Not if the pool is all of the colors. I haven’t even had all of them before.

https://gatorade.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Gatorade_Thirst_Quencher_Flavors

There are some that I could distinguish from the others.

then why not write modern software like how that was written?

Well, three reasons that come to mind:

First, because it takes more developer time to write efficient software, so some of what developers have done is used new hardware not to get better performance, but cheaper software. If you want really extreme examples, read about the kind of insanity that went into trying to make video games in the first three generations of video game consoles or so, on extremely limited hardware. I’d say that in most cases, this is the dominant factor.

Second, because to a limited degree, the hardware has changed. For example, I was just talking with someone complaining that Counter-Strike 2 didn’t perform well on his system. Most systems today have many CPU cores, and heavyweight video games and some other CPU-intensive software will typically seek to take advantage of those. CS2 apparently only makes much use of one or two cores. Go back to 2005, and the ability to saturate more cores was much less useful.

Third, in some cases, functionality is present that you might not immediately appreciate. For example, when I get a higher-resolution display in 2025, text typically doesn’t become tiny — instead, it becomes sharper. In 2005, most of it was rendered to pixel dimensions. Go back earlier, and most text wasn’t antialiased, and go back further and fonts seen on the screen were mostly just bitmap fonts, not vector. Those jumps generally made text rendering more-compute-expensive, but also made it look nicer. And that’s for something as simple as just drawing “hello world” on the screen.

uncensored

https://lemmyverse.net/communities?nsfw=true

reposts

If you’re browsing “All” instead of “Subscribed” — I recommend building a subscription list of interest — there’s a bot, @bot@lemmit.online that mirrors posts to Reddit to communities on lemmit.online. You can either block the bot or block the instance if you don’t want that.

You can monitor instance downtime at:

https://lestat.org/

I mean, it’s easy to check whether a given instance is using CloudFlare.

$ host lemmy.world|head -n1
lemmy.world has address 104.26.9.209
$ whois 104.26.9.209|grep ^NetName
NetName:        CLOUDFLARENET
$

You can browse anonymously on any instance that permits doing so, so if you just want to browse during an outage, you can do that anywhere.

IMHO, having an account on a second Threadiverse instance isn’t necessarily a terrible idea, not just because of CloudFlare outages, but because instances do have outages for various reasons. I have an account on olio.cafe (PieFed, not on CloudFlare) and on lemmy.today (Lemmy, not on CloudFlare) because I wanted to try out PieFed, and I have fallen back to that to post before if lemmy.today has issues.

That being said, I didn’t intentionally try to avoid CloudFlare. I mean, they’re used by a lot of major sites, and I don’t expect them to have a lot of downtime. I mean, every Threadiverse instance has had downtime for some reason or another. I’ve had Internet outages, as well as electricity outages. Not all that common or usually an extended thing, but they happen.

Took down Framework’s website, which I was using.

So, there are a couple of reasons to use CloudFlare, but I suspect that the reason that a lot of people are doing so is to deal with DDoSes, which are hard to deal with otherwise.

Like, my home instance, lemmy.today, doesn’t use CloudFlare, so it isn’t affected by a CloudFlare outage. But…it was also knocked offline for a few days about a month back by a DDoS.

A lot of major sites do depend on CloudFlare, so they probably aren’t going to have a horrendous amount of downtime — like, any issue that comes up is probably gonna have a lot of engineers banging on it pretty quickly.

Just keep in mind that the long run trend for storage prices is pretty strongly downwards; that’s a log-scale graph.

One early company that a lot of people were using for hosting Lemmy instances was Hetzner, a German hosting company (which IIRC also has datacenter space somewhere in the US).

I did a search for “Hetzner” and “lemmy.world” and got this:

https://lemmy.world/post/55124/65982

I run lemmy.world on a VPS at Hetzner. They are cheap and good. Storage: I now (after 11 days) have 2GB of images and 2GB of database.

Now, that was two years ago, and early on, and it may or may not be located there now; IIRC, from vague reading of announcements, the lemmy.world people have upgraded their server, and they might be on bare metal instead of a VPS or something now.

Assuming that the server is still with Hetzner, according to the company webpage, they have colo locations in Finland and Germany and cloud locations in Finland, Germany, the US, and Singapore.

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Portal_Creation

One portal at the outflow port of the hydroelectric dam, one portal back up at the top.

In The Cuckoo’s Egg, Cliff Stoll (correctly) identified that a German hacker working for the KGB attacking his systems in Berkeley, California and bouncing through intermediate systems was likely in Europe, based just on a round-trip latency measurement of Kermit responses, which is a lot more primitive than the above:

So I reopened our doors and sure enough, the hacker entered and poked around the system. He found one interesting file, describing new techniques to design integrated circuits. I watched as he fired up Kermit, the universal file-transfer program, to ship our file back to his computer.

The Kermit program doesn’t just copy a file from one computer to another. It constantly checks to make sure there haven’t been any mistakes in transmission. So when the hacker launched our Kermit program, I knew he was starting the same program on his own computer. I didn’t know where the hacker was, but he certainly used a computer, not just a simple terminal. This, in turn, meant that the hacker could save all his sessions on a printout or floppy disk. He didn’t have to keep notes in longhand.

Kermit copies files from one system to another. The two computers must cooperate—one sends a file, and the other receives it. Kermit runs on both computers: one Kermit does the talking, the other Kermit listens.

To make sure it doesn’t make mistakes, the sending Kermit pauses after each line, giving the listener a chance to say, “I got that line OK, go on to the next one.” The sending Kermit waits for that OK, and goes on to send the next line. If there’s a problem, the sending Kermit tries again, until it hears an OK. Much like a phone conversation where one person says “Uh huh” every few phrases. My monitoring post sat between my system’s Kermit and the hacker’s. Well, not exactly in the middle. My printer recorded their dialogue, but was perched at the Berkeley end of a long connection. I watched the hacker’s computer grab our data and respond with acknowledgments.

Suddenly it hit me. It was like sitting next to someone shouting messages across a canyon. The echoes tell you how far the sound traveled. To find the distance to the canyon wall, just multiply the echo delay by half the speed of sound. Simple physics.

Quickly, I called our electronic technicians. Right away, Lloyd Bellknap knew the way to time the echoes. “You just need an oscilloscope. And maybe a counter.” In a minute, he scrounged up an antique oscilloscope from the Middle Ages, built when vacuum tubes were the rage.

But that’s all we needed to see these pulses. Watching the trace, we timed the echoes. Three seconds. Three and a half seconds. Three and a quarter seconds. Three seconds for a round trip? If the signals traveled at the speed of light (not a bad assumption), this meant the hacker was 279,000 miles away. With appropriate pomp, I announced to Lloyd, “From basic physics, I conclude that the hacker lives on the moon.”

Lloyd knew his communications. “I’ll give you three reasons why you’re wrong.”

“OK, I know one of them,” I said. “The hacker’s signals might be traveling through a satellite link. It takes a quarter second for microwaves to travel from earth to the satellite and back.” Communications satellites orbit twenty-three thousand miles over the equator.

“Yeah, that’s one reason,” Lloyd said. “But you’d need twelve satellite hops to account for that three-second delay. What’s the real reason for the delay?”

“Maybe the hacker has a slow computer.”

“Not that slow. Though maybe the hacker has programmed his Kermit to respond slowly. That’s reason two.”

“Aah! I know the third delay. The hacker’s using networks that move his data inside of packets. His packets are constantly being rerouted, assembled, and disassembled. Every time they pass through another node, it slows him down.”

"Exactly. Unless you can count the number of nodes, you can’t tell how far away he is. In other words, ‘You lose.’ " Lloyd yawned and returned to repairing a terminal.

But there was still a way to find the hacker’s distance. After the hacker left, I called a friend in Los Angeles and told him to connect to my computer through AT&T and Tymnet. He started Kermit running, and I timed his echoes. Real short, maybe a tenth of a second.

Another friend, this time in Houston, Texas. His echoes were around 0.15 seconds. Three other people from Baltimore, New York, and Chicago each had echo delays of less than a second.

New York to Berkeley is about two thousand miles. It had a delay of around a second. So a three-second delay means six thousand miles. Give or take a few thousand miles.

Weird. The path to the hacker must be more convoluted than I suspected. I bounced this new evidence off Dave Cleveland. “Suppose the hacker lives in California, calls the East Coast, then connects to Berkeley. That could explain the long delays.”

“The hacker’s not from California,” my guru replied. “I tell you, he just doesn’t know Berkeley Unix.”

“Then he’s using a very slow computer.”

“Not likely, since he’s no slouch at Unix.”

“He’s purposely slowed down his Kermit parameters?”

“Nobody does that—it wastes their time when they transfer files.”

I thought about the meaning of this measurement. My friends’ samples told me how much delay Tymnet and AT&T introduced. Less than a second. Leaving two seconds of delay unaccounted for.

Maybe my method was wrong. Maybe the hacker used a slow computer. Or maybe he was coming through another network beyond the AT&T phone lines. A network I didn’t know about.

Every new piece of data pointed in a different direction. Tymnet had said Oakland. The phone company had said Virginia. His echoes said four thousand miles beyond Virginia.

Poring over the atlas, I remembered Maggie Morley recognizing the hacker’s password. “Jaeger—it’s a German word meaning Hunter.” The answer had been right in front of me, but I’d been blind.

This explained the timing of the acknowledgement echos when the hacker used the Kermit file transfers. I’d measured 6000 miles to the hacker, though I’d never relied much on that figure. I should have. Germany was 5200 miles from Berkeley.

They may also publicly announce it somewhere. I haven’t gone looking. I don’t know if they care about keeping their location private or not.

https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#our-governing-laws

The website and the agreement will be governed by and construed per the laws of the following countries and/or states:

• The Netherlands
• Republic of Finland
• Federal Republic of Germany

They could write whatever they want there, but that’s probably a pretty decent argument that the server’s in Europe.

I imagine that if there’s some way to induce a Lemmy server to perform an outbound connection to a host that one controls and it isn’t specially set up to use a VPN or something, that might expose its IP. Like, might be a way to do that via ActivityPub federation activity or something; I don’t know if that was designed around avoiding that.

IIRC lemmy.dbzer0.com explicitly does try to keep its location private, so I imagine that they’re relying on Lemmy not to expose its location. I don’t know whether @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com has looked hard at whether the Lemmy codebase is set up specifically not to do that, but he might have some familiarity with the topic, since I imagine that it’d be of interest to him.

For anything behind a reverse proxy network like CloudFlare, you could probably do something like measure access times from different CloudFlare points around the world and measure latency; that won’t give an exact address, but it’d probably let you home in on the general location. Probably some way to get a tcpdump of a TCP connection and do some kinda timestamp analysis that measures something like minimum time until an ACK packet is reflected in packet transmission or something like that; that’d cut stuff like connection setup time out of the question.

I remember thinking about how to identify the Jia Tan attacker some time back — that entity was always behind a VPN, as I understand it — and I remember thinking that if one knew that they were malicious before they broke off, one way would be traffic analysis on logged connections. If one has some idea of congestion on various international network links, it’s probably possible to get an effective statistical timestamp by analyzing packet response times on a TCP connection. If the unknown source has correlation in latency with latency on a given network link, then it becomes increasingly-likely that their connection, on the other side of the VPN, is traversing that link. Then walk back up potential network links, looking for statistical latency correlation with them. For smaller network links, could even briefly induce saturation yourself to accelerate generating a statistically-meaningful “latency fingerprint”.

Probably intelligence agencies and security researchers and suchlike that have done research on “piercing the VPN veil” via traffic analysis.

They probably use CloudFlare, though, as do many instances, and that’ll just be where it enters CloudFlare, which will then open a connection to the actual server.

$ whois 104.26.8.209|less

Looks like it.

NetRange:       104.16.0.0 - 104.31.255.255
CIDR:           104.16.0.0/12
NetName:        CLOUDFLARENET
NetHandle:      NET-104-16-0-0-1
Parent:         NET104 (NET-104-0-0-0-0)
NetType:        Direct Allocation
OriginAS:       
Organization:   Cloudflare, Inc. (CLOUD14)

Your home instance, fedia.io, may not know about !amitheasshole@lemmy.world yet.

You need to trigger a community search for the string “!amitheasshole@lemmy.world” on your home instance, which is what makes it “discover” the community.

Fedia.io runs Mbin.

On Lemmy and Piefed, clicking on a link to a community that your home instance doesn’t know about will provide an option to do such a search. I don’t know if Mbin does that. If not, I’d manually do it.

If that doesn’t work, maybe there’s some sort of compatibility problem between current Mbin and current Lemmy.

EDIT: Or could be the client, since you say that you’re using Interstellar.

IRC, though you’ll want to use it over TLS.

XMPP, which someone else listed, is also good if you want a more instant-message-like interface.

It’s archaic. I can’t really imagine a situation in which we’d use “thou” today for formality reasons. If you say “thou” , you’re pretending to be someone from hundreds of years ago or you’re quoting the King James Bible or something that is hundreds of years old.

I think a more-reasonable division between formality and informality would be whether or not one uses a title like “sir” today.

FDR is Franklin D. Roosevelt, a US President in the early 20th century.

CATO is an organization that pushes for small-government, market-oriented policy. They’d be, economically, on the right side of the US political spectrum, whereas typically, an American using the term “liberal” would be talking about a social liberal, somone who would be, economically, on the left side of the US political spectrum, would favor a larger government.

EDIT: Also, to add to the fun, the US uses “political colors” that are something like the opposite of what is the common convention in Europe.

In the US, historically, there was no association between color and political position. However, in the, I believe 2000 election, a convention became adopted, started off some arbitrary choice by a TV station, where the Democrats (the more-left of the Big Two parties) were the “blue” party, and the Republicans (the more-right of the Big Two parties) were the “red” party.

However, in Europe, the convention is for blue to be associated with center-right parties, and red to be associated with left parties.

EDIT2: Yes, 2000 election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states

By 1996, color schemes were relatively mixed, as CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, and The New York Times referred to Democratic states with the color blue and Republican ones as red, while Time and The Washington Post used the opposite scheme.[15][16][17]

In the days after the 2000 election, the outcome of which was unknown for some time after election day, major media outlets began conforming to the same color scheme because the electoral map was continually in view, and conformity made for easy and instant viewer comprehension. On election night that year, there was no coordinated effort to code Democratic states blue and Republican states red; the association gradually emerged. Partly as a result of this eventual and near-universal color-coding, the terms “red states” and “blue states” entered popular use in the weeks after the 2000 presidential election. After the results were final with the Republican George W. Bush winning, journalists stuck with the color scheme, as The Atlantic’s December 2001 cover story by David Brooks entitled, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible”, illustrated.[18][original research?]

You’ll tend to notice that in recent years, Democratic presididential candidates will wear a blue tie, Republicans red. Might also be true below that level; I haven’t looked. And, of course, Trump’s MAGA hat branding is red.

If you’re not from the US, unqualified “liberal” in the US started to refer to “social liberal” back around FDR.

This has been a source of irritation to some; CATO, which I’d call moderate right-libertarian, complains that they should get the title and self-describes as “classic liberal”. Meanwhile, in, say, Germany, an unqualified “liberal” tends to refer to the latter, so you get confusion when people accustomed to the two uses meet.

An unqualified “libertarian” in the US usually refers to right-libertarianism, whereas in some places, it would historically have referred to left-libertarianism; that can also be a source of confusion.

Some parties in Europe on the left side of the spectrum self-describe as “socialist” when they don’t really advocate for socialist policies any more, but rather for things like a larger welfare state. I’d call them “social democratic”; this branding is a legacy of older forms of those parties, when they did advocate for socialist policy.

The fact that small USB battery banks are typically rated in milliamp-hours and large ones are typically rated in watt-hours is just absurd.

i just had to battle a blister pack for like five minutes for ONE tiny pill

I keep a very tiny folding knife (a Spyderco Bug, though I’m sure that there are more-economical and equally functional keychain knives) on my keychain. I take it off if I’m going to fly somewhere. If one has something like that handy, one always has something with them to cut into a blister pack.