timewarp

This is an unpopular opinion, and I get why – people crave a scapegoat. CrowdStrike undeniably pushed a faulty update demanding a low-level fix (booting into recovery). However, this incident lays bare the fragility of corporate IT, particularly for companies entrusted with vast amounts of sensitive personal information.

Robust disaster recovery plans, including automated processes to remotely reboot and remediate thousands of machines, aren't revolutionary. They're basic hygiene, especially when considering the potential consequences of a breach. Yet, this incident highlights a systemic failure across many organizations. While CrowdStrike erred, the real culprit is a culture of shortcuts and misplaced priorities within corporate IT.

Too often, companies throw millions at vendor contracts, lured by flashy promises and neglecting the due diligence necessary to ensure those solutions truly fit their needs. This is exacerbated by a corporate culture where CEOs, vice presidents, and managers are often more easily swayed by vendor kickbacks, gifts, and lavish trips than by investing in innovative ideas with measurable outcomes.

This misguided approach not only results in bloated IT budgets but also leaves companies vulnerable to precisely the kind of disruptions caused by the CrowdStrike incident. When decision-makers prioritize personal gain over the long-term health and security of their IT infrastructure, it's ultimately the customers and their data that suffer.

I got 4 20TB drives from Amazon around Black Friday that I want to get setup for network storage. I've got 3 descent Ryzen 5000 series desktops that I was thinking about setting up so that I could build my own mini-Kubernetes cluster, but I don't know if I have enough motivation. I'm pretty OCD so small projects often turn into big projects.

I don't have an ECC motherboard though, so I want to get some input if BTRFS, ZFS, TrueNAS, or some other solution should be relatively safe without it? I guess it is a risk-factor but I haven't had any issues yet (fingers crossed). I've been out of the CNCF space for a while but Rook used to be the way to go for Ceph on Kubernetes. Has there been any new projects worth checking out or should I just do RAID and get it over with? Does Ceph offer the same level of redundancy or performance? The boards have a single M.2 slot so I could add in some SSD caching.

If I go with RAID, should I do RAID 5 or 6? I'm also a bit worried because the drives are all the same so if there is an issue it could hit multiple drives at once, but I plan to try to have an online backup somewhere and if I order more drives I'll balance it out with a different manufacturer.

About a month ago I got a notification that my subscription had been refunded and then another email that my account was terminated:

You are receiving this email because we have identified suspicious activity on your account. In order to protect our platform, we have refunded and canceled your subscription. You will no longer have access to ChatGPT Plus service.

This was after using the service for two months. I emailed and sent them a message almost immediately since I could prove my identity, but they haven't responded back in almost a month. Their customer support appears to be non-existent.

I keep wanting to sign back up, but I'm still pissed about it. I'm guessing it is because I used a virtual card when I signed up and they don't stay active for very long so I have to create a new one for each month of service. Usually I just get a failed payment notification and update my payment info with a new one which pulls from my bank account.

It sucks not being able to use the service though because it was so helpful at helping with programming tasks and Bard isn't nearly as good. Has anyone had any luck getting through to support?

This is my first post and isn't meant to be inflammatory but to provoke thought and ask some serious questions. A lot of people here and on Reddit seem surprised, confused, upset, disoriented, etc. that Reddit made the decisions they did and many people may not like what I have to say.

I empathize with people's frustrations about Reddit, but what the hell did they expect? Did they think that by being loyal to a company that the company would reciprocate loyalty back to them? Did they think that Reddit was a benevolent entity with a history of doing the right thing?

For over 30 years software developers have encountered this issue. Many prominent developers decided that if the source code wasn't free and open to use and change that your product was at the whim of a corporation. They realized that if you couldn't easily sync/backup and take your data with you and host it yourself that you didn't really own it. They even realized the licensing issues and created reusable licenses so that companies using and profiting from their software had to legally publish their changes and make them free as well. It isn't a new concept, but many people suddenly act surprised.

These mods and volunteers of Reddit willingly made a choice to give their time and energy to a company for free and Reddit made it clear that they shouldn't expect anything in return. Was Reddit publicly and transparently developing a federated platform at the same time to make their communities decentralized? Were they making it easy to export your data and create your own independent instances that you host and own yourself?

The truth hurts, but in all honesty these people were nothing more than useful idiots for Reddit. The good news is that if you were one of those useful idiots that you now have a choice.

1. You can pretend Lemmy, Mastodon, etc. are just like Reddit and do nothing different. Maybe the developers will be able to keep up and add new features, or maybe Reddit or some other company will offer them lucrative positions to take their talents elsewhere. Companies like Reddit fear nothing more than open source outpacing them. Governments fear nothing more than communities not being controlled by a centralized authority. The potential of Lemmy and other federated projects will be the target of multi-million dollar campaigns and billionaires will do everything they can to make sure they don't compete or succeed.

2. You can donate your time in creating quality bug reports, issues, feature requests, etc. You can learn what decentralization and federation mean for you and others and become an advocate for Lemmy and other like-minded projects. You can educate your family and friends. If you work for a company, you can take a hard stance on using and implementing open source solutions in your organization. Yes, your company can even have its own internal Lemmy instance! You can learn development skills and submit improvements yourself. You can donate to Lemmy and other open source projects to help other developers work on the project full-time. You can support organizations and non-profits like NLnet that help create and fund Lemmy and other open source projects. You can ask your Lemmy instance admins and moderators what you can do to help ensure their long-term success.

If you choose option 1, don't act surprised next time when things don't pan out. Don't be surprised if the features you think are important aren't implemented. Don't be surprised if the instances can't keep up with the traffic or spam and have to shutdown. Afterall, you'll probably leave anyway for the next E Corp product announcement until you realize you were a useful idiot again.

However, if you choose option 2, imagine what this place can become. Imagine what happens when Reddit truly fails and the communities win. Imagine what happens when Muskrat or Zuckerbot is no longer in charge. Imagine what happens when politicians and companies are no longer in control of your data and tuning algorithms to get you to consume. Imagine what happens when you can take your data and leave and start your own community with your own terms, and choose who you federate with and what you want to see.

Imagine! That is all. Signing off for now.