Just some Internet guy

He/him/them 🏳️‍🌈

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  • 348 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • The issue DNS solves is the same as the phone book. You could memorize everyone’s phone number/IP, but it’s a lot easier to memorize a name or even guess the name. Want the website for walmart? Walmart.com is a very good guess.

    Behind the scenes the computer looks it up using DNS and it finds the IP and connects to it.

    The way it started, people were maintaining and sharing host files. A new system would come online and people would take the IP and add it to their host file. It was quickly found that this really doesn’t scale well, you could want to talk to dozens of computers you’d have to find the IP for! So DNS was developed as a central directory service any computer can request to look things up, which a hierarchy to distribute it and all. And it worked, really well, so well we still use it extensively today. The desire to delegate directory authority is how the TLD system was born. The host file didn’t use TLDs just plain names as far as I know.


  • There’s definitely been a surge in speculation on domain names. That’s part of the whole dotcom bubble thing. And it’s why I’m glad TLDs are still really hard to obtain, because otherwise they would all be taken.

    Unfortunately there’s just no other good way to deal with it. If there’s a shared namespace, someone will speculate the good names.

    Different TLDs can help with that a lot by having their own requirements. .edu for example, you have to be a real school to get one. Most ccTLDs you have to be a citizen or have a company operating in the country to get it. If/when it becomes a problem, I expect to see a shift to new TLDs with stronger requirements to prove you’re serious about your plans for the domain.

    It’s just a really hard problem when millions of people are competing to get a decent globally recognized short name, you’re just bound to run out. I’m kind of impressed at how well it’s holding up overall despite the abuse, I feel like it’s still relatively easy to get a reasonable domain name especially if you avoid the big TLDs like com/net/org/info. You can still get xyz for dirt cheap, and sometimes there’s even free ones like .tk and .ml were for a while. There’s also several free short-ish ones, I used max-p.fr.nf for a while because it was free and still looks like a real domain, it looks a lot like a .co.uk or something.


  • Because if they’re not owned, then how do you know who is who? How do we independently conclude that yup, microsoft.com goes to Microsoft, without some central authority managing who’s who?

    It’s first come first served which isn’t biased towards early adopters, but I can’t think of a better system where you go to google.com and reliably end up at Google. If everyone had a different idea of where that should send you it would be a nightmare, we’d be back to passing IP addresses on post-it notes to your friends to make sure we end up on the same youtube.com. When you type an address you expect to end up on the site you asked, and nothing else. You don’t want to end up on Comcast YouTube because your ISP decided that’s where youtube.com goes, you expect and demand the real one, the same as everyone else.

    And there’s still the massive server costs to run a dictionary for literally the entire Internet for all of that to work.

    A lot of the times, when asking those kinds of questions, it’s useful to think about how would you implement it such that it would work. It usually answers the question.


  • In case you didn’t know, domain names form a tree. You have the root ., you have TLDs com., and then usually the customer’s domain google.com., then subdomains www.google.com.. Each level of dots typically hands over the rest of the lookup to another server. So in this example, the root servers tell you go ask .com at this IP, you go ask .com where Google is, and it tells you the IP of Google’s DNS server, then you query Google’s DNS server directly. Any subdomain under Google only involves Google, the public DNS infrastructure isn’t involved at that point, significantly reducing load. Your ISP only needs to resolve Google once, then it knows how to get *.google.com directly from Google.

    You’re not just buying a name that by convention ends with a TLD. You’re buying a spot in that chain of names, the tree that is used to eventually go query your server and everything under it. The fee to get the domain contributes to the cost of running the TLD.


  • Mostly because you need to be able to resolve the TLD. The root DNS servers need to know about every TLD and it would quickly be a nightmare if they had to store hundreds of thousands records vs the handful of TLDs we have now. The root servers are hardcoded, they can’t easily be scaled or moved or anything. Their job is solely to tell you where .com is, .net is, etc. You’re supposed to query those once and then you hold to your cached reply for like 2+ days. Those servers have to serve the entire world, so you want as few queries to those as possible.

    Hosting a TLD is a huge commitment and so requires a lot of capital and a proper legal company to contractually commit to its maintenance and compliance with regulations. Those get a ton of traffic, and users getting their own TLDs would shift the sum of all gTLD traffic to the root servers which would be way too much.

    With the gTLDs and ccTLDs we have at least there’s a decent amount of decentralization going, so .ca is managed by Canada for example, and only Canada has jurisdiction on that domain, just like only China can take away your .cn. If everyone got TLDs the namespace would be full already, all the good names would be squatted and waiting to sell it for as much as possible like already happens with the .com and .net TLDs.

    There’s been attempts at a replacement but so far they’ve all been crypto scams and the dotcom bubble all over again speculating on the cool names to sell to the highest bidder.

    That said if you run your own DNS server and configure your devices to use it, you can use any domain as you want. The problem is gonna get the public Internet at large to recognize it as real.





  • Ah I see. I wasn’t using those as job suggestions but rather examples of jobs that are considered “loser” jobs and use those to drive the point that they’re important too, and there’s nothing wrong with ending up with those for your whole life. A job’s purpose is to give you money. Trying to comfort OP by removing the “loser” label and not focus as much on “well you could go flip burgers” because that just doesn’t help the emotional side of the situation.

    I wish her to aspire to do a little more than those, but even assuming she’s as dumb as she claims to be, there’s still options, some granted less good than others, but just as important to society. I do think she’s got more potential than she thinks though, she reminds me a bit of my wife when I met her and now she’s competing with me as DevOps/SRE.


    As another example: I’m autistic, I struggle with a lot of things. I make frequent use of DoorDash, I also hire cleaners every now and then to clean, and handymen to repair stuff in the house I just can’t deal with on my own. All of those jobs, people shit on continuously, and me too because I can’t manage some quite basic tasks. But using those services let me focus on what I’m good at, which is keeping thousands of computers happy. I make a fair bit of money which gets shared with all those that support me in being a productive member of society: cooks, waiters, delivery drivers, cleaners, trades. It’s good for the economy, it’s good for society. Those people deserve respect for their somewhat hidden contributions. Not having those people would ultimately make me fail, that would drag my employer with it, other companies wouldn’t have the software they need to operate.

    Every one that contributes to society is important and valueble, whether people recognize it or not.


  • Yeah that’s an intentionally extreme example. I’ve also seen garbage truck drivers being used in that context. The point is more that we need people on all tiers of jobs, even the literal shit ones. We need truck drivers, we need train drivers, we need people to pick up crops, we need people to take the trash out, we need people to maintain the sewers, we need people to empty out sceptic tanks. They’re critical infrastructure, and one shouldn’t feel bad because they ended up being a garbage truck driver. If you want a cozy repeated job and come home at 5 to your kids and family, that’s perfectly acceptable.

    We put way too much emphasis on “success” and its connection to highly educated and high paying jobs.

    IMO the fact that fastfood jobs are considered temporary bootstrap jobs that you’re expected to be exploited to hell is bullshit and an indication of the absolutely broken moral compass of the corporate world. We could do without fast food, but that doesn’t mean we should pay them them minimum wage. Everyone deserves a livable wage no matter what they do.


  • I wouldn’t exclude lower IQ as that major of a problem. Sure maybe it kind of excludes you from being an engineer or a lawyer or a doctor and these kinds of jobs. But there’s plenty of low education jobs around, and there’s no shame in that. If everyone was engineers and lawyers we’d have major problems keeping shops and fastfood open. My dad didn’t finish school and raised me no problem, and lives fine. He might not be good at math or writing, but it’s plenty for woodworking and being a handyman.

    As others have already pointed out, you’re articulate and sound smarter than a bunch of people I’ve seen on Lemmy. I mean hell, you found your way into Lemmy, a platform that’s still fairly niche and filled with nerds. You could have gone to Reddit but you came to the fediverse.

    Everyone have their strengths and things they’re good at. Finding what you like to do is a good start. Some people inherently take artistic paths, and art has nothing to do with intelligence. What you need to do is figure out what you like to do that’s pleasant and satisfying for you to do, and get out of your head that you have to go to higher education.

    Also worth noting, you mentioned ADHD. If you’re not diagnosed for it or treated for it, in itself that can significantly lower your IQ scores especially if not accounting for that. When I had my ADHD assessment, they spent time measuring exactly how much my cognitive performance declines under conditions harsh for ADHD. I swear I struggled to figure out how to take the bus after that because I was so fried, was very glad I was too lazy to take the car that day. They noted, initially being well rested I performed really well then my performance tanked the moment they started hammering the ADHD. It’s also important to understand IQ measures only one thing: intelligence. It doesn’t measure empathy, communication, art, or anything else. That might limit you for intellectual jobs, but you can still be great a people jobs. You could be HR, you could be sales, you could be support. Some of the best artists I know failed school hard.

    Stop being jealous and ashamed. Those that shame you can go to hell, all they do is make you think you’re worthless and inferior to them. Find your own path.



  • It’s just not that good of a metric overall. Not just because it would be easy to fake it, but also because it would inevitably divide into tribes that unconditionally upvote eachother. See: politics in western countries.

    You can pile up a ton of reputation and still be an asshole and still get a ton of support from like-minded people.

    The best measure of someone’s reputation is a quick glance and their post history.


  • Those kinds of problems aren’t particularly new (PGP comes to mind as an example back when you couldn’t export it out of the US), but it’s a reminder that a lot of open-source comes from the US and Europe and is subject to western nation’s will. The US is also apparently thinks China is “stealing” RISC-V.

    To me that goes against the spirit of open-source, where where you come from and who you are shouldn’t matter, because the code is by the people for the people and no money is exchanged. It’s already out there in the open, it’s not like it will stop the enemy from using the code. What’s also silly about this is if the those people were contributing anonymously under a fake or generic name, nothing would have happened.

    The Internet got ruined when Facebook normalized/enforced using your real identity online.


  • With Docker, the internal network is just a bridge interface. The reason most firewall rules don’t apply is a combination of:

    • Containers have their own namespace including network namespace, so each container have a blank iptables just for them.
    • For container communication, that goes through the FORWARD table, not the INPUT/OUTPUT ones.
    • Docker adds its own rules to ensure that this works as expected.

    The only thing that should be affected by the host firewall is the proxy service Docker uses to listen on a port on the host and send it to the container.

    When using Docker, each container acts like an independent machine, and your host gets configured to act as a router. You can firewall Docker containers, the rules just need to be in the right place to work.