I signed onto Reddit six years ago because that was where I could discuss stuff I liked intelligently. Due to social awkwardness and poor conversational skills, I feel like I contribute nothing to the conversation anywhere, on forums or IRL. I even signed up for Stack Exchange, Hacker News, and Ars Techinca for discussion, but they all look like you need a Ph.D. to contribute anything meaningful?

Am I alone on this? How can I be a productive part of the conversation?

What's it like over there right now? IIRC the blackout was supposed to finish today. I've decided to quit reddit unless something changes, so I want to do my best not to visit the site, but I am very curious about what the website and culture has been like for the past few days. And now that the initial blackout is 'over', how many subreddits have started to emerge again? Are people coming back now and acting like they've won? Has reddit responded to the blackout at all?

As the title says, could someone explain the Fediverse or this whole concept of federated instances?

I looked at Mastodon a few months back and recently at Lemmy and read a few articles and I still don't quite get it. I joined a Lemmy instance but didn't see any content from other instances. (God this makes me feel old)

To me, a non techie (who is reasonably computer literate), the problem with all these federation based platforms is that they don't seem immediately intuitive to laypeople.

It also seems to have the problem of individual instances being quite parochial in that there seem to be a lot of niche instances but few that are necessarily generic for an international audience, or conversely instances that are too vague ('this is an instance for humans') whereas with something like Reddit you just sign up and post in subs just like vbulletin based forums and subforums back in the day. Tildes is essentially similar in principle.

Please feel free to tell me, if I'm an old man yelling at the Cloud.

To be clear, Matrix as in the communication protocol. Curious if anyone has any recommendations for communities there. Personally I am mostly in the NixOS space, since that is the official chat for issues and questions.

I have never been a leader at a big company (or anywhere...), and honestly I am pretty ignorant when it comes to money and business, so maybe that's why I feel this way but... isn't this what for-profit companies ultimately are supposed to do? (make money?)

Reddit is blowing up today over his internal memo, and that's when I kind of started to feel bad for him. Wouldn't an internal memo be expected at a time right now? Wouldn't it say that kind of stuff? I'm just curious but for others, if you were in his position, what would you do right now? Is there a better move to be made? What should he have said in that memo? I kind of feel bad for him. At the end of the day he helped create reddit, and it must kind of suck to watch your own project devolve and people come to hate you.

The thing about this API decision that got to me is how abrupt it was - 30 days or thereabout. That doesn't seem like very long. But aren't these decisions usually made by multiple people? (not just a CEO?) I also think it sucks that reddit app hasn't been made accessible to vision impaired folks. So maybe he sucks as a leader, but is that a reason to hate him?

I'd love to better understand.

So, I’m moving to a new phone and revisiting a lot of accounts, apps, and settings.

When it comes to things like location history or ad personalization or whatever, is it even worthwhile to turn it off? Am I really supposed to believe that because I have some toggle off that Google suddenly doesn’t track where I drive on Maps? Like if they are going to be tracking me, which I assume they are, I might as well be able to see it to rather than have it exist in the aether somewhere where the info is attributed to me but not viewable in the UI.

Even with ads, I know shadow profiles are a thing, and that they definitely have data beyond what they show in the UI, so might as well opt in there too right? Plus, the non-targeted ads I get are basically porn-tier ads or stuff for gay men.

What should I do here? Move into the woods? Feels like I can’t win.

Hello there
(oh god, I am opening my first thread here - so exciting)

I'd love to ask the people here about local LLMs.
To be honest, I got interested in this topic, but am leaving reddit, where a sub r/locallama exists.
I don't want to interact with that site anymore, so I am taking this here.

My questions, to start us off:

• Models are available on huggingface (among other places), but where do I get the underlying software? I read "oogabooga" somewhere, but honestly, I am lost.
• If I only want to USE a local model, what are the requirements, and how do I judge if I can use something from the values of "4bit / 8 bit" and "30B, 7B"??
• If I get crazy and want to TRAIN a LorA ... what then?
• Good resources / wiki pages, tutorials, etc?

It's been six months since ChatGPT launched and about three months since I started posting these. I think it's getting harder to find new things to post about about AI, but here's another one anyway.

Here's the previous thread.

I immediately installed iPadOS 17 Beta 1. Apart from quirks with saving images from the browser, it's been about as solid as the latest 16.x.x.

Anyone running the other betas as your daily drivers?

I'm also eager to hear from Sonora users. Considering updating my i7 Mac Mini.

Here are my views on this:

• Windows: The Windows attitude towards privacy isn't good with their telemetry and other data collection increasing gradually from 8 to 10 to 11. In fact, most geeks across the support forums think that 7 is probably the safest and most privacy friendly Windows version but MS is doing everything it can to ensure that newer software doesn't support 7 and it just goes into obsolescence.

  The "default" state in which a W10/11 laptop comes today is so privacy unfriendly that it sends all kinds of data like contacts, location, etc. to Microsoft and their "trusted partners". You can't turn off this data unless you've visited power user forums and know exactly where to find those settings, and basic telemetry still won't be disabled of course.

  As ironic and unintuitive as it sounds, Microsoft Windows was probably much better in privacy department during the bad old days of Gates and Ballmer compared to the good "open source and geek friendly" days of Satya Nadella!

• Mac: Apple systems should ideally be privacy friendly considering the amount of premium they charge to their products and services. But how well does that work in practice? I've never used an Apple product but those who use them seem to have the impression that they're no good in this department compared to others.
  Logic tells me that a more capitalist devil should be no different than the less capitalist one, they're probably all the same when it comes to throwing user's privacy in the bin!

• Linux: Linux used to be the holy grail of users who cared about privacy many years ago but does that still hold good today? Ubuntu was also in some data collection controversy or other many times in past, but how are the state of things today? And what about the derivative distros, are they good too?

Let's share our favourite mono fonts and maybe we can find some new favourites. I used to use whatever was inbuilt with Visual Studio and JetBrains' IDEs, but since JetBrains released their JetBrains Mono, I've started using it everywhere. I override the monospace font on every website with it. Never was a huge fan of Fira Code, Consolas, or the other popular ones. Personal taste. But somethings about JB Mono just speaks to me!

Are you a ligatures person? Personally, I love them :)

It's pretty clear that those times are over, but I'm sure many of us remember the heydays of VC funded tech extravagance. These are the ones that come to my mind, hoping to hear others experience.

• At one point, uberpool was cheaper than the cost of public transport in the city.
• No sales tax on Amazon!
• So many promotions and code to get you to join in on their platform. This was also before they try to get you to subscribe to their monthly plans.

I recently decided to start using RSS to curate interesting news as I feel I am being overloaded with Clickbait from all directions when I am looking for the latest news or updates on Google. I'm looking for some good sources for Tech or Programming Articles or news that aren’t just clickbait and have good informative content.

I currently have BBC News, Krebs On Security and Ars Technica, does anyone have any other website suggestions which are worth subscribing to?

Ars Technica Information Technology - https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/technology-lab
Ars Technica - Gaming & Entertainment - https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/gaming
BBC Tech - http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/technology/rss.xml
Krebs On Security - https://krebsonsecurity.com/feed/

Hey everyone. I’m a Computer Science major who feels very behind. I don’t have any substantial projects to put on my resume. I look at basic open source stuff and can’t understand it.

I’m currently attending WGU online, but also work full time so I don’t have a ton of free time to learn or work on side projects.

Anyone have advice for a guy in my scenario? I ended up dropping out of college a couple times during COVID and now I’m just trying to get back on the right path.

The language I know best is Java, but I’ve been trying to learn C++ and web development as well. Applied for internships but no luck so far, I think I need to make some better projects.