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Jon Rappoport: Images sent over thousands of miles, well-lit anchors who seem alert to everything of importance taking place in our world, field reporters in far-flung places who pop up and respond instantly to the anchors and deliver close-up accounts of vital events. And the same important faces of government leaders who, day after day, are struggling to improve our destiny against great odds, against intransigent enemies of progress. All this is delivered to us in the space of a few minutes, each night, like clockwork. The television news presents that little show of magic which the people sorely need. The need never dies. It's eternal. The television anchors can be obvious oafs, hucksters, cheap con artists. They can twist the truth, burn it, hide it, step on it, reverse it; it doesn't matter. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


Michael Krieger: The "Russiagate" scam-artist pundits and fake journalists have no shame and many of them already achieved fame and fortune. Moreover, just like the banker crooks of the financial crisis era and the Iraq war WMD peddlers that came before them, these people are more likely to be promoted than face any life-altering consequences for the society damaging lies they spread. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


Lenin: There can be no real and effective "freedom" in a society based on the power of money, in a society in which the masses of working people live in poverty and the handful of rich live like parasites. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


Just sharing a random bit of AI fun because I was bored and had a thought.

AI can incidentally translate language, but that also extends to things like converting victorian english to modern day english and even updating slang and euphamisms (though when asked for slang it'll lay it on a bit thick... but it's fun about it)

So... here's the opening monologue of Romeo & Juliet (and no, it didn't preserve iambic pentameter):

Yo, listen up, peeps! Two big-shot families, equally high and mighty,
Kicking it in fair Verona, where this drama's gonna go down.
An old beef turns into some fresh drama,
And it's so bad it gets everyone dirty.
From the messed-up love lives of these two rival crews,
A pair of star-crossed lovers are gonna do something crazy,
Their messed-up misadventures bring down a whole lotta pain,
And with their deaths, their parents' drama finally stops.
The crazy rollercoaster of their death-marked love,
And the never-ending feud between their folks,
That only ends with their tragic deaths,
Is gonna be the main event on our stage—
If y'all stick around and listen close,
We'll do our best to keep it real for ya!

#AI #RandomFun #Shakespeare



Server Crash


Regarding the downtime that happened last night (while I was trying to sleep which is why it went on for so long).

The short version is a bunch of stuff clogged up the pipes, hung, and just needed a good ol' fashioned restart to fix. I've made some changes to help reduce the chance of that happening again, as always I'm sorry for the trouble.

The longer version is that the php worker processes hung and bogged down the database which brought the whole thing to a screeching halt.

I've changed the limits on those workers so they should have less impact and hopefully not do that again (the downside is that they'll be a little slower on federating updates, but most of the time that shouldn't be noticeable).

I've also taken advantage of the existing downtime to migrate the database over to a second machine with more memory. I originally intended to upgrade the memory of the machine it was on, but unfortunately made the mistake of buying the wrong chips. That plan is still pending. However by migrating it I was able to expand the memory usage significantly which should help performance, the downside is that it's a busier system so the CPU is occasionally busier and can sometimes have a negative performance impact (it's likely negligible but I'm not super confident of that).

In the next week or two I plan to do further hardware upgrades, but with the database migrated already it should be negligible if any downtime.

Once that's done, I'm hoping to implement some high availability options to further reduce downtimes.

in reply to Server News

If you're experiencing particularly slow load times on the network page (the default homepage with your main feed), one thing on your end you can tune is how many items it tries to load at one time.

Go to Settings -> Display -> Content/Layout and you can change "Number of items displayed per page".

Especially as an item includes a post and all of it's comments as one item, this can make a drastic performance difference (on my personal feed 40 takes >30 seconds to load sometimes, but 20 takes < 3 seconds)


in reply to Shiri Bailem

Well, regarding disablities:

I don't know if I should still write something like this nowadays - but so be it.
2-3 years ago I went by train and there was a person in a wheelchair without legs, who turned on everyone else.
I kept out of it, but when I got off I had to inevitably pass him and he he had also for me me a stupid saying in store.
I was really annoyed by him and asked him where he was going? to a dance contest?
*concerned silence*
He started to laugh and said that I was the only one who would take him seriously.
I see him 1-2 times a year at most, but a friendship has grown out of the situation :)

This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Raroun

@Raroun I call that a lucky bit of chemistry. Also, just because someone isn't using saying ableist things doesn't mean they're being ableist... walking lightly around disabled people is also it's own form of ableism that gets really tiring.

And I'm not even sure your joke is what I was talking about since it was very direct and more a specific targeted jab that happened to reference their disability, you didn't even mark it as something shameful but rather just spouted an absurdity.

A prime example would be something like mocking the lisp of a Nazi. Sure, that person is a Nazi... but what about all the non-Nazis that you're also mocking at the same time?



Some updates since it's been a messy few days and I really should have said something sooner.

After a post of mine went viral, server encountered some load issues that kinda cascaded.

I've been gradually reducing the impact through tuning, and have ordered more ram sticks to expand the available ram on the server, as well as give me room on another server to provide redundancy (so it can try to spread the load between boxes).

Ram sticks for the second box will arrive tomorrow, I'll review how I want to approach things from there. No planned downtime for tomorrow, but a planned downtime for next Tuesday with the other ram sticks arrive.

Side note: I've made a custom error page to at least make it less painful, no blaring white, automatic attempts to refresh the page, and my email address to reach out about it if needed.



Planned Outage


Power company is coming to work on the power transformer next Monday (7/17).

I've been notified that the planned outage is for 9am to noon US Central Time.