other TicketMaster users then that person is likely reselling and they can clamp down on their account. TicketMaster’s true intent is to force all resales onto their ticket marketplace, because that’s where they get to take a cut of resales.


  • Oh yes, I don’t mean to absolve them of any blame. They treated it as an expensive lesson, which is probably the best way for them to process it.

    Also while TicketMaster is going to sell this as being an “enhanced security” thing, it’s pretty obvious that increased security is only a side benefit for them. Their angle in this is getting more control over the tickets they sell. As long as there are many people who want to go than can physically fit in a venue, there will be a reselling market for event tickets. TicketMaster wants to take a cut of these downstream transactions.

    While the security of rotating barcodes does hinder outright scams, mobile wallets normally allow wallet users to transfer items like tickets to another user if the ticket issuer allows it. TicketMaster does not allow this for their tickets, of course, because it could allow someone to resell tickets while cutting TicketMaster out of the transaction. Currently TM allows transfers using their app, but I’m sure they monitor usage of the feature and clamp down on anyone transferring many tickets. In other words if you try to resell in bulk without using TicketMaster’s own platform (where they get to take a cut), they drop the hammer on you.


  • The reason you can’t use screenshots or printouts is because they’re now using rotating barcodes. Much like the rotating codes in an authenticator app, the number values behind the barcode are changing on some regular cadence. Only the most recent barcode value is considered valid.

    The only other option is to use a mobile wallet, but that prevents me from sending my friends their tickets, since I purchased them all together.

    Some ticket sellers allow you to transfer tickets from one wallet to another wallet, but of course TicketMaster isn’t one of them because they’re fucking TicketMaster. What TicketMaster does allow is transfers from one TicketMaster account to another. Of course then everyone needs to have a TicketMaster account, needs to have the app, etc. It’s either that or leave all the tickets in your app or wallet and go in together. If you tell the door person “I have the tickets for these X people,” they’ll be able to handle that.


  • Yes because the security of barcodes and screenshotted tickets were such a huge problem before.

    I think what you just described is actually a problem. Friends of my parents were visiting somewhere, bought tickets to a show from a reseller, met up with the seller (normal looking guy, no red flags, gave some plausible story why he was selling) and paid cash for printed out tickets with barcodes. Printouts looked legit, dates on the printouts were correct, etc. Went to the doors, tried to scan their tickets, got told that unfortunately they’d just been scammed. The impression they get from the box office worker is that this sort of bad news is something they’ve had to deliver frequently. Anecdotal, but I doubt those friends of my parents were the only ones to get scammed in this way. TicketMaster still sucks as an organization but the extra security of rotating barcodes does serve a legitimate security purpose, just like the rotating security codes generated by an authenticator app.

    Airlines have recently been having problems with stowaways using screenshots of boarding pass barcodes or QR codes too. Such stowaways should get caught before departure by passenger headcounts or boarding ID checks, but clearly there are gaps or breakdowns in these procedures because some of these stowaways are getting caught at the destination. Others may have successfully flown for free. If it keeps happening I bet we’ll see rotating barcodes come to mobile boarding passes too, if that hasn’t already happened.