Web developer, gamer, reader, and a true ligma male

  • 7 Posts
  • 28 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I mean, I:

    • Eat at least three times per day (breakfast, lunch and dinner)
    • Exercise three times per week (in the gym, lifting weights)
    • Sleep at least 7 or 8 hours per night
    • Go outside every day
    • Have a skincare routine (although it’s not much)
    • Brush my teeth twice per day (after breakfast and before going to sleep)

  • I use it to manage my documents, backup my photos from my phone to my server and access all my files from any other device. Basically Nextcloud is my replacement for OneDrive.

    Additionally, I have used it in the past to collaborate on various group projects which require documents. For example, I had to make a presentation with some other people and I could create a PowerPoint in Nextcloud, send a share link to others and then we could edit the PowerPoint in realtime with Nextcloud + Collabora, which is pretty cool. It’s the only FOSS alternative (at least as far as I’m aware of) that can compete with Microsoft 365 / Google Workspaces.


  • Honestly, I’m not really excited about the past couple of major Nextcloud releases.

    Mainly because there’s still one big issue for small-scale Nextcloud servers: performance.

    Mainly the web UI is still too slow for me to properly use, which is why I don’t use it at all (unless I have to update an app).

    It’s a bit disappointing that they’re mainly focused on the large enterprise customers instead of small hobbyists like me, but it’s still understandable; after all, their income is mainly from the enterprise customers, not from selfhosters.

    I also don’t really like how they’ve jumped on the AI hypetrain instead of improving performance. But once again, I guess this generates more income for them than focusing on other things like improving performance.




  • I don’t think, I just do.

    I usually keep an end goal in sight; for example, I sometimes dread going to the gym, but I always remember that my goal is to stay fit, have a healthy body and exercising is an important part of that. By sticking to my goal, I maintain my discipline and go to the gym 3 times per week.

    Another example is school homework; in my case, my math homework is something I don’t enjoy, but I remind myself that I need the math certificate in order to enroll for a Computer Science degree at an university. Therefore, I keep pushing myself to study math and get good grades (which so far has worked pretty well)


  • Regrowing / regenerating certain body parts.

    This could theoretically be done with stemcell stuff, but it’s not there yet. However, when we finally reach the point where we can infinitely regenerate our body cells, we’ll become effectively “ammortal”; unable to die due to natural causes (such as illness), but we will still die from other people (for example, a bullet to the head)

    Besides that, I think nuclear fusion would be an incredible development if we can finally harness it to power our homes.



  • Docker is a container manager, but that doesn’t say anything if you don’t know what containers are.

    Containers are basically isolated apps. For example, take something like Nextcloud. Nextcloud can run in a Docker container, which means that it runs in an isolated environment completely separated from the user’s system. If Nextcloud breaks, the user’s server won’t be affected at all, because it’s running isolated.

    Why is this useful? Well, it’s useful because dependencies and such automatically update. Nextcloud for example, is dependent on PHP and if you install Nextcloud directly on your server, you’ll need to ensure that PHP 8 has been installed and set up properly. If PHP (or the required PHP extensions) aren’t properly installed, Nextcloud won’t work. Or, maybe if there’s a Nextcloud update that requires a new version of PHP (PHP 9 or 10 in the future), you’ll have to manually update PHP to the newer version.

    All that dependency management is completely gone with containers. The container itself automatically installs and sets up a proper environment for the app that’s running. So in the case of Nextcloud, the PHP binaries, extensions, and all the other stuff is all automatically included without the developer having to do anything at all. Just run one command and your entire Nextcloud instance is automatically updated.














  • Inflation occurs when the value of goods increase. This can mainly be caused by two things: An increase in consumption or an increase of production costs, which causes the vendor to increase prices in order to maintain profits.

    Deflation would occur when the opposite happens, aka when the value of goods decrease. This can be caused by things such as new technological improvements (old hardware has become cheaper, because new hardware has been released and the older hardware is no longer state-of-the-art), a reduction in consumption or a reduction in production costs. Perhaps I’ve missed a few cases, but these are the main things I can currently think of.

    Anyway, while deflation is generally useful for consumers (they have to pay less), it’s not very good for borrowers. Let’s take a mortgage for a house, for example. You want to buy a house for €200k and have a mortgage of €200k that will cover the house. If something bad happens to you financially (for example, you lose your job), you may end up in a situation where you’ll no longer be able to pay off your mortgage. Shit happens right? Usually, the bank would take control of your house, sell your house for €200k and use the revenue from the house to pay off your mortgage.

    However, if deflation has occurred and your house is no longer worth €200k, but €150k, you still have €50k to pay off to your bank, after the bank has sold your house. Simultaneously, you’re unemployed, so how are you going to do that? If you declare bankruptcy, you will no longer have to pay off your debts and the bank has lost €50k.

    Besides this, deflation can also be a symptom of something worse happening, such as high unemployment rates and a decrease in consumption, for example. When more people get unemployed, people will spend less, which reduces demand, which leads to a decrease of prices.


  • My ELI5 version:

    Basically, the ‘Web Environment Integrity’ proposal is a new technique that verifies whether a visitor of a website is actually a human or a bot.

    Currently, there are captchas where you need to select all the crosswalks, cars, bicycles, etc. which checks whether you’re a bot, but this can sometimes be bypassed by the bots themselves.

    This new ‘Web Environment Integrity’ thing goes as follows:

    1. You visit a website
    2. Website wants to know whether you’re a human or a bot.
    3. Your browser (or the ‘client’) will send request an ‘environment attestation’ from an ‘attester’. This means that your browser (such as Firefox or Chrome) will request approval from some third-party (like Google or something) and the third-party (which is referred to as ‘attester’) will send your browser a message, which basically says ‘This user is a bot’ or ‘This user is a human being’.
    4. Your browser receives this message and will then send it to the website, together with the ‘attester public key’. The ‘attester public key’ can be used by the website to verify whether the attester (a.k.a. the third-party checking whether you’re a human or not) is trustworthy and will then check whether the attester says that you’re a human or not.

    I hope this clears things up and if I misinterpreted the GitHub explainer, please correct me.

    The reason people (rightfully) worry about this, is because it gives attesters A LOT of power. If Google decides they don’t like you, they won’t tell the website that you’re a human. Or maybe, if Google doesn’t like the website you’re trying to visit, they won’t even cooperate with attesting. Lots of things can go wrong here.