Trying a switch to tal@lemmy.today, at least for a while, due to recent kbin.social stability problems and to help spread load.

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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 13th, 2023
  • tal@kbin.socialtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•A self-hosted wiki that can integrate with a fediverse instance
    12·
    1 year ago

    Reddit had the ability to have a per-subreddit wiki. I never dug into it on the moderator side, but it was useful for some things like setting up pages with subreddit rules and the like. I think that moderators had some level of control over it, at least to allow non-moderator edits or not, maybe on a per-page basis.

    That could be a useful option for communities; I think that in general, there is more utility for per-community than per-instance wiki spaces, though I know that you admin a server with one major community which you also moderate, so in your case, there may not be much difference.

    I don’t know how amenable django-wiki is to partitioning things up like that, though.

    EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/wiki/ has a brief summary.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•This should be a pinned post as it really captures the essence of my experience so far.
    4·
    1 year ago

    I broadly agree that “cloud” has an awful lot of marketing fluff to it, as with many previous buzzwords in information technology.

    However, I also think that there was legitimately a shift from a point in time where one got a physical box assigned to them to the point where VPSes started being a thing to something like AWS. A user really did become increasingly-decoupled from the actual physical hardware.

    With a physical server, I care about the actual physical aspects of the machine.

    With a VPS, I still have “a VPS”. It’s virtualized, yeah, but I don’t normally deal with them dynamically.

    With something like AWS, I’m thinking more in terms of spinning up and spinning down instances when needed.

    I think that it’s reasonable to want to describe that increasing abstraction in some way.

    Is it a fundamental game-changer? In general, I don’t think so. But was there a shift? Yeah, I think so.

    And there might legitimately be some companies for which that is a game-changer, where the cost-efficiencies of being able to scale up dynamically to handle peak load on a service are so important that it permits their service to be viable at all.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Looks like google domains is no more.
    1·
    1 year ago

    I mean, scrolling down that list, those all make sense.

    I’m not arguing that Google should have kept them going.

    But I think that it might be fair to say that Google did start a number of projects and then cancel them – even if sensibly – and that for people who start to rely on them, that’s frustrating.

    In some cases, like with Google Labs stuff, it was very explicit that anything there was experimental and not something that Google was committing to. If one relied on it, well, that’s kind of their fault.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoTechnology@beehaw.org•YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on
    4·
    1 year ago

    What’s been your experience with youtube recommendations?

    I’ve never had a YouTube account, so YouTube doesn’t have any persistent data on me as an individual to do recommendations unless it can infer who I am from other data.

    They seem to do a decent job of recommending the next video in a series done in a playlist by an author, which is really the only utility I get out of suggestions that YouTube gives me (outside of search results, which I suppose are themselves a form of recommendation). I’d think that YouTube could do better by just providing an easy way to get from the video to such a list, but…

  • tal@kbin.socialtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Why is DNS still hard to learn?
    41·
    1 year ago

    Yeah, I don’t think I really agree with the author as to the difficulty with dig. Maybe it could be better, but as protocols and tools go, I’d say that dig and DNS is an example where a tool does a pretty good job of coverage. Maybe not DNSSEC, dunno about how dig does there, and knowing to use +norecurse is maybe not immediately obvious, but I can list a lot of network protocols for which I wish that there were the equivalent to dig.

    However, a lot of what of what the author seems to be complaining about is not really stuff at the network level, but the stuff happening on the host level. And it is true that there are a lot of parts in there if one considers name resolution as a whole, not just DNS, and no one tool that can look at the whole process.

    If I’m doing a resolution with Firefox, I’ve got a browser cache for name resolutions independently of the OS. I may be doing DNS over HTTP, and that may always happen or be a fallback. I may have a caching nameserver at my OS level. There’s the /etc/hosts file. There’s configuration in /etc/resolv.conf. There’s NIS/yp. Windows has its own name resolution stuff hooked into the Windows domains stuff and several mechanisms to do name resolution, whether via broadcasts without a domain controller or with a DC whether that’s present; Apple has Bonjour and more-generally there’s zeroconf. It’s not immediately clear to someone the order of this or a tool that can monitor the whole process end to end – these are indeed independent systems that kind of grew organically.

    Maybe it’d be nice to have an API to let external software initiate name resolutions via the browser and get information about what’s going on, and then have a single “name resolution diagnostic” tool that could span multiple of these name resolution systems, describe what’s happening and help highlight problems. I can say that gethostbyname() could also use a diagnostic call to extract more information about what a resolution attempt attempted to do and why it failed; libc doesn’t expose a lot of useful diagnostic information to the application, though libc does know what it is doing in a resolution attempt.