Off-and-on trying out an account over at @[email protected] due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

  • 17 Posts
  • 1.95K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Idea for experiment: mail to fediverse?English
    1·
    3 hours ago

    You can probably do it, but I’m not sure how many users you’d get, as I think that it’d be a less-usable interface.

    • You’d need some way to handle voting; that doesn’t intrinsically show up. Maybe you could do it via expecting users to send specially-structured emails.

    • If by “fediverse” you specifically are talking about the Threadiverse — Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin — then you’re going to have to also deal with a lack of a way to handle responding to a given comment (unless you intend to forward all comments to all posts that a user has subscribed to to an email address, and then just only let them respond to those).

    • Email isn’t natively encrypted, so if that’s a concern and you want to deal with that, you’d need something like a PGP key that users could register, I guess.

    • Email clients don’t, as far as I know — I haven’t gone looking — natively have Markdown support, so either you need to throw out formatting or have some sort of mapping to and from Markdown to HTML. I don’t know if something like pandoc would be sufficient for that.

    • No native “report” functionality. Maybe you could do it via expecting users to send specially-structured emails.

    If what you want is to take advantage of existing native clients, my suggestion is that you’d probably get more mileage out of doing a bidirectional Usenet-to-Threadiverse gateway than an email-to-Threadiverse gateway. That has a much closer mapping in terms of functionality than email. You could do that a lot more efficiently in terms of bandwidth. Your “Usenet group list” would be a set of community@instance name entries, and you map posts to top level messages, and comments to responses to those.

    The major downside there is that I don’t think that any Usenet clients have native Markdown support and you still don’t have voting or native reporting functionality.

    The only obvious benefit I can think of from either Usenet or email is that there are clients for both that support offline functionality, and I don’t know of any Threadiverse-native clients that do. I think the major point I’d raise would be “you could probably do it, but…what do you gain that outweighs the drawbacks?” Like, I think that you’d probably get more good out of just picking your favorite native Threadiverse client and adding code to that (or starting a new one, if you absolutely can’t stand any of the existing ones).

  • tal@lemmy.todaytolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•CloserEnglish
    11·
    5 hours ago

    A quarter-century back…

    https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3676

    World domination. It’s a powerful and faintly sinister phrase, one you might imagine some B-movie mad scientist muttering as he puts the finishing touches on some infernal machine amidst a clutter of bubbling retorts and crackling Tesla coils. It is not a phrase you would, offhand, associate with cuddly penguins.

    When Linus says he aims at world domination, it seems as if he wants you to laugh at the absurd image of a gaggle of scruffy hackers overrunning the computing world like some invading barbarian horde—but he’s also inviting you to join the horde. Beneath the deadpan self-mockery is dead seriousness—and beneath the dead seriousness, more deadpan self-mockery. And on and on, in a spiraling regress so many layers deep that even Linus probably doesn’t know where it ends, if it ends at all.

    The way Linux hackers use the phrase “world domination” is what science-fiction fans call a “ha-ha-only-serious”. Some visions are so audacious, they can be expressed only as ironic jokes, lest the speaker be accused of pomposity or megalomania.

    PC gaming is still only a bit over 5%, but it’s one of the last remaining computing environments where Linux hasn’t become the dominant OS choice, as it’s displaced embedded systems and servers and suchlike. Things have changed a lot.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•Ubuntu Linux raises minimum system memory requirements by 50% — requirements bumped to 6GB of RAM, previously raised from 1GB to 4GB in 2018English
    21·
    8 hours ago

    I mean, it’s probably a good idea to have them higher, given that if someone wants to use it with some typical out-of-the-box desktop settings, that’s not unreasonable, but while I haven’t looked at the Ubuntu installer for a while, I strongly suspect that it permits you to do a minimal install, and that all the software in the Debian family is also there, so you can do a lightweight desktop based on Ubuntu.

    My current desktop environment has sway, blueman-applet, waybar, and swaync-client running. I’m sure that you could replicate the same thing on an Ubuntu box. Sway is the big one there, at an RSS of 189MB (mostly 148MB of which is shared, probably essentially all use of shared libraries). That’s the basic “desktop graphical environment” memory cost.

    I use foot as a terminal (not in daemon mode, which would shrink memory further, though be less-amenable to use of multiple cores). That presently has 40 MB RSS, 33 of which are shared. It’s running tmux, at 16MB RSS, 4 of which are shared. GNU screen, which I’ve also used and could get by on, would be lighter, but it has an annoying patch that causes it to take a bit before terminating.

    Almost the only other graphical app I ever have active is Firefox, which is presently at an RSS of 887.1, of which 315MB is shared. That can change, based on what Firefox has open, but I think that use of a web browser is pretty much the norm everwhere, and if anything, the Firefox family is probably on the lighter side in 2026 compared to the main alternative of the Chrome family.

    I’m pretty sure that one could run that same setup pretty comfortably on a computer from the late 1990s, especially if you have SSD swap available to handle any spikes in memory usage. Firefox would feel sluggish, but if you’re talking memory usage…shrugs I’ve used an i3/Xorg-based variant of that on an eeePC that had 2GB of memory that I used mostly as a web-browser plus terminal thin client to a “real machine” to see if I could, did that for an extended period of time. Browser could feel sluggish on some websites, but other than that…shrugs.

    Now, if you want to be, I don’t know, playing some big 3D video game, then that is going to crank up the requirements on hardware. But that’s going to be imposed by the game. It’s not overhead from your basic graphical environment.

    I’d also be pretty confident that you could replicate that setup using the same packages on any Debian-family system, and probably on pretty much any major Linux distro with a bit of tweaking to the installed packages.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•Iran War Chokes Off Helium Supply Critical for AIEnglish
    3·
    1 day ago

    I assume so. Here’s a video of someone floating a boat (apparently in air) in it, and then sinking it by pouring cups of sulfur hexafluoride over it:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee2NaYRnRGo

    If it avoids diffusing into air to the degree that you can scoop it up and pour it, I’d imagine that it’d pour out of one’s lungs the same way.

    But if you just want to get most of it out of your lungs — like, you’ve been breathing it and don’t want to asphyxiate — I imagine that exhaling all the air you can and inhaling air and doing that a few times would probably do a pretty good job, the way the Mythbusters video above did with the helium.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•Iran War Chokes Off Helium Supply Critical for AIEnglish
    19·
    1 day ago

    I’d guess that most industrial users of helium don’t consume it and could theoretically recover it from whatever process it’s involved in rather than just releasing it.

    EDIT: Hard drives being an exception, as apparently some ship helium-filled; there, it’s actually being consumed during the manufacture.

    EDIT2: I’d also point out that in the long run, we probably do have to be more conservative with our helium supply. We get it from pockets in the earth. It’s actually not all that common; it just happens, though, that we go to a lot of effort to extract natural gas, and that happens to sometimes also come up with helium, so we get that supply. But because it’s not reactive, it doesn’t bond to anything — it stays in gas form. When we let it go, it heads to near the top of our atmosphere and eventually gets lost to solar wind. Many users who today just release it — because why not, as the natural gas people will be providing more, and it’s cheaper that way — probably will need to capture what they’re using if we want helium to continue to be available.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•It's not just a RAM crisis — Panasonic says data center batteries are also selling out months in advanceEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    I doubt that there’s actually a substantial impact on battery cell production. Might be on rack-mountable batteries containing those cells. But setting that aside:

    Panasonic plans to expand lithium-ion cell

    Non-rechargable AAA batteries are typically alkaline, and rechargeables are typically NiMH, not lithium-ion.

    EDIT: Looking at a handful of rack-mount lithium-ion batteries on Amazon price history using camelcamelcamel, prices are either unchanged or very slightly up. Could be Panasonic looking to get into the news, but it’s not clear to me that there’s a shortage of even rack-mount lithium-ion batteries.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•AI chatbots lure vulnerable gamblers to unlicensed betting websitesEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    Ehhh.

    When I saw the title, I thought that someone was trying to use LLM-backed bots to drive some sort of marketing campaign or something.

    But this sounds like it’s just someone plugging in something into an LLM and it returning the same kind of stuff that a Web search engine would.

    Reporters fed national-language versions a range of prompts, including requests for online casinos with the biggest bonuses and websites that don’t ask for proof of age to register.

    In three quarters of replies, chatbots recommended gambling sites not licensed in Europe, describing them variously as “secure and fast”, “perfect for competitive players”, or “great for novice gamblers”.

    Casinos that lack national licenses for countries where they operate do not offer the same consumer protections as legal operators, and may expose players to the risk of scams or fraud.

    When prompted, the chatbots explained how software could be used to access unclicensed platforms and promoted sites registered in offshore territories. One Meta AI chatbot wrote that online casinos with no identification checks were the “Holy Grail!”. Google’s Gemini said crypto sites offered players “anonymity” and a “lack of rigid limits”.

    I have a hard time calling that “luring”.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoGames@lemmy.world•Is there any decent PvP FPS that's not infested with cheaters? Looking for a decent PvP FPSEnglish
    31·
    3 days ago

    cheaters

    Steam store

    If I were set on that, I’d probably play on a console. I prefer keyboard+mouse for shooters, but…

    The PC’s strength is that it’s open. You can do whatever you want. Want to mod a game to have more features or make it look prettier? Go for it. Tweak it? Sure. Get more-powerful or newer hardware to get a more-attractive appearance in a lot of games? Sure. Cheat to skip that annoying grindy bit in game X? Sure thing. Use whatever new and interesting input devices you want to add quality-of-life features with an extra button or macros? Sure.

    Works beautifully for single-player games.

    But by the same token, attempts to resist cheating in multiplayer competitive games are ill-suited to the platform and rely on developers trying to hack together attempts that tend to have performance and compatibility implications and work imperfectly. It’s hard to try to lock down an open platform.

    Whereas the strength of the console is that it’s closed. You can’t do whatever you want. You don’t get to mod or tweak games much, which eliminates routes to get an edge via exploiting that. Everyone has (more-or-less) the same hardware, so nobody can “pay-to-win” in the sense of getting a performance edge in multiplayer competitive games — there’s a level playing field. A lot of PC gaming hardware is ultimately driven by trying to sell some way to basically let players pay-to-win, to get some edge in competitive multiplayer, which isn’t something that most players much like having around — and consoles don’t have that problem. Cheating is a pain. I understand that these days, console vendors blacklist and authenticate alternative input devices, so that players can’t use alternative controllers and the like, which prevents them from getting an edge.

    Works beautifully for competitive multiplayer games.