StudentStuff

H.264 and H.265 decoding is handled by the VPU, and there was already a successful kickstarter to add mainline support for that: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bootlin/allwinner-vpu-s...

Ditto for the HDMI PHY, you can spin up Xorg with a fully libre stack on nearly any of the Allwinner boards from OrangePi, FriendlyARM, etc. The Mali GPU is really only useful for OpenGL ES (aka video games).

Once again embedded device security is a joke. Firmware updates are provided for 2 years or less on devices that end up lingering, acting as the core of networks for 5 to 15 years.

Repeat offenders should be held accountable, standards should be enforced (like running point releases of OpenWRT, providing vendor skins as a package, thus the vendor doesn't have to deal with software updates).

ISP mail relays generally work, not sure why you'd pay to add another MiTM besides the one that already exists (your ISP).

Sendgrid is usually spam or redundant notifications, depending on host they might not make it through without manual whitelisting. Additionally, using a totally unrelated SMTP rela to deliver mail defeats much of the point of a self-hosted mailserver, you'd be better off using your local network's SMTP relay.

Yeah, that is one workaround that is reasonable to use. I'm just a bit weird and want to do delivery to other servers without an intermediary :P

I don't run my mailserver on DO (I know a few people who do tho), but I've had few issues operating one on a no name host and another on OVH. If that was a persistent issue, it might be advisable to move to a host that isn't blacklisted.

Don't destroy your droplet then? Digital Ocean supports reinstalling VMs in place without destroying the VM. Floating IPs for a mailserver (esp. outbound) sounds a bit silly, mail infrastructure is more fault tolerant than other systems, to the point that a minute or two of downtime is far from the end of the world.

If your hosting email on a residential ISP, your gonna have a rough time. Comparatively, hosting on any of the notable VPS providers (DO, Linode, OVH, etc) has had fine deliverability in my experience, though emails may occasionally get flagged as spam.

Beyond that, the only insidious behavior I've seen has been Outlook.com hosted addresses accepting email, but then not delivering the email to the Inbox or Spam. Mysteriously, this issue disappears whenever I start going up the IT chain on the reciever's side. If the MTA is going to drop email, it should reject it rather than accept it (as otherwise the Outlook MTAs are falsely accepting mail that they will not deliver).

For select users that are willing to advocate for themselves against Google and are covered under a binding, unexpired contract Google will likely let them continue using said APIs. Everyone else is likely to see APIs break at Google's whim, as most users aren't covered by custom GSuite contracts.

When will Google stop updating Chromecast Audio? As we've seen with recent Chromebook mass-end of supporting, Google is happy to leave devices bought 18+ months ago in a vulnerable, insecure state even when it'd be easy to keep life support on (like delivering a secure browser to these perfectly fine laptops, or providing minimal security patches to embedded devices).

It seems like Google really can't handle long term support of anything that isn't wildly successful (200+ million users), and even for those things that hit said benchmark, long term support is bumpy, inconsistent and unpredictable.

+1, I've benefited from Lenovo sending out parts before. If you want to swap the part, they will happily mail you the part and send a link to their step by step guide on how to swap said part.

Beware of the extensive Restricted Businesses section: https://stripe.com/restricted-businesses

You don't know that a group is free of spies, but a group is less likely to have a spy than the current setup whereby pervasive, omnipresent surveillance is facilitated by WeChat, leading to people needlessly imprisoned and tortured for the thoughtcrime of others.

Azure is subsidized by Microsoft so they retain customers and mindshare, they also seem to have a mix of talent working for them. In some areas like reporting dashboards and such, Azure is head and shoulders better than AWS and GCP, but few if any of their large clients use these features (missing the primary value you'd get from using Azure).

Our interaction with the GCP sales team has repeatedly been aggressive US based sales agents, whereas Microsoft sent us to deal with (incompetent) sales agents out of India after promising us significant startup credits when we crossed paths with them at a conference near Seattle.

It happens, guessing SQLite was default at one point or suggested by the install guide that was followed. Kinda surprised it has survived thus far, never really thought of SQLite as something for high volume, multi-user messaging.

Gonna go try the migration guide here :P

Looks like we are using sqlite and Python 3.5.3, synapse cache factor is currently not set in our config, any pointers for how to migrate to Postgres? This box has basically been given to me after the person who set it up gave up in frustration.

Seems quite similar to Public-benefit Corporations, though with a looser set of requirements in the states that permit SPCs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-benefit_corporation

I'd be wary of Librem Chat being viable long term, Synapse (the server software for matrix) is a real ram hog, we see it hover at ~2GB of ram with 5 active users and have bumped its VM up to a dozen gigs of ram to deal with it OOMing (despite having 4GB of ram).

The documented switches like SYNAPSE_CACHE_FACTOR seem to cause wild oscillations in ram use and worsen the OOM problems, when enabled Synapse would jump between 500MB and 3.8GB of ram constantly, eventually OOMing.

Edit: Also, the support channels for Synapse exist, but you will rarely get any response.

Yes, filming the public right of way is illegal.

Defined benefit plans like pensions aren't generous, its merely the workers negotiating with the employer to put money aside pre-tax from their pay and invest it.

This all goes sideways when these funds are mismanaged & underfunded, which organizations have an incentive to do as it can be a nice way to juice profits immediately.

Wage theft is shameful in any color, and what has happened to American Pensions is stealing earned wages from workers retirement.

Sounds quite regressive, some states like Oregon have made such setups (filming public rights of way with a fixed camera) illegal.

Depends on the channel, Mozilla's IRC has channels (like #deeplearning) with helpful people ready to hold your hand through using and extending Mozilla TTS & Mozilla DeepSpeech.

"Inboxing" with Gmail & Outlook is a baroque, hellish process for mailservers.

When either provider decides your small email server is sending spam (eg: sending an email with an attachment, or any kind of form email like a daily report) you won't get through to user inboxes, and instead you'll be routed to spam, or for Outlook.com hosted addresses they will accept mail from your server and send it to /dev/null. Gmail's process is bad, but Microsoft has decided to accept emails and throw them away (which is ridiculous).

Switching to Blink would be a huge undertaking, ditto for moving off classic Gecko.

Mozilla ditched Firefox OS & Thunderbird over the huge amount of work that would need to be redone to move to newer Gecko (as Servo components were ported over and swapped in via Project Quantum), but that would likely be less work than getting Blink to be responsive with minuscule amounts of RAM, then go app by app and optimize the crap out of it (which Mozilla had dozens to hundreds of devs doing for Firefox OS while they were developing it).

The point was to eat the bottom of the cellular phone market, as Mozilla saw Blackberry dying, Ubuntu Touch & Android requiring way too much resources, and Windows Phone killing Meego yet not succeeding in retaining Nokia's marketshare.

What Mozilla built was an OS that could run on very basic hardware (eg: what an OEM can build for $5 to $10) and be more usable than the alternatives out there that were even more expensive.

A price war led by Mozilla was never going to pan out without buy-in from the OEMs and cell carriers, but after Mozilla ditched the project, Qualcomm seems to have decided KaiOS is the only reasonable thing for basic phones to run, and Google is funding it just enough to encourage integration of some Google services.

Google is trying hard to get a foothold on KaiOS, the OEMs that partnered with Mozilla (and particularly Qualcomm with its Qualcomm 205 chip) need something like KaiOS that can run well on 256mb of RAM and less than 16GB of flash, as Android is a pig (even Android One).

I wish Mozilla made an effort to get Mozilla DeepSpeech and Mozilla TTS onto this platform, as Speech to Text seems to be the first thing Google has gotten added to KaiOS. Problem is, with these budget devices you don't usually have the RAM for even a full memory mapped TF Lite model, and end up with a stripped down language model that is much less accurate :c

Mozilla could run DeepSpeech servers, but it would be a similar commitment to the Tor Relays they operate...

Malicious actors definitely try to spam and data mine the fediverse, but their accounts get disabled by the local instance admin, and when they try evading that by spinning up a few instances on their own domains to hide their spam or follow bots behind, those instances generally get blocked by instances that see said spam toots or spam followers.

I'm not black, but having spent time homeless and not having the best educational path, I know most tech companies that have interviewed me look down on me or consider me unhirable despite using code I wrote.

The experience you describe lines up with what I've heard from friends, I'd recommend reconsidering Amazon though, the company is highly segmented internally and time at a FAANG will likely boost your earning potential down the line. Most of the employees that have been there 3+ years are inert/zombified, working 50-60hrs a week. Their recruiters also BS around, I wouldn't take the interview process personally.

One friend interviewed at Amazon and thought she did terrible, yet they still offered her $80hr. Avoid the corporate kool-aid, cash their paychecks for a year or two, pole vault to an even better position at a slightly less well known company (with a better culture).

Techbros often only want to hire people that resemble them or make them feel comfortable. I've seen this be the case with multiple people hired by both Google & Amazon, "cultural fit" (eg: political & racial fit) over merit. Happens all the time outside FAANGs too.

Generally not, proactive blocking or silencing is reserved for instances that host illicit content like child porn or hate speech. Inter-moderator communication happens between your instance admin/democracy (or whatever structure your instance uses) and other instances.

Traditional tools like muting a user, silencing an instance (if they're spamming up the Federated Timeline on other instances, like Humblr.social does) and blocking (if the mods are total shit) can still be used. Small instances are the bulk of the content, so you aren't about to block them. Large instances like Mastodon.social are generally blocked tho (if your admin/democracy cares about a vibrant Fediverse).