hoppolito

@hoppolito@mander.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3184: Funny Numbers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Additionally, while technically imbued with ‘meaning’, even the number 420 itself is somewhat meaningless and was originally used to delineate those who knew from those who don’t. It’s just that it got famous enough that we now almost all know.

  In that sense I would argue it filled more or less the same function as 67.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3184: Funny Numbers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I was going to say, I think the perpetuation of leetspeak and most of its use falls squarely into the millennial generation’s early 90s into the early 2000s.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some unique Games to host server's of?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It might get a little simpler to host and busier to play again in the not too distant future if the announced free fanmade re-release works out!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It Only Takes A Handful Of Samples To Poison Any Size LLM, Anthropic Finds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As far as I know that’s generally what is often done, but it’s a surprisingly hard problem to solve ‘completely’ for two reasons:

  1. The more obvious one - how do you define quality? When you’re working with the amount of data LLMs require as input and need to be checked for on output you’re going to have to automate these quality checks, and in one way or another it comes back around to some system having to define and judge against this score.

     There’s many different benchmarks out there nowadays, but it’s still virtually impossible to just have ‘a’ quality score for such a complex task.

  2. Perhaps the less obvious one - you generally don’t want to ‘overfit’ your model to whatever quality scoring system you set up. If you get too close to it, your model typically won’t be generally useful anymore, rather just always outputting things which exactly satisfy the scoring principle, nothing else.

     If it reaches a theoretical perfect score, it would just end up being a replication of the quality score itself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Selfhosting with a seven year old⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Luanti and Minecraft are two distinct, if similar-looking things.

  Luanti is an open-source voxel game engine implementation which allows running a wide variety of different ‘games’ on it (including two which mimic Minecraft very closely).

  Minecraft is the closed-source game owned by Mojang.

  The two don’t interact and servers for the one are completely unrelated to the other as well.

  So, to answer the question - yes, they still need a Minecraft license if they want to play Minecraft. But this is disconnected from having a Luanti server, for which you don’t need any licenses but which will in turn only allow you to also play Luanti stuff, not Minecraft.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Recommended email providers?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s good but it’s also been bought out by, at least to me, an ‘unknown’ early this year. Since then, there’s been a couple outages though nothing too drastic. New owner also promised to only make changes that are ‘thoughtful and focused on making your experience better’ but I am still cautiously eyeing other options since then - I’ve learned never to trust those words by new owners.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nextcloud logs me out whenever I leave and rejoin my local network⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It might turn out to be something different - but just in case it does log you out after a system restart (but maybe not after network disconnect) it would probably have something to do with kwallet (the key ring which has your credentials) not unlocking correctly.

  If that’s the case this or this might be pointers in that direction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google's Agentic AI wipes user's entire HDD without permission in catastrophic failure⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you really nailed the crux of the matter.

  With the ‘autocomplete-like’ nature of current LLMs the issue is precisely that you can never be sure of any answer’s validity. Some approaches try by giving ‘sources’ next to it, but that doesn’t mean those sources’ findings actually match the text output and it’s not a given that the sources themselves are reputable - thus you’re back to perusing those to make sure anyway.

  If there was a meter of certainty next to the answers this would be much more meaningful for serious use-cases, but of course by design such a thing seems impossible to implement with the current approaches.

  I will say that in my personal (hobby) projects I have found a few good use cases of letting the models spit out some guesses, e.g. for the causes of a programming bug or proposing directions to research in, but I am just not sold that the heaviness of all the costs (cognitive, social, and of course environmental) is worth it for that alone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is laying on your stomach every once in a while good for you?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If it feels good for you, it is probably good.

  text on top saying ‘me: why to do I always have back pain? Also me:’ underneath which two stick figures are drawn sitting in very unhealthy positions on an office chair in front of their pc, curled up in a spine-breaking manner.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's nothing⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Holyy, thanks for this. I can finally put a name to it. Was wondering with my partner for ages what sometimes suddenly befalls us, especially if we’re lying in a weird position.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Searching for eBook reader solution⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been exclusively reading my fiction books (all epubs) on Readest and absolutely love it. Recently I also started using it for my nonfiction books and articles (mostly pdf) as an experiment, and it’s workable but a little more rough around the edges still.

  You can highlight and annotate, and export all annotations for a book once you are done, for which I have set up a small pipeline to directly import them into my reference management software.

  It works pretty well with local storage (though I don’t believe it does ‘auto-imports’ of new files by default) and I’ve additionally been using their free hosted offering to sync my book progress. It’s neat and free up to 500mb of books, but you’re right that I would also prefer a byo storage solution, perhaps in the future.

  The paid upgrades are mostly for AI stuff and translations which I don’t really concern myself with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Journiv self hosted journal: Now with markdown and inline media support⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Been seeing the posts pop up recently and I really like the look of your software, bookmarked for future jrnl integration possibilities.

  But what a missed opportunity to not have a Journiv Ahead in your second headline :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Open source/selfhost projects 100% keep track of how many people star a repo, what MRs are submitted, and even usage/install data.

  I feel it is important to make a distinction here, though:

  GitHub, the for-profit, non-FOSS, Microsoft-owned platform keeps track of the ‘stars of a repo’, not the open-source self-host projects themselves. Somebody hosts their repo forge on Codeberg, sr.ht, their own infrastructure or even GitLab? There’s generally very little to no algorithmic number-crunching involved. Same for MR/PRs.

  Additionally - from my knowledge - very few fully FOSS programs have extensive usage/install telemetry, and even fewer opt-out versions. Tracking which couldn’t be disabled I’ve essentially never heard of in that space, because every time someone does go in that direction the public reaction is usually very strong (see e.g. Audacity).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨**How** should I properly document my homelab?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting, so Metal3 is basically kubernetes-managed baremetal nodes?

  Over the last years I’ve cobbled together a nice Ansible-driven IaC setup, which provisions Incus and Docker on various machines. It’s always the ‘first mile’ that gets me struggling with completely reproducible bare-metal machines. How do I first provision them without too much manual interference?

  Ansible gets me there partly, but I would still like to have e.g. the root file system running on btrfs which I’ve found hard to accomplish with just these tools when first provisioning a new machine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tutorial series for self hosting beginners?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  When I was stumbling on some of his output it unfortunately felt very click-baity, always playing on your FOMO if you didn’t set up/download/buy the next best thing until the other next best thing in the video after.

  In other words, I think he’s cool to check out to get to know of a thing, but to get a deeper level of understanding how a thing works I would recommend written materials. There are good caddy/nginx tutorials out there, but a linux networking book will get your understanding further yet.

  If it has to be video, I would at least recommend a little more slowed down, long-form content like Learn Linux TV.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Headscale vs Netbird vs Pangolin - How do you like selfhosting them?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been using NetBird for quite a while now. It has grown from an experiment in connecting to the server without exposing it to quite a stable setup that I make use of every day, and even got my partner and some of my family to use. That is the hosted offering, however, not me self hosting my own server component.

  For a couple of months now, I’ve been eyeing pangolin though. It just seems like such an upgrade concerning identity and SSO - but equally a complete overhaul of my infrastructure and a steep learning curve.

  I am itching to get it running but would probably have to approach it step-by-step, and roll it out pretty slowly, while transferring the existing services.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Day 481 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It was mind blowing to me on a technical level back then though. I just remembered the footprints in the snow, the slow-trudging animations in the deep snow, the free-running along trees, all that was really cool.

  Sidenote: thanks for always posting some interesting games to learn and/or reminisce about. Haven’t been posting much in your threads but they are always a joy to read when they pop up!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Day 481 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I liked the game well enough when it came out, had a good friend at the time whom I always traded little game design insights and fun facts about the AssCreed games with.

  But the one thing nowadays I always remember about this one is that the ‘opening’ part is looooo(…)oong - until you really swing you sword and hidden blade about it takes hours of grand opening, shipping to America, learning the controls, doing little ‘preview’ missions in a restricted zone, then

  Spoiler

  finally switching to the actual main character only to have to do a new tutorial intro all over for a couple of hours.

  It felt somewhat compelling the first time round but on subsequent playthroughs it really stretched your patience - imo, of course.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Announcing IncusOS⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  No worries, mostly thought I’d point it out to others reading who might be a little confused by the close naming scheme and don’t know exactly what tool provides which functions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Announcing IncusOS⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Though perhaps it is important to make the distinction clear:

  Incus is the software that supports running OCI and LXC containers, and VMs. It is the functional equivalent to the Proxmox virtualisation suite, storage, network, image and container management and also the management web UI.

  IncusOS tries to support this program for your bare-metal servers by providing an immutable OS underneath which hosts Incus but cannot be reached via shell access at all. It intends to form a super locked-down base from which to use Incus, but which also comes with preinstalled goodies such as ceph, linstore, zfs, and some service setups (afaik).

  So the closest comparison to Proxmox currently is a simple Incus installation on a Debian bare-metal host. IncusOS I would argue is actually moving further away from that comparison with its locked down base and immutable nature.

  In a way the project reminds me much more of TalosOS which creates a similarly locked down base environment to work with Kubernetes on top of.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You'll Own Nothing and It's Awful [Gamers Nexus x Level1Techs]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If u looked at my username u would see a little Australian flag.

  Hmm nah.

  the username of muntedcrocodile without a little Australian flag

  But, to engage without as much snark:

  I think for this conversation to happen it would be good if you could define what for you is “extreme socialism”, and quickly explain how the argument you are making actually connects to the point OP made about the difference of private and personal property and how people misunderstand the difference.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Backup recommendations⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wow, I’ve been a longtime user of restic and never knew about resticprofile, it seems super nice. Already at a glance through the docs, the ease of doing an inherited stdin-enabled sql backup group alone is super exciting.

  Thank for pointing this one out!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Yale Study Finds AI Has Had Essentially Zero Impact on Jobs⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In addition to the results pointed out by studies like those posted by @ekZepp@lemmy.world I feel it’s not a simple question of ‘which jobs can now be done by AI/LLMs’.

  The ramifications of the wider ecosystem are more complex. For example, as this article illustrates, the actual search for a job is just horrible under this new paradigm. With the combination of copious machine generated job offers, machine generated job applications and machine driven applicant screenings, everything melts down into lowest common denominator stat-hiring process sludge, especially in combination with the more ‘platform’ driven hiring patterns of many sectors.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a little older, so I don’t have an extensive recollection. Things I have saved are the Poettering tweet pointing out their hostname being ‘Wolfsschanze’, doing their own torch march just after Unite the Right Charlottesville happened, and the expected anti-sjw, cultural marxism rhetoric to go along with it.

  It’s a case of no one individual instance being drastic (well, perhaps except for Wolfschanze), but coming together to form a picture which I firmly file into icky-politics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, no argument with that - although I am happy piefed is rising as an alternative.

  I did not intend to claim moral superiority or any absolutes, which is, again, why I just tend to also provide a small disclaimer while recommending that kind of software.

  It’s more about giving a small preface to people I care about should they ever end up intending to contribute to certain projects. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable stance to take. But if you think it is and weren’t just doing a social media zinger let me know.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m always a little torn on projects like this.

  On the one hand, I know a few people who have hosted tt-rss and the software worked very well for them and their needs.

  On the other hand, software whose maintainers have fascist tendencies, or are at best super edge-lords, and which maintains a culture in the developers and community that’s just super toxic is not something I ever wish to support or be associated with.

  I have similar feelings on the hyperland project, or suckless software. What i have personally settled on is to not touch the software myself, and give a slight disclaimer when recommending it to others.

  I suppose unmaintained can be added to the disclaimer for this one now. At least we have a plethora of very nice alternatives in the rss space with projects like freshrss, miniflux, and nextcloud news.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to manage docker compose apps?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But, how do folks manage this mess?

  I generally find it less of a mess to have everything encapsulated in docker deployments for my server setups. Each application has its own environment (i.e. I can treat each container as its own ‘Linux machine’ which has only the stuff installed that’s important) and they can all be interfaced with through the same cli.

  Is there an analogue to apt update, apt upgrade, systemctl restart, journalctl?

  Strictly speaking docker pull <image>, docker compose up, docker restart <container>, and docker logs <container>. But instead of finding direct equivalents to a package manager or system service supervisor, i would suggest reading up on

  1. the docker command line, with its simple docker run command and the (in the beginning) super important docker ps
  2. The concept of Dockerfiles and what exactly they encapsulate - this will really help understand how docker abstracts from single app messiness
  3. docker-compose to find the equivalent of service supervision in the container space

  Applications like immich are multi-item setups which can be made much easier while maintaining flexibility with docker-compose. In this scenario you switch from worrying about updating individual packages, and instead manage ‘compose files’, i.e. clumps of programs that work together to provide a specific service.

  Once you grok the way compose files make that management easier - since they provide the same isolation and management regardless of any outer environment, you have a plethora of tools that make manual maintenance easy (dockge, portainer,…) or, more often, make manual maintenance less necessary through automation (watchtower, ansible, komodo,…).

  I realise this can be daunting in the beginning but it is the exact use case for never having to think about downloading a new Go binary and setting up a manual unit file again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Searching through a bulk of pdf files⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For the OCR process you can probably wrangle up a simple bash pipeline with ocrmypdf and just let it run in the background once until all your PDFs have a text layer.

  With that tool it should be doable with something like a simple while loop:

  find . -type f -name '*.pdf' -print0 |
      while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do
          echo "Processing $file ..."
          ocrmypdf "$file" "$file"
          # ocrmypdf "$file" "${file%.pdf}_ocr.pdf"   # if you want a new file instead of overwriting the old
      done
  

  If you need additional languages or other options you’ll have to delve a little deeper into the ocrmypdf documentation but this should be enough duct tape to just whip up a full OCR cycle.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Searching through a bulk of pdf files⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In case you are already using ripgrep (rg) instead of grep, there is also ripgrep-all (rga) which lets you search through a whole bunch of files like PDFs quickly. And it’s cached, so while the first indexing takes a moment any further search is lightning fast.

  It supports a whole truckload of file types (pdf, odt, xlsx, tar.gz, mp4, and so on) but i mostly used it to quickly search through thousands of research papers. Takes around 5 minutes to index everything for my 4000 PDFs on the first run, then it’s smooth sailing for any further searches from there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I determine what a mystery dongle does?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you know if this functionality can be turned off? I’ve been stung by the ‘gibberish’ once or twice but never enough to dive into the docs for it :)