This is probably a very long shot. I was part of quite a few maling lists / email groups back in the 1990s in Brazil. Lists for things like writing, The X-Files, Star Trek, or skepticism. I made a few friends. I know some of them were probably hosted on large foreign companies like Yahoo. I don't remember the actual names of the lists, and the internet provider where I had my email no longer exists. So I don't expect to find them easily, but I imagine that there must be some kind of archive where they may or may not exist. I'm okay with sifting through for a very long time if I have to. That may be facilitated by the fact that the Brazilian internet was fairly small back then. And I do remember possible usernames I might have used at the time, which I can use in a search.

Is what I want possible at all? Is there some kind of centralized archive that is easy for me to use?

Thanks!

I had heard about GLG a while ago and I was just approached by someone from GLG for a project. Does anyone have experience working with them specifically? I have never done any paid consulting gigs and I want to make sure I understand what I'm getting into.

Thanks!

I would like to upgrade my aged 8 years old laptop and I'm completely undecided about which laptop to buy right now.

I considered Apple Intel laptops terrible, bad thermals, overpriced, unreliable, touch bar (uggg), I hated every second working on it, when the company I work for upgraded me with a M1, it was such a huge improvement from any laptop I have ever tried, absolutely no noise, incredibly performant and the longest battery life of any laptop by a lot.

I still don't like the Apple ecosystem, and I would prefer to use Linux as my main OS, but I can't find anything that comes even closer for the price of a Mac Air, If I go with Framework I'll get a less performant machine with a way worse battery, I honestly don't think the premium on repairability is worth for me when I don't have any issues repairing more challenging laptops, at the end repairability will be how easy is to get new parts.

ThinkPads have good reputation and repairability, but for what I see, the quality has gone down the drain in their latest models, and if I go with their premium models I get similar performance to Apple with worse battery, Dell has similar issues.

Gaming laptops are not an option, I don't do any PC gaming and the size and aesthetics are a dealbreaker for me.

The main issue seems to be that until ARM processors become better competitors to Apple, the battery life will be always the bottleneck, and I don't know how good the new Snapdragon X Elite compares right now.

Besides web development, photography edition and video editing (4k), I don't do many demanding tasks, I'm more than fine with the performance of a M1 as the baseline.

As an alternative, I'm thinking about getting a powerful desktop for the demanding tasks and a less powerful laptop with a good battery and screen, but ideally I would prefer a single machine.

I went down the path of thinking about switching to Passkeys but it seems like more hassle than it is worth, so I hoped this community could tell me if I am crazy.

I use Bitwarden to generate and save passwords for anything important and always use an authentication app when the option is present. I never use the same password. Sadly, most Canadian banks are awful and only allow SMS 2FA if anything at all. That said, of the two banks I primarily use, one does allow an authentication app and the other uses its own app to send authentication codes.

I always read that Passkeys are better for people who are lazy/bad with their passwords. For someone like me, is the security practically the same or is there still some benefit to switching everything I can to Passkeys?

When Musk bought Twitter and "unleashed free speech" on the platform, it made me curious about other social media platforms, specifically one where data and privacy are much more respected.

That inevitably lead me to mastodon. I opened an account and all that, but I must be doing it wrong, or maybe mastodon just isn't what I want it to be.

I don't really know who or what to follow on there that would create an experience that draws me in.

In fairness, it could just be that I am not following interesting accounts but I follow 7 accounts

• grapheneOS which is just updates about their O.S.
• Daniel Micay who hasn't posted in a loooong time
• James Gunn rarely posts
• nixCraft is just memes

and the rest are just news outlets like Ars Technica, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Propublica, which ain't bad but like, they post links to long-form articles, which isn't really what you are really looking for if you are just doing a light skim of your feed for a quick 5 minutes.

Are interesting folks not on mastodon? or I am just not following the right accounts? Im interested in tech stuff and social issues and some politics (but not much cause that can get doom scrolly fast)

I enjoy Tildes a lot for its thoughtful discussion and well curated links. It's a site you can enjoy casually and not get addicted to.

But sometimes you're dealing with a cold, or laying in a hotel room after a long flight, or just feeling lousy, and you start to long for that infinite scroll, dopamine hit, image / video cornucopia. Or really, there are just times I want to laugh at memes, people's drama, etc., until I'm ready to get out of bed and back to the world.

In the old days, we had things like memebase, or early reddit to scratch that itch. But these days social media algorithms have gone nuts. For example, I can't spend five minutes on reddit without finding myself in a racially charged discussion. Platforms like TikTok likewise seem appealing (an endless scroll of silly videos would be great), but again the algorithms are there to highlight conflict and make you miserable. I feel like even if you work hard to curate on these platforms, you're not safe.

So for anyone who feels like me: is there a solution to this? Perhaps a fedeverse instance still small enough to avoid astroturfing. Or non social-media options with a huge amount of content (something like thedailywtf, or hitting random on a quality web comic). I would love to hear about what you enjoy when you're looking for internet junk food.

I have a Moto G 5G 2023 and 2025 Chevy Trax that I'm trying to troubleshoot why Android Auto cannot last more than 10 minutes without crashing out and needing to either wait for the connection to be available again, or unplug and replug the USB cord to get it to reconnect. Sometimes it goes for an extended period of time, and sometimes it won't last for longer than a minute before it crashes with no visible error on the phone. I think it might be something in RAM, but more often than not it's when Google Maps is up, with Audible in the background and I'm not sure if it's one of those or possibly my Launcher or having the three buttons turned on for my phone, or some weird esoteric thing.

I'm one of those mythical Linux users who has been using it for years but has little to no idea what's going on behind the scenes or under the hood.

In my time using it, I've sort of passively gleaned that certain things are controversial, but I don't necessarily know why. It's also hard for me to know if these are just general intra-community drama/bikeshedding, or if these are actually big, meaningful issues.

If you're someone who's in the know, here's your chance to lay out a Linux controversy in a way that's understandable by someone like me, who can't tell you why people always make "GNU/Linux" jokes for some reason whenever people mention "Linux."

Here are some things that have pinged for me as controversial in my time using Linux:

• Unity
• Canonical
• Deepin
• systemd
• Arch
• GNOME
• Manjaro
• Kali
• Rust in the kernel
• elementaryOS
• Linus Torvalds
• Snaps
• Wayland
• Something about a university being banned from contributing to Linux
• NVIDIA drivers
• Package managers vs. Snaps/Flatpaks

There are certainly more -- these are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head.

Replies don't have to be limited to the above topics. I'm interested in getting the lay of the land about any Linux controversy.

IMPORTANT

This topic is intended for learning, not bickering.

• Please try to explain a controversy as fairly as you can.
• Please try to not re-ignite a flame war about a specific controversy.

It's fine to discuss these in good faith, but I do not want this topic to become yet another Linux battleground online. There are plenty of those already!

Disclaimer: I do not like LLMs. I am not going to fight you on if you say LLMs are shit.

One of the things I find interesting about conversations on LLMs is when have a critique about them, and someone says, "Well, it's no different than people." People are only as good as their training data, people misremember / misspeak / make mistakes all the time, people will listen to you and affirm you as you think terrible things. My thought is that not being reliably consistent is a verifiable issue for automation. Still, I think it's excellent food for thought.

I was looking for new music venues the other day. I happened upon several, and as I looked at their menu and layout, it occurred to me that I had eaten there before. Not there, but in my city, and in others. The Stylish-Expensive-Small-Plates-Record-Bar was an international phenomenon. And more than that, I couldn't help but shake that it was a perversion of the original, alluring concept-- to be in a somewhat secretive record bar in Tokyo where you'll be glared into the ground if you speak over the music.

It's not a bad idea. And what's wrong with evoking a good idea, especially if the similarity is just unintentional? Isn't it helpful to be able to signal to people that you're like-that-thing instead of having to explain to people how you're different? Still, the idea of going just made me assume it'd be not simply like something I had experienced before, but played out and "fake." We're not in Tokyo, and people do talk over the music. And even if they didn't, they have silverware and such clanging. It makes me wonder if this permutation is a lossy estimation of the original concept, just chewed up, spat out, slurped, regurgitated, and expensively funded.

other forms of conceptual perversion:

• Matters of Body Image - is it a sort of collapse when we go from wanting 'conventional beauty' to frankensteining features onto ourselves? Think fox eye surgeries, buccal fat removal, etc. Rather than wanting to be conventionally attractive, we aim for the related concept of looking like people who are famous.
• (still thinking)

A while ago some of the keys on my Dell XPS laptop started working poorly, they were only registering the presses half of the time or if I pushed them really hard. I tried removing the keycaps and cleaning the keys on the inside, but to no avail. Well, I thought, that means it's time to get a new laptop. So I was choosing the next laptop to get. One of the options I considered was the Framework laptop, which is supposed to be super repairable - I mean, if only I could just replace my laptop keyboard, I wouldn't have to buy a whole new laptop just because of a few broken keys!

Then I thought about it again. I realized that a repairable laptop is only useful if you actually try to repair your laptop, which I've never done. So, I looked it up, and turns out Dell, while obviously not as easily repairable as Framework, has very well-detailed official service manuals as well!

Two weeks of waiting for a Chinese copycat keyboard from AliExpress and three hours of work later, I finally have a fully working laptop! Turns out it isn't hard at all to replace a broken keyboard - but I'm still very proud of myself for doing it, mostly for even deciding to do it instead of just turning a fully functional laptop into e-waste as I would've done otherwise. I was also really surprised that Dell laptops are that easy to fix (though they don't officially sell replacement parts to consumers), since it's known to be a company that makes a ton of money on expensive support offerings.

I don't really know what the lesson of this post is, I just wanted to share this small achievement with y'all.

So since the USB-C spec came out, there are so many different cables advertising different optional capabilities.

Even if you are careful to select a cable which does what you need, there is a good chance it won't have all capabilities as advertised, you only find out when it arrives.

The situation on Amazon is particularly bad, with co-mingled stock and questionable brands like XZZTTG and EIUTOO dominating the listings.

For me, now, I'm specifically struggling to find a short replacement cable for my Samsung T7 SSD, which came with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 cable which was ~15cm and flexible. It was very nice, but they're not sold seperately!

So, where do you look these days to find a listing of decent and reliable accessories like USB cables?

UPDATE:

Great recommendations on brands to look for.
Thanks all!

Hi, so I've been thinking about this for several days now, and thought it might be an interesting topic for Tildes.

Earlier this week, YouTube suggested this AI Sitcom video to me. Some of the jokes are actually very cohesive "Dad jokes", and it got me wondering how much of the video was AI generated. Are the one-liners themselves AI generated? Was this script generated with AI, and then edited before passing it on to something else to generate the video and voice? Or are we at the phase where AI could generate the whole thing with a single prompt? If it's the latter I find this sort of terrifying, because the finished product is very cohesive for something with almost no editing.

I'd also be interested in discussing where this video might have come from. The channel and descriptions have almost no information, so it seems like this may be a channel that finds these elsewhere and reposts? Or maybe the channel is the original and just trying to be vague about technology used?

Also side note, I have no idea if this belongs in ~Tech, so feel free to move it around as needed.

I have a project I'm working on that could be performed by a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM. But almost everything on the Pi's board besides the SoC and RAM will be unused. And for this project size is important. I don't need WiFi/Bluetooth/ethernet/USB3/PCIe/Cameras/etc.

Here are my requirements:

• Performance at or above the SoC on the Pi5
• At least 8GB of RAM
• Either one USB port (for a mic/headphone jack combo USB sound card) or integrated analog audio input and output
• A couple of GPIO pins for buttons/LEDs
• Cost around the Pi5 - $80
• Runs Linux

Looking at the Pi5 I feel a properly stripped down version that meets my needs could be as small or smaller than a Pi Zero. I looked around and other SBCs are either much slower, much bigger, and/or much more expensive.

My current best option is to buy a Pi5 and trim its PCB as best as I can. But given there are so many competing options I assume one of them will have what I'm looking for.

I'm a web designer and web host. I've basically been doing this for almost 30 years - I registered my first domain back in 1996, and I've had my own dedicated server(s) since 2002.

I've gone back to starting up a business to do design and hosting, and so I'd like to get my business out there a bit, so that is a motivation for this; but also, I have long supported hosting projects that I believed in. The longest project I've hosted has been the Simutrans community - since 2002, I have hosted most of the resources used by the community, including being the primary source for most downloads of the game for a number of years.

One thing that makes me different from most webhosts? I believe in quality, speedy, secure hosting. You can get budget hosting on overloaded servers with support that doesn't care about you. That's not what I do. For my paid customers, I charge a bit more, but that's because I make sure that the sites run as quickly as possible.

I primarily host WordPress-based sites, and I use Divi on most of those because while it's pretty easy for non-techie people to understand how to make minor changes for those that want/need to do that, it's powerful and allows me to design websites for businesses.

I'm writing this post to offer hosting and help for up to six projects that people want to work on.

What I will provide:

• Website running WordPress+Divi
• Help using Divi
• Some design help, possibly a complete design, but at least some help with design ideas
• If your project doesn't use WordPress+Divi, I'd still consider hosting you. The server is a shared server environment, meaning PHP apps - a LAMP environment, essentially

What I will not provide:

• A domain name. But they are cheap through https://Namecheap.com/. And you wouldn't need one initially as I can set you up with a development subdomain on na1.site. (And if you were happy with a subdomain, I'd certainly allow that to be permanent)

For how long? Indefinitely. I'd say permanently, but you can't predict the future. That said, as long as I'm around and you still want the hosting service. Again, I've hosted the Simutrans project for more than twenty years. So I've been around and will be.

Questions? Lemme know. Interested? Lemme know.

I'm trying to keep this relatively short, so please, if you do have questions, please do ask.