• 0 Posts
  • 585 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 7th, 2023

help-circle
rss
  • Nvidia Shield. The regular version is $150 US and from what I understand it gives flawless playback. I have the pro version which is more powerful, but that’s specifically for running games.

    It’s Android TV OS, so app selection is great. You can load Smart Tube Next on there to get YouTube without ads, and there’s a very solid Jellyfin app. You can also use Kodi for local direct playback. Remote is perfectly functional, and you can use an app to rebind most of the keys.









  • I can’t stress to you enough how little this distinction matters to the rest of the world.

    America elected Trump. Again. Knowing exactly who he was, and what he would do, because it’s just more of what he did the first time.

    We don’t really care which specific Americans are to blame for that. The existence of good Americans is as meaningful to us as the existence of good cops.

    This is why the relationship between America and its allies is never going to be the same again. We can’t trust you. Sure, maybe in four years Trump will be gone. Maybe he won’t. But, to paraphrase a French senator, we can’t put our security in the hands of a bunch of voters in Wisconsin every four years.

    America held a trusted place in the world. That can’t happen anymore, because the American people have proven themselves incapable of living up to that trust.


  • This is why these “zero for zero” offers are going to go absolutely nowhere.

    By their own admission, the administration is simply inventing these numbers for “tariffs applied against the US”. What they are, in actually, is the US trade deficit against that country as a percentage.

    But the thing is, you’re never going see an even trade balance between the US and Vietnam while still having trade between those countries, because nothing made in the US is affordable to the average person living in Vietnam.

    The only way to get that fictional “tariffs applied against the US” number down to zero is for Vietnam to stop all exports to the US. That means that a whole lot of clothes, electronics and other consumer goods will need to be made in the US instead of being made in Vietnam.

    No version of this works out well for Vietnam, and even for the US it either involves prices increasing to reflect the higher average wages and cost of living in the US, or US wages decreasing to the point where you’ve basically got all these goods being made by utterly impoverished workers in American sweat shops.

    I’m not going to say that American consumers exploiting poorer Vietnamese workers to subsidize their own cost of living is a morally good system, but it sure is one that was working pretty well for the average American consumer.


  • It’s also worth noting that even the administration’s own formula assumes a tariff pass through rate of 25%. Obviously this is much, much lower than the 95% Cavallo calculates, but even taking the administration’s numbers as being accurate, they’re still saying that prices will rise by 25% of the tariff rate.

    The average weighted global tariff across all affected goods is now 40%. By Cavallo’s numbers that means a 38% average increase in the price of all imported goods. But even by the administration’s incredibly sunny numbers, they’re still saying that all prices on imported goods will rise by at least an average of 10%. That’s, effectively, a new 10% tax on most of what you buy.

    (Also, because of how much of what the US buys comes from China, that 40% weighted average will go higher if Trump applies additional tariffs on China, as they apparently intend to, to the order of over 100%)


  • This is the selfhosted community; Who are you training? In most cases there’s literally only one person who would ever need SSH access to this server. Maybe two or three in a tiny handful of cases, but anyone who can’t figure out Netbird in 30 seconds absolutely should not be accessing anything via SSH.

    And you’ve clearly never used Netbird, Tailscale, or any similar service, if you think that update, maintenance and config constitute any kind of meaningful burden, especially for something as simple as remote access to a VPS.






  • This is the correct answer. Never expose your SSH port on the public web, always use a VPN. Tailscale, Netmaker or Netbird make it piss easy to connect to your VPS securely, and because they all use NAT traversal you don’t have to open any ports in your firewall.

    Combine this with configuring UFW on the server (in addition to the firewall from the VPS provider - layered defence is king) and Fail2Ban. SSH keys are also a good idea. And of course disable root SSH just in case.

    With a multi-layered defence like this you will be functionally impervious to brute force attacks. And while each layer of protection may have an undiscovered exploit, it will be unlikely that there are exploits to bypass every layer simultaneously (Note for the pendants; I said “unlikely”, not “impossible”. No defence is perfect).



  • I’ve heard a few different theories about big plays that might be the intent here, and they all fall down on that same basic problem; The US, doesn’t have the reliability or the leverage to make it work. That’s not saying that the theories are bad - they’re all plausible enough - just that no matter what the White House thinks their play is here, it won’t work because no one has enough incentive to play nice with them. The US no longer has the economic dominance needed to force these kinds of changes, and they’re too unreliable a partner for anyone to willingly enter a a long term arrangement with them.

    But then I suppose none of this is surprising when you look at Trump’s business dealings. He’s never understood any way of operating other than being an unreliable partner and screwing everyone around you, and it’s why his businesses all failed. He’s never understood the value in being a reliable partner.


  • Ironically, this would largely achieve Trump’s goal of lowering America’s trade deficits. A big reason why America runs such deep deficits is because the strength of the dollar makes it less attractive to buy from the US, but the dollar never weakens because it’s the global reserve.

    Of course, when OPEC discussed moving away from the dollar Trump lost his shit, so it’s not like this is his actual plan. There’s no 5D chess here, they’re all idiots. Nor would intentionally devaluing the dollar to increase US exports be a smart idea, but it is something that has been seriously proposed by one of Trump’s economic advisors.