as someone has to lead

At this particular moment, the people of Minnesota are self-organizing the resistance against the invasion of their state, with no unified leadership structure in place. So I wouldn’t say it’s always mandatory.

Long live l’etoile du nord.

An indisputable use-case for supercomputers is the computation of next-day and next-week weather models. By definition, a next-day weather prediction is utterly useless if it takes longer than a day to compute. And is progressively more useful if it can be computed even an hour faster, since that’s more time to warn motorists to stay off the road, more time to plan evacuation routes, more time for farmers to adjust crop management, more time for everything. NOAA in the USA draws in sensor data from all of North America, and since weather is locally-affecting but globally-influenced, this still isn’t enough for a perfect weather model. Even today, there is more data that could be consumed by models, but cannot due to making the predictions take longer. The only solution there is to raise the bar yet again, expanding the supercomputers used.

Supercomputers are not super because they’re bigger. They are super because they can do gargantuan tasks within the required deadlines.

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I don’t think you’ve listed what you (and your partner’s?) financial timeline is. The number of years you have until needing to draw upon the nestegg is crucial for any discussion that involves retirement savings.

Also, I may want to also post to [email protected]

In the spirit of c/nostupidquestion’s Rule 1, asking two unrelated questions does not seem like it would accrue high-quality answers to either. And I see you’ve already added another post focusing on the first question.

Since it doesn’t cost 50 cents to make an additional post, I would suggest giving each question its own post. It would keep the discussion more focused, and actual answers should result.

Consider the following three types of monopolies:

There are monopolies where a single entity has entrenched their position by having the categorically superior product, so far ahead of any competition and while no barriers are erected to prevent competitors, there simply is no hope and they will all play second fiddle. This type of monopoly doesn’t really exist, except for a transient moment, for if there initially wasn’t a barrier, there soon will be: as market leader, the monopolist accumulates capital that at best is unavailable to the competitors (ie zero sum resources, like land or labor), and at worst stands in the way of free competition (eg brand recognition, legally -recognized intellectual property).

The second type is the steady-state scenario following the first, which is a monopoly that benefits from or actively enforces barriers against their competitors. Intellectual property (eg Disney) can be viewed as akin to the conventional means of production (land, labor, capital), so the monopolist that controls the usable land or can hire the best labor will cement their position as monopolist. In economic terms, we could say that the cost to overturn the monopolist is very high, and so perhaps it’s economically reasonable to be a second-tier manufacturer rather than going up against the giant. The key ingredient for the monopolist is having that structure in place, to keep everyone else at bay.

The third type is the oddball, for it’s what we might call a “natural” or “practical” monopoly. While land, labor, and capital are indeed limited, what happens when it’s actually so limited that there’s basically only one? It’s a bit hard to conceptualize having just one plot of land (maybe an island?) or having just one Dollar, but consider a single person who has such specialized knowledge that she is the only such person in the world. Do we say she is a monopolist because she can command whatever price she wants for her labor? Is she a monopolist because she does not share her knowledge-capital? What if she physically can’t, for the knowledge is actually experience, honed over a lifetime? If it took her a lifetime to develop, then she may already lack the remaining lifetime to teach someone else for their lifetime.

I use this example to segue to the more-customary example of a natural monopoly: the local electricity distribution system, not to be confused with the electric grid at-large, which also includes long-distance power lines. The distinction is as follows: the big, long power lines can compete with each other, taking different routes over terrain, under water, or sometimes even partially conducting through the earth itself. But consider that at a local level, on a residential street, there can practically only be a single distributor circuit for the neighborhood.

I cannot be served by Provider X’s wires while Co-Op Y’s wires serve my neighbor, and Corpo Z’s wires serve the school down the road. Going back to the convention means of production, we could say there is only one plot of land available to run these distributor circuits. So at most one entity can own and operate those wires.

Laying all that background, let’s look at your titular question. For monopoly types 1 and 2, it’s entirely feasible to divide and collectivize those monopolies. But it’s the natural monopolies that are problematic: if you divide them up (let’s say geographically) and then collectivize them, there will still only ever be one “owner” of the distribution lines. You cannot have Collective A own a few meters of wire, and then Collective B owns a few meters in between, all while Collective C is connected at the end of the street. The movement of electric power is not amenable to such granular collectivization.

To that end, the practical result is the same no matter how you examine it: a natural monopoly is one which cannot feasibly be split up, even when there’s the will to do so. Generalizing quite a lot, capitalists would approach a natural monopoly with intent to exploit it for pure profit, while social democrats would seek to regulate natural monopolies (eg US State’s public utilities commissions), and democratic socialists would want to push for state ownership of all natural monopolies, while communists would seek the dissolution of the state and have the natural monopoly serve everyone “according to their need”. But the monopoly still exists in all these scenarios, for it can’t be done any other way.

Other natural monopolies exist, but even things like radio spectrum are relatively plentiful compared to local power lines, for which there really is just one place to build them. We don’t have wireless power yet.

The full-blown solution would be to have your own recursive DNS server on your local network, and to block or redirect any other DNS server to your own, and possibly blocking all know DoH servers.

This would solve the DNS leakage issue, since your recursive server would learn the authoritative NS for your domain, and so would contact that NS directly when processing any queries for any of your subdomains. This cuts out the possibility of any espionage by your ISP/Google/Quad9’s DNS servers, because they’re now uninvolved. That said, your ISP could still spy in the raw traffic to the authoritative NS, but from your experiment, they don’t seem to be doing that.

Is a recursive DNS server at home a tad extreme? I used to think so, but we now have people running Pi-hole and similar software, which can run in recursive mode (being built atop Unbound, the DNS server software).

/<minor nitpick>

“It was DNS” typically means that name resolution failed or did not propagate per its specification. Whereas I’m of the opinion that if DNS is working as expected, then it’s hard to pin the blame on DNS. For example, forgetting to renew a domain is not a DNS problem. And setting a bad TTL or a bad record is not a DNS problem (but may be a problem with your DNS software). And so too do I think that DNS leakage is not a DNS problem, because the protocol itself is functioning as documented.

It’s just that the operators of the upstream servers see dollar-signs by selling their user’s data. Not DNS, but rather a capitalism problem, IMO.

/</minor nitpick>

I grew up in a suburban neighborhood that was built to only encourage driving and discouraged everything else, so my parents also took me most places during my teenage years. The cul-de-sacs made it particularly hard to walk to anything interesting, even though such destinations were actually fairly close by, as the crow flies.

What I would suggest is that if there aren’t many interesting destinations to start with, perhaps the walk itself can be of interest. Unless the walk to the mall is along a surface freeway with no soundwall – an actual occurrence in my hometown – you might start with an out-and-back trek to the mall, observing whatever architecture, people, or activities are visible and audible, and then return home. Think of it like people-watching, but less awkward because you’re just passing by, not stopping to stare.

As another commenter wrote, getting comfortable with something is a matter of doing it, first in a controlled manner and then gradually broadening your horizons.

But if this still isn’t a workable plan, then perhaps plan a day out to the 1-hour-away park, taking some time to explore what’s just outside that park. It’s not cheating to use a car to get to a more walkable area. But the walk should be the adventure.

I wish you the best of luck!

P.S. One other thought: could you go walking with someone else besides your parents? They may already have their own walking paths that you may also find workable, places that you can then explore on your own.

Is there anything near your home that you can walk to, to start? A park, a convenience store, or even just a friend’s house? I would start with those destinations, and then work your way to farther journeys. My presumption is that there are at least sidewalks and crosswalks near you, as some parts of the USA are genuinely built in the most pedestrian-hostile way. Also, I am assuming that there isn’t some sort of hazard that would prevent you from being safe in public, apart from the political climate.

Those farther journeys need not be on foot, but you could take a bus, a bike, or anything else that’s available to you.

I loaded True Nas onto the internal SSD and swapped out the HDD drive that came with it for a 10tb drive.

Do I understand that you currently have a SATA SSD and a 10TB SATA HDD plugged into this machine?

If so, it seems like a SATA power splitter that divides the power to the SSD would suffice, in spite of the computer store’s admonition. The reason for splitting power from the SSD is because an SSD draws much less power than spinning rust.

Can it still go wrong? Yes, but that’s the inherent risk when pushing beyond the design criteria of what this machine was originally built for. That said, “going wrong” typically means “won’t turn on”, not “halt and catch fire”.

“how I found about Harry Potter’s sex with Gwen from Spiderman…and broke aes256 in the process”

Breaking open the S(ex) box lol

Also, in the spirit of the season, that would 100% be a presentation at CCC; 39c3 just concluded, after all.

Steganography is one possible way to store a message “hidden in plain sight”, and video does often make a seemingly innocuous manner to store a steganographic payload, but in that endeavor, the point is to have two messages: a video that raises no suspicions whatsoever, and a hidden text document with instructions for the secret agent.

Encoding only the hidden message as a video would: 1) make it really obvious that there’s an encoded message, and 2) would not be compatible with modern video compression, which would destroy the hidden message anyway, if encoded directly as black and white pixels.

When video compression is being used, the available bandwidth to store steganographic messages is much lower, due to having to be “coarse” enough to survive the compression scheme. And video compression is designed around how human vision works, so shades of color are the least likely to be faithfully reproduced – most people wouldn’t notice if a light green is portrayed slightly darker than it ought to be. The good news is that with today’s high resolution video streams, the raw video bandwidth is huge and so having even just one-thousandth of that available for encoding hidden data is probably sufficient.

That said, hidden messages != encrypted messages: anyone who notices that there may be a hidden message can try to analyze the suspicious video and retrieve the payload. Encoding, say, English text in a video would still leave patterns, because some English letters (and thus ASCII-encoded bit patterns) will show up more frequently. But fortunately, one can encrypt data and then hide it using steganography. Encrypted data tends to approximate random noise, making it much harder to notice when hidden within the naturally-noisy video data. But bandwidth will be cut some more due to encryption.

TL;DR: it’s very real to hide messages in plain sight, in places people wouldn’t even think of looking closely at. Have you thought about the Roman Empire today?

As immediate as the power grid falls apart without constant frequency synchronization, so probably seconds. I do consider North America’s Western, Eastern, and Texas power grids as a communication system, because it does convey the precise 60 Hz AC line rate to every part of the continent.

For the benefit of non-Google users, here is the unshortened URL for that Bank of England article: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy

With that said, while this comment does correctly describe what the USA federal government does with tax revenues, it is mixing up the separate roles of the government (via the US Treasury) and the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve is the central bank in the USA, and is equivalent to the Bank of England (despite the name, the BoE serves the entire UK). The Federal Reserve is often shortened to “the Fed” by finance people, which only adds to the confusion between the Fed and the federal government. The central bank is responsible for keeping the currency healthy, such as preventing runaway inflation and preventing banking destabilization.

Whereas the US Treasury is the equivalent to the UK’s HM Treasury, and is the government’s agent that can go to the Federal Reserve to get cash. The Treasury does this by giving the Federal Reserve some bonds, and in turn receives cash that can be spent for employee salaries, capital expenditures, or whatever else Congress has authorized. We have not created any new money yet; this is an equal exchange of bonds for dollars, no different than what you or I can do by going to treasurydirect.gov and buying USA bonds: we give them money, they give us a bond. Such government bonds are an obligation that the government must pay in the future.

The Federal Reserve is the entity that can creates dollars out of thin air, bevause they control the interest rate of the dollar. But outside of major financial crisis, they only permit the dollar to inflate around 2% per year. That’s 2% new money being created from nothing, and that money can be swapped with the Treasury, thus the Federal Reserve ends up holding a large quantity of federal government bonds.

Drawing the distinction between the Federal Reserve and the government is important, because their goals can sometimes be at odds: in the late 1970s, the Iranian oil crisis caused horrific inflation, approaching 20%. Such unsustainable inflation threatened to spiral out of control, but also disincentivized investment and business opportunities: why start a new risky venture when a savings account would pay 15% interest? Knowing that this would be the fate of the economy if left unchecked, the Federal Reserve began to sell off huge quantities of its government bonds, thus pulling cash out of the economy. This curbed inflatable, but also created a recession in 1982, because any new venture needs cash but the Feds sucked it all up. Meanwhile, the Reagan administration would not have been pleased about this, because no government likes a recession. In the end, the recession subsided, as did inflation and unemployment levels, thus the economy escaped a doom spiral with only minor bruising.

To be abundantly clear, the Federal Reserve did indeed cause a recession. But the worse alternative was a recession that also came with a collapsed US dollar, unemployment that would run so deep that whole industries lose the workers needed to restart post-recession, and the wholesale emptying of the Federal Reserve and Treasury’s coffers. In that alternate scenario, we would have fired all our guns and have lost anyway.

From a biology perspective, it may not be totally advantageous to grow in all three dimensions at once. Certainly, as life forms become larger, they also require more energy to sustain, and also become harder to cool (at least for the warm blooded ones). Generally speaking, keeping cool is a matter of surface area (aka skin). But growing double in each of the three dimensions would be 4x more skin than before, but would be 8x more mass/muscle. That’s now harder to keep cool.

So growing needs to be done with intention: growing taller nets some survival benefits, such as having longer legs to run. Whereas growing wider or deeper doesn’t do very much.

But idk mang, I’m in a food coma from holiday dinner, just shooting from the hip lol

I recently learned about Obsidian from a friend, but haven’t started using it yet, so perhaps I can offer a perspective that differs from current users of Obsidian or any of the other apps you listed.

To start, I currently keep a hodge-podge of personal notes, some digitally and some in handwriting, covering different topics, using different formats, and there’s not really much that is common between any of these, except that I am the author. For example, I keep a financial diary, where I intermittently document the thinking behind certain medium/long-term financial decisions, which are retained only as PDFs. I also keep README.md files for each of the code repos that I have for electronics and Kubernetes-related projects. Some of my legacy notes are in plain-text .txt file format, where I’m free-form record what I’ve working on, relevant links, and lists of items outstanding or that are TODOs. And then there is the handwritten TODO and receivables list that I keep on my fridge.

Amongst all of this chaos, what I would really like to have the most is the ability to organize each “entry” in each of their respective domains, and then cross-reference them. That is, I’m not looking to perform processing on this data, but I need to organize this data so that it is more easily referenced. For example, if I outline a plan to buy myself a new server to last 10 years, then that’s a financial diary entry, but it would also manifest itself with TODO list items like “search for cheap DDR5 DIMMs” (heaven help me) and “find 10 GbE NIC in pile”. It may also spawn an entry in my infrastructure-as-code repo for my network, because I track my home network router and switch configurations in Git and will need to add new addresses for this server. What I really need is to be able to refer to each of these separate documents, not unlike how DOIs uniquely identify research papers in academic journals.

It is precisely because my notes are near-totally unstructured and disparate that I want a powerful organization system to help sort it, even if it cannot process or ingest those notes. I look at Obsidian – based on what little I know of it – like a “super filing cabinet” – or maybe even a “card catalog” but that might be too old of a concept lol – or like a librarian. After all, one asks the librarian for help finding some sort of book or novel. One does not ask the librarian to rehash or summarize or extract quotes from those books; that’s on me.

In the English-speaking world, you can always shorten the year from 4 to 2 digits. But whether: 1) this causes confusion or 2) do you/anyone care if it does, are the points of contention. The first is context-dependent: if a customer service agent over the phone is trying to confirm your date of birth, there’s no real security issue if you only say the 2 digit year, because other info would have to match as well.

If instead you are presenting ID as proof of age to buy alcohol, there’s a massive difference between 2010 and 1910. An ID card and equivalent documentation must use a four digit year, when there is no other available indicator of the century.

For casual use, like signing your name and date on a holiday card, the ambiguity of the century is basically negligible, since a card like that is enjoyed at the time that it’s read, and isn’t typically stashed away as a 100-year old memento.

That said, I personally find that in spoken and written English, the inconvenience of the 4 digit year is outweighed by the benefit of properly communicating with non-American English users. This is because us American speak and write the date in a non-intuitive fashion, which is an avoidable point of confusion.

Typical Americans might write “7/1/25” and say “July first, twenty five”. British folks might read that as 7 January, or (incorrectly) 25 January 2007. But then for the special holiday of “7/4/25”, Americans optionally might say “fourth of July, twenty five”. This is slightly less confusing, but a plausible mishearing by the British over a scratchy long-distance telephone call would be “before July 25”, which is just wrong.

The confusion is minimized by a full 4 digit year, which would leave only the whole day/month ordering as ambiguous. That is, “7/1/2025” or “1/7/2025”.

Though I personally prefer RFC3339 dates, which are strictly YYYY-mm-dd, using 4 digit years, 2 digit months, and 2 digit days. This is always unambiguous, and I sign all paperwork like this, unless it explicitly wants a specific format for the date.

For the objective of posting photos to an Instagram account while preserving as much privacy as possible, your approach of a separate machine and uploading using its web browser should be sufficient. That said, Instagram for web could also be sandboxed using a private browsing tab on your existing desktop. Certainly, avoiding an installed app – such as the mobile app – will prevent the most obtuse forms of espionage/tracking.

That said, your titular question was about how to maintain an Instagram account, not just post images. And I would say that as a social media platform, this would include engagement with other accounts and with comments. For that objective, having a separate machine is more unwieldy. But even using a private browsing tab on your existing machine is still subject to the limits that Instagram intentionally imposes on their desktop app: they save all the crucial value-add features for the mobile app, where their privacy invasion is greatest.

To use Instagram in the least obtuse manner means to play the game by their rules, which isn’t really compatible with privacy preservation. To that end, if you did want a full Instagram experience, I would suggest getting a separate, cheap mobile phone (aka a “YOLO phone”) to dedicate to this task. If IG doesn’t need a mobile number, then you won’t even need a working SIM account. Then load your intended images using USB file transfer, and use an app like Imagepipe (available on F-Droid) to strip image metadata. Turn off all location and permissions on this phone, and when not in-use, turn the phone off or in airplane mode.

For the blockchain technology at the very core foundation of cryptocurrencies, it’s a reasonable concept that solves a specific challenge (ie no one can change this value unless they have the cryptographic key) and the notion of an indelible or tamper-evident ledger is useful in other fields (eg certificate revocation lists). Using a blockchain as a component is – like all of engineering – about picking the right tool for the job, so I wouldn’t say that having/not having a block chain imparts any sort of opinionation or qualities of good/bad.

One step above the base technology is the actual application as currency, meaning a representation of economic value, either to store that value (eg gold) or for active trade (eg the €2 Euro coin). All systems of currency require: 1) recognition and general consensus as to their value, and 2) fungibility (ie this $1 note is no different than your $1 note), and 3) the ability to functionally transfer the currency.

Against that criteria, cryptocurrencies have questionable value, as seen by how volatile the cryptocurrency-to-fiat currency markets are. Observe that the USD or Euro or RMB are used for people’s salaries, denominate their home mortgage loans, for buying and selling crude oil, and so on. Yet basically no one uses cryptocurrency for those tasks, no one writes or accepts business-to-business contracts denominated in cryptocurrency, and only a small handful of sovereign states accept cryptocurrency as valid payment. That’s… not a great outlook for circulating the currency.

But for fungibility, cryptocurrency clearly meets that test, and probably exceeds the fiat currencies: there’s no such thing as a “torn” Bitcoin note. There are no forgeries of Etherium. It is demonstrable that a unit of cryptocurrency that came from blood-diamond profits is indistinguishable from a unit that was afforded by wages at a fuel station in Kentucky. There are no “marked notes” or “ink packs” when committing cryptocurrency theft, and it’s relatively easy to launder cryptocurrency through thousands of shell accounts/addresses. To launder physical money a thousand times is physically impossible, and is way too suspicious for digitalized fiat currency transfers.

And that brings us to the ability to actually transfer cryptocurrency. While it’s true that it should only be an extra ledger entry to move funds from one address/account to another, each system has costs buried somewhere. Bitcoin users have to pay the transaction costs, or currencies pegged to other currencies have to “execute” a “smart contract”, with attendant verification costs such as proof-of-work or proof-of-stake. These costs simply don’t exist when I hand a $20 note to a fuel station clerk. Or when my employer sends my wages via ACH electronic payment.

Observe how cryptocurrency is traded not at shops with goods (eg Walmart) or shops for currency (eg bureau de change at the airport) but mostly only through specialized ATMs or through online exchange websites. The few people who genuinely do use their cryptocurrency wallets to engage transactions are now well in the minority, overshadowed by scammers, confidence/romance tricksters, investment funds with no idea of what they’re doing except to try riding the bandwagon, and individuals who have never traded financial instruments but were convinced by “their buddy’s friend” who said cryptocurrency was a money-making machine.

To that end, I would say that cryptocurrencies have brought out the worst of financial manipulators, and their allure is creating serious financial perils for everyday people, whether directly as a not-casino casino or to pay a ransomware extortion, or indirectly through the destabilization of the financial system. No one is immune to a breakdown of the financial system, as we all saw in 2008.

I used to like discussing with people about the technical merits of ledger-based systems, but with the awful repercussions of what they’ve enabled, it’s a struggle to have a coherent conversation without someone suggesting a cryptocurrency use-case. And so I kinda have to throw the whole baby out with the bathwater. Maybe when things quiet down in a few decades, the technology can be revisited from a sober perspective.

If I understand the Encryption Markdown page, it appears the public/private key are primarily to protect the data at-rest? But then both keys are stored on the server, although protected by the passphrase for the keys.

So if the protection boils down to the passphrase, what is the point of having the user upload their own keypair? Are the notes ever exported from the instance while still being encrypted by the user’s keypair?

Also, why PGP? PGP may be readily available, but it’s definitely not an example of user-friendliness, as exemplified by its lack of broad acceptance by non-tech users or non-government users.

And then, why RSA? Or are other key algorithms supported as well, like ed25519?