[-] sxan@midwest.social 5 points 22 hours ago

And people make fun of NFTs. This one's right up there with The Toilet for low-effort pap.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 5 points 1 day ago

And you are right, in all ways!

I misread the title of the post. Hazards of being subbed to both "privacy" and "piracy".

[-] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah. I finally went and looked it up. I can't find anything that says it's bad for cats, but high creatinine levels is an indication of kidney disease - so it's not necessarily a cause, but it's an effect and so probably best avoided.

I was misremembering; the list of supplements cats require in their (processed) foods for them to be nutritionally complete is long.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 4 points 1 day ago

I have a Kobo as almost exclusively the only way I read books anymore, and I've owned a Sony and a Nook; the Kobo has lasted the longest and I like it best. That said, why do you claim it's the most privacy friendly?

[-] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 2 days ago

Interestingly, my compsci degree never covered O notation, so that I've had to pick up along the way :/

Really‽ That's a shame. It's one of the topics that, in my programming career, was regularly valuable and used. That, set theory, and discrete math have an been broadly applicable even in the most banal applications. It's a shame if it's not part of the CIS curriculum at some universities.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 8 points 3 days ago

Realtime doesn't necessarily mean low latency, it means consistent latency.

This is such a critical distinction which can be counter-intuitive. In this case, their game may run slower, they just won't get lags resulting from local resource contention. And even that statement has caveats.

One of the biggest difference between self-taught developers and ones with CS degrees is that the ones with degrees usually understand a lot of important theory, such as O(1) means constant time, not necessarily fast time.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 95 points 4 days ago

Until January. Then that will all stop.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 3 points 4 days ago

Apes together strong.

And so it begins. See you all in the human pens!

[-] sxan@midwest.social 18 points 4 days ago

I think creatinine is an essential dietary requirement for cats anyway. I need to go check, but I think it's one of those things they put in "food" cat food, as opposed to cast treats, which aren't nutritionally complete.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 15 points 6 days ago

Already done.

I mean, you have to use it to get software; and if you're submitting patches to other people's software; and I have inherited maintenance of a popular project that would just confuse a ton of people, including several distros, if I moved it. But I never create projects in github anymore. Sourcehut has been great.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 88 points 6 days ago

There are a frightening number of systems that don't allow "-", which isn't even an edge case. A lot of people - mostly women - hyphenate their last names on marriage, rather than throw their old name away. My wife did. She legally changed her name when she came of age, and when we met and married years later she said, "I paid for money for my name; I'm not letting it go." (Note: I wasn't pressuring her to take my name.) So she hyphenated it, and has come to regret the decision. She says she should have switched, or not, but the hyphen causes problems everywhere. It's not a legal character in a lot of systems, including some government systems.

18

I was thinking about this before the Tholian wave, but it's apropos.

It unscientifically appears to me that TOS had a far higher incidence on non-humanoid aliens than later series. Tholiens, Horta, the flying neural parasites on Deneva; while there were many bipedal aliens sometimes differing only by skins color, many were non-bipeds or were bipedal but radically different from humans, like the Gorn and the salt vampire. In later series, it seems nearly all aliens were reduced to bumpy head species.

TOS ran for only three seasons, and truly different aliens are expensive; I understand the economics of going the prosthetic forehead route. And it's difficult to have recurring truly alien biology in a series.

My question is whether anyone's done a statistical analysis covering the originality of aliens, per series, based on divergence from the humanoid base. Does it only seem like TOS had more different types of aliens (intelligent and non) because it was so short, or was the universe really more diverse in TOS?

348
29
QMK (and Kanata) (midwest.social)

I'm posting here because I have nowhere else to post. If you squint, this meets the community rules because my current keyboard is a Piantor/42, and my issue stems from a combination of 40% and QMK behavior. Although, to be honest, this is mostly about QMK, but using Discord is painful, and I'll go there only as a last resort.

For a long while, I used Kanata on my laptop, and desktop an ErgoDox, having replaced kmonad because of one certain feature: tap-hold key sequence behavior. It's best described here, but the tl;dr is that (press lsft) (press a) (release lsft) (release a) where a is a tap-hold key should output "A" and not "a" -- kmonad outputs "a".

A few months ago, when I got my Piantor, I discovered that this sequence outputs no character, and although there's an option that makes it output "a", I can't find a combination that makes it output "A". I'm asking whether, in the bewildering set of QMK variables, is there a way to configure QMK s.t. the sequence (press lsft) (press a) (release lsft) (release a) outputs "A"?

That's the main thrust of my question. As a sort of addendum, I think this behavior is behind another of my QMK irritations: I'm a reasonably fast typer, and often will be typing the next key before I've completely released the previous key. This means I have to set a large-ish time-out before tap-hold engages, which introduces an annoying delay whenever I want to chord a layer and get at, e.g. numbers. I do understand that this is may be an unsolvable issue, that it's just an unavoidable limitation on small keyboards in having so many common keys (numbers, punctuation, and arrows are the worst -- coding, nearly half the text are characters from layers). Either I have a long timeout and and live with an annoying delay when I want to type (many) punctuation characters or numbers; or I have a short timeout and frequently accidentally shifting layers. However, I feel as if this might be mitigated somewhat with the Kanata-style key sequence handling, because even though my Kanata configuration is nearly an exact mirror of my QMK layer configuration, I never have this problem with Kanata.

I suppose I could give up on using QMK for anything except the most fundamental mapping, and use Kanata instead. However, there's an appeal to the portability of having the programming in the keyboard itself; it makes me a little less dependent on the computer to which the keyboard is attached.

33
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by sxan@midwest.social to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

Edit 2024-10-01

Another person posted about a similar need, and I decided to create a matrix document to track it, in the hope that those of us looking for this specific use case could come up with the best solution. The idea here is that, while many OSS social media projects are capable of being used like a Fcbook wall, they don't all necessarily provide an ideal user experience. Feature set is not equivalent to being designed for a specific use case, and the desired workflow should be the primary means of interacting with the service. The (for now) open document tracking this is here.

I'm a little surprised I can't find any posts asking this question, and that there doesn't seem to be a FAQ about it. Maybe "Facebook" covers too many use cases for one clean answer.

Up front, I think the answer for my case is going to be "Friendica," but I'm interested in hearing if there are any other, better options. I'm sure Mastodon and Lemmy aren't it, but there's Pixelfed and a dozen other options with which I'm less familiar with.

This mostly centers around my 3-y/o niece and a geographically distributed family, and the desire for Facebook-like image sharing with a timeline feed, comments, likes (positive feedback), that sort of thing. Critical, in our case, is a good iOS experience for capturing and sharing short videos and pictures; a process where the parents have to take pictures, log into a web site, create a post, attach an image from the gallery is simply too fussy, especially for the non-technical and mostly overwhelmed parents. Less important is the extended family experience, although alerts would be nice. Privacy is critical; the parents are very concerned about limiting access to the media of their daughter that is shared, so the ability to restrict viewing to logged-in members of the family is important.

FUTO Circles was almost perfect. There was some initial confusion about the difference between circles and groups, but in the end the app experience was great and it accomplished all of the goals -- until it didn't. At some point, half of the already shared media disappeared from the feeds of all of the iOS family members (although the Android user could still see all of the posts). It was a thoroughly discouraging experience, and resulted in a complete lack of faith in the ecosystem. While I believe it might be possible to self-host, by the time we decided that everyone liked it and I was about to look into self-hosting our own family server (and remove the storage restrictions, which hadn't yet been reached when it all fell apart), the iOS app bugs had cropped up and we abandoned the platform.

So there's the requirements we're looking for:

  • The ability to create private, invite-only groups/communities
  • A convenient mobile capture+share experience, which means an app
  • Reactions (emojis) & comment threads
  • Both iOS and Android support, in addition to whatever web interface is available for desktop use

and, given this community, obviously self-hostable.

I have never personally used Facebook, but my understanding is that it's a little different in that communities are really more like individual blogs with some post-level feedback mechanisms; in this way, it's more like Mastodon, where you follow individuals and can respond to their posts, albeit with a loosely-enforced character limit. And as opposed to Lemmy, which while moderated, doesn't really have a main "owner" model. I can imagine setting up a Lemmy instance and creating a community per person, but I feel as if that'd be trying to wedge a square peg into a round hole.

Pixelfed might be the answer, but from my brief encounter with it, it feels more like a photo-oriented Mastodon, then a Facebook wall-style experience (it's Facebook that has "walls", right?).

So back to where I started: in my personal experience, it seems like Friendica might be the best fit, except that I don't use an iPhone and don't know if there are any decent Friendica apps that would satisfy the user experience we're looking for; honestly, I haven't particularly liked any of the Android apps, so I don't hold out much hope for iOS.

Most of the options speak ActivityPub, so maybe I should just focus on finding the right AP-based mobile client? Although, so far the best experience (until it broke) has been Circles, which is based on Matrix.

It's challenging to install and evaluate all of the options, especially when -- in my case -- to properly evaluate the software requires getting several people on each platform to try and see how they like it. I value the community's experience and opinions.

5

I do not have CHS, a symptom of which is vomiting. I have never vomited from cannabis. I have always, however, gotten the spins, and almost invariably spend the high uncomfortably nauseous. It really doesn't matter how much I take; anything more than a microdose and I get nauseous. I've been this way forever, since the first time I tried it.

I live in a state where recreational use is legal, and it really irks me that I can't partake.

Does anyone have any advice about what I could do to get rid of the side effect of nausea? Why does this happen to me‽

75

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/15132091

Bedfordshire Police have said just ten arrests were made over the Bedford River Festival this weekend (20/21 July) with Live Facial Recognition (LFR) technology responsible...

13
submitted 4 months ago by sxan@midwest.social to c/privacy@lemmy.world

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/15132091

Bedfordshire Police have said just ten arrests were made over the Bedford River Festival this weekend (20/21 July) with Live Facial Recognition (LFR) technology responsible...

19
submitted 4 months ago by sxan@midwest.social to c/tenforward@lemmy.world

I vastly prefer to support community artisans over mass-produced material when I can. Is anyone in the community making Moopsies?

14
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by sxan@midwest.social to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

A friend of mine would like to post an op-ed style political essay about the current turmoil in the Democratic Party about Biden's fitness. They are concerned about it affecting their career, should it be linked back to them; the US is highly divided and they know some of their peers are Republicans, and they're not sure about the affiliations of people in their upward chain of command. My friend is concerned that posting an emotional opinion piece might -- if attributed to them and seen -- negatively affect their career. They want to stay anonynmous.

I think getting something posted anonymously in Lemmy would be fairly easy; no-one is going to trying legally coercing an email out of a Lemmy instance over an op-ed. And getting a boost in Mastodon would be simple. I was hoping that there'd be something like WriteFreely where they could post, but anonymity appears to be not even a consideration by the main developers.

And then there's the question of how to get links to the essay out of the Fediverse, where 90% of the people are. I don't have a Xitter account anymore, and have never had a Facebook account.

What suggestions does Lemmy have? How, in today's world, does someone anonymously post content?

Subscript: I do not mean political anonymity -- not in the way that protection from law enforcement is needed. My friend lives in the US where freedom of speech is still more-or-less ensured, and the content is not illegal, incidiary, inciting, or even unusual. However, they want anonymity sufficient to guard against data miners, correlators, and brokers. They need to get something off their chest, express an opinion, but not at a risk to their career.

93
submitted 4 months ago by sxan@midwest.social to c/tenforward@lemmy.world

It is not my intention to ignite an EMACS/vim war; I will say that I find it baffling that Lower Decks is ending while Strange New Worlds is being continued. I like Strange New Worlds, despite disagreeing with some of the artistic licenses being taken. But if I had to choose between the two shows, it'd be no contest. Not only as a viewer do I prefer LD, but it has to be the cheaper show to produce. The fact that next season is the last (both by design, it only being contracted for 5 years; and announcement) is sad and incomprehensible in the same way the cancelation of Firefly was - except LD is popular and successful, whereas Firefly merely had a fanatical (🖐️) fan base.

I don't understand it. Yes, you want to end on a high note. Maybe the writers are running out of plot ideas. Perhaps, given an initial life span of 5 years, the actors have all made other arrangements and aren't available. But I just can't believe the One Big Plot Arc that's been building would necessitate ending the series by its resolution.

LD is a strong show. It's lighthearted. It's a breath of fresh air after the more decidedly darker, ethically challenging, and emotionally straining runs of TNG, Voyager, DS9. And Strange New Worlds... the Gorn are basically Xenomorphs from the Alien franchise.Who, despite being the existential threat of the show, somehow get entirely forgotten about by the time in TOS.

But I digress. I'm going to miss Lower Decks, badly. How can this happen? And why?

37
submitted 4 months ago by sxan@midwest.social to c/linux@lemmy.world

This is kind of a rant, but mostly a plea.

There are times when BusyBox is the only tool you can use. You've got some embedded device with 32k RAM or something; I get it. It's the right tool. But please, please, In begging you: don't use it just because you're lazy.

I find BusyBox used in places where it's not necessary. There's enough RAM, there's more than enough storage, and yet, it's got BusyBox.

BusyBox tooling is absolutely aenemic. Simple things, common things, like - oh, - capturing a regexp group from a simple match are practically impossible. But you can do this in bash; heck, it's built in! But BusyBox uses ash, which is barely a shell and certainly doesn't support regexp matching with group capture. Maybe awk? Well, gawk lets you, with -oP, but of course BusyBox doesn't use GNU awk, and so you can't get at the capture groups because it doesn't support perl REs. It'd be shocking if BusyBox provided any truly capable tools like ripgrep, in which this would be trivial. I haven't tried BB's sed yet, because sed's RE escaping is and has always been a bizarre nightmarish Frankenstein syntax, but I've got a dime riding on some restriction in BB's sed that prevents getting at capture groups there, too.

BusyBox serves a purpose; it is intentionally barely functional; size constraining trumps all other considerations. It achieves this well. My issue isn't with BusyBox, it's with people using it everywhere when they don't need to, making life hell for anyone who's trying to actually get any work done in it.

So please. For the sanity of your users: don't reach for BusyBox just because it's easy, or because you're tickled that you're going to save a megabyte or two; please spare a thought for your users on which you are inflicting these constraints. Use it when you have to, because otherwise it doesn't fit. Otherwise, chose a real shell, at least bash, and include some tools capable of more than less than the bare minimum.

20
Moar Borderlands (midwest.social)
submitted 5 months ago by sxan@midwest.social to c/gaming@lemmy.world

I know it's tragically pedestrian; and I know there's supposed to be a 4 in 2025; and I also know there's many a slip twixt cup and lip, and the gaming industry is going through some pretty radical changes... but all I really want is another Borderlands.

There's not much they can do with it, not many places to go, and I'm sure everyone who's worked on the series over the years is thoroughly sick of it. But, damn. Every one of the main games (at least; I haven't loved every in-between spin-off) has his a sweet spot of mindless fun, funniness, and replay-ability. I've played 3 so many times through, and spent so many hours just running around in every location, even I can't work up much enthusiasm to fire it up anymore.

There's an occasional game that fills the same niche; Bullet Storm was pretty fun, but with low replay-ability. I just want a game where I can turn off the higher brain functions and run around killing stuff in interesting ways.

Thanks for attending my Ted Talk.

view more: next ›

sxan

joined 2 years ago