I’ve been seeing this a lot lately, and honestly, it’s starting to worry me. There’s this weird growing disdain in CS education and among new grads for anything that touches the metal, Assembly, C, even C++…

Whenever these topics come up, they’re usually dismissed as obsolete or unnecessarily hard. I’ve literally had new devs look at me like I’m crazy for even mentioning C, treating it like some radioactive relic that has nothing to offer a modern environment.

I spent a good chunk of my career in firmware, and I can tell you: nothing changed my perspective on software more than actually understanding what’s happening under the hood.

The problem isn’t that everyone needs to be writing Assembly every day. The problem is that without those fundamentals, all these modern high-level abstractions just become magic. It’s like trying to fly a plane without having a clue how aerodynamics work.

I feel like we’re churning out devs who are great at using tools but have no idea how …

I just had a technical interview that consisted of a panel of 3 developers from the team that I would work on if hired. They happened to be Indian with very heavy accents, and I had an extremely hard time understanding them over Zoom. I was pretty frustrated by the halfway point, and I could tell they were to because I had to ask if they could please repeat most of their questions. I tried to listen very intently, but it did nothing for me. I was able to answer their questions when I understood, but we ran out of time due to how many times I had to ask them to repeat themselves or me asking further follow up questions to try and understand what they were asking.

The framing of some of the follow up questions they had for me, were said in a way that sounded like they were making a statement other than asking me a question. Also the question framing in general was very odd and hard to follow. So some awkward silences after they said something, and I didn’t respond because it …

Most people I’ve worked with have been decent, or average, meaning they get the job done, sometimes poorly, but more often than not okayish, some things need to be corrected, but overall it’s something one can work with. They usually improve with time, albeit slowly.

But there’s also a small group of people I genuinely can’t understand how they ever got the job. Very slow, produce only low quality. The personalities vary too, there are those who are trying, but are clearly not cut out for this and just never improve, even after years; then there are those who are just not interested and are basically coasting from day 1. No amount of handholding, pair programming and explanations will help here.

Have you met many of those? I’d say it’s a good 15% of all devs I’ve worked with.

The thing is, of those I know nearly all of them have been let go in the last 2 years and now that I think about it, only one remains! Maybe there’s good things about bad …

It seems like there are becoming less and less jobs for QA. When I say QA, I am not only talking about manually testing software but also automating end to end tests with integrating tests into CI/CD pipelines, SDET kind of stuff. Software developers are increasingly testing more while having to code less, effectively cannibalizing many aspects of QA. There is a lot of skill overlap between QA and developer especially when it comes to the programming side of things, so it’s not much of a leap. Also companies are increasingly adopting the mindset that end users should be testers for better or worse.

What do you guys think in terms of QA dying?

Good times teach only bad lessons: that building software is easy, and that you don’t need to worry about risk. The most valuable lessons are learned in tough times. In that sense, I’ve been “fortunate” to have lived through some hard ones:

• The .NET Web Forms era, which started as a drag-and-drop success like Windows Forms but fell apart in production with the ViewState mess.
• The Adobe Flex wave, where companies went all in on rich browser apps until Apple pulled the plug on Flash in Safari.
• The run toward NoSQL, where teams rushed to use MongoDB everywhere and ditched relational databases, only to hit a wall when the first serious report was asked.
• Installing ERP systems for users who needed only 5% of what those systems were built for, and watching the learning curve kill morale.
• ORM-heavy code that boosted developer productivity but struggled under real read load.
• The microservices trend, where everything became a service, and we paid the distribution tax.
• Kubernetes setups that …

Hi folks,

I built Borg UI, a self-hosted web interface for BorgBackup to manage backups, restores, and scheduling without the CLI.

I had been using BorgBackup via command line for a while to create backups of my Immich library (self-hosted photo management tool). It felt very tedious to continuously monitor and maintain, especially via SSH. Since I already run everything in Docker, I decided to build a web UI to simplify the workflow.

It runs as a Docker container (no config needed) and includes:

• Backups and restores with visual scheduling
• Live progress tracking with notifications
• Archive browsing like regular folders
• Built-in SSH key manager

Four months later, the project has grown to 1,100 stars, and 150k Docker pulls.

Thank you. Genuinely. Every star, issue, and kind word kept this going. ❤️

Over this time I’ve closed 250+ issues, pushed combined test coverage to 64% (backend 58%, frontend 81%), and built out smoke, integration, and unit tests across the stack.

I have 10+ …

Sat down this morning and realized my media server is finally where I want it. It’s at the point where it’s totally automated and essentially hands off. I wanted to organize things in my brain (I’ve failed) and also have a fun example for friends and family on how much goes on behind the scenes for them towatched everything (they understandably still don’t understand, but we had a good chuckle). This is pretty hard to follow but shows how integrated these things can get. I started just over a year ago and this took a lot of work, but it’s nice to be stable and working well. Everything runs in docker on my ugreen dxp4800.

Frontend: Jellyfin (media), seerr (requests)

External access: NPM, unifi IDS/IPS, unifi endpoint vpn for non-public services, unifi ddns to cloudflare

Arrs: radarr, sonarr, prowlarr, bazarr, autobrr, profilarr (dictionarry repo)

Torrents: qbittorrent, qui (cross-seeds across trackers, deleting upgraded torrents after minimum seed time …

Hi. So… a little while back I lost my job and then shortly after had a pretty serious injury that required surgery and months of recovery.

During that time, a family member asked if I could help go through decades worth of old hardware they had lying around and figure out what to keep, what to donate, and what to get rid of. It gave me something to focus on.

What started as simple inventory work slowly turned into something else.

I began trying to revive old machines - figuring out what each one was still capable of, what its “best use” might be, and how far I could realistically push it. Along the way I found a bunch of Raspberry Pis doing nothing, old laptops collecting dust, old hard drives that were either dead, decaying or somehow in perfect working condition despite having 50k+ power-on hours (made sure to stress test them with `badblocks`) and all sorts of forgotten gear that still had some life left in it.

I realized I actually really enjoy working within …

Sorry for a such a depressing title and the post. I just wanted a space to air out my frustrations and my sadness.

First before I get to my depressing part, I want to talk about my journey. I got intrested in self hosting during my undergraduate studies, graduated at 2024 and started this journey, initially I did not want to spend any money on this and used the really old laptop as my NAS for my services and had it accessible only through private network.

Last month i decided to have proper setup, bought a thermal paste, new cmos battery cleaned up my laptop and also bought a domain and setup cloudflare tunnel(I don’t have a static IP).

Things were going good for a month but then issues started to occurred, the system heats to 71C, before fresh paste it heats up to 90C, found the problem to the exhaust fan. Then it was the failing harddisk and ram problems and system generally being extremely slow due to aging hardware.

With the current RAM prices and Storage generally being …

The King’s Day promo is live! Link: https://www.newsdemon.com/kingsday/

1. $0.50 for month one
2. $0.50 for month two
3. $24/year after that

That averages out to $1.79/mo for the first 14 months!

The $24/yr rate is locked with no surprise renewals at $96 or whatever the going rate becomes next year. As long as you stay subscribed, your price stays the same. Have you seen the price of gas? Who needs an increase in the price of Usenet?

What’s included:

• Unlimited speed and access
• 50 SSL connections
• Three NNTP Farm Locations (US-East, US-West, Amsterdam)
• 5,724+ days retention
• Post-quantum encryption (X25519MLKEM768 hybrid key exchange)
• NNTP pipelining

Payment options now include iDEAL and SEPA in addition to credit card, PayPal, and crypto. We haven’t offered iDEAL as a payment option lately, so if you encounter issues, please let us know and our team will iron them out. Specific issues can be sent to u/ND_Guru_Brent if you find any.

“Fit For A King” Sale is back this year, 2nd time it has fallen around the time of the Dutch holiday of King’s Day. Crazy timing. So we will celebrate the birthday of King Willem-Alexander and some other Kings like Elvis and Harold.

It is all very fitting though. If you missed it late last month, with the expansion into South Africa we continue to be the King of Usenet with an actual global usenet network with a server on every (livable) continent. Don’t just settle for a server in Europe and/or USA. Go Local.

The deal includes:

• Access to all 7 of our main server locations around the world, Netnews backbone, 5,500 +/- days retention
• Our independent backbone, bonus backup server access with up to 1 TBs per calendar month; 3,000 +/- days retention. This server is truly independent of the main servers. Do not get caught up with other packages who may bundle and stealthily sell you the same access two or three times.
• Up to 200 connections on the main servers / another 50 on the …

The indexers wiki doesn’t show how far back their nzbs go

https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/indexers/

Are some better than others for that or all more or less the same

Hi all, i signed up for NinjaCentral almost 14 days ago and Ive been trying to upgrade for a few days, but haven’t been able to get a response from them via the website and email.

I now only have 2 days and have no idea where to turn to

Are there any other avenues to reach them?

Thanks in advance

I’ve been using pretty much the same setup for years. Think I’ve been using Geek for a decade at least by now. Lately I’ve been noticing many failed downloads and assumed it was likely my provider, but I tested today and its definitely geek likely being DMCA’d if the files aren’t brand new.

My setup is NZBHydra -> Sonarr/Radarr. Up until I haven’t thought about it much since I only had geek in there. Now I’ve added slug to NZBHydra.

As far as I can tell, Sonarr/Radarr can’t tell which indexer the data is being fed from, it’s all just from Hydra. I’ve set slug at a higher priority than geek in hydra.

1. Does that priority translate at all to Sonarr/Radarr?
2. Should I just disable geek in hydra?
3. Should I spin up a second Hydra instead so I can present each indexer separately to Sonarr/Radarr and then assign priorities that way?

Any tip on the best way to handle things would be appreciated. Thank you.

UPDATE: So I …

[Release] Reclaimerr – Open Source Media Library Cleanup Tool (Plex, Jellyfin, *arr optional)

Hey everyone!

My home server hit near capacity on 100TB of storage and new drives aren’t getting any cheaper… So, I built Reclaimerr, an open source tool to automatically reclaim disk space from your media library using configurable rules (unwatched, low-rated, etc).

I looked at Maintainerr first and it was a big inspiration, but it didn’t fit my setup: I run both Plex and Jellyfin against the same physical library and didn’t want to depend on Sonarr/Radarr. So I built my own.

Key features:

• Not vibe coded!
• Rule based scanning to identify reclaimable media
• Supports Plex and/or Jellyfin (run both against the same physical library)
• *arr (Sonarr/Radarr/Seerr) is fully optional (Reclaimerr works without them)
• Protection system: prevent specific media from ever being flagged for deletion; users can request protection (approved/denied by admin/users with permissions) …

As we’re all well aware, Plex’s auth API has been down for a few hours

No problem, you might think if you have your own local media

You’ve followed the Plex guide to disabling auth on local IPs so that you dont even have to touch the auth server

It works on your laptop, your iPhone, but when you try it on your LG TV? Impossible. Plex wont even load. Even though its in the IP range you excluded in the above step

Edit: Plex’s Auth server is back up

I got into Plex when my kids were small and we started collecting kids content on DVD/Bluray: Thomas, Doc McStuffins, Dora, you name it. And so I wanted to find a way to avoid having to pop in DVDs. It needed to be easy and accessible from multiple TVs. I discovered Plex. I managed a basic setup, nothing like what I’ve read about here. But it got the job done for the last 12 years. We don’t use it as much now but I’ll sometimes catch them going back to it and re-watching something from when they were little. And I realized not only has that content become nostalgic for them, it’s also forever associated with Plex.

I had a Jellyseerr page set up, protected by Authentik with 2FA to protect it. I set my users up with Authentik accounts, but not one ever bothered to log in to request anything, too much hassle for them.

I discovered and set up Pulsarr, just told my users to add stuff to their watchlist and it downloads straight away. If they start adding stuff that’s 20 seasons long, it’ll just download the first one until they watch it. They get a notification in Plex when their content is available. My users love it, complete game changer

[](#p-3878628-plexamp-v4131-1)Plexamp v4.13.1

It’s been a hot minute! But we’re back.

This is a new release for desktop to address a few issues. Lots of other stuff in the pipeline, but wanted to get this out for now because we know it’s been painful for Linux users, and we’re super sorry about that.

[](#p-3878628-fixed-2)Fixed

• Linux: The issue with the audio not working until outputs are toggled.
• Linux: Lots of MPRIS issues.
• Upgrade to Electron 41 (also improves Linux experience).

Source: https://forums.plex.tv/t/221280/85