Given that your original problem was related to WAN upload performance, why did your investigation lead you to Ethernet flow-control? An ISP connection generally deals in packets at Layer 3 (“network”, eg IP) of the OSI model, whereas Ethernet is a Layer 2 (“data-link”) layer technology.

If there is a bottleneck at your WAN modem, then that will cause congestion at layer 3, but Ethernet flow-control can only deal with congestion that exists at layer 2. What has likely happened is that you have configured your gateway so that congestion at layer 3 is mirrored onto your layer 2 LAN. And if flow-control is enabled, then that would result in back-pressure propagating back to your VMs. Your VMs will then slow down their layer 2 rate, which conveniently forces the layer 3 traffic to also slow down.

This is an incredibly round-about and inefficient way to do traffic shaping. You should not configure a network so that L3 and L2 issues bleed into each other. A major consequence of using flow-control in this way is that it reduces the capacity of your LAN, even for traffic that isn’t going out to the WAN.

The customary approach for keeping L2 and L3 separate is to perform traffic shaping solely at the threshold where your LAN meets the bottleneck. This would be OpenWRT, since after OpenWRT would be the WAN (50 Mbps upload). OpenWRT would be configured with some sort of QoS feature so that certain L3 packets are selectively dropped.

You cannot do effective L3 traffic shaping without dropping packets. In fact, all competent L3 protocols expect dropped packets in order to slow down their data rate: SCTP and TCP have their own exponential congestion control mechanism, UDP simply accepts that some packets won’t make it through, and QUIC has its own mechanism as well. Simply put, all L3 protocols only understand one signal that tells them to slow down, and it is to drop a few packets. They will adjust accordingly, finding the stable equilibrium where traffic flows at the very cusp of congestion.

The Main reason for this problem seems to be the down-stepping of 10Gbit traffic to 1Gbit devices

This is a red-herring, for the reasons I’ve outlined above. With 1+ Gbps connections on your LAN, your L2 network is an order of magnitude faster than your WAN upload. It cannot be the case that a fast LAN makes a slow WAN slower. This is not RF impedance where step-transitions cause reflections; we are dealing in packet-switched networks, where queuing theory controls.

TL;DR: please try OpenWRT QoS instead

I personally would be thrilled if day-to-day commerce could be settled using HTTP return codes. If I could IP-block the small-talk, DNS blackhole the advertisements, and just do precisely the transactional things I have to do, without being accosted by pushy salespeople, the inconvenience of driving and parking in car-dependent suburbia with no realistic, properly-funded transit options, this would honestly be great.

The modern in-person shopping experience is not a place of honor. It is an affront to call shopping malls and big-box stores as “the future” when it so degrades the human experience, reducing people into wallets with emotions ripe for exploitation.

Online shopping did not kill in-person shopping. The in-person shopping experience destroyed itself, poisoning the idea for whole swaths of the next generation. Only time can possibly heal these deep wounds.

The latter part of Rule 3 is the issue:

If it’s not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

There is exactly one sentence in the post which relates to self hosting, buried in the middle of a paragraph, and one which could be plausibly understood in two ways: 1) we (Anonymous) are recruiting the working-class people who maintain the infrastructure that keeps the world running, or 2) we (Anonymous) are seeking people that know how to build self-sufficient infrastructure. Only the latter might be vaguely self-hosting. And in no circumstance would I say the sentence is “obvious”.

I won’t rules-lawyer the other points, but I repeat the old adage: when you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras. If a post is skirting multiple community rules, and the community is downvoting it into oblivion, then all signs point to a post that shouldn’t be here.

This is not a good idea: having to search means an implicit reliance on a search engine. Even with a trustworthy web search – and those are becoming fewer and fewer – why add this complication? The URL doesn’t even have to be large; it just has to be readable.

Even worse is when there’s an adversary: what would stop someone from buying getcontinuwuity.org but have it be pro-Big Tech propaganda, with tracking cookies galore, and then pay Google or Bing to put it at the top of the web search results?

Whereas in 2026, a URL is not confusing at all to include. People know what http:// or https:// mean. Even big brands might not own their own product name’s domain. This exact problem came up just six days ago: https://www.neowin.net/news/paintnet-can-finally-be-downloaded-from-the-right-place/

The whole point of marketing is to reduce the barriers for people to find something useful or valuable. Adding an accessibility barrier is antithetical to that objective.

I think this is a Rule 5 violation for this community, and maybe even Rules 3, 4, and 7.

This is the homeserver written in Rust, right?

A suggestion: wherever a QR code is included, the human-readable content should be included next to it. Not everyone has a QR code reader handy, or their reader has the bad habit of immediately opening links or apps. In this case, I see that it just goes to https://continuwuity.org/ and is benign, but others may be apprehensive at naked QR codes.

(there’s obviously an exception for QR codes that are intended to convey machine info, like TOTP codes)

The map overlay on that website is stunning. I don’t know much French, but I managed to get it to overlay the IGN map (I presume the currently accepted map from the government mapping agency) on the Cassini map, both at 50% opacity, and it’s truly remarkable how good the latter must have been in its time.

There’s so much detail along the coast that was faithfully recorded. The only thing I can spot that is noticeably different would be the river runs, but that’s entirely expected since rivers naturally move around.

I’d love to know if there’s a USA website that overlays colonial-era maps atop the modern USGS maps.

Might I suggest this article about French mapmaking in the 1600s. Supposedly in response to a map commissioned by King Louis XIV at the time, which shower France about 20% smaller than originally mapped, the King replied:

“Your work has cost me a large part of my state!”

there’s jury duty

In California and probably other states too, there’s a requirement to actually reside within the county in order to be called for jury duty. College students that live on-campus away from their home county might receive a jury summons, but it’s an automatic excusal if they write back and affirm that they’re not domiciled in that county at the time of the summons. Of course, students are eligible to be selected for jury duty in the county where the university is, but since most in-state students don’t change their driver license or state ID card address, that county usually doesn’t have the info to summon them anyway.

right to vote

In the USA and basically most other Western countries, I’m told, overseas citizens are eligible to vote. It is a defining quality of being a citizen, after all. An overseas American citizen would be registered to vote in the county of their last American address. This is basically a mail-in ballot with all federal offices, and depending on the US State, some state offices too.

What exactly do you see as a tether, apart from the unique American position on taxation by citizenship?

I’d like to draw a comparison: a cozy wood fire versus central heating. In the right time and place (eg camping in the woods), a wood fire is both very practical and very useful. Meanwhile, most homes built in the past 70+ years in the USA have central heating (or are somewhere that doesn’t need heating at all) and the benefits are quite obvious: automatic temperature regulation, supplied by a utility, and low or no local emissions. And yet, there will still be rural homes that are heated exclusively by a wood stove, located in the middle of the living room, whose iron construction stores and radiates heat well after the fire has gone out.

Do I bemoan individual homes that use a wood fire? No, not really. The reality is that a grand, overwhelming majority of people don’t have wood fires anymore. Even when air quality is poor, prohibiting wood fires in a few rural homes isn’t exactly what would clear up the air.

Now, it would be a vastly different story if city-dwellers all had wood fires. When every home in a neighborhood is building and burning a wood fire, the results are disastrous: horrific PM2.5 in the air, soot coating everything, substantially reduced energy efficiency, and mass logging just to keep the wood supply. A mole-hill quickly becomes a mountain of problems when it’s at scale.

So to that end, I would very much like to see commercial-scale AI reigned in, as the external costs have already gotten out of hand. What they have built is more correctly called a wildfire, not a wood fire. But where does that leave small-scale AI/LLM users? They can weigh the cost/benefits for themselves, provided that they don’t harm other people or resources in the process.

But that brings us back to a cozy wood fire versus central heating: at small scale, a wood fire struggles to heat an entire modern American home (ie 2500 sq ft; or 232 sq m). Yet central heating does it with ease. Who then will be interested in this endeavor? Probably only those with a love for the camping aesthetic, and other enthusiasts.

At this point, it has become more clear what the utility of small LLM models is, and they do pale in comparison to larger LLM models. If small LLMs are what sensibly survives into the future, then that’s essentially a cap on their capabilities, given a want to avoid burning the planet to run anything larger. The only way out would be for substantial developments in the energy efficiency of small LLM models, but that’s not where the interest is.

No one is seeking to build a more efficient wood fire.

There are subscription costs for homelabbing?

I don’t disagree. But seeing as OP specifically asked for a word, I’m inclined to offer the most specific, most descriptive word I can muster that is germane to what they’ve described.

IMO, precision of language is paramount when it comes to addressing other people’s problematic behavior, because it closes the door on excuses like “it’s just a simple misunderstanding” or “that’s just their opinion”.

The most poignant example I’ve heard of are from parents that make absolutely certain that their children learn the proper names for their body parts. As in, not “hoo-hah” or “privates” but the actual, unambiguous clinical names. This is a marked improvement than the TV trope of “where on the doll did the bad man touch you”.

Deflection: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/deflection

The act of attacking or blaming another person rather than accepting criticism or blame for your own actions: Deflection is a psychological defense mechanism.

financial philosophy

Surely this would just be economics, no? Especially as your question pertains to the money supply, which is squarely in the domain of macroeconomics.

how much money is there in total, in the world?

I can only summarize what my economics course at uni covered, but you’d have to start with defining what should be counted as money. Even if we looked at an isolated island nation, what is and isn’t money is not readily apparent. If I write out a check/cheque drawn against my bank account, is that money? Can my cheque be circulated as if it were currency? How about a banknote against the gold reserves of a national bank or treasury? What if that banknote isn’t directly redeemable for gold or anything, but is a floating currency? What if it’s neither redeemable nor is managed as if a currency, and yet it is readily accepted by Canadians and has actual buying power at a national retail chain.

Then we get to second-order candidates that could be money (or not): goods and services, land and houses, ongoing businesses, these all have some value and are tradable. Are these money? Are they at least a store of value? If a company is incorporated and is imbued with some starting investment, and then grows that value through business operations, does that create money?

To deal with this messy reality, economists have multiple definitions for money supply, found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply. If two people use differing definitions, then of course they’ll conclude different values for the world’s total money supply.

Then the bank owes $1.02B actually, while only having $1B on the account. So the total amount isn’t zero, it’s negative

Not correct, because: 1) this fails to account for the interest the bank can generate through re-lending the money, and 2) interest is not a front loaded charge but is an expense over time.

For #1, it would be some profligate mismanagement of money for a bank to just obtain a loan “for the lolz” and there would be some sort of plan to actually make it do work. In that sense, capital should be viewed as if it were a powderkeg: very capable if applied carefully, very dangerous if mishandled. As for whether or not a bank’s future revenue can be immediately reflected on their books – since the revenue is only theoretical yet the central bank loan is already a certainty – that’s a question for accountants.

For #2, the mistake is that interest – although continually accruing, or by other terms – is somehow entirely due at the very beginning, which is not how most loans are structured. At any given point in time, yes, the bank could have negative net value, but they could also have positive net value, depending on their cash inflows. And even with negative cash flow, accounts receivable could still boost their net value because future value is still value.

My recommendation would be to review some basics in economics or accountability, as these sorts of questions have been hashed out over the course of hundreds of years. And even when economic theories don’t exactly describe this reality, they are still useful as models, which is still more rigorous an approach than divination.

In a nutshell: https://github.com/becarpenter/misc/blob/main/why6why.md

An app…lique?

Sewing jokes aside, this would be a nightmare, where something as basic as a bandage requires an app to unlock the dispenser. Dead phone? I guess only death awaits…

Following along, in the hopes a material scientist will give a detailed description of what makes a good lube for human activities.

Some of the most impactful demonstrations of science are hands-on activities. After all, any sufficiently advanced science starts to look like magic, and a major objective of science museums is to disabuse people of that notion. That these demos seem to be child-oriented is simply a result of not assuming any background knowledge of the topic. But even adults might not know how a tumbler lock works, or that electricity follows all paths in inverse proportion to resistance. If something is rooted in natural phenomena, age is not a prerequisite to understanding.

As an adult, I personally enjoy science museums precisely because they’re the polar opposite of technical papers and textbooks: an accessible and chill mood to learn about stuff I’ve seen but never paid much attention to. I’m not so vain to think that I can’t learn something from a museum visit. In some sense, adults going to science museum is akin to edutainment, the genre on YouTube. Some museums even specifically have after-hours events so that adults can roam without children in the way.

Some might also call it “adult learning” or “continuing education”, but whatever it is, it’s enriching for individuals and families alike.

There might exist one, but it probably doesn’t haven’t much volume or isn’t well federated because few other instance want to interact with spammy, problematic, high-complaint instances.

What you’re describing might be a Level Three in the moderation speedrun: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/

I’m unreliably informed that the absolute minimum amount of liquid to drown a human is 1 liter. That might require a special head-shaped bucket, but it seems plausible.

But out of curiosity, what sort of statistics are you seeing about UK people falling into canals? I know they have canals and people, but I thought the trope was shopping trolleys (USA: shopping carts) falling into canals. Is this a serious issue? Can we find comparable figures from the canal-strewn Netherlands for comparison?