Solution

It was probably my motherboard. I got a new CPU and motherboard and it worked. I also upgraded from DDR3 to DDR4 ram in the upgrade process

Background

So my computer is not posting, and I am unsure the cause. I am not getting an error code, so that complicates things. I do not know if this motherboard will provide post codes, it does not have a seven segment display for providing post codes.

How it started

It just randomly stopped displaying any pictures, unsure if it happened while in use or when the computer was asleep. I was doing stuff at my desk and had music playing on my computer. The music ended and I did not put on more music and the monitors went to sleep. Later when I went to use my computer It did not appear to wake up, I tried fully shutting down and turning on my computer, and that is when this problem occurred.

Symptoms:

• When I power on, computer appears to start normally, with all fans spinning so power delivery appears to be working. Even GPU fans are spinning.
• Holding down the power button turns the computer off as normal.
• Nothing is displayed on the screen, my monitors do not even detect an input.
• USB devices do not appear to be powering on.
• Every minute or two, the GPU fans ramp up briefly, and then ramp down. It may be all fans are ramping up, kind of hard to tell exactly which fans are ramping up.
• With the AMD GPU, the LEDs for power turn on. However, I vaguely recall the GPU itself having some RGB when the system was running that was not on. How my computer was setup I did not see inside my case that often, so the RGB on the GPU is a vague memory from a few years ago and I would not put much weight in there being some RGB.

Hardware:

• MOBO: Gigabyte 9900FXA-UD3
• CPU: AMD FX-8350
• GPU: ASUS Radeon HD7870 or EVGA GTX 970
• PSU: Cooler Master Elite V2 550W

Troubleshooting Attempted:

I initially assumed it was GPU related as the computer appears to turn on normally, but then nothing is displayed. So another user shipped me his old GPU (the GTX 970), and I swapped it out with my old one, and the problem persists.

I tried swapping out the RAM

I tried a brand new PSU and that also did not solve the issue

Leading hypothesis

Since I have changed everything out except CPU and MOBO, I am thinking it is probably my MOBO. I am currently researching my options for replacing my MOBO, or a friend offered me his CPU and RAM from his old rig with a broken MOBO that may be a better option than replacing mine.

Early last year, there were some rather heady predictions within my company about the potential/future of decentralized autonomous organizations. (That a DAO would be running a real company, that a DAO would play an important role in an election somewhere, etc.) They have not come true. From my perspective, the same generally seems to be the case for nearly all Web3 components.

That led me to wonder, though - are DAOs still a thing? Is there quiet potential there and the hype machine has simply moved on to LLMs... or was hype all there ever was?

Have any of you seen any actual uses of a DAO? I would love to hear about it if so.

I've been struggling with this for a long time. I want to keep my workflow consistent independent of my "workstation", and have identical dotfiles (like .bashrc, .vimrc etc.) on different devices.

So... How you personally deal with this issue, and what should I do?

Thanks!

After the debacle with Reddit, Twitter, et al some of my friends an I decided to stop posting to corporate walled gardens and instead focus on sharing and co-creating.

I remember reading about modern alternatives for WebRings two years ago, but can't for the life of me find them or remember what they were called! Tiny web? TinyRing? SmallWeb? Does this ring a bell for some of you?

Alternatively, I'd appreciate if you could share ideas and approaches to alternative/indy syndication or agreggation.

Thanks !

EDIT: ding ding ding https://indieweb.org/Micro.blog

As per the title, is anyone into hacking about with Firestick devices and getting some world free IPTV?

Essentially it's just Kodi with plugins and Add-ons, and they're generally just python scripts anyway.

I've just fallen down this rabbit hole after a friend said he'd gotten a Firestick off a bloke down the pub for £75 for the year. He said its Sky Glass and loads of box sets and what not.

A quick inspection and it's not Sky Glass, it's a custom skin for an IPTV player. The box sets are a mix of Real Debrid links and what looks to be the Eupherium plug in which uses torrents. Straight away I threw a VPN on his stick with the killswitch enabled.

Anyway, I decided to see what I could with basics on my own Firestick for free. I used Kodi, Eupherium, The Crew's Daddy Live, The Loop, and a sports plug in. I managed to set up Electronic Program Guide (EPG) for most of it. I used Surfshark from the get go as this is all dodgy, but it's purely for experimental purposes.

It's great doing this for free but there are some downsides:

Channels are hit and miss whether they are even near HD quality. Streams are often low fps and you need to rely on interpolation on the TV to smooth the stream out.

Kodi often crashes during use or startup requiring a cache clearance.

Steams change often. They can be great one day, the next that IPTV is dead and you need to pick another which may or may not work.

I realise there is a whole underground network for private streams and people are making serious bank selling these for PPV access alone.

What are people's thoughts on all of this? I work in the TV industry and it's bad for businesses, but at the same time, there are far too many fat cats around making this industry drown.

Hi Tilderinos,

I head up a small startup and we're looking to get some support for our data security. Up until now we've worked with small mom and pops that didn't have any requirements, but a few of our new clients have full data security teams and our infrastructure and policies/protocols aren't up to snuff. We reached out to a few consulting firms and they quotes us between $80-100k to get things set up and run us through a full SOC2 review. As a small company we don't really have that type of budget, more like $40-50k. I stumbled upon Vanta and Drata as alternatives and had meetings with their sales folks last week. Both of their offerings from setting up our protocols to monitoring and getting us through a SOC2 were only $16k.

Are platform based companies like Vanta or Drata enough to get us off the ground while we're still getting set up? Has anyone worked with them before and have any feelings one way or the other? Should we be signing on with a security consulting company - be it at a lower rate if we can negotiate it?
This is all quite new to me and any insight folks here can provide would be incredible useful.

I found myself on the Archivebox website earlier today. After reading some of it, that's the kind of program I could use. The ephemerous nature of the web is bothersome, so much content is lost for one reason or another. Archivebox seems to be one of the most popular tools, and it can automatically mirror my locally downloaded website to archive.org, which is great. It seems complex though, maybe more complex than I usually tolerate these days. Which is why I am asking if anyone has personal experience with Archivebox or other similar programs. Do you find them useful and reliable? Have you ever found in your local storage a webpage that you really liked, which was gone from the web? How's your setup?

Thank ;)

A year or two ago when the decay of social media became a popular topic of discussion, there was a lot of talk about a resurgence in the use of RSS readers. My impression recently was that the RSS renaissance hadn't really materialised in the end, but I realised that if it had it would be pretty hard to tell.

So, Tildes users: do you use an RSS reader currently? If so, is that a recent decision? Tell me about your experience.

I've recently come back to studying German, after having taken a small break for a few months for a new job.

My main form of study is immersion (I recently stumbled across the books of Walter Moers and haven't looked back since) and conversation practice on iTalki.

Nowadays, I try my hardest to only buy tech second-hand and preferably as future proof and modular as possible. My go-to machines are a fully modded Lenovo Thinkpad T430, and a more humble Thinkpad X230, both running Linux (Ubuntu and PopOS respectively). They work just fine for my basic needs (mostly surfing, some occasional streaming and word processing). But they struggle during my conversation lessons on iTalki or Zoom, most of the time either overheating or freezing/stumbling. I realize this might be a Linux problem, but I have also found the web camera and built-in microphone on both machines to be really inadequate for video calls. I gave up using my own laptops for my language lessons over a year ago, and now have resorted to stealing my partners Macbook, which isn't ideal.

Do you have any recommendations for any more recent laptops that would offer a better video conference experience, while offering at least a removable battery? Pricewise it would be great to be find something below €500 used.

A question for the more tech-savvy here.

I seem to recall an article about Google trying to eliminate competition by making it so that searches or other content would work well on Chrome but not on Firefox. I think I also heard they both run on Chromium, so the engine under the end is the same? I don't fully remember.

But where I'm going with this: I'm noticing lately that certain websites or searches won't work well with Firefox, but when i switch to Chrome, they go off without a hitch. I admit that this often involves personal information being entered (side note- I even had one incident where it didn't work on laptop and had to resort to my phone instead to get it to work). The problem is... I HATE using Chrome. There are some issues with Firefox occasionally, but I'm going to use FF about 90% of the time. And I think I heard that people are becoming more aware of how much of a bastard Chrome is... so is Chrome fighting back dirty to force people to come back over? Or could it possibly be some completely unrelated issue?

Edit: Apache OR Nginx? Could someone fix my title - I posted without proofing.

My wife is having half decent success with ecommerce. She's doing great on Etsy and eBay, and now her website is starting to pick up.

It's currently hosted on 20i who pride themselves on being an excellent WordPress and Woocommerce provider, with a half decent CDN. In reality, I think it's pretty shit for what you pay for.

I'm tempted to either grab a VPS or even go as far as a bare metal at a CoLo with public IP and run the full stack myself. If I do, shall I go Apache or Nginx? I've done both and I'm pretty agnostic. OS would be Debian.

Before I go to this length though, does anyone know of a fair priced but good performing Woocommerce platform? She's got hundreds of hours already, the plugins and over 300 products listed, so I'm loathe to move to a different solution, however, I'm not ruling it out.

The reason to not all in on Etsy or eBay is the 25% cut they take of everything. Using a personal site and Stripe payment platform means it's more 1% + 20p for processing.

Ideas, thoughts and suggestions please?

I have been having a lot of trouble finding a digital clock. I don't even know where to ask for recs, I tried a couple subreddits but there is no /r/digitalclocks so I'm trying a more general place here and maybe someone can help?

My requirements (I'm in the USA so that's where the time finding needs to happen):

1. It autosets the time based on the radio signal
2. It automatically detects DST
3. Backup battery so if I get a power failure it doesn't lose the time
4. The time is the only thing on the display. (Although, this seems to be the hardest one to find, so, if it also shows the temperature or something, that's ok, as long as the time is a lot bigger than anything else)
5. Not willing to spend more than $50 on a clock
6. Needs to be LED not LCD, i.e. I want to be able to see the time in a dark room without pressing a light-up button or anything

Additional bonuses:

1. If it has a rainbow display
2. If it has a USB charging port
3. Big numbers, like at least 1.5" tall

I don't care about the alarm or any overhead projection features.

If you have a digital clock that you love that meets these requirements (or at least mostly does) I would like to hear about it!! Thanks!!

I use keepassxc as my password manager and it sits in the system tray quietly until it is requisited by a login form in firefox.

Gnome does not have a system tray, so you just open keepassxc on startup and it just stays there floating in the background?

It's been months since I last used Gnome. Did anything change or it's still like this?

I was asked to recommend a phone to an older relative that is bad with technology and wanted to ask some advice.

It is important that the phone is reliable and clean. That is no bloatware, popups, adware, nagware or anything like that. Other than that the requirements are simply as good a camera as is available at the budget and maps.

The options I can see are:

• standard Android phone - Personally I have Samsung A34 which would fit the hw and price but the sw is horrible. I also have no current experience with custom ROMs as I went with adb(and Universal Android Debloater for ease of use) to remove the worst of it. From what I have heard the Google Pixel comes with least amount of bloat as Android(single source) but they seemed to have different problems with hw each generation and the price would mean an older one. Maybe something else would be better choice here.

• iPhone - honestly I have zero experience here as I never had it so I don't even know how much it would fit. The price would also mean an older or used model

• Dumb or KaiOS phone would fail the camera requirement and the minimal phones mentioned here(eg. Light phone, Minimal phone) are expensive for what they are and I am not convinced a good choice here given the usual problems with niche hw and sw(but maybe I am wrong?)

I am in EU and the budget is less than 500EUR, preferably less than 350EUR.

Okay -- I am looking for a decent but dirt cheap tablet, manly for recipes, spotify, youtube/VLC, maybe some simple puzzle games. I want the largest tablet I can get for the fewest dollars spent

Not a lot. I was looking at the Lenovo Tab M11 or something around there.

Also, ideally something that can take a crap-free Android ROM.

quick edit: I gave up on this for a few days because I got into the 'this one is better... but this one is better...' and before I knew it I was hitting a grand for something I'll barely use. I just ordered a Lenovo P11. I don't expect it to be amazing, but it'll be fine for the very basic tasks I'll be using it for.

Its surprising how much old stuff is for sale on Amazon. iPads from 2018, for instance. Doesn't seem right.

double edit: I returned the under-powered P11 and got a Lenovo Tab K11 LTE w/ 8gb and 128gb eMMC. Not a big fan of eMMC, but it'll be fine for my uses.

What sort of non stock andriod launchers are people using at the moment? Just moved from iPhone to Android and want to use something better than oneui. Currently using niagara but curious what people are actually using?

When people talk about switching to Linux from Windows/macOS, especially for those inexperienced with Linux, the conversation often becomes mostly about drawbacks: all the things you'll have to sacrifice, that don't work outright, or that aren't as smooth.

On the other hand, if you had to highlight the advantages of Linux to a newcomer, what would you say?

What might someone gain by switching to Linux, rather than lose?

What are some of the drawbacks people are currently living with on other OSes that they might not be aware of simply because they're used to them?

For the end-user, that is. I'm sure Meta and the like think their algorithms are fantastic at what they want them to do.

I find myself routinely asking why I get so many suggestions I have no interest in when using all types of websites. I haven't used social media since the early years of Facebook, but I imagine most recommendation algorithms are tuned much like the ones on those sites, i.e. to offer more of the same, whereas I'd prefer something to introduce different stuff I'd probably like. Maybe that differentiates me from the average user, but there should be enough people like me that it'd be factored in, no? Just because I watch a cat video doesn't mean I'm all in on cats.

I mostly like Pandora's service but it feels like their music library isn't huge for my fav genres. Steam regularly tries to interest me in the most insipid games based on superficial commonalities to what's already in my library. Youtube can be good, but it can easily be echo-chambery. Shopping websites of all sorts are usually a crapshoot. What gives?

I am wanting to setup a personal podcast server but I am not really sure how to go about that.

I have my own server at home with docker and I am not sure if there are any well-known FOSS (preferable dockerized) podcast server applications that I can spin up and load some podcast episodes into so that I can create my own custom podcast feed that only I would subscribe to?

and I want to be able to support video podcasts.

Hello friends, and thank you in advance for any help on this topic.

I am looking for an android keyboard that does not have emoji, stickers or gifs, but also has long press options for special characters like dashes, slashes and colons etc.

Searching online for variants of "no emoji keyboard," only floods my results with the opposite and it's beyond frustrating!

I realize that the answer is likely right under my nose and I'm just missing it for whatever reason.

I would glady pay money for such an option if only I could find one.

I'm sorry if this question is silly or posted in the wrong thread, but I'm at my wits end.

Again, thank you for any help or redirection to my query!

Cheers!

I find myself scrolling through YT hoping to see something to play in the background, occasionally checking things like TechLinked or MichaelMJD with occasional PointCrow and Dougdoug. But really just wasting time doing nothing, just scrolling.
So I want to cut it off but I want to fill in that time with something else.
Anyone else has tried to cut off YT(Or at least minimize) YT from their life? I’m probably using YT the wrong way.
I would like some RSS feeds or podcast to make me go on YT less. Or thoughts/opinions/experiences from other people that used to have YT on almost all the time but minimized the time on YT.

I remember seeing a fun website somewhere which was basically an isometric animation of a space station or something like that. It had a lot of tiles with a lot of fun stuff happening on it, it kinda had a "Where's Waldo" vibe. I think it had a number in it's name, like station42 or something like that. I can't find the website now. Does anyone remember what it is?

It’s been a few weeks now since the release of iOS 17.4, which

[…] provides new options for app marketplaces, web browsers and payments for residents of the European Union. […]

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am a firm believer in the underlying regulation to it, and have been ever since the possibility of this becoming a reality was in the Brussels air. But so far, I haven’t really been able to come up with a truly practical use case.

Furthermore, I haven’t seen any marketing for an Epic Store, Meta Store, or similar “app marketplaces”, but this may be attributed to the still rather… wobbly legal situation surrounding, notably, still having to direct payments to Apple while not using their store for app distribution. I don’t think there has been any follow-up from Apple (or the EU) that retracts these conditions.

So: Have any fellow EU resident ~tech’ies done anything fun or interesting with this new freedom yet?

To those not affected by this regulation, what would you like to “sideload”, or are perhaps already sideloading on Android?

Do any of you think big companies will move their entire palette onto an alternative store anytime soon, e.g. Facebook and sister products? To be honest, I doubt this will happen, otherwise it would’ve long occurred on the Google Play Store as well.

My ideas were:

• I’ve thought about trying to install Minecraft (the full version, probably using Pojav), or a game of similar caliber, on my phone just for fun and to see how well the iPhone GPU really fares against a “real” game, but didn’t find the time yet for looking into it.
• Also personally, I’d love to see a real “root-capable” shell on iOS, but I don’t think that will ever be a thing irrespective of how much sideloading Apple is forced to allow into their OS.

Not quite sure if this is a ~tech question, or a ~sport question, or a ~health question. But at least it's a question!

I have a Garmin watch, and so does my wife. They track our activities. We would like to compete in challenges, but Garmin's challenge options are quite limited. Through Garmin, you can compete for the number of steps, or distances ran or swam and such, but those don't really work very well for us.

I was wondering, are there any apps that work on both iOS and Android, sync with Garmin Connect (either directly or through Apple Health / Google Health Connect), have a sensible privacy policy, and offer some or all of the following types of challenges, which I think would be more interesting:

• Total time exercised (either any exercise type, or specific sports)
• Time spent in "vigorous" exercise
• Time spent in "zone 2" exercise (or another zone)
• Active calories burned (either total, or percentage of your resting calories)
• Number of exercise sessions
• Number of consecutive exercise days, i.e who can maintain the longest streak (allowing rest days)

Does anything like that exist?

I also have a bonus question:

Garmin has Expeditions, which track the distance you have walked or run, and once you reach your Expedition goal (say, "walk the distance of the Appalachian Trail"), it tells you that you have reached your goal and gives you a badge. I like the basic idea, but the implementation is quite bland.

Are there any Expedition type apps where the app not only tracks the number of steps against the total needed, but actually shows on a map where you'd be currently going if you actually were walking the Appalachian Trail or something, and gives you notifications when you reach some interesting points along the way, with pictures and a little bit of information about the place? Now, that would be something!

Hey there,

Title is pretty self-explanatory, looking for some web camera recommendations, USB obviously¹, good price to value, higher quality the better, microphone not required, but appreciated.

¹ Don't need any MDR-26/SDR-26/CameraLink connectors, or Game Boy Camera recommendations here /s

This is my cry for help.

I'm a newer programmer who just got hired for my first actual programming job a few months ago. Before now the only things I really made were simple python scripts that handled database operations at my last job. I live in an area with no opportunities, and so this new job I got is my saving grace at this point. For the first time in my life I can have actual savings and can actually work on moving to an area with opportunities. However...

Everything is falling apart. I have no idea how this place has survived this long. There is no senior dev for me to go to. There are no code reviews. There is no QA. There is a spiderweb of pipelines with zero error handling or data-checking. Bugs are frequent and go undetected. The database has no keys or constraints, and was designed by a madman (so it's definitely not normalized whatsoever). I already have made a bunch of little scripts handling data-parsing tasks that are used in prod, and I've had to learn proper logging and notifications on errors along the way, and have still yet to learn how to do real tests (I ordered a book on pytest that I plan on going through). I am so paranoid that at any moment something I made does something unexpected and destroys things (which... kinda actually happened already).

We're in the long and arduous process of moving away from this terrible system to a newer, better-designed one but I'm already just so lost and... lonely? There's a few separate dev "teams" but one is outsourced and the other is infamously unapproachable and works on a completely different domain. There's no one there to catch me if/when I make mistakes except myself. The paranoia I have over my programs is really getting to me and already affecting my health.

I guess I just want advice on what I should do in this situation. Is this a normal first experience? I care deeply about making sure the things I make are good and functional but I also don't have the experience to forsee potential issues that may come up due to how I'm designing things. And how can I cope with the paranoia I'm feeling?

EDIT: It takes me a while to write responses, but I want everyone to know that I really appreciate all your advice and kind words. It does mean a lot to me! I'm doing my best to take in what everyone has said and am working on making the best of an atypical situation. I'm chronically hard on myself, but I'm gonna try to give myself a bit more grace here. Again, thanks so much for all the thoughtful replies from everyone. :)

I have for the last few years been preoccupied with creating a kind of audio-based social media, a call-in radio-show if you will without any call-screening, and the occasional piece of music to rest the ears after too many words. By now this has resulted in a pretty solid community of dedicated listeners capable of discussing a wide range of topics and so far no heckling or trolling even though we never had a call-screener. Two listeners even met through the show and are now dating <3 <4

The relative success of this radio format has made me ponder how a community comparable to tildes would behave if it had an audio or podcast layer to it. Like a spoken forum/Reddit thread with moderators arranging audio messages from users/listeners into threads that make up rotating topical sections in an ongoing audio transmission. If you could listen to a curated spoken feed of tildes. A community-based audio forum live radio social media hybrid.

Drop some references if you know of any media experiments it might be worth for me to know about while I brainstorm with myself!

One example I know of is the US-based 100% listener-sponsored radio station WFMU. Full weekly schedule, absolutely unrelenting top programming by hosts who have full autonomy to explore their broad musical interests. There is never this modern smarmyness of some podcasts hosts. No ads. Fully listener sponsored. Your attention is taken for granted. Nobody's trying to get you hooked. Your attention is rewarded. They have a written chat-roll during most broadcasts the host will sometimes include into their speak, but not often. It's freeform radio with a digital layer as an add-on. It's fantastic for what it is. https://wfmu.org

Do you know of any experimental/hybrid social media where the users/listeners provide the spoken input in the style of call-in radio? Please drop some references, books, anything that connects to experiences gleaned from this type of experiment. Also interested in your ideas for how to make this work in real life.

It's not supposed to be the best and most streamlined brains-off entertainment ever. Just a stab at a technologically modern and democratic way of enabling discourse and the identification that seems a unique feature of audio-based media. When you can't see the person talking, it's a pseudonymous stranger ... you fill in the blanks with projections, guesses about the person. Always loved this kind of interaction. Which is why I'm here on tildes too!

I've been looking at job postings at tech companies. Many of them have pretty bad Glassdoor reviews
(and I tried pretty hard to play Devil's Advocate while reading!). I think there's no perfect company out there. Still, I notice a lot of mentions of overvaluation, layoffs / diminishing culture, stressed employees / long hours, insurmountable tech debt, junior / inexperienced leadership, "toxic" culture, Hire-to-Fire 15% PIP cultures, etc. I feel differently about a lot of companies I used to aspire to join.

In the midst of all that, I also then see small startups. 10, 20 people. It sounded like way too much work at first, but I know some people who seem pretty fulfilled by such a setup and not (visibly) half as stressed as I was at a ~70 person mismanaged startup (although engineering headcount was pretty small). Some part of me wonders if a small company, even of strangers, would actually be less stress because we wouldn't yet have made the mistakes on culture mismatch, growing headcount, adding features to get growth that may never come, etc.

edit: adding clarification

Oh yes, to be totally clear-- a lot of the Glassdoors / Blinds were actually for large tech companies, including but not limited to "startups" originating from 10 years ago. Some were also smedium sized (~6 years old, ~50 people, typically Series A or earlier) so had been doing the startup thing long enough where you can see the team is starting to fray.

In my post, it's basically a slightly unhealthy comparison between older companies that have had lots of time to screw up, and companies that have not yet publicly or irrevocably screwed up (the small, new startups). Of course, I'm then kind of assuming I won't be the reason something fails when I totally could be lol.

Something I have been thinking about lately is how sexual content online seems to be proliferated and normalized much more than it used to be. I'll give a couple of examples.

While I do not use the big social media sites (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok) very often, I've seen questionable content while others are scrolling, as well as conversations both online and offline with others who do use them. Nearly all of these sites contain profiles of people who are primarily there to market an OnlyFans account or similar. And these profiles are pushed to various demographics, seemingly moreso to males.

Reddit has a very questionable history with this type of content. But outside of that, any subreddit that allows submission of photos of people will often include these models trying to promote themselves, and they frequently make it to the top of the subreddit. (Some reddit users make fun of this in subreddits such as r/UNBGBBIIVCHIDCTIICBG, which stands for "Upvoted Not Because Girl, But Because It Is Very Cool; However, I Do Concede That I Initially Clicked Because Girl").

Twitch is a livestreaming platform that primarily hosts streamers who are playing video games. Streaming other events or "just chatting" has grown in popularity, which I have no complaints about. But there has been a lot of controversy about sexual content on the platform. To address this to some degree, Twitch added a "Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches" category for people who are streaming in that specific context. But OnlyFans models do not stick to that category, and can easily be found in "Just Chatting." And I can personally say that regardless of how many times I select "Not Interested" on these streams, I continue to get suggestions for them.

Even generic chat applications (such as WhatsApp and Discord) are plagued with bot accounts that are either representative of an actual model or part of a scam, but in both cases, try to lure users in with sexual content.

I do want to say I have no issue with adult content when it is in the appropriate venue. Sites dedicated to pornography are completely fine for consenting adults. What I take issue with is how this content has expanded far beyond dedicated sites.

Society has reached a point where we hand off internet-connected devices to children at a very young age. Chromebooks are used in schools very early in education, and smartphones are given to kids early in life. It already seems to be common knowledge that social media use results in self-image issues in youth. These issues will likely be accelerated by social media not only showing a false image of how people live their lives but also the lengths they go to appear sexually appealing.

I'm not proposing some overreaching "save the children" censorship legislation is needed. But it's hard to imagine how this trend can be turned around. It produces a ton of clicks, which is all these user-posted content sites (and advertisers) care about. Is there anything that can be done, or is this just the new internet?

I have, despite my better judgement, gone back on reddit in a limited way after exiting completely for a few months. I decided to anonymize myself as much as possible and was using Redact to cover my history. It overwrites comments with random words plus a short message that the comment has been anonymized and deleted with Redact. It's been working great for quite a few months.

Today I logged on for the first time in a few days and my comments have ALL been restored, right back to when I opened a new account a few months ago after closing my ten year old account. Everything is there again.

Not sure reddit's point in restoring them, other than a stark reminder that comments and personal info mining is the point of reddit, not community engagement, just like all the other social media.

Curious if anyone has any idea on how to permanently delete comment history?

I've been a hiring manager before across a few jobs. But, then, I was receiving maybe 50 resumes to screen a week with my recruiter. Y'all are, what, at a few factors to an order of magnitude more than that?

Are your recruiters now pre-filtering resumes before you see them? What is being used to determine whether a candidate gets an interview now?

What I'm seeing:

• Referrals almost never matter: I've gotten two interviews through my network after dozens of applications—and I'm fairly well networked.
• Experience at other well-known Tech companies doesn't get an interview
• Having the right skill set, based on the job description doesn't get an interview.

From the outside, it seems like a coin flip.

Meanwhile, I have LinkedIn's AI advisor routinely giving me flavors of "yes, you're definitely their kind of candidate" yet no responses after weeks followed by the occasional casual rejection email.

So what's happening behind the scenes? How do resumes get on your radar? How do you work from the deluge to hiring a human?

Sincerely,
A very experienced engineer and manager who is rather fed up with what seems like a collection of pseudo-random number generator contemporary hiring processes.

EDIT: I should have also included recruiters in the title of my ask.

It's nice having english language forums that don't require a vpn to access. Anyone got any other suggestions and any recommendations for vpns that work on mobile data reliably? I've found PIA, Nord, and Proton to not work but Surfshark does for now if intermittently (more reliably on wifi).

I really like this instructional video. I even downloaded a copy. The copy I downloaded is as blurry as the copy on YouTube.

Is it possible to possible to sharpen my copy of that video?

If it is possible, can it be done with freely available software on Linux?

Thanks either way.

In the recent months I started getting dissatisfied with Google the company in general, but also with its search engine due to privacy reasons, and SEO bloat affecting certain searches. A few weeks ago I switched to Duckduckgo from Google. Some searches are fine but there are three main issues I've been experiencing with Duckduckgo since the switch.

• The search "fails" and shows me results that are tangentially related to the query. Happens quite often and for various topics.
• It shows me a semi-related search results instead of the one I searched for, because it says there are not enough results for my query. Then I have to click again on the small text to search for the actual query.
• The automatic prompts that complete your query are scarce and unsatisfactory.

Because of this I've been switching back and forth between Google and Duckduckgo lately. I don't want to use Google, but Duckduckgo is definitely the worse option in general in my experience. It's better in some searches and shows useful results instead of big site bloat, but my overall experience was one of getting heavily downgraded.

This led me to a criticism about the discussions around this topic. People talk a lot about SEO bloat affecting search results, and it's definitely a real issue. It's especially a problem for some political searches, as it results in you getting propaganda results. However, recommending people Duckduckgo without mentioning its significantly worse search quality seems misleading.

I am of course not against using or recommending Duckduckgo. In fact, I wish them greater success in market share and development, as I think their policies are much better. But I think mentioning Duckduckgo's downsides is important to adequately inform people. I expected a noticeable downgrade, but I didn't expect it to be this worse because nobody mentioned it. As a result, I felt misled, and I definitely didn't know what I was getting into. Being adequately informed would have prevented that, as I would adjust my expectations.

So, this seems to be largely unaddressed in discussions around this topic, and I suspect the echo chamber effect around anti-Google discourse and privacy issues might be to blame.

What are your thoughts? Has anyone experienced something similar?

I am going to be living in France for the next year. I want to keep my US mobile phone number, and I would like it to be somewhat usable while I am out of the country, but I can't find an affordable way do set this up. I am hoping someone here has some more insight for me.

I am going to be buying a French mobile phone plan (most likely through Orange) that will cover my data usage, along with a local number for calls and texts. I already have either whatsapp or imessage set up for calls and texts to/from my family in the US. Ideally, I would like to have my US number on a second sim on my phone. I wouldn't need any roaming data for that sim, just calls and texts, and my actual usage will be very small.

Here are the solutions I have explored:

1. Porting my number to Google Voice. This is probably the best solution, but I would like to avoid google if at all possible. This costs only $20 with no monthly fees. This would require me to use a separate app for this number. If possible, I would like to be able to use the iPhone system apps for calls and texts.

2. Some MVNO with international roaming. So far the best I have seen is Ting mobile. It costs $0.30 per minute calls and $0.12 per outgoing text. This pricing would be perfect for my extremely low usage. However it requires a $10/month pay as you go plan which is more than I want to pay.

3. IoT sims (although I am almost positive this won't work). These appear to be sms and data only, so for my usage they would be sms only. Telnyx is the service I found that actually supports esim (my phone has only esim). I am having trouble with the console, but I am trying to get an esim on my iphone. If this can work, it would be only $2/month plus usage, which would be perfect.

Are there any other possible solutions that I should look into?

Sorry in advance if this is kind of a ramble. Thanks for any thoughts you may have.

This post asking about specific hardware made me realize that I have lost touch with major architectural changes in PC hardware. Back in college (over 20 years ago), I was constantly upgrading and rebuilding computers, talking about them, reading about them. But that's probably par for the course in a EE program. I'm sure there must have been other online resources, but Slashdot is the thing that sticks out in my memory of that time.

Then in grad school, my last set of desktops from college carried me through the first few years, and I had a series of laptops provided by school.

Since then, I've always just bought laptops because they've gotten good enough to do everything I want, and with kids, it's much more flexible to be able to work anywhere in and out of the house. My latest (now several years old) has a high end I7 cpu, an NVIDIA GPU, two solid state drives (1.5TB total). It weighs just a few pounds and does everything I want, including things like Solidworks, zbrush, and older PC games.

Since I can remember a time when I was excited about 90mhz processors and feeling like I was getting a screaming deal to pay $500 for a 500mb hd, sometimes it just feels surreal for this to be so normal.

So, am I out of the loop? Or is this reflective of a more general shift? What do you read / where do you post to discuss hardware, hardware compatibility, etc. Are you still building desktops? Laptops? Cyberdecks? What are your thoughts on cost/value trade off of dell, etc. vs rolling your own?

I'm working on an AI chat portal for teams, think Perplexity but trained on a company's knowledgebase (prosgpt dot com for the curious) and i wanted to talk to some people who are successfully using LLMs in their teams or jobs to improve productivity

Are you using free or paid LLMs? Which ones?

What kind of tasks do you get an LLM to do for you?

What is the workflow for accomplishing those tasks?

Cheers,
nmn

I am planning to go back to a desktop after using laptops for years.

I already have an 1080p IPS monitor. I want just the tower.

There is the new Zen 5 coming out soon.

I was thinking about buying a Ryzen 7600 and maybe buy a GPU in the future if I want to play heavier games. The Ryzen 7600 has integrated graphics for basic things.

My main use now is just some casual gaming (Afterimage, Hollow Knight, Fallout 4), movies, browsing the web and compiling some software (Gentoo Linux).

I use exclusively Linux and I want to keep using AMD.

Should I wait the Zen 5 to come out and see if the 7600 price drops or this probably won't happen?

As the title says, looking for recommendations of fun and interesting websites that don't involve current events/news. Sites where you can spend hours diving down rabbit holes, browsing fun and interesting content, or just otherwise detach from reality for a bit.

This isn't a request for just myself, but just in general. I feel like all the biggest websites just have a bit too much influence from current events and news, which can make browsing pretty stressful. And given how centralized the internet has become, finding sites outside those has become a bit trickier. It'd be fun to see some more focused sites for various topics and niches. Can be an educational site with cool articles, could be entertainment, could be a forum or a blog. Just, what sites could you spend hours on?

I know it isn't a good habit. I like to watch movies, "T.V. shows" on my computer. It was never a problem with older style monitors.

However with newer style monitors ( like I have ) and T.V. screens you either have to be far away from the monitor or be sitting up straight for the images not to fade. Worse, you can't see anything with night scenes.

Anything I can do about it aside from buying a hug TV and sitting on a couch at the other end of the room?

Update: I got the monitor /user/ButteredToast recommended. It works noticeably better than my old monitor and the price was very reasonable