I definitely agree that it feels like there’s something funny going on with the missing Dems.

That said, I think something like half of all Democrats (and more Republicans) in congress get support from AIPAC, so singling out these 11, many of whom had relatively small contributions from AIPAC is pretty obviously intentionally misleading.

I’m not saying this article is right or wrong, but it feels more like propaganda than reporting.

I made the migration over to Fastmail recently and have been very happy with it. Good engineering culture, security conscious, has all the features I’d expect, no nonsense.

Would recommend it!

If I ask an LLM to review my code it will find a long list of issues. Some of them will be real, and some of them will look kind of like issues, but won’t really be when you dig into them. Sometimes the issues will be kind of real, in the sense that there’s a real best practice not being quite followed, but they don’t actually rise to the level of a bug or vulnerability, and they’re not worth fixing.

If I fix that first list of issues, then ask an LLM to review my code again, it will, almost without fail, generate an equally long list of issues the second time. There might be some new real issues it missed in the first pass, but it will be much more slanted towards the “not quite a real issue” category, or duplicates of the “issues” I didn’t fix.

By the third round of review, almost everything it produces will be useless.

I’m pretty sure this is what’s going on with Project Glasswing.

Doubling down on a winning strategy I see.

You can use git over ssh with no other infrastructure. It’s less work, and you’ll learn more from doing it.

Tailscale is a sort of VPN. So, yeah, treat it the same.

I’m mostly responding to add a little context to the security concerns. Probably the biggest inside-the-VPN concern is that someone on your VPN gets some malware. So, if this is your family network, and say, your kid’s phone or laptop gets some malware, now any non-encrypted traffic is potentially compromised. Basically, the VPN is only as secure as the weakest link. That’s the thing you’re protecting against with https for individual services.

If I were hosting vaultwarden, and had my bank login in there, I absolutely wouldn’t consider a VPN + http sufficient protection. With LLMs, if we don’t have malware that knows how to hunt around for valuable credentials in the wild already, it’ll be here soon. I personally run my Jellyfin server over https because I’ve gone to the trouble to set up a good system to use letsencrypt with nginx as a proxy for any service. But I wouldn’t be too worried about running Jellyfin over http.

If you’re not using https, then anyone who can see the traffic in your VPN can see everything you do.

Whether that’s a problem depends. In principle, as long as access to your VPN is restricted to people you trust, then http inside it is fine. In practice, if your security isn’t perfect, and someone gets access to your VPN, then https provides a meaningful second line of defense.

My recommendation would be to never use http for anything where a breach would be really painful. It’s good that vaultwarden is on https. Beyond that, https is absolutely the best practice, but if someone getting access to your service is only a mild inconvenience, then leaving it on http is fine as long as it’s only accessible inside your VPN - the risk is relatively low, and the consequences aren’t bad.

castle-nathan.gif

I don’t know why, but I always assumed that image was from Firefly. It’s the same color shirt and everything!

I’m not saying it’s great.

I just don’t see this ending without a bunch of people having their lives ruined, so whatever we can do to pull the bandaid off faster is the best we can hope for.

You know, this might not be for the worst.

People really need to get used to the idea that everything you see online, and especially on Facebook is fake. Maybe it’s for the best if they don’t moderate things well enough to let people pretend otherwise.

I don’t have any personal experience with self hosted webmail. I know there are a bunch out there and definitely both options that can sit in front of a maildir and options that can sit in front of a POP/IMAP server like Dovecot.

I did a little googling, and if I wanted to set this up, the first thing I’d check out is something like imapsync -> dovecot -> Roundcube.

Dovecot provides a really reliable maildir -> IMAP/POP conversion layer, and once you’ve got that, most things should work.

You can use imapsync to keep a local synced copy your email in maildir format. That, along with a domain you own, solves the “I own my own email sycned to my server” problem pretty much completely. Switching email providers is just syncing to the new server (which imapsync supports) and updating your MX records on your domain.

Some email clients (like aerc) can just operate on the maildir directly. That’s what I do, but there are lots of ways to do this.

One option is to just keep using your email client the way you are now talking directly to your mailserver, and just rely on the imapsync side to be your owned backup/migration path.

Alternatively you can run your own local IMAP or POP server like Dovecot backed by the local maildir. So that’s imapsync -> dovecot -> thunderbird (or similar). It’s a little more software to set up, but once it’s set up it should be very reliable and gives you total control over what email client you use and full ownership of your data.

Is France… ok?

I’ve always treated my home server with public facing services as presumptively compromised. I don’t put any data on there I wouldn’t want to see become public, and any data I actually care about losing is backed up to the cloud with an append-only key. The NixOS config lives in a git repo not on the server. If something bad happens, I can wipe the machine clean, redeploy the image, restore my backups, and we’re back to the status quo.

So, my threat model hasn’t changed much!

They really want people scared, ehh?

note that you probably need to trust the remote household with your data

Probably not actually. Borgbackup (and any sensible encrypted backup system really), does client side encryption. So the data should be encrypted before it’s even sent down the wire. The remote household shouldn’t be able to access the data without the encryption key/password.

I mean, they will have to trust the remote household not to destroy the data, but that’s pretty much an unavoidable limitation.

You’d better give us money and not try to regulate us.

Actually, right now, the western AI companies desperately want regulation.

An unregulated environment is one where they’re forced to compete on price against the Chinese companies and startups running open-weight models. All signs point to them losing that battle.

OpenAI/Anthropic’s wish list right now is a bunch of regulation to prevent the use of foreign models, and to require expensive to implement “safety” requirements that make it hard for startups to compete.

You absolutely shouldn’t be angry!

The existence of powerful open-weight models is the single thing that’s going to prevent us from descending into the full corporate dystopia everyone’s afraid of.

It’s going to hit the stock market hard once everyone figures out what’s going on though.

[forget]
keep-daily = 10
keep-weekly = 4

Daily backups are cheap because of de-duplication. I keep a few weekly backups in case it takes me a bit to notice something went wrong. I don’t usually back up logs.

I could probably drop the weekly backups without much risk, but I’ve got the space.

The hilarious part is, yes, I don’t care how fast my launcher is.

But… also, Steam is by far the slowest, least responsive program on my computer.

“Faster than Steam” feels like a joke.

I don’t use a lot of non-open source applications (and not a lot of desktop applications generally). Have they gotten so bad that the slowness of Steam doesn’t feel bad to people anymore?