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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • The main difference is who bears the risk. For pensions, it’s the employer, who has to make extra payments if the pension fund falls behind it projected obligations, or surrender its management to PBGC. That open-ended risk is why most companies have abandoned pensions. For SS, it’s the government (although they do have the power to change their legal obligation). For annuities, it’s the recipient, who will just get less money if the annuity’s investments underperform during the accumulation phase.



  • Don’t even try to pick based on performance. Whatever they did in the last year, or 5, or 10 is mostly irrelevant to what they do in the next 30. You’re betting on the economy, not on a stock picker.

    Beyond that, it kind of depends on why you want an ‘SRI’ fund. If you just want someone to tell you your investments don’t make you a bad person, then pick a fund from a large brokerage with low maintenance fees, ideally in the range of 0.1%/year. If you want an SRI because you think the market is going to reward ethical companies or punish unethical companies, or because you’'re willing to sacrifice long-term performance for not actively exploiting externalities, then you need to dig into the funds a little deeper and find out what they mean by ‘social responsibility.’ It’s a hot marketing phrase right now, with no regulatory meaning, so you can be sure that there are products being called ‘socially responsible’ with little or no difference from products not so labeled.

    If you actually have a specific ethical agenda, then you need to be prepared to do a lot of work. You’ll need to understand how the fund defines SRI, find out what benchmarks they use to greenlight companies, and figure out whether those benchmarks can be greenwashed. Can Exxon donate a few million dollars to a sketchy ‘reforestation charity’ and claim to be carbon-neutral? I imagine this research is out there, but the people interested in Wall Street tend to be a different set than those interested in climate, labor rights, or political freedom.



  • I switched from an I3-530, nominal TDP 73W, to an N-100, nominal TDP 7W, and power from the wall didn’t change at all. Even the i3 ran around 0.1 CPU load, except when transcoding, and I’m left with the impression that most of the power goes into HDDs, RAM, maybe fans, and PS losses. My sense is that the best way to decrease homelab power use is to minimize the number of devices. Start with your seyrver at 60W, add a WAP at 10-15W, maybe a switch at 10-15W… Not because of the CPUs, necessarily, but because every CPU every CPU comes with systems to keep the CPU going, keep the power regulated, etc.



  • My ISP seems to use just normal DHCP for assigning addresses and honors re-use requests. The only times my IP addresses have changed has been I’ve changed the MAC or UUID that connects. I’ve been off-line for a week, come back, and been given the same address. Both IPv4 and v6.

    If one really wants their home systems to be publicly accessible, it’s easy enough to get a cheap vanity domain and point it at whatever address. rDNS won’t work, which would probably interfere with email, but most services don’t really need it. It’s a bit more complicated to detect when your IP changes and script a DNS update, but certainly do-able, if (like OP) one is hell bent on avoiding any off-site hardware.





  • It really depends on what your data is and how hard it would be to recreate. I keep a spare HD in a $40/year bank box & rotate it every 3 months. Most of the content is media - pictures, movies, music. Financial records would be annoying to recreate, but if there’s a big enough disaster to force me to go to the off-site backups, I think that’ll be the least of my troubles. Some data logging has a replica database on a VPS.

    My upload speed is terrible, so I don’t want to put a media library in the cloud. If I did any important daily content creation, I’d probably keep that mirrored offsite with rsync, but I feel like the spirit of an offsite backup is offline and asynchronous, so things like ransomware don’t destroy your backups, too.




  • tburkhol@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldISO Selfhost
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    3 months ago

    Wonder if there’s an opportunity there. Some way to archive one’s self-hosted, public-facing content, either as a static VM or, like archive.org, just the static content of URLs. I’m imagining a service one’s heirs could contract to crawl the site, save it all somewhere, and take care of permanent maintenance, renewing domains, etc. Ought to be cheap enough to maintain the content; presumably low traffic in most cases. Set up an endowment-type fee structure to pay for perpetual domain reg.


  • tburkhol@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldISO Selfhost
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    3 months ago

    At least my descendants will own all my comments and posts.

    If you self-host, how much of that content disappear when your descendants shut down your instance?

    I used to host a bunch of academic data, but when I stopped working, there was no institutional support. Turned off the server and it all went away (still Wayback Machine archives). I mean, I don’t really care whether my social media presence outlives me, the experience just made me aware that personal pet projects are pretty sensitive to that person.


  • As a long-term non-exerciser, routine and coupling it with a reward was definitely key. I started out just walking, and walking to get lunch was a key motivator. Upgraded to a rowing machine, and it doesn’t even feel like a chore to sit on the machine and watch a movie in parts or a show, going on 5 years.

    Still have to figure out how to get some strength work in there. Just can’t seem to find a system to consistently do a few push ups, pull ups, and stand ups.


  • For me, the effort of going somewhere to exercise is a big impediment, and I’m self-conscious exercising in front of people. The low barrier to start a daily workout wins, hands down.

    Others find camaraderie just having other people involved in the same process, or really enjoy the variety of machines and options of a well-equipped facility.

    You have to figure out which type of person you are. The most important thing is just to do something. (Unless you have specific, Jason Momoa-type goals in mind)



  • Back in the day, I set up a little cluster to run compute jobs. Configured some spare boxes to netboot off the head-node, figured out PBS (dunno what the trendy scheduler is these days), etc. Worked well enough for my use case - a bunch of individually light simulations with a wide array of starting conditions - and I didn’t even have to have HDs for every system.

    These days, with some smart switches, you could probably work up a system to power nodes on/off based on the scheduler demand.