8
Server upgrades (lemmy.studio)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Hey, friends!

In the last couple weeks I upgraded our instance to run the latest version of Lemmy, and because it was consuming more RAM today I upgraded the VPS to one with 4GB.

This means that the cost for running the instance have gone up. Historically I've been paying around $20 per month out of my pocket to run the instance (after Ko-fi donations), and this will increase to $35 after the upgrade.

Our cost per user is around $0.10/month, so it's not a lot. If you can contribute money, even $1/month, please do, it really helps.

Thanks!

5
Woovebox, anyone? (lemmy.studio)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Anyone else using the Woovebox?

I received mine last year, and I'm slowly starting to explore it. It's a full groovebox, with samples, live mode, song mode, multiple synth engines. So small!

2
New walkman from FiiO (www.musicradar.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Let's wait for the reviews to see if the transport is any good. It would be nice to have a decent quality new walkman on the market!

5
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

No major changes, just bug fixes.

Let me know if something's not working.

17
Please read (lemmy.studio)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

There has been a shitty incident where someone intentionally posted CSAM to a Lemmy community that unfortunately someone in our instance was subscribed to. Due to federation, the images might have been copied over to our instance storage.

Because of that I've taken the following measures until we understand the problem better:

  1. I've defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
  2. I've deleted all images uploaded since 2023-08-27 00:00:00 GMT.
  3. I've disabled the image server.

I'll post updates when I have them. Thanks for understanding.

5
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Link is also on the sidebar. We'll use it to keep people updated on releases and give support when people can't reach the Lemmy instance.

Also, I'm an IRC kind of person, so forgive my noobness with Matrix. 🙃

8
Instabilities today (lemmy.studio)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Hey, hey!

This morning (Pacific time) I changed the nameservers on lemmy.studio, switching to a service that provides a CDN and a WAF. It's a cautionary measure to protect us from DDOS attacks. That caused some instabilities, sorry for that.

I also noticed that the CDN was too aggressive, caching URLs regardless of the Content-type, and it seems that Lemmy uses content negotiation (the same endpoint can return HTML or JSON depending on the headers). I've fixed the caching to take the headers in consideration, so hopefully you won't be seeing JSON responses when accessing the website on your desktop. If you do, let me know!

On a related note, I created a spreadsheet showing the monthly expenses on the instance, and how much we're making from user donations on Ko-fi. The sheets was shared with the current supporters. If you can spare a dollar (or five) every month to help the instance run smoothly please do, anything helps.

Thanks!

[-] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

I worked for a startup that had as main investor a company called InterTrust. Our office was inside their building.

InterTrust was a patent portfolio that belonged to Sony and Philips. All they did was sue people. One day they were able to sue Apple on some stupid patent, and there was much rejoicing at the office.

14
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.studio/post/488779

Out of all the legendary albums on this list, I doubt many of them had their origins as an abandoned rock opera. Many arrangements and scraps of Pete Townshend’s abandoned Lifehouse project became the basis for Who’s Next, an album that has no underlying theme or storyline. This sense of freedom allowed The Who to focus on making great individual songs rather than an overarching story.

The result is The Who growing up in public. The songs combine the hard-hitting energy of the band in their youth with the more experimental elements explored on Tommy. The most noticeable improvement is Roger Daltrey’s voice, reaching heights that were only hinted at in the past. Keith Moon’s drum solo followed by Daltrey’s scream at the end of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” remains as one of rock’s greatest moments.

While everyone knows about the singles, from the opening keyboard of “Baba O’Riley” to the building acoustics of “Behind Blue Eyes,” every song on this record is a potential hit. Listen to the explosive chorus of “Bargain.” Check out a rare lead vocal from bassist John Entwistle on “My Wife.” With tracks like these, it’s easy to see why Who’s Next moved The Who from a great band of the ’60s to a rock superpower in the ’70s. — Joe Marvilli (2010)

Listen to it here.

9
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Out of all the legendary albums on this list, I doubt many of them had their origins as an abandoned rock opera. Many arrangements and scraps of Pete Townshend’s abandoned Lifehouse project became the basis for Who’s Next, an album that has no underlying theme or storyline. This sense of freedom allowed The Who to focus on making great individual songs rather than an overarching story.

The result is The Who growing up in public. The songs combine the hard-hitting energy of the band in their youth with the more experimental elements explored on Tommy. The most noticeable improvement is Roger Daltrey’s voice, reaching heights that were only hinted at in the past. Keith Moon’s drum solo followed by Daltrey’s scream at the end of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” remains as one of rock’s greatest moments.

While everyone knows about the singles, from the opening keyboard of “Baba O’Riley” to the building acoustics of “Behind Blue Eyes,” every song on this record is a potential hit. Listen to the explosive chorus of “Bargain.” Check out a rare lead vocal from bassist John Entwistle on “My Wife.” With tracks like these, it’s easy to see why Who’s Next moved The Who from a great band of the ’60s to a rock superpower in the ’70s. — Joe Marvilli (2010)

Listen to it here.

[-] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago

O O

^ this is a Venn Diagram showing people who would fall for that scam, and people who would be able to figure out how to buy Bitcoin if their lives depended on it.

[-] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago

ffmpeg is written by Fabrice Bellard, who's one of the most underrated programmers in the world (he also wrote QEMU). It's probably the best tool out there, still actively maintained, and most commercial apps are probably using it under the hood for any kind of conversion.

[-] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago

I've been using Alacritty for a while. It's fast and does everything I need.

[-] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
  • Ethical reasons: hundreds of billions of animals are killed every year (not counting fish), after living a miserable and short life.
  • Environmental: greenhouse emissions (CO2 and methane), deforestation for pastures, water pollution, are all caused by animal agriculture. If everyone went vegan we'd need only 25% of the land we currently use for agriculture.
  • Health: there is some evidence that meat causes cancer, and convincing evidence that processed meat causes cancer. Also, the use of antibiotics for animals can lead to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Cow farts are methane, which are a more aggressive form of greenhouse gas, though with shorter lifespan.

Here's more info about meat and the environment.

[-] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

Related: every time you shuffle a deck of cards you get a sequence that has never happened before. The chance of getting a sequence that has occurred is stupidly small.

[-] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago

Has anyone played it on the Deck yet? What's the experience like?

[-] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago

Soy and quinoa both have all essential amino acids. And you can also combine different grains to get all essential amino acids.

If everything went vegan we'd need only 25% of the farms we currently have. So we can do fine without meat, and the planet will thank us.

19
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Hi, folks!

Since I started lemmy.studio a lot of people have reached out offering help and financial support for our instance. While right now the hosting costs and administration efforts are mostly negligible, I want to make sure the instance can grown in a sustainable way, and I have some ideas on how to do that.

For financial support, I created a Ko-fi page. If you're not familiar with Ko-fi, they're very similar to Patreon, but the fees are optional and they pay creators immediately (not monthly). They also support one-off donations, which is nice. Right now there's a single monthly tier of $1 (though of course people can pay more, if they want).

The current monthly costs for the server, domain, and backups are around $25/month (edit: $45), and we have almost 200 users, so I'm hoping it will be relatively easier to get the costs covered. Any excess income would go towards a reserve to ensure we have a good runway and funds for upgrading the server as we grow. I'm going to create a spreadsheet and share with everyone donating, to keep this transparent.

Second, so far I've been the only administrator in our instance. The volume of reports is still small, usually a handful of spam posts per week, but as we grow we're going to need more people removing spam, banning bad actors, and ensuring we're building a supportive and encouraging culture across our communities. I'm planning to reach out to some "long-term" users that have offered help, but feel free to DM me if you want to help.

(An intermission about culture. This is a music-focused instance, and we're here to share the music we love and the music we make, and also help each other by sharing our process and tools. We're all united by the belief that music makes the world better. So let's put our differences asides, focus on what we have in common, and try to always be kind and supportive!)

Third, I've been also the only sys admin of the instance, responsible for backups and upgrades. Right now the instance is running on a personal team on Digital Ocean, together with other personal projects. My plan is to move the instance VPS to a separate team, so I can invite 1-2 people to share those responsibilities with me. Initially these would have to be voluntary, but I'm hoping that if we get enough support through Ko-fi we can compensate people doing this work.

Finally, for the long run I'd also love to set up a governance model. I'm not sure how this would work, but I'd rather have something where we can make decisions collectively.

Let me know your thoughts!

Edit: I just got my first AWS bill after switching the instance storage to S3, and while it's not bank breaking it caught me by surprise. My monthly bill is around $3-5, last month it was $28.64.

Edit 2: people are migrating to our instance from waveform.social because of malicious activity (DDOS and spurious file uploads), so if you can support the instance please do. I'm planning to move the database to a separate VPS, and maybe look into using CloudFlare to prevent us from being affected, and that will cost more money.

[-] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago

In Brazil (Portuguese speaking) we also use Fulano de tal. I didn't know it was used in other countries!

We also "José Ninguém" and "Maria Ninguém" to mean someone who's a nobody. It literally means Joseph/Mary (very common names in Brazil) Nobody.

14
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Hi, folks!

Sorry for the latest instabilities in the instance. For some reason we were getting spikes of 100% every now and then, and that would make the instance unstable.

I just finished upgrading to 0.18.3, which was released today. There should be a lot of CPU improvements since 0.18.0, so hopefully the instance will be more stable from now on.

Let me know if you encounter any problems! Since we're usually in the dark during instance upgrades I created a Mastodon account for the instance, so I can post status updates. You can find it here: https://mastodon.social/@lemmystudio

7
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Who would have thought four twenty-somethings from Minneapolis could produce something so timeless, so vital, and so vivid? Back in 1984, when The Replacements dished out their magnum opus, Let It Be, nobody did. While all eyes were on Prince at the time, Paul Westerberg, Tommy Stinson, Chris Mars, and Bob Stinson were creating pure, unadulterated rock and roll. With his heart on his sleeve, Westerberg poured his love, his loss, and his inhibitions into each and every lyric, note, chord, and yelp.

On “Androgynous,” the first hit of the piano strikes your nerves, tugging at your eyes, and by the time Westerberg sings, “Future outcasts, they don’t last,” you’re right there beside him — in the dusty bar, within the late hours of a week night, and with nobody to hold onto but the music. That’s everything The Replacements were meant to be; here they do that in every note, over 11 tracks, and for 33 minutes and 31 seconds. It’s not an album, it’s a life preserver. — Michael Roffman (2010)

Listen here.

[-] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My favorite comment about this from Mastodon: "X is just a sans serif swastika".

[-] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago

You realize most atrocities in history were done "just following the law", right?

[-] [email protected] 105 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Let's say you have a cow. The cow had a baby, and it's producing milk, but more than the calf or your family need. So you start selling the excess milk.

It's good money! Soon you buy another cow, and another. Eventually you can't take care of them all, so you hire people to help you. Yay!

After a while you realize that waiting for the cows to be impregnated by your bull means they are not producing milk as much as they can. So you start forcefully impregnating the cows so they are always pregnant or producing milk.

The calves are drinking a lot of your milk, so you decide to kill them as soon as possible. You don't know what to do with the dead calves, so you start marketing them as "veal", a delicacy!

A lot of your process is still manual, so you buy machinery that increases your productivity by 100x. You're still paying your workers the same amount, even though they're now responsible for producing 100x more.

One day you realize there's too much milk in the market. If you sell it all, the price will drop too much. So you dump thousands of gallons of milk in the river, to keep the prices stable. You couldn't give them away to people in need, that would still affect the market!

You're still not selling enough (though you have more money that you could spend in your lifetime). So you buy some politicians so the government says that milk is essential, the only way to absorb calcium, and it should be in every school. People are convinced they need milk, even though it's from another species and even though humans don't need milk after a couple years of age.

That's why I hate capitalism.

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beto

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