Ah HP printer drivers, my favorite form of self-inflicted malware.

My favorite HP sucks story happened many a year ago. The boss’s shitty HP multi-function POS died, and we got him a nice Brother instead, and then went to uninstall the drivers.

Somehow, and the reason for this is totally unknown to anyone other than HP engineers, the driver ‘uninstaller’ decided that today’s hilarity would be that it was going to uninstall… everything.

After about 15 minutes of the drive churning away I got concerned, rebooted it, and found that nearly 75% of everything on it had been deleted by the uninstaller.

No fucking idea, but that was a fun thing to explain and then fix.

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Even following ‘beginner’ tutorials is hit or miss

It’s gotten worse than it even used to be, because more than half the “tutorials” I’ve run across are clearly AI written and basically flat out wrong.

Of course, they’re ALSO the “answers” that get pushed by Bing/Google so even if you run into someone who is willing to follow documentation, they’re going to get served worthless slop.

One thing I will give arch is that if there’s a wiki entry for something, it’s at least written by a human and is actually accurate which is more than I’ve found ANYWHERE else.

And more fun, lots of laptops have really goofy routing. I’ve got one where the DP alt mode on the USB-C ports are on the dGPU, but the HDMI ports are on the iGPU. And the internal panel is on the iGPU unless you switch it to be on the dGPU because yay mux.

Why? I don’t know. Too much meth while laying the board out or something I guess.

Everything is temporary, except for that 25 year old system that’s keeping everything running and can’t be replaced because nobody knows how or why it works just that if you touch it everything falls over.

I don’t recall exactly, but it’s more like days rather than hours. At some point the instances will mark you as down, and then stop trying to federate with you, so there’s a hard limit but it’s fairly generous and not especially aggressive.

I found the PR for the queue, and it mentions retries but doesn’t seem to mention exact timing, at least to my quick read. ( https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3605 )

Yeah. There’s a retry queue, which does expire after a certain time period, but for a short outage that’s how it’d work.

You keep cloning and configuring shit on a Win10 instance because you can’t find the key?

That’s silly and you should just stop doing that: https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts

There you go! One less problem to deal with.

completely disable Windows Update

Since this is a work thing, I’d maybe check with whomever is in charge of your shit that you’re not violating any compliance shit by turning updates off.

If you’re not, cool, then whatever, but compliance bullshit is awful and sucks and it’s better if you’re not the reason you fail an audit.

Edit: for the OP, not you.

See, IBM (with OS/2) and Microsoft (with Windows 2.x and 3.x) were cooperating initially.

Right-ish, but I’d say there was actually a simpler problem than the one you laid out.

The immediate and obvious thing that killed OS/2 wasn’t the compatibility layer, it was driven by IBM not having any drivers for any hardware that was not sold by IBM, and Windows having (relatively) broad support for everything anyone was likely to actually have.

Worse, IBM pushed for support for features that IBM hardware support didn’t support to be killed, so you ended up with a Windows that supported your hardware, the features you wanted, and ran on cheaper hardware fighting it out with an OS/2 that did none of that.

IBM essentially decided to, well, be IBM and committed suicide in the market, and didn’t really address a lot of the stupid crap until Warp 3, at which point it didn’t matter and was years too late, and Windows 95 came swooping in shortly thereafter and that was the end of any real competition on the desktop OS scene for quite a while.

Ignore and move on.

Literally the solution to every single ‘THERE IS SOMETHING I DISLIKE ABOUT LEMMY AND THUS YOU SHOULD ALL ACCOMODATE ME!’ post.

If you don’t like someone’s shit, block them. There’s not a limit of how many people who make you upset you can block, so go hog wild.

Hey Elon! Do it! You want to! You have the money!

Buy Reddit!

(It’d be the funniest damn thing.)

Question: how is LinkedIn useful to you?

For me it’s just a non-stop swarm of recruiters from India who want me to kindly listen to their offer of a job that pays less than I’d make picking up garbage, utter sociopaths dredging up some psychotic hustle culture nonsense, and previous people I’ve worked with/for asking for favors, which of course means free.

Is it somehow more useful for an actual business?

I wouldn’t argue with the dude; he’s got a clear case of bad-faith-itis. What you did was bad, so you shouldn’t have done it, but no I won’t tell you how to fix it.

The absolute best you could have done is cross-posted to a Mastodon/Bluesky/whatever account as well, but you can’t just always go around yanking the rug out underneath communities especially if you’re in a position where it’s not just lazy shitposting and worthless commentary.

…that said, you have moved anything you can to being posted somewhere in tandem riiiiiiight?

Huh.

Usually when I run into that I just bounce the Portainer container and it sorts shit out.

Maybe that’s actually causing the tokens to rotate/expire and thus doing the same shit?

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One thing I ran into, though it was a while ago, was that disk caching being on would trash performance for writes on removable media for me.

The issue ended up being that the kernel would keep flushing the cache to disk, and while it was doing that none of your transfers are happening. So, it’d end up doubling or more the copy time because the write cache wasn’t actually helping removable drives.

It might be worth remounting without any caching, if it’s on, and seeing if that fixes the mess.

But, as I said, this has been a few years, so that may no longer be actively the case.

I’d argue perhaps the opposite: if you want full moderation and admin freedom, running it on your own instance is the only way to do it.

If you run it on someone else’s server, you’re subject to someone else’s rules and whims.

Granted, I have zero reason to think the admins of any of those listed instances would do anything objectionable, but that’s today: who knows what happens six months or a year or two years from now.

Though, as soon as you start adding stuff to your personal instance, you’re biting off more maintenance and babysitting since you assumably want your stuff to be up 100% of the time to serve your communities, so that’s certainly something to consider.

Stuttering and texture pop-in makes me immediately wonder if your SSD shit itself.

Maybe see if there’s anything in the system logs and/or SMART data that indicates that might be a problem?

Cloudflare tunnels are the thing you’re looking for, if you’re not opposed to cloudflare.

You run the daemon on your local system, it connects to cloudflare, and presto, you’ve bypassed this entire mess.