FBXL Social

When does the "companies that don't make anything good regardless of AI" bubble pop?

I don't think anyone I like calling themselves "we" should, in a "I like you don't come to school tomorrow" sort of way.

[Admin mode] This is a log I was writing as I continued through.

We've finally at long last made it to the new server! (lol when I wrote that line I was so naive)

One thing I learned is that pg_repack will totally fill up your storage if it fails (as mine did during the time period of crashing all the time) -- hundreds of gigabytes of old tables that didn't do anything. It massively increased the time I took to transfer the database for no good reason. For anyone else running an instance, it's probably something to be aware of.

According to documentation, it can be cleaned up with:

\c pleroma
DROP EXTENSION pg_repack CASCADE ;
CREATE EXTENSION pg_repack;

In the case of my database, I got well over 100GB of drive space back immediately for no good reason. In terms of restoring the backup I made, it ended up sucking up huge amounts of time on dead databases.

So I wrote the above 7 hours ago. It turns out the restore isn't a linear process!!

It's a never-ending process.... I understand now why I failed on the previous process, I couldn't have actually completed the steps I'm waiting for -- 12 hours after I started.

It's a substantial upgrade in some ways. The SSD was SATA before, now it's nvme. The original CPU was a Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4570TE CPU @ 2.70GHz with hyperthreading disabled. The social container I have only has 2 of the 4 cores now, but it's on a AMD Ryzen Embedded R1505G with Radeon Vega Gfx

(The rest of the day passed) Holy moly, 20ish hours in?

(Several more hours in) I ended up calling it a failure 24 hours in, and went with a new way of looking at things: Instead, I upgraded the postgresql 15 to postgresql 16 and plan to just move the binary folders over.

This seemed like a great idea for the first hour... But it turns out slow machines are slow, so it took quite a while to migrate. Still probably the right idea.

Eventually the upgrade did finish, then I was able to just tar up the postgresql 16 folder and ftp it over to the new server.

Thankfully, this time it did in fact successfully transfer. I had one problem where it seemed the user didn't get created properly so I set the password and database permissions. Next, I had a quick issue where pleroma was exposing itself to the old IP address, but that was one line change in the config. Finally, after what felt like days without FBXL Social, things were back up.

One thing not related to the technical side of things, there were a few times where I had a thought and went "Oh, that's clever I should post that on -- oh nevermind I sure hope postgresql hurries up!"

So a few points afterwards:

1. Proxmox is really nice. Other than constantly whining about not having a subscription, it's really nice.
2. We're now doing automated backups to network attached storage, which is also really nice.
3. It's all just containers, so if hardware fails, I can fire up the same container on another proxmox machine which is (you guessed it) really nice. (I was going to try for High Availaibilty, but you need
4. Containers are really light, so I'm able to have individual containers for individual services which is (find another description bro) really nice.
5. Migrating large postgresql databases is friggin slow!
6. Using straight pg_dump to create a backup of your database is actually stupid, because my backup was 200GB. Once I used -FC the size went down like 75%.
7. pg_repack helps improve size and performance of postgres databases, but if it fails half way through you end up with potentially huge databases that don't do anything! That was the final straw that stopped me from the original migration. The server took a full day on re-indexing one table (I think activity visibility) and I realized the repack tables would probably be just as long or longer.
8. I should have cleaned up my database before trying to migrate in the first place.

One thing that's really funny -- the server that ran my reverse proxy, my nextcloud, my main website, the fbxl website, and fbxl social all at once now just runs a couple small things, and now it's sitting at 0.04 load. That machine crashing (ostensibly because it couldn't turbo anymore) was the thing that began this whole ordeal, and now it's basically idle.

Next for me will be taking a lot of my now idle or removed boxes and making them into tiny proxmox nodes so I can do all kinds of neat things on the fringes from one centrally managed system. No downtime required since nothing active will go down.

Still 0 fans in my entire empire of dirt.

To be fair, it has to end eventually -- either because it is ended intentionally or because the American empire drowns in debt.

Carney really is looking like Canada's Kamala Harris. Hopefully we get a similar result to America's Kamala Harris.

[admin mode] so remember when I said "should be 2 hours"... 3 days ago?

The lie detector determined that was a lie.

I'll post a postmortem later today, but bottom line is we've finally successfully migrated fbxl social to the new hardware and software platform.

Glad it's done, I don't want to do that again any time soon. Thankfully I shouldn't have to.

[Admin mode] Heading down for a couple hours to try switching servers. Be back soon (hopefully)

I'm afraid that Canadians aren't smart enough to self-govern. If the Liberals win the election that was just called, maybe it's time to just become a US protectorate.

Honestly, I'm a millennial, and even my college wasn't that bad. I did end up with a small amount of debt, but not enough for it to be a huge deal.

Since then, rents have quadrupled, food is on a totally different level, gas has doubled, tuition has doubled, and bills have gone way up too.

We can hate on the boomers, but it was my generation that pushed Obama and Trudeau over the finish line. We pulled out own trigger.

Look, I don't like Donald Trump claiming that we're going to be the 51st state anymore than I like any other American saying that. But you need to understand he's saying it because he knows it's going to piss us off. It's a bargaining tactic.

He's trying to get concessions, and the only way that you're going to get concessions against democratic nations like ours is to rattle the cage. He wanted to get Europe to start paying for defense, and he rattled their cage. He wants us to start doing something about the drugs that flow freely across our border to the extent that our government was able to honestly claim basically no drugs were seized at the border? Well guess what now both main political parties are talking about the border.

He's a ruthless New York businessman. What you're seeing right now is him playing that role. When you see him cozying up to Putin, he actually said it straight up in the one press conference that made headlines with Zelensky -- when you are negotiating with an autocrat, you suck up to the autocrat. When you're negotiating with weak leaders like Trudeau or now Carney, you push them around and bully them. It isn't nice to be on the receiving end, but you have to understand what you're looking at otherwise you're going to go nuts from stress.

The fact of the matter is, the reason he keeps on saying it is because it keeps on getting a reaction. He's a bully. The thing is, you need to realize what kind of bully he is: he's the sort of guy who's going to say things that are absolutely absurd and intended to get under your skin so that you'll give up what he actually wants you to give up.

As for the discussion about most Americans not voting for trump, that is a talking point from the democrats. Now that doesn't mean that it's a bad talking point, The source doesn't mean that it's wrong. What makes it a bad talking point is that it's a really stupid. Trump got more votes in the last election than any president ever other than Joe Biden in 2020. The. Voter turnout in 2024 was greater than any election in decades except for 2020. So if Trump isn't a legitimate president because not enough people voted for him, then that means that Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan weren't legitimate presidents either. In terms of pure votes, it means that no president other than Biden in 2020 was legitimate.

What we're seeing right now is a direct consequence of the way the Liberals dealt with Trump in 2016-2020. He tried playing the standard global diplomacy game, and they tore him to shreds. Now it's 2024, and he's playing his way. If you want to blame someone for all this, it's Trudeau and his Liberals (most of whom are up for election this year)

Neither the Canadian media reporting on the "51st state" rhetoric nor the US media reporting on the tariffs provide this context because it's in their political and business interest for you to be scared and angry.

Aw shit, you've got a point.

Nevermind I'll give her 5 bucks.

(I feel like you could probably get more than 150 for a mirror that'll let you see the hottest chick whenever you ask)

I often find it difficult to engage with people using modernist frameworks, because they tend to operate within absolutes.

The "assumptions" you've presented here are examples of these. You claim I assume that the only way of manifesting value is longevity, and that I assume that all art is propaganda. These are not assumptions I'd ever make because that's not how I think.

Let's look at the sort of way I do think.

The fact that Athenian Democracy lasted less than 200 years doesn't mean that it's not valuable, but it does mean that it wasn't something robust enough to last a long time.

Rather than viewing Athenian democracy as a pure ideological invention, it makes more sense to see it as a waveform: the product of interacting forces, values, myths, and strategic advantages.The waveform of Athenian democracy then was a combination of things, including success at navy combat, the democratizing influence of the iron age, Helenic culture such as the Greek Gods, the Illiad and the Odyssey, even the failure of kings in prior ages. Athena, goddess of strategic war and civic order, stood in contrast to Ares, the embodiment of raw violence and chaos.

If we assume that a modernist liberal democrat would want their democracy to endure, then Athens — which collapsed into oligarchy and was absorbed into Rome's empire — should be cause for reflection.

A modernist might assume that I'm trying to optimize solely for longevity and they'd be wrong. Obviously a form of government must be many things: Just, stable, consistent, effective, and many more things. Longevity is an important part, since if your form of government goes away, its virtues are meaningless.

Although we'd both agree that ancient Athens and ancient Athenian Democracy had some very positive aspects, we must also admit that it also had a lot of horrible things going for it. It was a slave state, and in historical terms, their behaviour was often duplicitous, especially in how they used the Delian League as a pretext for empire. The story of the Delian League is the epitome of bad behaviour -- they got all the surrounding city-states to contribute to this "league", then ultimately used the money to enrich and empower themselves. Of course they would, one of the dangers of democracy is that people will vote to enrich themselves at the expense of others. A lot of those beautiful stone structures were built with money that was essentially extorted from a fund intended for collective defence. The Parthenon, that mighty symbol of Athenian democracy, was built using funds embezzled from the Delian league.

So in my worldview, it's something we should hold, and something we should learn from, but not something we should hold as sacred so we can use it as evidence a thing is perfect and should not be questioned.

To make your original argument in a different method: Zeppelins were one of the first forms of commercial flight. Commercial flight is a net good for society. Zeppelins used hydrogen, so we should be OK with using hydrogen for commercial flight. Of course, this is an absurd and broken piece of logic -- the hydrogen in zeppelins caused the Hindenburg to burst into flames, ending the age of zeppelins. Today we use other forms of commercial flight. Then you can go "Well just because zeppelins blew up doesn't mean commercial flight is bad" but that's not what I was saying, it was that just because an early form of commercial flight used it doesn't mean it's something we should continue to use.

As for your second point, it seems uncharitable -- even insulting -- for you to think I'm assuming all art is propaganda. I used art as propaganda as evidence that we need to be careful about making mass media into something considered sacred and ineffable. As someone who has spent months working on one book and I'm on track to have my next one published within 30 weeks, I'm not (at least not intentionally) producing propaganda, but I do have to accept the reality of creating art is multi-faceted.

It's true that art changes the viewer if it's effective. It's also true that you can be changed in ways that are either good or bad. It's also true that some of the ways art changes you is through pre-epistemic means such as through emotion and gut feeling and instinct. Those are meaningful ways of knowing something, but they're also not perfect which is why we ultimately developed different methods of knowing. It's true that if everyone is seeing the same message, and that message is flawed, then everyone will be exposed to the same flaw and potentially be similarly flawed. All these things and more are true, and they must all be considered at once because none of them stop being true just because they contradict one another.

Some of the truths about art come from postmodernism, which shows that while it's flawed and modernist when used as a totalizing ideology, it is nonetheless a useful tool to understand the world.

Even when art is not created as propaganda, well-produced and ethically intended media can nonetheless act like it in function if it acts to change people's minds en masse in the same way at the same time, and so while I'm not arguing we should get rid of mass media, I'm arguing we have to treat it with care.

Previously I wrote about Fight Club, and pointed out that many people's understanding of the movie ends with Act 1, the creation of fight club and the deconstruction of consumerist culture. In spite of the fact that it's a 3-act story, many people created fight clubs, but forget the middle where project mayham turns into a modernist postmodernism -- deconstruction systematized, industrialized, totalized, with people working shifts, people being interchangable cogs in a machine intended to deconstruct society's grand narratives or objective truths -- or the third act where the main character fights to return to more traditional structures of morality, meaning, and value.

My ultimate assumption isn't anything that you said, and instead that people ought to think for themselves and not allow themselves to become mindless by allowing themselves to be captured by mass media. Even if you do engage with it, you must engage with it carefully and critically, and not assume that just because it was important in Athenian democracy that it's automatically good -- or even that it's automatically bad.

I understand now why these misunderstandings persist. It isn't because people in modern frameworks aren't intelligent or because they're not trying their best, it's because their framework is primitive. The very same simplicity is one of its superpowers, letting groups hyper-focus on one thing to the exclusion of all else, but the modernist hunger for systematized truth and ideological purity, when pushed to extremes, produced totalizing regimes like fascism and communism — and ultimately enabled the mechanized horrors of the Holocaust. (only to have postmodernism become a modernist ideology in turn, totalizing a totally different set of specific points)

Athenian democracy lasted less than 200 years. Whatever it's institutions, it might be worthwhile to scrutinize any of them given it's collapse. During Athenian democracy Socrates was killed by jury, and both plato and Aristotle wrote books predicting the end of democracy, even people living within it didn't seem to think it was a system with a future.

If plays are enough to change the vote of the people, then those in power aren't the people at all -- it's the people funding the plays or writing the plays. This is a problem we see today, and it's still a risk to democracy. Even as a writer writing books I hope to change the world someday, but I recognize this risk myself -- just writing a compelling book or a compelling play doesn't make your ideas correct or wise or just.

A proper Democrat doing his duty would be an independent thinker, balancing different options and making decisions based on their own train of thought rather than media provided by someone else.

This whole with thinking it's important because in the modern age and onwards, mass media has become a tool where bad narratives can infect the populace. One of the most important tools of the fascists in Italy and the national socialists in Germany was the unified power of the media. People outsource their thinking to compelling rhetoric and support genocidal ideologies they'd never consider on their own.

In my case, every book that I put out is structured in such a way to demand the reader come to decisions on their own. For example, in the one I'm working on right now I'm trying to train the reader in the mindset of post metamodern superpositional thinking, which is fundamentally different than the modernist method of trying to sway my readers to a very specific outcome, and instead is about accepting and balancing many true but contradictory things. If we use that method of thinking, then necessarily decision-making is local and I can't tell you what decisions to make because I'm not you and I don't live where you live.

Ngl, a 76 year old dude dying is not particularly shocking. That's significantly higher than the average, particularly for black men.

The west doesn't understand character development like Chinese stories.

Take Lord of the rings: One ring and he didn't even extract the heavenly essence from it to elevate frodo from the heavenly wankers cramp level to the base golden alley behind a 7/11 level!

[admin mode] Gonna try move to the new server again sometime today. If the site is down, that's why. If we don't succeed, we'll roll back again. I found a way to extract the database from the working server that's 8x faster than before, which is quite exciting.

I'll make a post before I start, but it won't be for a few hours, closer to the evening.

I mean, the story looks pretty cut and dry...

Person is in the country on an expired visa, they don't have a new Visa for 5 years, so eventually she gets picked up for not having a Visa.

Really, the exact same thing could have happened under any president. It is a major risk of walking around without doing the right things.

If you had been driving your car without insurance or a license for 5 years, and then the police found you and you got in lots of trouble for driving with a license or insurance, are you going to blame whoever your president or Governor is at the time, or are you going to accept the fact that you were driving around with a license?

I'm sure she's a nice girl, but actions have consequences.

Only under the postmodern framework would there be rules that you just completely ignore and think it's justified.

On a pre epistemological basis, you feel the stress of knowing that you're breaking the rules. Of course, the whole story that's also based on a couple of other I'm gut reactions such as "that's a pretty girl" and "what if it was your newlywed wife?"

On a pre-modern basis, it is just expected that you're going to follow the rules, because truth comes from the rulemakers. There is actually a direct premodern parallel to this, and that is in the word villain. You see, the word villain didn't always mean generic bad guy. It referred to the "people of the land" under feudalism who escaped and moved to a village. In England at least, if you manage to stay in the village for a certain period of time then you would be released from being a person of the land. Although you can empathize with people who are tied to the land under feudalism, there's a reason why the word villain means what it means today.

My understanding of the system might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure being married to a US citizen actually further privileges her in terms of making it easier to do the right thing and get a Visa.

You can make an argument in the postmodern framework to say that the rules were really difficult to follow so you didn't follow them, but the reality is once your Visa has expired it's on you to either get it renewed immediately or leave the country that you are no longer entitled to be in.

And even through a postmodern lens, somebody who comes to America on an education Visa isn't someone with no power. Most people in the west can't afford an American education, so if you come in to have an American education in Wisconsin, you're probably someone of some means, and thus are going to have less excuses for not following the rules.

I will give a little bit of grace to the fact that her visa expired during the covid-19 pandemic, since the entire world got screwed up around that time. Covid did eventually end, and in the same way that I eventually had to go and get a passport in spite of the fact that I couldn't during covid, eventually it becomes someone's duty who is still in the country to either get the documentation in order or leave.

I have to give credit to the man for accepting that while the laws have negatively impacted him here, they do have a good reason to exist and they still apply to him.