sylver_dragon

This is great, but the Senate seats up for election in 2026 make the Democrats winning a majority really, really tough. The current Senate is 53 Republicans, 43 Democrats and 2 Independents who caucus with Democrats. This means that the Democrats need to net +4 seats to gain control of the Senate. Sure, it’s possible but the map doesn’t look good.

For example, the Democrats best pickup opportunity is likely Susan Collins’s seat in Maine. Despite Maine leaning Democrat in statewide elections, this is a rodeo Collins knows very, very well. Democrats have been trying to knock her off for several cycles and yet she’s still here. Maybe this will be the year. But, if this is the best opportunity for Democrats, we aren’t off to a good start.

North Carolina is an open seat, which helps some. But, the State has consistently voted Republican in Statewide elections (and went for Trump by ~3 points in 2024). A large enough blue wave could overcome that, but it’s already an uphill battle. And things only get worse from here.

Next up is Ohio, which Trump won by ~11 points. We aren’t talking super-hard MAGA land there, but Democrat friendly, it ain’t. This is the state which gave us Vice President JD Vance as a Senator. The election here is for the remainder of Vance’s term. Hope may spring eternal, but there is a really sketchy looking reality hiding around the next corner with a sock full of pennies.

That takes us on to Iowa. This state was Trump +13 in 2024. Sure, some farmers may be pissed off about the tariffs, but enough to put a Democrat in the Senate? This seems to fall into the “time to put the bong down and reconnect with reality” territory. I mean, it’s always possible. With a really well calibrated Democratic candidate, the GOP picking a really flawed candidate and really poor economic conditions, maybe. But I wouldn’t be betting the farm on Democrats picking this one up.

And then we need to consider defense. Jon Ossof is up for re-election in Georgia. Georgia went for Trump by ~2 points. Not a large margin, but enough that Osoff isn’t a shoe-in. And Michigan (Trump +1) is an open seat election. The previous Senator (Gary Peters) was a Democrat, so there is certainly hope, but again this isn’t a certain thing. If either of those seats are lost, Democrats are then looking at Texas (Trump +14. Also, it’s fucking Texas).

I’m all for a Democratic Congress. But their chances in the Senate look pretty bleak.

My bet is on it never getting completed. It’s going to be a running grift over the next few years. There will be delay after delay after delay with multiple “independent” contractors rolling through to deal with whatever the current delay is. Those contractors will be chosen via a competitive bid process,. The company bidding the highest kickbacks to Trump being awarded the contract. At the end of the Trump administration, anything actually constructed on the grounds will need to be torn down due to engineering failures, and multitudes of bugs planted by foreign spy agencies.

I started self hosting in the days well before containers (early 2000’s). Having been though that hell, I’m very happy to have containers.
I like to tinker with new things and with bare metal installs this has a way of adding cruft to servers and slowly causing the system to get into an unstable state. That’s my own fault, but I’m a simple person who likes simple solutions. There are also the classic issues with dependency hell and just flat out incompatible software. While these issues have gotten much better over the years, isolating applications avoids this problem completely. It also makes OS and hardware upgrades less likely to break stuff.

These days, I run everything in containers. My wife and I play games like Valheim together and I have a Dockerfile template I use to build self-hosted serves in a container. The Dockerfile usually just requires a few tweaks for AppId, exposed ports and mount points for save data. That paired with a docker-compose.yaml (also built off a template) means I usually have a container up and running in fairly short order. The update process could probably be better, I currently just rebuild the image, but it gets the job done.

But, but, docker, kubernetes, hyper-scale convergence and other buzzwords from the 2010’s! These fancy words can’t just mean resource and namespace isolation!

In all seriousness, the isolation provided by containers is significant enough that administration of containers is different from running everything in the same OS. That’s different in a good way though, I don’t miss the bad old days of everything on a single server in the same space. Anyone else remember the joys of Windows Small Business Server? Let’s run Active Directory, Exchange and MSSQL on the same box. No way that will lead to prob… oh shit, the RAM is on fire.

Dead is dead, parts is parts, dead guys is parts.

The three top competitors of the US, two of which are under heavy sanctions by the US, and the other one has been the target of a trade war, are conspiring against the US? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you. Well, not that shocked. If only there was an area of the world where the US could be using its massive military resources to directly bleed one of those competitors and indirectly bleed a second, just by transferring material to a country which wants closer trade and relations with the US.

While the upper management is a bag of syphilitic dicks, the CDC’s site for this is really nice (for now):
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#maps_positivity-week

It’s been a few of years since did my initial setup (8 apparently, just checked); so, my info is definitely out of date. Looking at the Ubuntu site they still list Ubuntu 16.04, but I think the info on setting it up is still valid. Though, it looks like they only list setting up a mirror or a stripe set without parity. A mirror is fine, but you trade half your storage space for complete data redundancy. That can make sense, but usually not for a self hosting situation. A stripe set without parity is only useful for losing data, never use this. The option you’ll want is a raidz, which is a stripe set with parity. The command will look like:

zpool create zpool raidz /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd

This would create a zpool named “zpool” from the drives at /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc and /dev/sdd.

I would suggest spending some time reading up on the setup. It was actually pretty simple to do, but it’s good to have a foundation to work with. I also have this link bookmarked, as it was really helpful for getting rolling snapshots setup. As with the data redundancy given by RAID, it does not replace backups; but, can be used as part of a backup strategy. They also help when you make a mistake and delete/overwrite a file.

Finally, to answer your question about hardware, my recollection and experience has been that ZFS is not terribly demanding of CPU. I ran a Intel Core i3 for most of the server’s life and only upgraded when I realized that I wanted to game servers on it. Memory is more of an issue. The minimum requrement most often cited is 8GB, but I also saw a rule of thumb that you want 1GB of memory for each TB of storage. In the end, I went with 8GB of RAM, as I only had 4TB of storage (3 2TB disks in a RAIDZ1). But, also think about what other workloads you have on the system. When built, I was only running NextCloud, NGinx, Splunk, PiHole and WordPress (all in docker containers). And the initial 8GB of RAM was doing just fine. When I started running game servers, I stared to run into issues. I now have 16GB and am mostly fine. Some game servers can be a bit heavy (e.g. Minecraft, because fucking Java), but I don’t normally see problems. Also, since the link I provided mentioned it, skip ECC memory. it’s almost never worth the cost, and for home use that “almost never” gets much closer to “actually never”.

When choosing disks, keep in mind that you will need a minimum of 2 disks and you effectively lose the storage space of one of the disks in the pool to parity storage (assuming all disks are the same size). Also, it is best for all of the disks to be the same size. You can technically use different size disks in the same pool; but, the larger disks get treated as the same size as the smaller disks. So long as the pool is healthy, read speeds are better than a single disk as the read can be spread out among the pool. But, write speeds can be slower, as the parity needs to be calculated at write time. Otherwise, you’re pretty free to choose any disks which will be recognized by the OS. You mention that 1TB is filling up; so, you’ll want to pick something bigger. I mentioned using spinning disks, as they can provide a lot more space for the money. Something like a 14TB WD Red drive can be had for $280 ($20/TB). With three of those in a RAIDZ1 pool, you get ~28TB of storage and can tolerate one disk failure , without losing data. With solid state disks, you can expect costs closer to $80/TB. Though, there is a tradeoff in speed. So, you need to consider what type of workloads you expect the storage pool to handle. Video editing on spinning rust is not going to be fun. Streaming video at 4k is probably OK, though 8k is going to struggle.

A couple other things think about are space in the chassis, drive connections and power. Chassis space is pretty obvious, you gotta put the disks in the box. Technically, you don’t have to mount the disks, they can just be sitting at the bottom of the case, but this can cause problems with heat shortening the lifespan of the drives. It’s best to have them properly mounted and fans pushing air over them. Drive connections are one of those, you either have the headers or you don’t. Make sure your motherboard can support 3 more drives with the chosen interface (SATA, NVMe, etc.) before you get the drives. Nothing sucks more than having a fancy new drive only to be unable to plug it into the motherboard. Lastly, drives (and especially spinning drives) can be power hungry. Make sure your power supply can support the extra power requirements.

Good luck whatever route you pick.

Probably the easiest solution would be to just chuck a larger disk in the system and retain the original drive for the operating system. If you do not need the high speed of an SSD, you may be able to get more storage space for the money by going with a spinning disk. 7200RPM drives are fast enough for most applications, though you may run into issues streaming 4K (or higher) resolution video.

Another option would be to start building out a storage pool using some type of RAID technology. On my own server, I use ZFS for the data partition. It is basically a software RAID. I use a RAID-Z1 configuration, which stripes the data over multiple disks (three in my case) and uses a parity calculation to provide data redundancy. It also has the advantage that it can be expanded to new disks dynamically and does not require that all disks are the same size. Initial setup does require more work and you are now monitoring multiple physical disks, but having a unified storage pool and redundancy is a nice way to go.

Any way you go, just make sure you have good backups. Drives fail, and sometimes even early in their life. Backblaze reports can be an interesting read when looking at drive options, as they really do put the drives through the wringer.

Tesla just needs to update it’s logo to better represent it’s leadership:

Ya, they kinda should be. While I don’t like Youngkin one bit, he was pretty well calibrated to run as a Republican in Virginia at the time he ran. He was elected in late 2021, and people were pretty unhappy with the situation around COVID at that point. And much of that blame was piling up on Democrats (read: Biden Administration). Virginia was not some solid blue state. With a heavy military and FedGov presence, there is a lot of pull towards the GOP politically. And Youngkin was reasonably charismatic and appealed well to the GOP base in Virginia. Also, the Democrats had gone out of their way to find as bland of a candidate as possible. Sure, there was nothing major wrong with McAuliffe, but you really don’t want your campaign slogan to be “meh, he’s ok”.

Earle-Sears is basically the wrong candidate at the wrong time for the GOP. She’s done little to nothing to distance herself from Trump, and that brand is not doing well in a lot of Virginia. Even in the Southwest, which is redder than a baboon’s ass, Trumpism has been showing cracks. Earle-Sears’s has also not been doing a lot to promote herself, hiding out from journalists and avoiding debates. She’s just not the charismatic, “independent conservative” which Youngkin built a campaign message around. By contrast Spanberger is pretty close to the center of politics in Virginia. She’s basically a centrist Democrat who has been out pushing a left of center economic message. She’s also former CIA, which I think helps on the balance in Virginia (again, big Military and FedGov presence). She won’t win any sort of popularity contest on Lemmy, but the candidates Lemmy would like aren’t going to win in Virginia at the moment.

There’s plenty of fraud, waste and abuse. It’s just conveniently called “contracting”, so money can be shoved out the door to private companies which do half the work at twice the price and end up delivering shoddy results. The reason DOGE didn’t find anything was that they weren’t looking at the contracting companies and instead were looking at the agencies themselves and the employees working for them. I won’t say that some of those agencies aren’t a complete waste of money (see: TSA, ICE, DOGE); but, DOGE was hyper-focused on agencies which actually do useful stuff (e.g.: SSA, NOAA).

do any of you hate how self-hosting services like photo- or document-management systems, or even a simple rss tool, forces you to sort your stuff out, and put your decades old files in order?!

What is this “sort” thing you speak of? I don’t sort anything, I have NextCloud syncing my entire photos, videos and documents folders and they are just as messy as ever. Granted, I do go through my photos and videos once a year and dump them in a folder named for the year they were taken. Occasionally, I’ll go hog wild and try to sort some of a year’s photos/videos into folders named after events. Though, that hasn’t happened in a number of years. I setup NextCloud so I could have everything synced to my own server and just forget, not have to deal with labeling my data.

As for bookmarks. I already keep those in folders; but, I don’t sync those. I use my desktop far more than I use my phone for web browsing. And the types of things I use my phone for (mostly recipes), I just keep bookmarked there.

It seems that internal polling put the “weird” message as not really helping (or hurting) the Harris campaign. Arguably, keeping up the “weird” message may have been useful, but they were likely trying to find something that seemed to have a larger impact.

Crypto is a ponzi scheme playacting at being a currency or investment vehicle. Meme coins just dispense with playacting and aim for shorter time horizons on cashing out from the ponzi scheme.

Maybe just take them away from their abusive parents, keep them out of the horrors of WWI and provide a better society for them to grow up and live in which isn’t facing crippling post war sanctions. For as evil as Hitler turned out, a lot of that was probably shaped by the environment he grew up and lived in. And the environment in which he rose to prominence and power was not something he set up. While it might seem an easy solution to snuff out baby Hitler, and in no way am I trying to excuse what Hitler did, it’s entirely possible that someone else would have done the same things, if Hitler didn’t exist.

If we want to not have horrible, mass murdering fuck-heads, we need to create societies which don’t promote the creation and elevation of mass murdering fuck-heads.

That is really rich coming from the person who wrote the decision making the President unaccountable to the Rule of Law.

The entertaining question would be: what do the salaries of the new employees look like, compared to the old ones? I’d suspect that the administration is thinking they can fire a well experienced, but expensive employee and hire on a cheap replacement. However, I also suspect many of those positions are fairly specialized and they are going to end up paying to get rid of all that experience and then end up paying a premiums to hire someone with the needed experience for the position.

This is why many communication options these days advertise that they are encrypted.

Like Signal. You know, the app they were using, as was mentioned in the article, multiple times. You did read the article, right?

This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon “moderation” in government. Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H.L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
– President Eisenhower

It seems that this is going to be put to the test.