I blow hot air.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • I agree, 401ks are stupid and were invented as more of a tax loophole for the wealthy than as an every-man’s retirement fund. But they’re cheaper for business so that’s what we’re stuck with.

    That’s not what I was talking about at all, though. I was just pointing out that if you have enough money to save for retirement, there are ways to relatively easily invest and grow your money while still mitigating risk and staying mostly hands-off.

    Fun fact about pensions. At their height, only about 45% of private-sector workers actually had a pension. Having one was undoubtedly better, on average, than having a 401k today. But they weren’t the utopian retirement solution that we (including myself) like to pretend they were. A majority of the population didn’t benefit from them at all, and the less-fortunate were essentially in the same or worse spot as they’re in today.


  • There are targeted retirement funds that target a retirement year and slowly transition from stocks into bonds/less risky positions as that date approaches. Those are generally a better idea for retirement savings than broader market funds for the reason you described.

    And it’s not like retirement immediately liquidates your 401k. There’s just some minimum that you need to take out per year which isn’t very high. Roth IRA’s don’t have a minimum distrust requirement until after the death of the owner.






  • If you’re worried about unauthorized access to the physical machine, you could always just do disk-level encryption instead or store the app’s data in something like a Veracrypt virtual disk. They’d still be able to access the data if they go through your OS/user, but wouldn’t pick anything up by accessing the drive directly.

    Nothing short of E2EE can truly stop someone from accessing your data if they have physical access to the server, but disk encryption would require a targeted attack to break, and no host is wasting their time targeting your meme server. I seriously doubt they’d access it even if you had no encryption at all, since if they get caught doing that they’d get in a heap of legal trouble and lose a ton of business.



  • All these answers read like they’re written for comp sci students rather than a general audience. Let me give an ELI5 (more like ELI12) a shot.

    Ports are just numbers. They aren’t physical pathways or doors or windows or anything like that. A better analogy is a street address, like an apartment number. Your IP address identifies your computer (apartment building), and the port identifies the program on the computer (the apartment). When a program needs to talk to the internet, which is very similar to sending a letter, it hands a packet/letter to your computer and your computer assigns the program a port number. It then puts that number on the return address of the letter so that the recipient knows where to send the response. The computer remembers that port number is associated with that program, so when it gets an incoming letter with that number, it gives it to the program. After the program is done talking to the internet, the computer frees the port up to be used by another program.

    Ports are “closed” when there is no program associated with them. Any incoming letters are ignored because they have nowhere to go.

    Ports are “open” when they’re associated with a program. This happens automatically when programs send outgoing letters, or you can manually open (or “forward”) ports by telling your computer/router what the port should be associated with and that it shouldn’t use the port for something else.

    ELI5 over.

    The internet is networks on top of networks on top of networks, so your computer will have an IP and assign a port number, then your router will remember that and change the address on the letter to its own IP with a different port number, then that process repeats a few more times until eventually it reaches its destination. You don’t have to deal much with your computer’s internal network, but occasionally you have to deal with your router’s by opening/forwarding a port because it has a NAT that has to deal with all of the devices on your network. Forwarding the port just tells your router to always send incoming letters with that port number to a specific device.






  • Vent@lemm.eetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlHow do you ask for help?
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    1 year ago

    There was a study a few years ago that found that asking someone for help actually strengthens your relationship and makes them like you more. IIRC it was on workplace interactions. The basic idea being that if you ask someone for help, it shows you have trust and confidence in them and they get to feel useful, which people generally enjoy.

    Obviously that’s going to depend on the type of help. If I need help moving or with some mental issue, that’s going to be a more appreciated ask than if I ask for money. Not that asking for money is always a bad thing, so long as it’s a legitimate need and doesn’t become a habit I think most people would be happy to help out a friend low on cash. It’s better to get financial help from friends and family than from some predatory payday loan that is designed to keep you in debt for the rest of your life.