My constant shitposting is working!

2 months ago, I decided to post one thing a day, every day, to our !cyberpunk community in an attempt to keep it active and potentially grow the community. I don't know what type of content people like to see, so I tried posting a mix of: anime recommendations, movie recommendations, book recommendations, tv show recommendations, news, discussion topics, etc. But I also made sure not to have the same post "type" back-to-back to make sure I wasn't making too many movie recommendations or anime recommendations. I seriously gave it too much thought. I just didn't want it to devolve into random artwork like r/cyberpunk on reddit. Cyberpunk artwork is fine but I want it to be more about the themes than the aesthetic.

And now, 2 months later, we're at 1k subscribers! I consider that a huge accomplishment. My ultimate goal though is to have more subscribers than the cyberpunk community at https://lemmy.ml/c/cyberpunk. They're at 1.16k subscribers

Are you afraid? What is it you fear? The end of your trivial existence?

When the history of my glory is written, your species shall only be a footnote to my magnificence.

https://youtu.be/qO0uHkUx8eE?t=336

Lemmy 0.18.4 has been released. You can see the official release announcement here. This one's a small one so should go smoothly. As usual, we'll update at 04:00 UTC tonight.

Edit: Completed successfully as expected. Unfortunately we did have a significant downtime just before the update due to the serve running out of memory. This was partially an odd coincidence and partly my fault. I had noticed that we were getting very near being out of memory, but expected the server would hold out until we rebooted during the maintenance window tonight. Unfortunately that didn't happen. Lemmy does gradually eat memory over time and requires periodic restarts, but the frequency seems rather variable. I never had restart the server for the entire time we were running on 0.18.2, while 0.18.3 needed a restart after just a handful of days of operation. Most significantly, this incident revealed that some of my monitoring tool

Lemmy 0.18.3 has been officially released. You can read the official release notes here. The eagle-eyed among you may notice that we are upgrading from 0.18.1 to 0.18.3 and wonder what happened to 0.18.2, and I share you confusion. It never got an official GitHub release so I never upgraded to it.

I plan to update tonight at 2023-07-29 2023-07-30 2023-07-31 04:00 UTC. Expected downtime is slightly longer than usual due to database updates, but should still be less than 10 minutes. As always, downtime may extend to up to an hour if any thing goes wrong.

Edit: There was a glitch with the update and I had to restore from a backup, which took most of the planned hour. I did successfully test the update on a clone of the production VM beforehand so I'm hopeful that simply retrying the upgrade will succeed, but to keep things within my one hour maintenance window I'll hold off on trying again until the same time tomorrow.

Most of the proposals you see center around issues like removing bias, preventing malicious use, protecting personal data, and a bunch of other shit that makes you sound like the devil if you don't do literally anything they ask of you to achieve it.

These major entities like OpenAI and the "Center for AI and Digital Policy" do not give a shit about these things. These things are ways to establish a foot in the door to ensure that only major corporate providers can work in this space.

The end result of this is a world where the rich dominate AI to a far greater extent than they would otherwise.

AI can be regulated, but handing power to unaccountable corporate boards is not the answer. Corporations are a type of AI all their own, and if you're worried about computerized AI taking over the world you should be a hundred times more concerned about the gestalt consciousnesses that are corporate entities gaining exclusive dominance in this sphere. They are the slow moving, mechanistic, an

I'm really loving Aliens: Dark Descent. It turns out gear you set up is persistent between missions, so I can spend an hour setting up minefields and listening posts on my first run at a location then come back for another mission later and be like Navy SEALs sneaking past all the enemies and luring them into prepared killing fields taking no losses.

Find a sentry gun in a mission? You can pick it up and take it with you, back to your base even. Or forget it there, come back on another mission, remember it and pick it up! Even corpses are persistent between missions, so if you forget alien samples you wanna take you can get those too on latter missions. (So far I have had to visit each location twice but in theory I'm allowed to go back more)

I also have to deal with treating marines wounds, their exhaustion levels, and their combat fatigue (PTSD) all as individual unique problems. You can't just level up one squad of marines and use them for every mission because they have to sleep

Hi, @[email protected]!

Have you considered updating to 0.18.2? In the release notes they say that should prevent any not yet discovered XSS (not just the custom emojis), which I think is quite important.

We are slowly accumulating both image and database data and our current disk will likely be full within the next several days. Fortunately I can increase the size of the disk by another 30GB without incurring any additional cost, which should be enough to at least another month of data. Unfortunately Linode doesn't let me increase the size while the server is online so there will be a brief downtime while I shut down the server and reallocate the disk.

Edit: Completed with just over 1.5 minutes of downtime.

TLDR: It talks about Google and Microsoft having a direct involvement in ending the growth of federated protocols in the past. It goes on to imply that Meta Threads is in line to kill networks like Mastodon and Lemmy.

I just wanted to inform you all that some other instances got hacked during the night.

It appears to have something to do with a vulnerability regarding costume emojis, but I am not sure about the exact details as I am not that knowledge about coding.

I don't know if this instances is affected by this, but even some that are not have taken preventive measurements and loged every one out to renew the login token. As the hack stole it, and used it to spread harmful and disturbing posts.

https://lemmy.world/post/1290412

Lemmy 0.18.1 has been officially released. You can read the official release notes here.

I plan to update tonight at 2023-07-07 04:00 UTC. Expected downtime is just a couple of minutes, but may extend to up to an hour if any thing goes wrong.

Edit: After a slight delay unrelated to the server, the update was uneventful and looks like it was successful.

The pace of censorship on Reddit seems to have increased since they booted a lot of admins and replaced them with even bigger pawns after the whole protest thing.

It's grown impossible to post anything that even slightly breaks the mold. One of like 60 random people with the dumbest interpretation of everything they read and a 10 ton inferiority complex decides they don't like the post for some reason and deletes it because they're the digital equivalent of those inbred fucks who sit on HOAs yelling at their neighbor for having the wrong kind of flowers planted or parking their truck on their own yard.

I really appreciate just being able to go to another community or, god forbid, set up my own and not have to answer to 5 separate chains of command who all have 5 respectively proportioned sticks of increasing girth and length carefully cemented into their assholes.

It looks like this instance has exceeded 100 users so I'm curious what your experience has been managing it so far.

Is being a mod exhausting yet or are you able to keep up? How big would you want this instance to grow? Who are you using to host it (or is it self-hosted)? How much are you paying to keep it up and running?

The guys over at corteximplant.com created a cyberpunk Lemmy instance at dataterm.digital but then got so irritated with the whole thing he deleted the instance without any warning. I certainly don't blame him for doing it but now I'm wary of starting another cyberpunk community on another small Lemmy instance so I wanted to get your thoughts. I'm thinking about posting random nonsense to the !cyberpunk community here in an attempt to make it more active but I'm not sure if that's something you'd actually want.

Anyway, thanks for creating this instance!

Hi Everyone,

This is just a quick FYI that I will be upgrading the instance to the Lemmy 0.18.0 release today at 21:00 (9PM) Pacific time, AKA 2023-06-23 04:00 UTC. Expected downtime is just a few minutes, but may extend up to an hour if anything does not go to plan. You can read the full release announcement here.

Edit: As of 21:03, everything appears to have gone as planned and we are now running 0.18!

I thought it could be fun trying to make one of those AI generated QR codes for Villa Straylight, this was a pretty good result. Id like to see any others people make.

I caught this fast enough that I wonder if anyone even noticed, but this is the first unplanned downtime for the instance I'll go ahead and report on it anyway.

The instance has been consistently running at approximately 75-80% memory usage since it started. This morning (in my local time zone) the server experienced a memory spike. This spike caused the kernel to start swapping excessively, which in turn spiked CPU usage to 100%.

Timeline of Events

• 2023-06-14 17:11 UTC: Memory hit 100%, caused excessive swapping and 100% CPU usage
• 2023-06-14 17:14 UTC: Issue was noticed thanks to monitoring tools
• 2023-06-14 17:15 UTC: Shut down node, initiated node resize to double RAM and CPU
• 2023-06-14 17:17 UTC: Server back up and running

Evaluation

I was already a little concerned about running the server so close to the edge of memory. This event proves that it's not tenable. With the new node we now have 4GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores compared to 2GB and 1 core before. We are curren

We're getting a slow but steady stream of signups, but most of you are just lurking. Creating at least one post or comment helps boost our active user count, which in turn gets us higher on the join-lemmy.org website so that more people see our little corner of the Fediverse when deciding where to sign up. I don't expect to ever be one of the major servers of the Lemmiverse, but I do think the more people we have here the more fun it will be.

To that end, please leave a comment here introducing yourself to the server, especially if you have been lurking up till now. Or, just go out there and comment anywhere on Lemmy (it doesn't have to be on our instance) so that you are counted as active!

We're slowly accumulating users here so I figure I will throw this out there. Right now pretty much all of the icons and banners on the instance are AI generated art courtesy of Midjourney. While that has its own appeal given my username, I would be more than happy to replace it with user-submitted improvements (even more AI generated stuff. I'm not all that great at getting what I want out of the AI anyway). In exchange I can offer you a shout out in the community/instance description or something in addition to the karmic benefit of contributing to the instance. :)

I noticed on my new account here that lemmy.one and sh.itjust.works are not accessible. I am curious to when/if federation occurs.

As you all know, Lemmy is a rapidly evolving platform. That goes for those of us administering instances as well as users. As we grow and learn, it is occasionally necessary to restart the Lemmy instance to tweak settings.

Generally speaking, I'm able to set these changes up first, then click the button to restart the server, so the instance is down for less than a minute at a time. I think this is short enough that it's not worth making a post and waiting for an announced time for every restart. When/if I encounter a situation where I need to make more significant changes they will definitely be announced.

I would like to hear whether anyone has noticed and/or is bothered by occasional unannounced downtimes. If there's anyone out there that wants me to announce them first, I'm happy to do so when possible. The only cost is that it slows down my ability to iterate towards the ideal server config.