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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Whoever thought it was good at coding? That’s not what it’s designed for. It might get lucky and spit out somewhat functional code sometimes based on the prompt, but it never constructed any of that itself. Not truly. It’s conceptually Googling what it thinks it needs, copying and pasting together an answer that seems like it might be right, and going “Here, I made this”. It might be functional, it might be pure garbage. It’s a gamble.

    You’re better off just writing your own code from the beginning. It’s likely going to be more efficient anyways, and you’ll properly understand what it does.




  • I still have an active Netflix account (for the odd thing I haven’t yet added to my self-hosted Jellyfin instance), and actually downgraded from the Premium tier to the Basic tier a few months ago when they started cracking down on password-sharing here in Canada.

    Even though the Basic tier is “only 720p”, I barely notice the difference in quality since my TV (and a lot of other modern TVs) has built-in upscaling that works surprisingly well. And I’m the type that is really picky about picture quality, particular about codecs and encoding methods, and all that jazz. But I’m really happy that I managed to get onto the Basic tier before they removed it. I was prepared for a clear drop in quality in return for cost-savings, and I was okay with that, but was delighted to find nothing had noticeably changed after switching over.

    The Basic tier checks all of my boxes, verifiably:

    • 1 screen at a time is enough
    • The end result of the video quality I can perceive is perfect
    • Cheapest plan without ads

    Sometimes I even wonder if my TV is even actually upscaling from 720p, or if Netflix is just quietly serving 1080p in reality, but was just continuing to advertise 720p to deter people from the cheaper plan to get them onto a more expensive one, with plans all along to phase this tier out.

    My parents, who were previously sharing my account when I was on the Premium tier, ended up getting their own account also on the Basic tier. The net result is that Netflix makes less money off of the two of our accounts combined now compared to the single Premium account we shared before. So in the end, they ended up losing money, and we lost nothing of perceivable value.

    I’ll probably end up cancelling our account at some point entirely, and my parents can continue to use their own account without being affected, so the forced split actually saved us all money and made our situations more future-proofed.

    Contrary to popular belief, I actually think that the Basic tier could have ended up seeing more uptake in the long-run had people who only needed a single screen and wanted to save money, decided to try it, and notice that the picture quality was more than satisfactory enough, either due to the stream quality being better than advertised in reality, or due to the pretty good upscaling ability of modern TVs. I’m sure word would have gotten around from technically-minded people to the masses at some point, and we would have seen more people switching.

    I’m sure Netflix did away with the Basic tier because they knew it could realistically put a dent in their profits at some point.



  • You’re seeing that toast about versions since backend version 0.18.0 switched away from using a websockets-based API to a REST API, and the Jerboa client app is (in a not-so-descriptive way) warning you that the backend you are connected to isn’t aligned with the app version in terms of what it expects of the backed. This should go away pretty soon as more servers update their backend version and the Jerboa app update hits more devices.


  • Oh yeah for sure, everyone should work on whatever they want without restriction or obligation to be focusing on what someone else wants. And more often than not a pet project is a way to learn a new language or framework with the goal of self-development. That’s a great thing.

    It’s just a thought I selfishly have sometimes when I see many apps in development for the same platform, I can’t help but wonder “if all of this effort were focused across fewer apps, could each of those be better than any of these current ones are individually today?” Of course the number of devs contributing to a project has no direct correlation when it comes to the quality or maturity of the product. That’s down to the management, skillset of the devs, etc. I’m well aware of all of that, and the pros and cons of the differences in scenarios.

    Just thought I’d share the thought out there. In any case, Lemmy getting all of this attention will no doubt lead to the rise of at least a few solid mobile apps that will stick around and not fizzle out into development neglect within a couple of months.


  • It’s awesome to see Lemmy getting lots of love, and choice in the mobile app space is great for everyone. But some part of me also kind of wishes that rather than spreading so much development effort out over so many mobile apps, that more developers would jump in and contribute to polishing up the official open source Lemmy mobile app, Jerboa. I can’t help but feel that it would be nice to see a focused effort somewhere in bringing that one in particular up to snuff, as a sort of “reference” app. And have a few others floating around out there just for some diversity and testing innovative ideas.

    Maybe it’s already that way, I don’t know. It kind of feels like there’s a new Lemmy mobile app announced every couple of days.



  • However, that’s come with other tradeoffs in useability, speed, and fediration experience.

    Like what? If properly configured none of the things listed should negatively impact hosting a Lemmy instance.

    sure I’ll be adding an exception/rule for that, but it’s not a straight forward task.

    It honestly should be to someone who would be hosting any public web application using Cloudflare. Cloudflare makes all of this quite easy, even to those with less experience.

    Heck, the removal of websockets will require quite a few changes in my Cloudflare config.

    What config are you referring to? In the Cloudflare console? For websockets changing to a REST API implementation there should be nothing at all you need to do.

    Sure, someone truly concerned with security knows to do this, but that’s definitely not going to be everyone

    And it shouldn’t have to be everyone, only those who take on the responsibility of hosting a public web application such as a Lemmy instance.

    No matter the capabilities inherent in what you choose to host, the onus rests on the owner of the infrastructure to secure it.

    Everyone should be free to host anything they want at whatever level of security (even none) if that’s what they want to do. But it’s not reasonable nor appropriate to expect it to be done for you by way of application code. It’s great if security is baked in, that’s wonderful. But it doesn’t replace other mitigations that according to best practices should rightfully be in place and configured in the surrounding infrastructure.

    In the case of the captcha issue we’re discussing here, there’s more than enough appropriate, free solutions that you can use to cover yourself.


  • There’s nothing stopping instance owners from incorporating their own security measures into their infrastructure as they see fit, such as a reverse proxy with a modern web application firewall, solutions such as Cloudflare and the free captcha capabilities they offer, or a combination of those and/or various other protective measures. If you’re hosting your own Lemmy instance and exposing it to the public, and you don’t understand what would be involved in the above examples or have no idea where to start, then you probably shouldn’t be hosting a public Lemmy instance in the first place.

    It’s generally not a good idea to rely primarily on security to be baked into application code and call it a day. I’m not up to date on this news and all of the nuances yet, I’ll look into it after I’ve posted this, but what I said above holds true regardless.

    The responsibility of security of any publicly hosted web application or service rests squarely on the owner of the instance. It’s up to you to secure your infrastructure, and there are very good and accepted best practice ways of doing that outside of application code. Something like losing baked in captcha in a web application should come as no big deal to those who have the appropriate level of knowledge to responsibly host their instance.

    From what this seems to be about, it seems like a non-issue, unless you’re someone who is relying on baked in security to cover for your lack of expertise in properly securing your instance and mitigating exploitation by bots yourself.

    I’m not trying to demean anyone or sound holier than thou, but honestly, please don’t rely on the devs for all of your security needs. There are ways to keep your instance secure that doesn’t require their involvement, and that are best practice anyways. Please seek to educate yourself if this applies to you, and shore up the security of your own instances by way of the surrounding infrastructure.



  • The main advantage to me is that I can work with Invidious as a backend, and whatever I configure there will reflect in Clipious as a client. So as I subscribe to new channels in Invidious, add or update playlists, etc, Clipious will reflect these changes accordingly. Advantages of selfhosting Invidious that indirectly benefit Clipious are of course built-in adblocking by virtue of how Invidious works, SponsorBlock support, and the ability to cache static assets, such as video thumbnails for faster load times, using a reverse proxy (Nginx is what I use). There’s a lot more we could dive into beyond this, such as no Google account requirement (for enhanced privacy).

    One area where the SmartTubeNext and YouTube ReVanced combo has the advantage is the convenience of being able to cast from your handheld device to your TV. Clipious/Invidious has no casting ability. But I can totally live without that.


  • I just stood up a selfhosted Invidious instance the other day, and I replaced YouTube ReVanced with Clipious (an Invidious client for Android) on my phone. No ads, SponsorBlock built-in, no need for a YouTube/Google account to create subscriptions, playlists, etc. And it’s highly performant since I run it behind a reverse proxy with some custom caching configuration for things like thumbnail images, static assets, etc.

    Clipious can also be installed on an Android TV (has an actual Android TV interface). I’m going to end up installing it on mine, but I’m also using SmartTubeNext at the moment, which does require a YouTube/Google account for subscriptions, playlists, etc, but does have no ads, built-in SponsorBlock, and a slew of other great features. I’ll be keeping both around, since I do sometimes like to cast to my TV, and SmartTubeNext allows for that (Clipious does not, at least at this time).

    Unless YouTube somehow starts somehow dynamically splicing in ads as part of the actual video stream, there’s always going to be a way to block ads, unless they do something pretty elaborate. But that’s probably not worth the effort on their end to go that far, since the vast, vast majority of people won’t know what to do to get around that, nor will they probably care enough to try. But I think it’s clear that DNS blocking using services such as AdGuard Home, PiHole, etc, are going to become less effective over time.