I have been thinking about this issue lately because I own some devices that still work as normal, but are really old (one being almost eight, and the other almost seven years old).

The dilemma is the following:

I don’t actually need to upgrade these devices, because newer models don’t have any new features that I have any need of. What my current devices do is all that I need them to do, and that could probably still be true for many more years to come.

In other words, if I get an upgrade now, then I would be wasting money because I could just stick with my current device until it breaks for good and then buy a new one instead.

The problem is that, if I wait until that point, then I’ll be left without a device that I need for everything that I do on a daily basis, until I have been able to save up the money to buy a new one.

This makes me think that I should maintain a “critical device failure” fund, just in case. But even if I do, that doesn’t solve all the problems.

With my smartphone, for example, I use it for online banking authentication. There is no alternative system that I can use where I live, and this system can only be tied to one device at a time. There is always the risk that if I lose my phone, then I would also lose access to my online banking app, which is a service that due to certain circumstances, my wife and I use on a daily basis. We truly depend on it. I would have to quickly buy a new device, and then rush to the bank, to go through a long and gruesome process of getting the permission to install the app on the new phone (true story).

Ironically, I can “transfer” the app between devices, but that feature is useless if I let my smartphone completely die first.

And there are many other similar apps and services that I regularly use, which I can hold on one device only.

I also know, however, that whatever date I choose to upgrade these devices on, will be a mostly arbitrary one. So... shrug

Just to give you a final example: The battery on my smartphone wasn’t doing too well, so after almost six years, I finally got it replaced. It was surprisingly cheap, considering how it breathed new life into my device. Maybe I was just imagining it, but it suddenly seemed to work faster, not to mention that the battery lasts way longer now, obviously. Many people that I know though, would just have tossed this six-year-old device and gotten a new one. For them, a dying battery is synonymous with a dying phone, and at the six year mark, that’s... maybe not a completely unreasonable way of thinking?

But anyway.

How do you device when you upgrade a device?

Looking at the submission rules for Clarkesworld Magazine, I found the following:

Statement on the Use of “AI” writing tools such as ChatGPT

We will not consider any submissions translated, written, developed, or assisted by these tools. Attempting to submit these works may result in being banned from submitting works in the future.

EDIT: I assume that Clarkesworld means a popular, non-technical understanding of AI meaning post-chatGPT LLMs specifically and not a broader definition of AI that is more academic or pertinent the computer science field.

I imagine that other magazines and website have similar rules. As someone who does not write directly in English, that is concerning. I have never translated without assistance in my life. In the past I used both Google Translate and Google Translator Toolkit (which no longer exist).

Of course, no machine translation is perfect, that was only a first pass that I would change, adapt and fix extensively and intensely. In the past I have used the built-in translation feature from Google Docs. However, now that Gemini is integrated in Google Docs, I suspected that it uses AI instead for translation. So I asked Gemini, and it said that it does. I am not sure if Gemini is correct, but, if it doesn't use AI now it probably will in the future.

That poses a problem for me, since, in the event that I wish to submit a story to English speaking magazines or websites, I will have to find a tool that is guaranteed to be dumb. I am sure they exist, but for how long? Will I be forced to translate my stories like a cave men? Is anyone concerned with keeping non-AI translation tools available, relevant, and updated? How can I even be sure that a translation tool does not use AI?

Hello Tildes!

I've been trying out a lot of open-source apps these past few months but I've always hosted them on a VPS. It's been great and educational so far. However, I started considering to host my very own server on-prem so that my data is absolutely physically with me and nowhere else.

With that short intro, I'd like to say I'm in the market for a home server. I can install OS's, docker containers, etc. And that's how I managed to install Jellyfin, Immich, Paperless, Portainer, etc on my VPS right now.

What out-of-the-box miniPC can be good for someone dipping their toes in the home server scene? I feel like I might need the storage to be extendable somehow? And it must be able to stream music and video through Jellyfin.

The choices in YouTube videos are overwhelming that I keep jumping from saying "ooh I'll get that" to "oh wait maybe I'll get that other one".

I also am not very handy in terms of hardware so I would prefer something out-of-the-box (if possible). Maybe a max budget of 500? But around 400 euros would be preferred. (Edit: In EU also, if possible)

Thanks for reading! Hope to hear from you guys!

I expect a good chunk of us are in tech of some sort. I will be at the Snowflake Summit in SFO next week. Anyone else attending? We could coordinate a meet up at a local bar or something if others are around!

AFAIK there are three software options for such thing: Peertube, Owncast and Restreamer. If there's something else, please write, I will appreciate.

Regarding hosting, I'm an almost total noob. What I know is that I don't want big latency and I don't want to pay too much. I don't know what to look for and the best thing would be to have some options to try, e.g. some trial period (a day, a week?) for free/cheap.

I've already tried Owncast and Restreamer on webh.pl VPS . Looking e.g. at requirements it seems that no huge machine is needed. However, latency was enormous, about 30 seconds, on both softwares.

What affects the latency the most and what would you recommend to try? Is VPS enough, should I aim for something else?

[edit]
I stream from Europe, if it changes anything.

I use vim on remote servers or on my machine to edit single files. I, however, use it in a very basic sense, I do not use any vim motions. I enter edit mode, I change what I need to change, exit edit mode and save and quit, that's it.

Recently, I've been looking for alternatives to Visual Studio Code as Microsoft is starting to push Copilot very heavily and while I could use a cleaned up fork, the other concern is with more and more essential extensions becoming closed source and subject to Microsoft's licensing. And vim is a text editor that pops up over and over when I ask for recommendations.

A few days ago I've listened to No Boilerplate's Writing at the Speed of Thought which brings up a point about vim and vim motions being designed around the human body and how "editing by letters is extremely unnatural ... [and] extremely ill-suited to our nature".
That just doesn't sit well with me and may be the reason why vim never fully clicked with me. For context, I've been using computers in some capacity since a very early age, so perhaps the 'unnatural' way I've learned is so ingrained that I just can't make the switch, maybe I just think about things in a way that is more computer-centric just due to that as well.

I am still on my quest to replace VSCode and I would love to make a switch to something that's less attached to a single corporation that can pull the rug from under me at any time. A part of that quest I guess turned out to be trying to understand vim and maybe finally making it click for me, so I turn to the wonderful community of Tildes for help :)

Thank you

I am not a programmer nor am I in IT, but I like to use some of the same tools they use. I use Emacs for writing fiction and I like it a lot. One of the packages I use with Emacs is git-timemachine, which allows me to visualize all the previously commited versions of the file I am currently working on. It serves as a very good and very reliable undo system. All my writing is on a private repo on Github. My usage is so simple and basic, Git/Github only serves as a kind of backup and undo (I know Git is not a backup, so I regularly download my repos as zips and send to OneDrive as an extra. They are also always available offline in the machines work, of course).

The problem is, sometimes I work on different machines, and sometimes on different operating systems on the same machine (via dual boot). So I would like to know if there's an easy way to always "sync" the local mirror I am currently working on with the latest changes (also making sure that all changes are pushed). Essentially, I am asking if I can make Git work like Dropbox or OneDrive by automatically accept changes as long as they are the most recent version of a file. I do not wish to go through diffs approving every single change.

I understand I could use something like rclone for that, but their bisync feature is still very new and not considered reliable. Also, I already use Git and it is good for me. So I would prefer not adding an extra piece to the puzzle.

I am familiar with cron, have an elementary understanding of shell scripts, and can follow instructions.

So, can Git do the job?

Was rifling through a drawer looking for a printer cord and came across my old school calculator. This Sharp Elsimate 201 was my pride and joy. I think I got it in junior high so about 1975. And for a 50 yr old calculator it still does exactly what it should.

Then I realized how much old tech I have that I have an emotional attachment to. I still have a Mac Plus and a Mac SE as well as an Imagewriter dot matrix printer and about a hundred 3.5" floppies sitting in a closet. I loved the first time I tried a Mac after the frustration of using DOS on a 286 PC. It just seemed like light years of improvement to actually use a mouse and playing with MacPaint was magical. I sometimes got chided for being a Mac evangelist at university and many people thought Apple would be crushed by Microsoft - looks like they're doing just fine.

My Marantz stereo is about the same vintage, mid 70s, and the Yamaha speakers still sound as good as the first day I fired them up. That stereo was built back when 22 watts per side was actual output and its loud enough to shake the walls. None of this "300 watts" fakery that came along when boom boxes became a thing. Plenty of distortion and zero fidelity is easy, quality sound takes quality engineering.

What have you got laying around that you just dont want to get rid of?

Hi, all.

I'd like to ask for a lazy recommendation. I last bought a KVM maybe 6-9 months ago and I returned it because of audio interference as well as low refresh rates on one operating system.

Ideally, I'd like the KVM to support:

• 1-2 4k monitors over either HDMI or USB-C at a minimum of 120Hz
• 1-2 USB-C peripheral ports
• 1-2 USB-A peripheral ports (presumably we're still at 3.1?)
• audio via 3.5mm
• RJ-45 @ 100 or 1000 Mbps
• a physical button to swap between inputs

For the most part we're talking about swapping between a MacBook Pro and a Windows Desktop. I would love if I could also include my Mac Studio in.the cycle of devices but I absolutely understand If I can only have two.

I hope you're all alright with me flippantly asking for a recommendation! I'm not a KVM expert. I spend my time elsewhere. I was really annoyed at the low performance of the previous KVM I bought. I hope there are folks on Tildes that can rave and rant about their KVM preferences. Thanks folks!

+1 for slashdot, mainly because of intelligent topics and conversations about science, technology, scifi, games and all that fun stuff. Community participation and quality discourse made it interesting.

Everything on popular social media "out there" now is about click bait and sound bites, even comments and replies. Posts (and communities) are reduced to nothing more than grabbing a few seconds of attention.

I use Android and I don't like and I suspect I would like ios about that much. The sw practices and manufacturer behavior is not what I would call exemplary. Compared to the desktop the mobile os landscape is locked down without much choice.

I have personal experience only with Pinephone released around 2020 which I used for about a year with postmarketOS for most of that time. I finally replaced it due it low battery endurance and call reliability with sleep due to inflexible requirements on that front but I actually liked it more that the Samsung I use now.

Other than that I only know about Librem 5 released around that time. Are there any recent examples of phone hardware that is meant to run a linux distro and what do you think about the future of that?

Opinion

Video links go unwatched.

This gets even more true the longer the videos are.

I think it helps to post a 2-3 line summary of what people can expect to find in the video.

There is just too much content in the Internet for many people to watch a video, just because it is posted, even if it has an interesting title.

I've seen some discussion on self-hosted stuff, but a lot of it depends on docker or droplets or some such.

As a user of dedicated servers and the shared hosting environment on them, although Virtualmin gives me much more freedom than cPanel did, I still can't run a lot of the fun stuff I want to play with.

So I'm curious to know what you run in that sort of environment that's awesome.

Although I will start with one: NextCloud has been around for a while - taking over from whatever-Cloud they forked from that I've now forgotten the name of. heh. It was not a bad project, but it really wasn't featured enough for my needs.

But recently, I've discovered that they have been expanding their features rapidly. What I love and use:

• NextCloud Talk is almost on par with Teams. Featureful chat. Shared files. Links to various things on NextCloud.
• With the local app installed, syncing a folder to the server, I can edit files locally or in the browser and it's a really nice synced environtment. The web view works well, almost like File Explorer - dragging and dropping files around, etc.
• Ability to share files publicly. And even the ability to have a chat with users visiting the file page if you want. Ability to "hotlink" shared pics - like to embed in a forum
• The "Cards" app is... I forget the original name for teh layout, but you get cards in lists. Cards have details, due dates if you want, things like lists you can check off items, embed pics, etc. Also, each card has a chat related to that card and you can @ people
• Passwords app - share passwords with certain people, click to opy to the clipboard. Storing credit cards means I can copy-paste easily to use on my phone instead of typing.
• Calendar that can sync to other sources
• Tables - lke Microsoft Lists - custom set up of columns, handy for any number of things from making a ticket system / issue tracker, to lists of resources for a particular site. Can ahve edit access, or make it into an "app" where it gets stuck up on the nav bar and view-only for your clients, for example

Basically, while there are still some rough spots, it is really pretty slick and works well. And the awesome part is that being self-hosted, I control it. There's a large number of apps you can add to it, of varying quality.

So I'm curious to know what other projects you love and find useful! :)

I am planning to use Plaid API and have a spring boot backend but given that I will be storing my financial information (such as whatever the Plaid API needs me to store to use their endpoints as well as just the transactions on my credit and chequing account), the security of the data is obviously crucial. and I think my problem is I don't know what I don't know.

I have a basic idea of what kind of things I need to protect against.

1. WIll have to use Spring security (or whatever is best) for thing like protecting against xss and csrf
2. I need to ensure that the PostgreSQL database is encrypted

but beyond that, I don't know much about the nuances of each type of security and customizations I should be on the look-out for. wonder if there's a trustworthy resource for at least detailing for me the kind of security I need to implement on either the Spring or PostgreSQL side of things?

Im just kind of done with Windows and 10 has been stable, but 11 seems to be even more intrusive and I find all the AI 'assistance' to be incredibly annoying. Im just kind of done with MS and Office and I want to try something else.

I dont have many needs. I run LibreOffice spreadsheet and word processor and the only other software I need to work is CORELdraw and CORELpaint as I still do a fair bit of design work on them and Ive been using them for 30 years so I dont want to switch. Other than that its just browsing (Firefox), email (Thunderbird) and TurboTax.

My question is how do I know whats going to work until I try it? And which version of Linux is easiest and most stable? I dont want to have to keep upgrading, I just want a stable usable fairly easy to learn OS that works with what Ive got as Im unlikely to be changing much. Suggestions?

I've been on reddit (yes, Im embarrassed that I haven't quit the cocaine) for about 15 years now. The changes in the last year or so have been noticeable.

For one thing, the worst of the ranting trolls are gone. I used to occasionally get some replies from people who obviously were just out to get a reaction, usually by swearing and name calling with the kind of grammar skills you'd expect from an angry 9 yr old who just discovered how to log on. Those have largely disappeared. But I have a hard time believing that trolls are gone off the net, so is it just better moderation? Or has reddit just implemented more auto rules that squelch the noisy juvenile behavior?

Secondly, Ive noticed the discussions becoming much more detailed. It was typical, especially in political subs, to see the only comments that got strongly upvoted, were short quips, the more smart ass the better, and then for those to be followed by a long succession of similar quips. That still happens, but Ive noticed a lot more lengthy discussion with redditors actually disovering they can create paragraphs and debate more maturely. Is that a change in human behavior? Or are those not likely humans?

And some behavior really has me suspicious. In particular I have gotten the same reply several times to a comment. It will say, "Thank you for sharing your comment, I appreciate it. Could you tell me more about your _______?". This COULD be a human, but the fact that it always starts the same and then asks me for further engagement really has me wondering, if for no other reason than I dont recall the average redditor being that polite.

Ive also noted some strange comment patterns. Yesterday I interacted with a poster and then checked their post history. Over 10,000 comments and they were ALL in the last few months during the run up to the Canadian election and ALL were against one party. Only 4 posts but 10,000 comments?. If there are NO posts in any other sub that seems very suspicious. Either a bot or someone hired to do as much damage as possible?

Reddit has changed. Its now publicly owned. And like all other social media it lives on engagement so I have no doubt that it will do whatever it takes with AI bots to keep people online and engaged. But how good are they? I just hate being 'taken for a ride' by a bot and a company. But how do you ever know if its a human or a bot you're talking to?

A while back I read an article about the development of a new Digg platform.

I signed up for an email list about new developments. I got invited to pay $5 USD to join a forum to see updates on their efforts and give suggestions.

I've been advocating for not implementing downvoting.

My reasoning is that having just upvotes like Tildes serves the original purpose of voting on content. It moves the better content towards the top and the poorer content towards the bottom. Downvoting at least on Reddit just becomes a middle finger for most cases.

I was surprised how many other people at this special forum were AGAINST that idea. They really want to be able to give people a middle finger.

Sadly, I saw a preview of the U.I. today and at least for new threads it had a "bury" link.

Oh well. I tried!

It may surprise you to hear that ever since the tender ages of 15 to 16 (2004 to 2005) I have tried to “become famous” on the Internet.

Why? I don’t know. I just wanted to. I wanted people to hear my opinions on the Internet and praise me for sharing them.

I tried pretty much everything: blogging, YouTube, social media, you name it. Content that I made ranged from commentary, to news, gaming, music, cooking, etc. All my projects “failed” (or rather, they didn’t grow as fast as I expected them to, so I gave up). I’m talking hundreds of attempts.

Then in late 2023, I made a New Year’s resolution for 2024 to fully delete Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, 9gag, and Reddit. My resolution worked and it changed my life.

A lot of people in my social circle have since begun telling me that I have this talent or that talent, and that I should monitize it by growing a following on social media. I have ignored all of them, despite spending a good 20 years trying to do exactly that. Here’s why:

• The first and foremost reason is that I don’t want to wrestle with algorithms and follow trends. It seems that it’s almost impossible to grow a following on the Internet these days without doing that, unless you get very lucky growing a following organically, which only very few people do. Chasing algorithms and trends is not fun, and if I’m not having fun with what do with my spare time, then I don’t want to do it at all. I’ve also come to hate creating video content for some reason. I just find it tedious.
• Over the years, I feel that I have become afraid of getting lucky and becoming successful. It seems to me that the people who live off creating content for the Internet, don’t ever get a break. Their followers demand a steady stream of content, and if you don’t keep vying for their attention, then they’ll go give it to someone else and you’re suddenly left without any income. I know that many creators work seven days a week.
• This leads me to the problem of “attention”: I don’t want to compete for people’s attention anymore. I hate the whole concept of the “attention economy”. It’s so insane to me that the survival of so many hundreds of million of people depends of how much human attention their work gets. And I’m not talking just about social media now, but entertainment in general. There are only so many humans, and they have a limited amount of time during the day that they can offer attention to entertainment to (be it social media, TV, movies, music, games, you name it). I think that these business models are not sustainable. There are also too many “things” for us to pay attention to these days and I feel like it’s driving us all insane. I’ve been intentionally trying to pay attention to as few things as I possibly can for a while now and it has significantly reduces my anxiety and FOMO. It’s given me a lot of peace. So, I don’t want to contribute to this “evil” myself.
• The Internet has become a dangerous place. Even people who publish otherwise completely innocuous content get sometimes harassed or doxxed. Streamers get SWATed. Women get the brunt of it (I think) because sexual harassment and deepfake porn has become so prevalent, and they can do nothing to protect themselves. Everything you publish anywhere can and will be used against you (including by potential employers). Being “unknown” and “staying in your lane” seems to be about the only way that you can stay safe these days.
• I also just don’t want the endless scrutiny that comes with fame, the expectation that my personality can’t change, that opinions can’t be nuanced, and that I squarely fit into either the “blue box” or the “red box” (in whatever aspect, since every field of opinion these days seems to be thoroughly divided in half). Whatever opinion people share online, even the most trivial, can and will be misinterpreted by bad faith actors and trolls to just mentally crush you.
• I have come to think that dying in anonymity, while leaving no legacy behind, is actually not a bad thing. I mean, it’s a “natural” thing. It’s what happens to the vast majority of humans anyway. Why should I be so afraid of that? Afraid of living my life in the peace of anonymity? There are plenty of ways to live a meaningful life that don’t involve becoming famous on the Internet, or famous at all.

I regret arriving at this conclusion now only. I had so much trouble in my short and fruitless life because of stuff that I posted on the Internet (talking about Facebook and my social circle more specifically). I could have avoided all of that. I could also not have wasted so much time entertaining ideas of online grandeur, blowing away countless hours of my pitiful existence on projects that never amounted to anything, and instead, gotten an education, so that I wouldn’t be living in poverty now.

Oh, well. It is what it is. Better learning now than never.

I’m not sure why I ever wanted to be famous on the Internet to begin with, or what made me think that there’s any inherent worth in getting online praise just for sharing my mediocre opinions. Maybe I’m mentally ill. Maybe I’m traumatized. Maybe this is something that I should consult a therapist over. However, what I do know, is that I’m done with pursuing online fame.

I think that the Internet as it is today, flipped some sort of switch in people’s brain (including mine), which convinced us that it is normal to chase fame because the means to get there are so readily available. I don’t know how the Internet could have been designed differently to prevent this, but “giving a voice to everyone” was, in hindsight, maybe a badly implemented idea.

I’d be surprised to hear that any of you here have been trying to become famous on the Internet, but if you have, then I’d like to hear about your experience, and your opinions on this topic in general.

I often like to go on the App Store or GitHub and look for new and interesting apps, but very rarely I find really good ones. So I turn to you - what niche apps are you using, why are they niche, why do you use them specifically and would you recommend them?

Here's my Top 3:

Novel writing: I use a tiny app called uFocus for all my Markdown writing. It's lightweight, the developer is a real cool guy and it's entirely free. It has barely any features, and I like that about it. I don't use Word because it's too distracting and complicated, I used to use iA Writer but it's really not justified the updates it's gotten and is straying away from Markdown.

Email: I use MailMate, which is an insanely complicated and user-hostile email client that only works with IMAP/SMTP and does NOT support Gmail or Exchange, but is incredibly powerful at email management and search if you learn how to think like it does. It looks like it hasn't been updated since Mac OS 8, but it's getting regular updates and is very charming in its aesthetic.

Programming: I don't do much, barely some web design, but I like Zed as my editor of choice. It's not very popular, doesn't have a huge user base and barely any extensions compared to a juggernaut like Code or Cursor, but does what it does well and isn't written in Electron. It's also very performant.

The Issue

I'm streaming games from a desktop PC hardwired into my router (running Sunshine) to a laptop wirelessly (using Moonlight). It works beautifully.

Except, every five minutes, the stream chugs: my framerate drops precipitously, and Moonlight gives me a warning telling me I should lower my bitrate. This happens for only a few seconds, before it resolves and goes back to normal.

I timed the interval between the chugs several times and got approximately 5:07 between each slowdown. It is remarkably consistent.

Because it's so consistent, I assume there's some scheduled task or something running every five minutes that's causing it to chug. Dropping the bitrate makes the chugging less noticeable, but it still happens.

Ruling Things Out

I think it's safe to rule out the idea that it's my router or the host PC.

I have a smaller 13" laptop that I used to stream to, and I just recently bought a 17" to replace it. The five-minute issue only happens on the 17", even with identical stream settings (same resolution, FPS, and bitrate).

The computers are obviously different hardware, but they're also running two different linux distros.

The 13" Laptop is running MX Linux 23.5 (KDE). This is the one that works.

System:
  Kernel: 6.1.0-32-amd64 arch: x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 12.2.0
    Desktop: KDE Plasma v: 5.27.5 Distro: MX-23.5_KDE_x64 Libretto September 15
    2024 base: Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)
Machine:
  Type: Laptop System: Dell product: Latitude 7370 v: N/A
    serial: <superuser required>
  Mobo: Dell model: 0XFY7T v: A00 serial: <superuser required> UEFI: Dell
    v: 1.28.3 date: 02/07/2022
Battery:
  ID-1: BAT0 charge: 12.6 Wh (62.1%) condition: 20.3/34.0 Wh (59.6%)
    volts: 8.1 min: 7.6 model: SMP DELL WY7CG58 status: charging
CPU:
  Info: dual core model: Intel Core m5-6Y57 bits: 64 type: MT MCP
    arch: Skylake rev: 3 cache: L1: 128 KiB L2: 512 KiB L3: 4 MiB
  Speed (MHz): avg: 2496 high: 2758 min/max: 400/2800 cores: 1: 2400 2: 2758
    3: 2400 4: 2429 bogomips: 11999
  Flags: avx avx2 ht lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx
Graphics:
  Device-1: Intel HD Graphics 515 vendor: Dell driver: i915 v: kernel
    arch: Gen-9 bus-ID: 00:02.0
  Device-2: Realtek Integrated_Webcam_HD type: USB driver: uvcvideo
    bus-ID: 1-9:5
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 1.21.1.7 with: Xwayland v: 22.1.9 driver: X:
    loaded: modesetting unloaded: fbdev,vesa dri: iris gpu: i915
    resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz
  API: OpenGL v: 4.6 Mesa 24.2.8-1mx23ahs renderer: Mesa Intel HD Graphics
    515 (SKL GT2) direct-render: Yes
Audio:
  Device-1: Intel Sunrise Point-LP HD Audio vendor: Dell driver: snd_hda_intel
    v: kernel bus-ID: 00:1f.3
  API: ALSA v: k6.1.0-32-amd64 status: kernel-api
  Server-1: PipeWire v: 1.0.0 status: active
Network:
  Device-1: Intel Wireless 8260 driver: iwlwifi v: kernel bus-ID: 6c:00.0
  IF: wlan0 state: up mac: <filter>
Bluetooth:
  Device-1: Intel Bluetooth wireless interface type: USB driver: btusb v: 0.8
    bus-ID: 1-2:2
  Report: hciconfig ID: hci0 rfk-id: 1 state: up address: <filter> bt-v: 2.1
    lmp-v: 4.2
RAID:
  Hardware-1: Intel 82801 Mobile SATA Controller [RAID mode] driver: ahci
    v: 3.0 bus-ID: 00:17.0
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 238.47 GiB used: 31.99 GiB (13.4%)
  ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Toshiba model: KSG60ZMV256G M.2 2280 256GB
    size: 238.47 GiB
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 232.43 GiB used: 31.47 GiB (13.5%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/dm-0
    mapped: luks-a8eaaa90-b4ba-4943-8c1d-ddace5892f40
  ID-2: /boot size: 973.4 MiB used: 524.1 MiB (53.8%) fs: ext4
    dev: /dev/sda2
  ID-3: /boot/efi size: 252 MiB used: 274 KiB (0.1%) fs: vfat dev: /dev/sda1
Swap:
  ID-1: swap-1 type: file size: 3 GiB used: 3.8 MiB (0.1%) file: /swap/swap
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 80.0 C pch: 68.0 C mobo: 48.0 C
  Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A
Info:
  Processes: 251 Uptime: 33m Memory: 7.65 GiB used: 3.56 GiB (46.6%)
  Init: SysVinit runlevel: 5 Compilers: gcc: 12.2.0 Packages: 2789 Shell: Bash
  v: 5.2.15 inxi: 3.3.26

17 *    * * *   root    cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly
25 6    * * *   root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || { cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily; }
47 6    * * 7   root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || { cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly; }
52 6    1 * *   root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || { cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.monthly; }

The 17" Laptop is running Linux Mint 22.1 (Cinnamon). This is the one that has the five minute chugs.

System:
  Kernel: 6.8.0-58-generic arch: x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 13.3.0
  Desktop: Cinnamon v: 6.4.8 Distro: Linux Mint 22.1 Xia
    base: Ubuntu 24.04 noble
Machine:
  Type: Laptop System: Dell product: Inspiron 7773 v: N/A
    serial: <superuser required>
  Mobo: Dell model: 0R58C3 v: A00 serial: <superuser required> UEFI: Dell
    v: 1.19.0 date: 12/15/2021
Battery:
  ID-1: BAT0 charge: 34.9 Wh (97.5%) condition: 35.8/56.0 Wh (63.9%)
    volts: 16.0 min: 15.2 model: Samsung SDI DELL W7NKD7B status: discharging
CPU:
  Info: quad core model: Intel Core i7-8550U bits: 64 type: MT MCP
    arch: Coffee Lake rev: A cache: L1: 256 KiB L2: 1024 KiB L3: 8 MiB
  Speed (MHz): avg: 658 high: 867 min/max: 400/4000 cores: 1: 400 2: 800
    3: 400 4: 400 5: 800 6: 800 7: 867 8: 800 bogomips: 31999
  Flags: avx avx2 ht lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx
Graphics:
  Device-1: Intel UHD Graphics 620 vendor: Dell driver: i915 v: kernel
    arch: Gen-9.5 bus-ID: 00:02.0
  Device-2: NVIDIA GP108M [GeForce MX150] vendor: Dell driver: nvidia
    v: 550.120 arch: Maxwell bus-ID: 01:00.0
  Device-3: Realtek Integrated_Webcam_HD driver: uvcvideo type: USB
    bus-ID: 1-5:2
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 21.1.11 with: Xwayland v: 23.2.6 driver: X:
    loaded: modesetting,nvidia unloaded: fbdev,nouveau,vesa dri: iris gpu: i915
    resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz
  API: EGL v: 1.5 drivers: iris,nvidia,swrast platforms:
    active: gbm,x11,surfaceless,device inactive: wayland,device-2
  API: OpenGL v: 4.6.0 compat-v: 4.5 vendor: intel mesa
    v: 24.2.8-1ubuntu1~24.04.1 glx-v: 1.4 direct-render: yes renderer: Mesa
    Intel UHD Graphics 620 (KBL GT2)
Audio:
  Device-1: Intel Sunrise Point-LP HD Audio vendor: Dell driver: snd_hda_intel
    v: kernel bus-ID: 00:1f.3
  API: ALSA v: k6.8.0-58-generic status: kernel-api
  Server-1: PipeWire v: 1.0.5 status: active
Network:
  Device-1: Intel Wireless 3165 driver: iwlwifi v: kernel bus-ID: 02:00.0
  IF: wlp2s0 state: up mac: <filter>
Bluetooth:
  Device-1: Intel Bluetooth wireless interface driver: btusb v: 0.8 type: USB
    bus-ID: 1-7:3
  Report: hciconfig ID: hci0 rfk-id: 4 state: up address: <filter> bt-v: 4.2
    lmp-v: 8
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 238.47 GiB used: 36.5 GiB (15.3%)
  ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Samsung model: MZVLB256HBHQ-000H1
    size: 238.47 GiB temp: 25.9 C
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 229.63 GiB used: 36.21 GiB (15.8%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/dm-1
    mapped: vgmint-root
  ID-2: /boot size: 1.61 GiB used: 291.7 MiB (17.7%) fs: ext4
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p2
  ID-3: /boot/efi size: 511 MiB used: 6.1 MiB (1.2%) fs: vfat
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1
Swap:
  ID-1: swap-1 type: partition size: 1.91 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%)
    dev: /dev/dm-2 mapped: vgmint-swap_1
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 30.0 C pch: 32.5 C mobo: N/A
  Fan Speeds (rpm): N/A
Info:
  Memory: total: 16 GiB available: 15.36 GiB used: 1.82 GiB (11.9%)
  Processes: 338 Uptime: 2h 38m Init: systemd target: graphical (5)
  Packages: 1996 Compilers: gcc: 13.3.0 Shell: Bash v: 5.2.21 inxi: 3.3.34

17 *	* * *	root	cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly
25 6	* * *	root	test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || { cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily; }
47 6	* * 7	root	test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || { cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly; }
52 6	1 * *	root	test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || { cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.monthly; }

Help Request

Anyone have any ideas for tracking down what might be causing this? I was going to just wipe the machine and replace Linux Mint with MX Linux to rule that out, but I figured I'd ask here before doing that, especially because it could be the hardware and not the distro that's causing the issue.

To be honest I have some problems explaining what I mean, which might be why I can't find a solution or explanaition for it.

I use firefox on Linux and out of habit i highlight text while reading it. I always did that and it helps me to read a lot faster and to relax my eyes while reading. It's something i don't think i can get rid of, even if I tried, it's just so deeply burned in.
As well I use to scroll the text I'm reading to the top out of the same reasons or maybe it's just habit as well, but I realised I cannot get rid of it as well :-)

So no to my problem:
Usually this works flawless, i can highlight text and have the cursor where I'm reading in the topmost visible line. But for some strange reason this does not work in the "new" wikipedia layout. where if I highlight text in the upper third of the page it scrolls upwards quite fast which just fucks up everything and makes my day bad. (this behaviour is not present in the old design which e.g. the germand wikipedia still uses)

Is it me?
Is it my browser?
Is there a way to get rid of this, so I can keep my workflow while reading and learing on wikipedia? Is somebody else observing this behaviour?
Where can I even start to look for a solution? I don't even know what to look for.

It truly bothers me, as I'm close to every day on it, and it might be my favorite website.
I heard there is a way to switch to the old wikipedia layout, which might be a workaround. But I actually like the new Layout a lot, so if there is a way to avoid that it would be great :-)

Just something I was frustrated by ever since it became increasingly common even outside of smartphones and tablets.

For a few years now I increasingly see basically any battery powered product having mostly internal accumulator options(aka proprietary battery of uncertain ability to replace), especially in more expensive items in the category. Why?

I mean do see several advantages from the business side, I simply have no idea what advantage would there be for the actual user.

I could see it if the batteries had comparable lifespan to the product, which they most definitely do not unless the item is of truly bad quality.

Okay, I’ve been grinding through the process of replacing Windows 10 in my Twitch streaming setup with Pop!_OS. I’ve got OBS dialed in, my old NVIDIA card is holding it together surprisingly well, and video performance is right where I need it.

But the audio. Is. Destroying. Me.

It’s this horrible crunchy, crushed mess when I stream from Linux. Same exact hardware, same OBS scene setup. On Windows 10 it’s crystal clear. I’m pulling audio from my mixer and theres no “Line In” I can see. Something in the Linux chain is mangling it.

Here’s a side-by-side if you want to hear the pain:

Pop!_OS (crushed audio): https://youtu.be/wQUVlufAQs8?si=RlGH8Z90dK0X9KhA

Windows 10 (clean audio): https://youtu.be/hbJzIHzg_ek?si=ThiZpbBgTk89qL2p

Sample rates seem to match, nothing obvious is clipping. I’m out of ideas and running on pure stubbornness at this point.

Would love to hear from anyone who’s made Linux work in a similar setup. Tips, gotchas, weird fixes. Whatever you've got. I'm so close to fully escaping Windows here. Grrr.

For reference, here’s how I got my Pop!_OS setup working so far (OBS + NVIDIA NVENC + GTX 960):
https://doubledropdown.com/abdoanmes/2025/ditching-windows-setting-up-obs-with-nvidia-nvenc-on-linux-pop_os-gtx-960/

I like modern tech, but I'm slowly coming to hate the internet.

I read Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism late last year and found it preaching to the choir, but noticed that most of the negative effects of technology use were actually from internet use. The attention economy, privacy violations, enshittification, etc. are all mostly byproducts of the internet being so tightly integrated into our lives. When I heard about CVE potentially losing its funding (I know very litte about CS or anything related to software, so I'm unsure of how big a threat this really is to an end-user), the thought popped into my head... "is it time to get offline?".

I am 20 years old, so my entire life has been spent in a world where devices are connected to the internet far more often than not, and I wonder if it's time to switch to an "offline first" mentality? I already embrace this philosophy when it comes to music, downloading the songs I want to my computer and syncing them to my phone through iTunes, but this would take that one step further: turn on my computer's wi-fi to check emails, read through the new posts here, check some other sites, etc. and then turn it off until I explicitly need to do something online.

I'm lucky enough that most of the (important) things I do on my computer can be done 90% offline, but I wonder if it's even worth doing? I'm curious to hear thoughts on this from the people of Tildes, or any methods that you have implemented in your life.

EDIT: I should clarify: I already have basically no social media, I use beeper to see my instagram DMs (I can't really get rid of this without abandoning any age-adjacent social life) and that's it. You could call Discord and Tildes social medias, but that's maybe pushing it. I'm more talking about the recent resurgence of physical media and reframing the internet as something that is accessed rather than omnipresent in my usage habits.

My current mouse is a Logitech Lightspeed G502, it works fine and aside from double click issue which I brought to a store to fix, no issues with it but it was my friend's prior mouse before he upgraded to a newer model.
As for why I want an ambidextrous mouse, on the rare occasions I want to use my left hand to navigate instead of right.
I used to use a chinese MMO mouse that honestly was not bad but its software was fairly garbage(Rebranded Red Dragon mouse iirc) so I don't mind Chinese mice as clearly being a brand name mouse doesn't mean much, just want something that is good and lasts a while, since I'm not that big on mice.

I want these qualities in a mouse.

• Works wired and with a 2.4GHz dongle
• Either rechargeable batteries or replaceable works
• High DPI
• Not a "lightweight" mouse
• Has a few programmable buttons
• On chip storage for programmed buttons/DPI/etc
• Available worldwide

Bluetooth as a 3rd option would be neat but not something I'm looking for in particular.

Rechargeable batteries are supposed to provide better longevity afaik, but the buttons or the mouse itself will probably die before the battery.

I use 8200 DPI on my current mouse pretty much in both games and in desktop... with mouse acceleration,

I only lower it on the rare occasions I use something like GIMP.

Not a fan of these perforated light mice or super light mice, I used to put weights in my previous wired Chinese mouse but I'm using the G502 without weights currently. I am willing to compromise on this if there are no options however.

On the G502 I only use 2 buttons regularly, and they are to switch to the left or right virtual desktop, the rest of the buttons have a function but they get rarely used (Except Windows+Tab to show all virtual desktops).

On chip storage is good when I switch platforms (e.g. PC/Windows, SteamDeck or Linux, Mac) and in case I want to completely drop Windows and not worry about needing software for the programmable buttons to work.

Worldwide availability because I don't live in the US or most parts of Europe.

Not aware if Logitech has a mouse that does all what I need, the free scrolling wheel is cool and gets used, but they got a history of switches that die too fast.

The blog is daviramos.com

It is more like a 2000s blog than whatever blog means today. Just things I wanna write sometimes. It is not commercial, no ads. I like fast things. Images are heavily optimized, not mandatory, and always inside posts.

Bearblog is reliable and minimal without being barebones. I wrote about it before, so there's no need to go over it again here.

I really want to know if the way I’ve organized my blog makes any sense. Please keep in mind that I’m not a developer, programmer, or anything like that. I chose Bearblog partly because I already liked the default theme and didn’t need to change much. I appreciate minimalism, understand Markdown, a little HTML, and can "decode" simple CSS using a mix of intuition, Google, and ChatGPT. I only changed stuff that was not very deep and would not be hard to maintain.

:root {
    --width: 720px;
    --font-main: Verdana, sans-serif;
    --font-secondary: Verdana, sans-serif;
    --font-scale: 1em;
    --background-color: #fff;
    --heading-color: #222;
    --text-color: #444;
    --link-color: #3273dc;
    --visited-color:  #8b6fcb;
    --code-background-color: #f2f2f2;
    --code-color: #222;
    --blockquote-color: #222;
}

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
    :root {
        --background-color: #01242e;
        --heading-color: #eee;
        --text-color: #ddd;
        --link-color: #8cc2dd;
        --visited-color:  #8b6fcb;
        --code-background-color: #000;
        --code-color: #ddd;
        --blockquote-color: #ccc;
    }
}

body {
    font-family: var(--font-secondary);
    font-size: var(--font-scale);
    margin: auto;
    padding: 20px;
    max-width: var(--width);
    text-align: left;
    background-color: var(--background-color);
    word-wrap: break-word;
    overflow-wrap: break-word;
    line-height: 1.5;
    color: var(--text-color);
}

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
    font-family: var(--font-main);
    color: var(--heading-color);
}

a {
    color: var(--link-color);
    cursor: pointer;
    text-decoration: none;
}

a:hover {
    text-decoration: underline;
}

nav a {
    margin-right: 8px;
}

strong, b {
    color: var(--heading-color);
}

button {
    margin: 0;
    cursor: pointer;
}

time {
    font-family: monospace;
    font-style: normal;
    font-size: 15px;
}

main {
    line-height: 1.6;
}

table {
    width: 100%;
}

hr {
    border: 0;
    border-top: 1px dashed;
}

img {
    max-width: 100%;
}

code {
    font-family: monospace;
    padding: 2px;
    background-color: var(--code-background-color);
    color: var(--code-color);
    border-radius: 3px;
}

blockquote {
    border-left: 1px solid #999;
    color: var(--code-color);
    padding-left: 20px;
    font-style: italic;
}

footer {
    padding: 25px 0;
    text-align: center;
}

.title:hover {
    text-decoration: none;
}

.title h1 {
    font-size: 1.5em;
}

.inline {
    width: auto !important;
}

.highlight, .code {
    padding: 1px 15px;
    background-color: var(--code-background-color);
    color: var(--code-color);
    border-radius: 3px;
    margin-block-start: 1em;
    margin-block-end: 1em;
    overflow-x: auto;
}

/* blog post list */
ul.blog-posts {
    list-style-type: none;
    padding: unset;
}

ul.blog-posts li {
    display: flex;
}

ul.blog-posts li span {
    flex: 0 0 130px;
}

ul.blog-posts li a:visited {
    color: var(--visited-color);
}

/* MY CHANGES */

/* That is an entirely new class for text */
/* that goes below an image as a subtitle */
.subtitle {
    text-align: center;
    font-style: italic;
    font-size: small;
    font-weight: bold;
}

.upvote-button {
    display: none !important; /* Hides button, overrides other settings */ 
        pointer-events: none; /* Disable mouseif it visible */
}

.title h1 {
    font-size: 1.2em;
}

nav a {
    font-size: 0.95em;
}

footer {
	font-size: 0.95em;  
}

.spaced-line {
	margin: 100px 0;
	text-align: center;
}

/* Keep images centered */
img {
    display: block;
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto;
}

For comparison, see Herman's blog to see something closer to the default. He’s the creator of Bearblog.

Here’s what I’ve changed: the font size for the blog’s name, the navbar, and the footer that says Powered by Bear ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ is slightly smaller (0.95em instead of 1em). I added a guestbook and links to the English and Portuguese pages in the navbar. I also changed the favicon and the site's meta-image to different-sized images of Humphrey Bogart.

The English and Portuguese pages are in their respective languages and only list posts in those languages. I don’t know if it’s possible to customize the navbar further. EDIT: bearblog has a builtin voting feature which I removed with CSS. All pages and posts are configured with their appropriate language via Bearblog, which I assume browsers and search engines can detect. Does it make sense to make my blog bilingual this way?

Maybe this is a new feature, but Bearblog lets you organize posts into subfolders/subdomains. So I placed all Brazilian Portuguese posts under /br/, which feels logical and predictable. I haven’t shared them anywhere yet, so there’s no risk of broken links. On the other hand, I already have several English posts that have been shared elsewhere. If I move all English posts under /en/, I’d love to find a way to let the older links keep working gracefully. Is that possible somehow? Maybe that’s a question for Herman, but I have a follow-up: Other than my obsession with tiny details, is there any value in separating my posts under either /br/ or /en/? Titles and URLs are unlikely to conflict between languages, and if they do, I can always add a -pt or -en suffix like in example-post-pt.

Other than that, I’d welcome any advice on how to improve my blog—whether in big ways or subtle ones.

Thanks!

I think the answer is probably yes, but I wanted to double check. Does anyone here have experience with them? For clarity, this is the home modems that you can buy for stationary 5g internet. This is not those pocket, battery powered personal hotspots.

I just moved into a new studio in France. Despite literally every other building on the street having fiber, my studio does not have it. So I am stuck with DSL, since France doesn’t use cable for internet service. My dsl gets 2-10 Mbps down and 0.25-1 up. This is abysmal, especially the upload.

The other problem is the building is such a good shield against radio waves. With Orange, supposedly the best mobile carrier in France, I get exactly zero service, even sticking my phone out the window.

There is a carrier called Free, that does offer a 5g home internet box. To test it out, I got a Free (but not free) SIM card for my phone. Sticking it out the window, I get about the same speeds as my DSL box provides.

So there is the impetuous for my question. Should I expect their 5g home internet box to be about the same speeds as my iPhone, or can I expect them to be faster and more reliable, since it isn’t battery powered and can me larger?

An RPG book is a book containing the rules and setting for a tabletop RPG game. Like Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, Worlds Without Number, Star Trek Adventures, etc.

The fact that they are rarely in text format always puts me off reading RPG books. I don't want to diminish the importance of art, but importing printed RPG books is prohibitively expensive, and reading huge PDFs on a laptop is not a good experience for me.

I also find it unpleasant to navigate the complicated design of these books. They're distracting.

I have a 6.8" Kindle Paperwhite but reading RPG PDFs on it is awful. RPG books have lots of art and complicated layouts. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to make an RPG into text. I was seriously considering just copying the text and converting it to markdown myself (it doesn't need to be markdown, just something that I can convert into a format my Kindle understands) when I remembered chatGPT.

Copying the text and asking GPT to make it into markdown worked okay, but it missed the tables. Sending an image of a page worked pretty well, so I think AI is the way here. But I am not a GPT subscriber and I bet I'll hit a limit at some point. Also, instead of sending pages individually, I would prefer to send the PDF and get the result in text. Even if there were limitations (like only 10 pages in one go), it would be an improvement.

In any case, using chatGPT will be much better than doing it by hand. But is there an AI or other kind of PDF service that is better suited for that task, so I can reduce the amount of manual input?

I did a masters in data analytics, and then the niche I fell into in the working world was building dashboards, reports and spreadsheets of financial data for non-technical bureaucrats. Instead of ensuring data quality by technical means, my current company often just has me manually reviewing and checking financial data. This is pretty frustrating to me because I have no education in finance, and the things I miss or get wrong are so second nature to my boss that he doesn't even see them as something I should have been trained on. The only technologies I use are SQL server and excel. Any proactive steps I've made to automate processes has been discouraged as not worth the time.

I'm aware that most people spend years on tedious stuff before ever getting to work with more engaging technology, but honestly I'm starting to wonder if they've forgotten I'm not a finance guy. I want to move up in my career especially to escape my current role, but I'm feeling completely lost as to how. There's no obvious role in my company that could be a 'next rung of the ladder' to advance into, so there's nobody I can emulate to help chart a course. My boss had an unconventional path to his current role, and isn't really into manager stuff like career mentoring, so he's no help in that regard.

To anyone with experience in data science, what is the advancement supposed to look like? What are the key skills I should be developing? Am I being too averse to learning the subject matter of the data I'm working on? Any insight is appreciated!

I'm looking for a handheld voice recorder that's as simple to use as possible for my dad. His memory is starting to fail and I'm wondering if this would help ease some tension that that is causing.

He has trouble with tech these days so unfortunately using an app on a phone isn't an option. The hurdle of getting the phone out and app open would be too much and that's assuming he remembers to use it and HOW to use it.

I'm hoping for a device that just has a button that can be pressed or held down for short voice notes. I'm picturing the device being able to be plugged into a computer for saving the audio recordings. It would also be a huge bonus if there is some automatic transcription functionality that makes the notes searchable, though I bet there's software for that that doesn't have to come with or be part of the voice recorder itself.

I can see lots of cheap options on Amazon but before I just start buying some to try I'm hoping someone here might have some experience in this area.

I really appreciate any insight anyone is able to give.

I've not bought a new router since 2010 because I try to physically wire everything in my house so it's pretty much my phone using Wifi.
However, I've found great use for my Steam Deck as a streaming platform on my TV using Moonlight and I'd like to get a new, good router to support it.
I think the Steam Deck can support Wifi 6, but I'd like a Wifi 7 router if possible so I can future proof the possibility of getting a new wireless VR headset too. Though I'm not 100% sold to the idea if there's good argument to just buy Wifi 6 today.

Long story short, I'm finding it really hard to choose what router to buy. There's so much "gamer" junk.
Reviews are all over the place too, site A will give a router a top recommend and site B will list off a huge range of cons.

Does anyone have any advice? I just want a good, reliable, high throughput router and I can't be bothered with the returns process to try and buy if possible.

Curious to know if we have a current morphometric based system that can detect with the same accuracy as DNA testing, if two people are related, without a priori knowledge that they are related, if that makes sense.

Meaning, if a system is fed 100 random photos of humans, but is not told "there are definitely related people in here" can it match it as accurately as a DNA test of those same humans' DNA samples?

So I am considering switching to a dumb phone. All I really need it to do is call and text. However, the texting part might be slightly tricky. I am fine learning how to text using a numpad, but being able to do group chats would be something I would want to keep. Using Google Messages as my texting app even on an older Samsung has worked to get effective group chat functionality, so being able to access the Google Play Store to download it would be beneficial. Other than that, I don't have any other tasks I need to do on my phone. Does anyone have any recommendations?

A list of requirements:

• Available in Canada
• Can handle group chats or can download and install Google Messages
• Ideally not too expensive

As the years go by, I’ve become increasingly annoyed (I choose that word intentionally) at the thought that there’s some “record” of my activity on the Internet somewhere, which was probably put together by my ISP. I “don’t have anything to hide” (other than perhaps the one or other ROM or movie that I download), but I also don’t want to randomly get fined or put in prison if, in a few years, our governments decide to retroactively criminalize certain activities (I’m thinking mostly about piracy).

I’m not tech savvy though. That’s not because I haven’t tried. I have. I spent countless hours reading about how one can keep one’s activity on the Internet “private”. To my knowledge, it isn’t actually possible. I mean, even if I didn’t use my real name anywhere, or didn’t have any social media accounts (thankfully, I don’t), just the fact that I have to use an ISP to surf the web means that at least they are “spying” on me.

So, I’m approaching all of you wonderful, tech savvy people (rather than ChatGPT or a search engine) to ask you if there’s something that I’m missing, and if there is a way (preferably a fool-proof one) to stop my ISP (or “anyone” for that matter) from collecting data on my activity on the Internet (particularly when I download ROMs or movies, which is the only “illegal” thing that I ever do).

The popular online discourse on Large Language Models’ (LLMs’) capabilities is often polarized in a way I find annoying and tiresome.

On one end of the spectrum, there is nearly complete dismissal of LLMs: an LLM is just a slightly fancier version of the autocomplete on your phone’s keyboard, there’s nothing to see here, move on (dot org).

This dismissive perspective overlooks some genuinely interesting novel capabilities of LLMs. For example, I can come up with a new joke and ask ChatGPT to explain why it’s funny or come up with a new reasoning problem and ask ChatGPT to solve it. My phone’s keyboard can’t do that.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are eschatological predictions: human-level or superhuman artificial general intelligence (AGI) will likely be developed within 10 years or even within 5 years, and skepticism toward such predictions is “AI denialism”, analogous to climate change denial. Just listen to the experts!

There are inconvenient facts for this narrative, such as that the majority of AI experts give much more conservative timelines for AGI when asked in surveys and disagree with the idea that scaling up LLMs could lead to AGI.

The ARC Prize is an attempt by prominent AI researcher François Chollet (with help from Mike Knoop, who apparently does AI stuff at Zapier) to introduce some scientific rigour into the conversation. There is a monetary prize for open source AI systems that can perform well on a benchmark called ARC-AGI-2, which recently superseded the ARC-AGI benchmark. (“ARC” stands for “Abstract and Reasoning Corpus”.)

ARC-AGI-2 is not a test of whether an AI is an AGI or not. It’s intended to test whether AI systems are making incremental progress toward AGI. The tasks the AI is asked to complete are colour-coded visual puzzles like you might find in a tricky puzzle game. (Example.) The intention is to design tasks that are easy for humans to solve and hard for AI to solve.

The current frontier AI models score less than 5% on ARC-AGI-2. Humans score 60% on average and 100% of tasks have been solved by at least two humans in two attempts or less.

For me, this helps the conversation about AI capabilities because it gives a rigorous test and quantitative measure to my casual, subjective observations that LLMs routinely fail at tasks that are easy for humans.

François Chollet was impressed when OpenAI’s o3 model scored 75.7% on ARC-AGI (the older version of the benchmark). He emphasizes the concept of “fluid intelligence”, which he seems to define as the ability to adapt to new situations and solve novel problems. Chollet thinks that o3 is the first AI system to demonstrate fluid intelligence, although it’s still a low level of fluid intelligence. (o3 also required thousands of dollars’ worth of computation to achieve this result.)

This is the sort of distinction that can’t be teased out by the polarized popular discourse. It’s the sort of nuanced analysis I’ve been seeking out, but which has been drowned out by extreme positions on LLMs that ignore inconvenient facts.

I would like to see more benchmarks that try to do what AGI-AGI-2 does: find problems that humans can easily solve and frontier AI models can’t solve. These sort of benchmarks can help us measure AGI progress much more usefully than the typical benchmarks, which play to LLMs’ strengths (e.g. massive-scale memorization) and don’t challenge them on their weaknesses (e.g. reasoning).

I long to see AGI within my lifetime. But the super short timeframes given by some people in the AI industry feel to me like they border on mania or psychosis. The discussion is unrigorous, with people pulling numbers out of thin air based on gut feeling.

It’s clear that there are many things humans are good at doing that AI can’t do at all (where the humans vs. AI success rate is ~100% vs. ~0%). It serves no constructive purpose to ignore this truth and it may serve AI research to develop rigorous benchmarks around it.

Such benchmarks will at least improve the quality of discussion around AI capabilities, insofar as people pay attention to them.

Update (2024-04-11 at 19:16 UTC): François Chollet has a new 20-minute talk on YouTube that I recommend. I've watched a few videos of Chollet talking about ARC-AGI or ARC-AGI-2, and this one is beautifully succinct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWHezX43I-4

Background:

I've been using a 9-year-old 13.3 inch Dell Latitude 7370 laptop running MX Linux to stream games via Moonlight from a beefier desktop machine. It is SO good and works flawlessly. My only complaint is the smaller screen size.

I would like to upgrade to a larger computer, and given that the computer will literally only be used for streaming games, it doesn't need to have great stats. I'm looking at used/refurbished models -- both for price and because buying something new feels like complete overkill for my needs.

My only requirements are:

• 17 inch screen
• USB-C charging

That's it! I'm assuming that literally anything I can get with that will work for what I need given that my small, decade-old laptop is already doing the same job perfectly. USB-C charging is a must-have for me. I already have USB-C power cords in all the places I plan on using it, and I don't want to have to use a separate charger for it.

My Situation:

Because I'm searching for used/refurbished models, I'm limited to what's available rather than going for any specific model of computer. I can easily find listings for computers with 17 inch screens. What I can't find easily is whether or not they support USB-C charging. Most sites don't have a filter for that, and a lot of the listings don't specify the type of charger used and just list "AC adapter" (or don't mention it at all). Many sites don't have pictures of the ports, or the pictures they do have are stock photos that aren't of the exact model.

Is there some easy way to find these that I'm missing? Some keyword, or a site that does have a filter for that, or brand knowledge that can point me in the right direction?

Also, if anyone has any recommended sites for used/refurbished laptops, let me know. I have had success with Backmarket for used tech before, but I'm open to recommendations.

Lately there's been a rash of people ripping apart AC units on small business' so they can sell them for parts (mostly the copper). Tends to take days to months to discover, and by that time they're long gone and the police are rarely interested in it (in my experience even when you figure out who's actually buying stolen copper, or car parts....but i digress).

I was asked as a friend to help with this for a couple of small business locations that otherwise don't need normal security. To start it's just one large, 60x300', roof with a couple of units on it. They're willing to spend money, but also don't want to get scammed, so I've been looking into it for them.

They're getting a quote from one of the big security companies like ADT, but didn't feel they were getting it right since they just wanted a camera pointing at the access ladder, when it sure looks like the first time this happened it was someone who brought their own, so they really do need some good coverage and not just one camera pointed at a ladder while they pay for some 24/7 person to stare at the feed.

The rough requirements are:

1. Some decent weatherproofing, as this will be on a roof all day. We can put an enclosure around it but trying to keep this simple.

2. Easy remote access to footage, ideally with notifications that can be setup for things like human motion, or lost connection.

3. Ideally fewer cameras. Not exactly because of cost, but because of the difficulty of getting the power/network up there. Be a lot easier to do one drop in the middle of the roof than say a drop at every corner.

4. Probably not wifi cameras. I figure we need to run power up there anyways, so it might as well be POE if at all possible. Added bonus being that you don't need to worry as much about wifi signal and the rare enterprising criminal with a jammer/scrambler/whatever?

and the tricky one
5. No on site storage. Likely they'll want cloud.

My first thoughts:
I have ubiquiti at home, and this seemed fine for it as a nice in-between since they probably need 2-4 POE cameras max (was going to see if i could get away with 2 in the middle of the roof, one looking each way). Was going to mess around and see what level of alerts they give and make them a couple of accounts (basically one alert to the person who'd call the cops and one to the person who'd look at it if the feed went down).

The no on site storage thing however, complicates stuff....i think?

The short version is there's no way to do even a basic NVR there (i've been over this thoroughly, and it's more a drama thing than a business thing). I figured that wouldn't be an issue, they'd just have to pay extra for some cloud storage and host it there, and it would probably scale well for them if they liked the solution and rolled it out anywhere else. Rather than having a bunch of NVR's they could just have one cloud based one, neat.

buuuuut it seems ubiquiti doesn't really do that. The people i'm helping are somewhat technical but i'd like to keep this turnkey as possible. I don't think there's any clean/easy way to accomplish this with ubiquiti, or at least that I can find?

In theory I think there might be some clever network way to host the NVR at some other physical/central location (with less drama) and then route all the traffic there, but that's beyond my current ability, and i'm skeptical that even if I learn how, i can keep it simple enough that i'd feel comfortable suggesting it.

The followup research:
So there's huge professional companies like verkanda/axis. I did some basic pricing research and it looks like $2kish, minimum, a year for these things. That might be within their budget (i'm told the damage done was easily into the 5 figure territory), but it also feels like extreme overkill for something that should be easier to solve?

Another one i've come across before is Reolink, but I have 0 experience with it and haven't found much in either direction that makes me think it'd be a good solution or a terrible one.

I'm pretty against ring/nest just due to a mixture of "fuck em" and also feeling like you don't get what you pay for.

Overall-

Anyone have any experience or guidance with this sort of thing? I really feel like my own home network/camera setup has me right on the edge of being able to say "ah yeah here's what you need...." and yet i've fallen at the finish line. Is there some easy way to make ubiquiti work (seems to meet all the needs except the cloud storage)? Or some system you're familiar with that does have that feature?

I feel like i bump into these kinds of problems more and more where the options are "make it a second hobby/job" or "pay through the nose" when it feels like there should be a reasonable inbetween.

Oldest doesn't have to mean absolute age and can be relative to that tech's particular "lane" (e.g. your "old" cell phone might be newer than one of your game consoles, but it still "feels" old when compared to cell phones exclusively).

And "tech" can be, well, anything you think counts as "tech!"

I've tried DDG for some time, but I keep finding myself using !g to find better results. I read a comment on Reddit that you just need to get used to searching things differently, but I'm starting to think that DDG just isn't very good. Kagi works well and I use the free version a bit for academic stuff, but I don't see myself paying for a search engine. Anyone have long-term reviews of search engines like Brave, Qwant, etc.?

So this may be weird, I just got a new set of pixel buds pro 2 and they work great, except if I'm not playing audio on my phone they frequently disconnect and reconnect from my bluetooth - I can tell because I can hear the tones. But if I'm playing a podcast or YouTube video, no issue. Phone is a Pixel 7a and it doesn't do this with my old A buds, my car, etc. haven't tried pairing the buds to anything else yet.

I've updated firmware, restarted everything, checked settings, turned off the adaptive sound, with no change. Help?

eBay is updating its privacy policy, effective next month (2025-04-27). The major change is a new section about AI processing, accompanied by a new user setting with an opt-out checkbox for having your personal data feed their models.

While that page specifically references European areas, the privacy selection appears to be active and remembered between visits for non-Europe customers. It may not do anything for us at all. On the other hand, it seems nearly impossible to find that page from within account settings, so I thought I'd post a direct link.

I'm well aware that I'm anomalous for having read this to begin with, much less diffed it against the previous version. But since I already know that I'm weird, and this wouldn't be much of a discussion post without questions:

• How do you stay up to date with contract changes that might affect you, outside of widespread Internet outrage (such as recent Firefox news)?
• What's your threshold -- if any -- for deciding whether to quit a company over contract changes? Alternatively, have you ever walked away from a purchase, service, or other acquisition over the terms of the contracts?

Title kinda gives the gist of it all.

I have been wondering about a way to have a "full" desktop with just XR glasses, a phone, bluetooth keyboard, and an internet connection.

Not sure if this is easily doable, or if Windows VMs would be so expensive to make it pointless. Maybe something like WINE or w/e the not 20 year outdated current thing is to run Windows software.

The main use would be to run 1-2 browsers and trading software.

Just curious if this is a foolish idea or not.

We recently did a Kagi trial giveaway, and I have since received another email from Kagi with 3 additional trial codes. I'm assuming other Kagi subscribers also received the same thing (I got my email on February 25 with the subject line "A treat from us"), so I figure we're due for another giveaway topic.

As before, if you would like an invite, please request it in a comment.

If you have invites to give, please PM them to requesters, then reply to their comment so that other givers will know they've been sent one and don't double up.

Gen 2 Chromecast devices all got struck by a certificate issue today, which is a firm reminder that they are another thing in my house that I don't actually control. They are also one of the very few google things that I still use.

I want to kill both of those points.

Fire Sticks, Roku whatevers, Chromecast, they all have to phone home to some central server to authenticate and feed information. I don't want that. I have servers, I have raspberry pis, I have like 6 random old laptops that need a use.

Is there any self hosted project that emulates the functionality of a Chromecast?

Currently, I'm using the Razer Deathadder V2 wired. Sadly, it's only sold through sketchy 3rd party sellers now since Razer has moved onto V3 (which I tried, but it's significantly less comfortable)

Does anybody know of a mouse that has similar contours, size, and weight to the Deathadder V2 (or V1, which was quite similar)?

The closest I've seen so far is the Corsair Sabre Pro Champion Series, but I'd love some input before committing to it, if anybody has any.

TL:DR: Need a remote desktop program that will let me get into my desktop from another network with no action required at the desktop itself.

Will be out of town for about two weeks, have a Windows 10 desktop and a Windows 10 tablet. Desktop stays home, tablet is going with me in case I need something from my desktop. Need a way to connect and access and control my desktop from the tablet (I'll have KBM with me) with no interaction at the desktop itself (most remote desktop programs require confirmation at the desktop to access and/or gain control).

Suggestions? FOSS preferred.