I don’t even have Internet at home. I use it in public spaces. There are moments when I had a quasi permanent connection but it was a measured rate service and I still would not keep an always-on machine anyway.

power usage concerns can be mitigated by running irc on an old phone.

Interesting thought but I suppose during moments when I have a somewhat persistent uplink, I might rather try to run ZNC on an openwrt router, assuming that’s possible.

But I must also say the question is not just about me. It’s for a club and that club meets in an IRC chat room. It would not be ideal to impose on all members of the club a need to have a persistent uplink and an always-on machine. The club should establish itself on a server that supports chathistory and MemoServ so that every member can be accommodated.

Could work but seems dicey. A nick need not be registered to use IRC. Although the chathistory spec says it’s possible to get msg history for a nick, it makes no mention of nick registration. IIRC, users can use someone else’s registered nick while they are offline, no? So either it opens the door to users grabbing the DMs of others or the spec is an incomplete spec.

Even if that’s sorted, the recipient must be aware of chathistory and then know to proactively run the command to check for msgs – IIUC. And some clients (like irssi) don’t even have the chathistory capability. I must send a quoted string to the server to use chathistory.

Contrast that with MemoServ, where only the sender needs to know how to send msgs and the recipient can be oblivious. MemoServ only accepts msgs for registered nicks. The recipient signs on and automatically they get hailed and msgs delivered.

So I probably want both. CHATHISTORY for getting a channel log and MemoServ for sending DMs with a degree of confidence that it will work.

I appreciate the tip. I connected to them in the past and did not realise they had a memoserv. ATM they seem offline, or at least their onion is. I do this:

$ socat -T9999999 -s TCP4-LISTEN:16999,ignoreeof SOCKS4A:127.0.0.1:vrw7zcuarwx4oeju3iikiz3jffrvuijsysyznqf53mxizxrebomfnrid.onion:6667,socksport=9050,ignoreeof
$ irssi

Then I /connect to local port 16999 with notls_verify, and get:

-!- Irssi: Looking up 127.0.0.1
-!- Irssi: Connecting to 127.0.0.1 [127.0.0.1] port 16999
Waiting for CAP LS response…
-!- Irssi: Connection to 127.0.0.1 established
-!- Irssi: Looking up 127.0.0.1
-!- Irssi: Reconnecting to 127.0.0.1 [127.0.0.1] port 16999 - use /RMRECONNS to abort
-!- Irssi: Unable to connect server 127.0.0.1 port 16999 [Connection refused]

That used to work.

(edit) it worked again for a moment, but it’s not reliable.

That only works from the search bar at the top, and only if the user already knows there is an IRC forum at lemmy.cafe. It fails on other forms. Suppose you post something in !irc@lemmy.sdf.org and then you want to crosspost to irc@lemmy.cafe. If you search from the cross-post form, the fully qualified name finds nothing (which is yet another Lemmy bug). We are forced to query on a single-word token and it cannot have an “@”. Results for “IRC” are longer than the page can support.

Suppose you do the reverse: you 1st post to !irc@lemmy.cafe and then cross-post to !irc@lemmy.sdf.org. Since the SDF community has “internet relay chat” as the long name, you can just use “relay” as the search query to reach it.

Just wait till the judges also run AI for their end of it. The AI slop might get green lit / rubber stamps.

ah, thanks! I tried several dates and all had the same problem apart from the latest capture which just redirects to a dead end. But apparently you found a good one. I was not going to try all of them. Would be nice if the WB calendar showed sizes.

It need not be a replacement for bills. Could be “KOSA & other Bad Internet Bills (US law for now)”. Any way to work in the word “legal” or “legislation” would give a better chance at being found in searches.

Right-wing assholes and their language aside, surely a men’s prison would have both genuine transgender women and also “transgender women” who are genuinely men who will say anything to get access to female inmates. The genuine transgender women need to be moved to a woman’s prison for their own safety. But false (“transgender women”) need to stay in the men’s prison for the safety of female inmates.

How is that distinction made? I hope the trans rights defenders would not argue for simply trusting prisoners’ declarations. Surely that would be a recipe for disaster. Do sex offenders lose their privilege to declare their own gender? Or would they decide based on the gender of sex offenders’ victims?

Relying on an oppressive walled-garden corp like Cloudflare who sees all traffic is an instant show-stopper for me. If CF is necessary to keep it gratis, then we have to wonder how Cloudfare is profitting. As you say:

“That, and Cloudflare is itself somewhat of a tracking and analytics company; so you’re never going to be really anonymous using this setup.”

I only read that far. But I have to say getting your own domain should be sufficient because some domain name services include gratis email forwarding. I don’t recall having a limit on the number of aliases but my memory could be off on that.

The thread of the bug report I submitted reveals that SDF is not /expressly/ blocking thelemmy.club, at least not transparently. So this leaves these possibilities:

• opaque secret blocking of thelemmy.club perhaps using a firewall
• community-specific blocking that suppresses both Android and mildlyinfuriating
• software defect

After SDF was down for ~9 months, it never fully recovered from the re-opening. So possible there is some obscure software defect related to federating.

If it’s the 1st bullet, I would say it’s likely intentional… but not necessarily. If, for example, thelemmy.club had a local user with shared IP attacking or annoying SDF in some way, SDF would perhaps block the IP not realising that thelemmy.club uses the same IP.

It’s kind of a futile exercise because even if you could search communities on a defederated instance

It’s not about the server making extra connections. The search failed to get results given a specific community name and location. The software knows why it failed. It is neglecting to pass that info on to the user. Giving specific error feedback is the sort of task that should be an automatic assumption when writing code. If a request has obvious potential to go unsatisfied, the programmer should expect that anomaly feedback will be expected. It’s the sort thing that should not even arise as a bug report.

Now to be clear, I reported this thinking that SDF was blocking thelemmy.club… which would be fair enough if true, but it turns out not to be. kbin.cafe is the only expressely blocked instance. From there, it’s something else… maybe a silent block by the firewall or a block by the other host.

I recall that some software supported that and some did not (lemmy vs kbin vs piefed… mastodon). mildseason wrote that Lemmy would have to gather info it does not have, which led me to think Lemmy was one of the pkgs that neglected the disclosure feature.

In the case of sdf, thelemmy.club is not on the blocked instance list. So there is a different problem with SDF. Which is exactly why it is important for the software to inform the user when a search for a fully qualified community name fails.

I would call failing to inform the user a clear defect. It should in the very least supply the information it has. I believe defederating is done within the Lemmy server software, which knows which nodes are defederated. OTOH, it is possible for a Lemmy admin to not use that mechanism and to defederate using a firewall. In that case, the Lemmy software is limited (though it could still say something like “time out trying to reach the other host”).

Admins have reasons for defederating. I am not sure if Lemmy already captures that. There are various levels of effort that could be made in fixing the defect, but I’m calling it a defect because it has info that it is not sharing. I’m sure of that because it’s unlikely that all admins on all the nodes I am on are using just the firewall to defederate. SDF is in fact documented in a 3rd party dataset to be defederating with thelemmy.club.

This is a natural feature of activityPub.

IIRC, other software (e.g. Mastodon) has an API to query for nodes that are defederated and admins have a choice whether to expose the list. Lemmy devs neglected to use that mechanism, but the Lemmy server still maintains an internal list of defederated nodes IIUC.

(update)

Calm down. Try to make at least one point without using logical fallacy. Not sure why you think I am upset. Where are you getting that from?

There is a first for everything. Lemmy users cannot arbitrarily post to unfederated /communities/. To federate to an external community, at least one user on the host (SDF in my case) must subscribe to it. To do that, they must search for it by its full name. IOW, use the search tool to search for something you already know exists. Sometimes it takes a couple attempts because it tries to contact the external host on the spot at that moment. If it finds the community, then the user must subscribe to it. Then they can post there, as well as anyone else on the same host.

Only one person needs to be subscribed. If the first subscriber unsubscribes, then I believe it goes back to the original state of being an unknown (unfederated) community.

The problem in the case at hand is if an SDF user searches for a specific known community hosted by thelemmy.club, that whole host is defederated. So the user-hostile search tool assaults our dignity by outputting no results (instead of doing the dignified diplomatic thing and explain to the user that thelemmy.club is deliberately defederated). In fact, this is a bug. I am reporting it. brb.

(update) Added a bug report:

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/59309326

see the other comments. pdflatex crashes when fancyqr is overworked, which I’ve seen happen when exceeding just 2 qr codes. There is also a typesetting problem w/big codes.

Even when it doesn’t crash the compiler, it’s very slow. None of the QR pkgs are sophisticated enough to store the computed result and reuse it from one compilation to another.

You would care in some situations. Someone needs codes to be scannable from a long distance: https://hachyderm.io/@dolanor/117079618531657267

I sometimes produce a document that is littered with codes. If the qrcodes are small enough, they can be in the doc close to where they are referenced. The bigger they are, the more intrusive they are to typeset around. If you are doing a bilingual doc with a different lang on either side of the QR code, It’s harder to manage a big code aesthetically. Then we are forced to consider moving all the QR codes to the last page in a references section – which is a trade-off because it means the reader must track down the right code for the reference they want to follow.

QR encoding is computationally intensive. When I use the fancyqr package (which uses colors), I can only get away with 2 QR codes per document or latex crashes. (edit: not really a crash but probably terminates with → “ERROR: TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [input stack size=10000]”).

Consider artwork as well. A stained glass worker really needs to keep the labor of cutting glass to a minimum and has a strong incentive to have a reduced number of bits. But then it’d be a shame to do a lot of labor to get a stained glass QR code that yields all uppercase text.

So the poor decision to use all uppercase for the smaller charset impacts in several unpredictable ways. That is, you cannot predict all the circumstances that small QR codes are needed. But they could have predicated that all uppercase is less useful than all lowercase.

To be clear, it’s not about what happened to me. I don’t give a shit that the thread was locked. It’s about what happened to the zerowaste community, who can no longer discuss prevention of e-waste of freedom-respecting hardware.

I have to say I don’t consider myself a victim here. I’m not bothered that the thread was locked (ref: 4th sentence).

The zerowaste community is the victim. The zerowaste moderator intends to quietly block collaboration on preventing e-waste of hardware that respects people’s freedom, which is no longer produced.

Breadsmasher’s reading comprehension problem (or intellectual dishonesty) led to framing me as a self-perceived “victim” (a strawman of sorts) in order to make way for a giant red herring (for what b/s later unwittingly reveals serves their motivation for posting: to have a competition). It seems to have worked. The audience mostly fell for it. We don’t seem to have the deepest of critical thinkers here.

Youre in the wrong in the linked thread. suck it up and move on.

I said a lot of things. Wrong about what?

why did you even post if you didn’t want to be challenged?

Good informative challenges are fine. “Challenges” (thread crap) by tech-challenged pro-corporate-bent brains - not so interesting.

(edit) It’s not a competition. The point of the thread was to inform the public about a waste problem to invite solutions and feedback about other instances of the problem. It was not to have the pissing contest that seems to be your drive for posting. It was not to look for reasons to justify spychips and e-waste. You failed to grasp the thesis and purpose of both that thread and this thread.