On money counting....
Well, $500 and $1000 bill was discontinued in 1969.
So, if you are dealing with those bills, you are dealing with collectors who will be more particular.
So, let's got with $100 bills.
Googling "fastest bill counter" gives the "JetScan iFX i100" which can do 1600 bills per minute.
Which is only 6.25 minutes for $1M in $100 bills.
And it had counterfeit detection.
Honestly, that's a hell of a lot faster than I expected.
If the bank has/uses automated machines for customer deposits.

Anyway, I don't think a bank would accept a $1M deposit.
Any deposits over $10,000 require special processing by the IRS.
Indeed, all financial institutions need to abide by "know your customer" rules.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer

If you are a regular banker than has a $50k salary and you rock up with $1M cash, a bank is going to refuse you. Or at least do a hell of a lot of due-diligence.
It's all about anti-laundering and anti-terrorism these days, and they need to manage the risk of having you as a customer.
If you have a history of big cash deposits, then it might be easier.

Even then, chances are you would have to go to a fairly major branch of a bank for them to be able to accept the risk of holding $1M in cash.

I know modern banking is "Money in, money out. So easy".
But beyond certain thresholds, risk management, government agencies and laws all come into effect. And you can bet your ass, a bank will be wanting to minimise their risk!

That's a huge number.
If 10% of that is profit for various companies, that's a $34 billion industry.
No wonder there is such push back against walkable communities and other such initiatives

For me, it was a notepad.
Not a note app or anything digital.
Just a book to scribble the random thoughts in with a pen.
It lets my mind release it, and if I circle back to it when chilling I can always re-read the notepad and make changes or whatever.

If I find myself super bored when trying to have a few days off, I can collate any notes into more concrete notes.
But always pen on paper, in a notepad.

Next time I'm at work, I can reread my notes and make more objective decisions on their quality/implementation

All it does for me is double down the imposter-syndrome.
I'm not good at this... People keep hiring me, maybe I'm alright at it. Dunning-Kuger is a thing, maybe my "people keep hiring me" ego is making me blind.
And yet, every day I do cool things, I learn new cool things, I redo old things with my new knowledge
But still... I'm just pretending

Fucking hell, that's horrendous

Which is awesome.
I actually have no idea where Blockchain tech could exist.
A reputation could be an excellent example. But if it can be manipulated or gamed, it kinda makes it pointless.
At which point a centralised registry makes sense.
As long as the central registrar can be trusted.
But I don't think Blockchain solves that point of trust.

So, once again, turns out Blockchain tech is pretty useless.

Is this finally an application for a Blockchain?
Some sort of decentralised registry of instance reputation?

Theres some that aren't just money.
There are bots that mirror content from Reddit, just linking to them.
I've seen posts that are 3 or 4 crossposts (between community/instances) deep.

I want content.
I don't want bot content

I think getting to a bank, explaining where 1M in cash came from, getting them to accept the deposit, getting them to count it, then spending it in less than an hour is not feasible.

Because, depositing it in a bank is not enough.
It has to be spent.
So, if you don't spend it then the bank is left without however much disappears... If that makes sense.

And, given that, I don't think investing is a suitable application.
Otherwise, just invest it directly at the bank.
Maybe you don't get inflation-beating interest (ie, if it was your 1M you would be losing money), but after whatever-term you get 1M of clean money to spend.

I'm jealous of the React ecosystem, for sure.

I tried react, and it just didn't click for me.

I like Vue3, it has some awesome features and power as you dig in, and at the same time if it's a simple component it's simple code.
I like that 99% of the time, I don't have to overthink the reactivity and lifecycle of components.
I like that the templating is basically HTML.
And I think the composition API has finally clicked for me, instead of just using it "because I should"

I certainly feel like the protests have gone beyond the API charges.
They were certainly the instigator.
However, the continued protests came around because of Reddits attitude towards the 3rd party developers, internal Reddit memos dismissing the protests, an AMA that doubled down on these disliked opinions, further interviews that lots of redditors think showed that Reddit doesn't understand what they have/are doing (or don't like what Reddit are doing), trying to forcefully reopen subreddits to dismiss users opinion.

It's a culmination of Reddit doing strange things (video streaming, chat, NFTs) that nobody really wants, in order to try and be something they are not, then finally trying to forcefully monetize their users.

I think these further protests show that Reddit isn't as smart as it thinks it is, and has no idea what it is doing, what its market is, what its core users are...

They could have required 3rd party app access to require Reddit Premium, with enterprise access plans for AI companies.
This covers everything.
Allows the same monetisation as 1st party premium subscribers (albeit with less extra user meta data).
Age verification for NSFW API access.
Premium subscription could even be tiered to separate the modest users from the heavy users. And enterprise plans that can pay for the heavy data usage.

In my view, or at least why I left Reddit (and support the strike), it's not about the API charging.
It started as the price. Then it was also about
Lies about the 3rd party apps.
Lies about 3rd party app developers.
The whole process from January (no API changes planned) to announcing there will be a cost, to 6 weeks later giving a 1 month deadline and stating the ridiculous prices.
Back up by years and years of failed promises from Reddit, as well as whatever bullshittery they seem to concentrate on instead (chat, streaming, NFTs)

I remember being in a PS2 outfit (aka clan) when the building was released.
We optimised a base build for 12 people (a squad), ensuring everything was covered by repairs, the sky shield capping the walls.
It was beautiful.
We could build it incredibly quickly, and it could last against a platoon for a decently fun amount of time.

Unfortunately, there was no point in attacking/defending player bases at the time. We would often have to poke an enemy faction to fight us

It's not built by Nazis for Nazis.
Some opinions follow, because nothing is black/white.

I'm pretty sure the Devs are Communists and are very anti-nazi, anti-racist, anti-facist. They have controversial opinions, so I think some people think/say they are Nazis.
You can read more about their opinions here: https://github.com/dessalines/essays and draw your own conclusions.

Additionally, I'm fairly confident that they have separated those beliefs between lemmy.ml and lemmygrad, and I'm fairly confident they do a good job of moderating Lemmy so it doesn't become lemmygrad2.
Some people who post thinking Lemmy is a bastion of free speech may get a shock when they get moderated. And they might equate such moderation to more extreme political beliefs or false equivalents.

As for the Lemmy software, it is Free Open Source Software. It's built for everyone. Literally the most socialist/communist thing there can be - advocating for public ownership.
I think there is enough vested interests in Lemmy, with enough skills behind it, that - if the main software somehow became an issue (unlikely) - that a dominant fork would emerge and everyone could migrate (there would be a period of turmoil during the transition).

If you want my opinion:
You have nothing to worry about.
If you want a right/left/commy/socialist/safe-space/wholesome/techy/nazi community, there will be an instance that tailors towards it.
If you aren't sure, you can pick an instance for now and get a feel of the fediverse, then create a new account on another instance when you find one that suits your sensibilities (I'm sure account migration is in the works).

Unless they are Reddit bots.
There are stories (not sure of their truth) of regional subs being started and filled with reposts translated to the regional language - to the point of idioms not making sense when translated.
There are pictures of a while string of comments from different accounts saying "time to dust off my laptop and use the web version I guess" (or something like that).

I have absolutely no doubt that Reddit is using paid actors or AI actors to generate/push content/interactions

I understand that emails are optional.
However, if a user wants to recover their account, then they should provide an email (even just a burner).
It's not much, but it would add an extra safe-guard against admin abuse.
Mod logs could show "mod changed email for user x" without any PII. Which would add some insight into potential admin abuse if this happened excessively or if a user complained about it happening to them.
I imagine any admin with postgres skills could delete/suppress the modlog entry tho.

Personally, I wouldn't trust any website if I contacted them with an "I've locked myself out" request, and they replied with a new password.

TL;dr: Regardless, I don't actually have any skin in the mod/admin game.
I can understand that it seems useful.
I am still of the opinion that it is an outdated way to do account recovery.

In my opinion "change password" is an outdated way of doing things.
"Send password reset email" would be the correct way.

I have 2 nodes and a raspberry pi as a qdevice.
I can still power off 1 node (so I have 1 node and an rpi) if I want to.
To avoid split brain, if a node can see the qdevice then it is part of the cluster. If it can't, then the node is in a degraded state.
Qdevices are only recommended in some scenarios, which I can't remember off the top of my head.

With 2 nodes, you can't set up CEPH cluster (well, I don't think you can).
But you can set up High Availability, and use ZFS snapshot replication on a 5 minute interval (so, if your VMs host goes down, the other host can start it with a potentially outdated snapshot).

This worked for my project as I could have a few stateless services that could bounce between nodes, and I had a postgres VM with streaming replication (postgres not ZFS) and failover. Which lead to a decently fault tolerant setup.

The protocols Lemmy uses rely on additional instances and federation to scale horizontally.
That's kind of the point of the fediverse. There shouldn't be big instances.

The issue is a lot of users want to be on the busy instances.
Whilst it shouldn't matter which instance you actually join and use, some instances might have community/moderation that aligns with how you want to experience Lemmy (eg beehaw)

Lemmy hasn't been developed for a single instance to scale horizontally. Throwing bigger hardware at it is the correct way to implement scaling when a project is this size/maturity.

Having stateless middleware, running caches, sharding databases, database replication, read/write load balancing on databases, having the actual front end load balancers....
It's a difficult problem. Companies have entire teams that work on this, and it requires a lot of skill and attention to keep all the parts working correctly, and ensure things are fault tolerant.
Most instances are run by volunteers and community funding.

Like I said, hopefully Lemmy will move to a format that allows for easier scaling. But it's a lot of work.
There is probably more value in squashing bugs, improving user experience, adding some well-needed features, and any optimizations they find along the way - than there is in rebuilding the stack to support horizontal scaling.

Remember, Lemmy has a core team of 2 developers.
And this massive influx of users became apparent at the start of this month.
It's going to take some time, and things will be rough round the edges.

Unfortunately, a Lemmy instance currently scales vertically.

To stop an instance from being overloaded, it needs more CPU/RAM on a single server.

Lemmy's horizontal scaling comes from more instances federating with eachother. Which is why there are a lot of comments and posts about "please pick a quiet instance".

I know people are trying to get a single instance to work across multiple servers, which would allow for load balancing and dynamic scaling.
However, at the scale Lemmy is currently operating at: throwing bigger hardware at it is easier than getting Lemmy to autoscale and use more hardware.
I imagine in a month or so, solutions will be developed to make horizontal scaling more accessible.