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MostlyGibberish

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MostlyGibberish ,

Funny you should mention that.

MostlyGibberish ,

I switched to buckwheat pillows a few years ago and I’ve been a fan. It’s a really interesting texture that you can move and shape really easily, but then when you apply pressure to it, it firms up and holds its shape. So, you get a really supportive pillow that’s molded to your head and neck (For reference, I’m a side sleeper). The only downside I’ve noticed is the filling degrades relatively quickly, and after about a year it loses a lot of its volume and doesn’t hold its shape as well, so you’ll need to replace it. The bright side is that it’s fairly cheap, and entirely biodegradable.

MostlyGibberish ,

Because someone screen capped it from Instagram, and for some reason static images need to be videos with a random song playing.

SGE, ChatGPT and the likes are the stupidest thing to come from AI

This may be an unpopular opinnion… Let me get this straight. We get big tech corporations to read the articles of the web and then summarize to me, the user the info I am looking for. Sounds cool, right? Yeah, except that why in the everloving duck would I trust Google, Microsoft, Apple or Meta to give me the correct info,...

MostlyGibberish ,

This is why I do a lot of my Internet searches with perplexity.ai now. It tells me exactly what it searched to get the answer, and provides inline citations as well as a list of its sources at the end. I’ve never used it for anything in depth, but in my experience, the answer it gives me is typically consistent with the sources it cites.

MostlyGibberish ,

To be fair… Flakes are still marked as an experimental feature, so they are telling you it probably won’t be documented and the interface could change. But yes, given how widely adopted they are in the community, it’s definitely time to document them better and ideally make it the default for new setups.

MostlyGibberish ,

Related question: what’s everyone using to stream from their Jellyfin server these days?

I have a shield pro, but it’s definitely starting to age, and with Nvidia neglecting it for years and finally ending support, I don’t think I’ll be getting a new one. My TV OS doesn’t have an app without side loading, and even if it did, I don’t think I’d want to use it.

MostlyGibberish ,

I was kind of afraid that would be the answer. Do you still need a separate Apple device to set it up? I’m not necessarily morally opposed to buying an Apple product, but I am morally opposed to buying two to use one.

MostlyGibberish ,

Interesting. Thanks for the information!

MostlyGibberish ,

Android has a similar feature. It’s called “Lockdown mode” on the shutdown menu. Locks the phone and turns off any biometric unlocks.

MostlyGibberish ,

I use Portainer and it’s a good UI, but I find the way they market business edition pretty scummy. Like having a banner ad constantly visible on the page, and having half the features visible but disabled with a big bright “upgrade to Business Edition” message next to them, and directly refusing to add any mechanism to opt out. I respect that they need funding for development, but they need to realize that a lot of their users simply don’t need a business license and aren’t going to buy one no matter how much advertisement you throw at them. The fact that they don’t realize that and refuse to budge indicates to me that they’ve stopped caring about the user experience of their product.

Sorry for the rant, I’ve been annoyed by this for a long time. Some day I’ll set up my own gitops pipeline, but that pesky day job keeps getting in the way.

MostlyGibberish ,

I’ve used nextcloud for a while now, but it does suffer from jack of all trades syndrome. I’ve started offloading the things I use it for to other services that do a particular thing better. Syncthing for general file syncing across my devices, Immich for managing photos, Radicale for contacts and calendar sync…

If you’re just looking for an all in one Google Drive like experience for your files though, Nextcloud is as good as it gets.

MostlyGibberish ,

Yeah, once I made the switch to wireless earbuds, I didn’t miss the jack at all. People have valid complaints about them, like the price and the limited battery, but I think the convenience is worth it.

MostlyGibberish ,

Honestly, because Windows is a steaming pile of garbage and using Mac feels like swimming with pool floaties.

I recently started using NixOS as my distro and it has been phenomenal. Saying the learning curve is a little steep is like calling a hurricane a little bit of rain, but once you start to get it, it’s extremely powerful and delivers on the promise of “all of your configuration in one place.” It gives me a lot of peace of mind to know that every time I tweak or fix something, it’s reliably making it into a version controlled and backed up repository. I could throw my laptop out the window, pick up a new one, and have all my applications installed and configured within half an hour.

MostlyGibberish ,

This doesn’t directly answer your question, but highly recommend checking out trash-guides.info

They have a ton of guides on how to configure and automate really detailed rules for sonarr/radarr. So, while it won’t help you verify the download matches the labels, it’ll make it more likely to get releases from reputable sources that are more likely to use accurate labels.

MostlyGibberish ,

This seems like a good time to mention that if you live in the US, there’s currently a significant amount of federal money up for grabs to expand the rail network, with an emphasis on high speed rail. See if there are any projects being planned in your state, and make your voice heard so NIMBYs and airline industry cronies don’t bully us out of a vastly superior mode of inter-city transit.

Pornhub shuts down in Texas... and predictably, VPNs benefit (mashable.com)

From the article: “Unsurprisingly, this skyrocketed searches for the best VPNs. According to a SlashGear report sent to Mashable, searches for “Texas VPN” jumped by 1,750 percent in the past day. It also spotted a 1,600 percent increase for the phrase “How to access Pornhub.””

MostlyGibberish ,

Not as long as there are minorities to blame for everything.

MostlyGibberish ,

Right. Why do I have to submit a retinal scan and 3 forms of ID to watch porn because parents can’t be bothered to learn basic computer skills and monitor their own children?

MostlyGibberish ,

Do you own the house? Both coaxial cable and CAT6 (or CAT5) cable is extremely cheap and doesn’t really require any special tools or know-how to run. Obviously I have no idea what your situation is, but it might be worth replacing the cable yourself.

MostlyGibberish ,

Kind of crazy that Vietnam can provide better Internet service to their citizens than the US. Not to disparage Vietnam in any way, but you’d think a country with the largest economy in human history would be able to keep up.

MostlyGibberish ,

Because people are afraid of things they don’t understand. AI is a very new and very powerful technology, so people are going to see what they want to see from it. Of course, it doesn’t help that a lot of people see “a shit load of cash” from it, so companies want to shove it into anything and everything.

AI models are rapidly becoming more advanced, and some of the new models are showing sparks of metacognition. Calling that “plagiarism” is being willfully ignorant of its capabilities, and it’s just not productive to the conversation.

MostlyGibberish ,

I can definitely see why OpenAI is controversial. I don’t think you can argue that they didn’t do an immediate heel turn on their mission statement once they realized how much money they could make. But they’re not the only player in town. There are many open source models out there that can be run by anyone on varying levels of hardware.

As far as “stealing,” I feel like people imagine GPT sitting on top of this massive collection of data and acting like a glorified search engine, just sifting through that data and handing you stuff it found that sounds like what you want, which isn’t the case. The real process is, intentionally, similar to how humans learn things. So, if you ask it for something that it’s seen before, especially if it’s seen it many times, it’s going to know what you’re talking about, even if it doesn’t have access to the real thing. That, combined with the fact that the models are trained to be as helpful as they possibly can be, means that if you tell it to plagiarize something, intentionally or not, it probably will. But, if we condemned any tool that’s capable of plagiarism without acknowledging that they’re also helpful in the creation process, we’d still be living in caves drawing stick figures on the walls.

MostlyGibberish ,

it also means the need for societal shift to support people outside of capitalism is needed.

Exactly. This is why I think arguing about whether AI is stealing content from human artists isn’t productive. There’s no logical argument you can really make that a theft is happening. It’s a foregone conclusion.

Instead, we need to start thinking about what a world looks like where a large portion of commercially viable art doesn’t require a human to make it. Or, for that matter, what does a world look like where most jobs don’t require a human to do them? There are so many more pressing and more interesting conversations we could be having about AI, but instead we keep circling around this fundamental misunderstanding of what the technology is.

MostlyGibberish ,

Related, if you see a listing for an “entry level” job that requires 5+ years of experience or whatever, apply for it anyway. Odds are no one with experience is going to want to take the salary they’re offering, so you might get an interview.

MostlyGibberish ,

The only thing stopping them is the fact that anyone who wants the data can just utilize the federation protocol to take any data they want, and there’s not a lot anyone can do about it. You can’t sell something that’s trivial to get for free.

If the question you’re really asking is “what’s stopping content on Lemmy/Mastodon/etc from being used to train an LLM?” the answer is, nothing.

MostlyGibberish ,

I’m not super paranoid about security, but I do try to have a few good practices to make sure that it takes more than a bot scanning for /admin.php to find a way in.

  • Anything with SSH access uses key-based auth with password auth disabled. First thing I do when spinning up a new machine
  • Almost nothing is exposed directly to the Internet. I have wireguard set up on all my devices for remote access and also for extra security on public networks
  • Anyone who comes to visit gets put on the “guest” network, which is a separate subnet that can’t see or talk to anything on the main network
  • For any service that supports creating multiple logins, I make sure I have a separate admin user with elevated permissions, and then create a non-privileged user that I sign in on other devices with
  • Every web-based service is only accessible with a FQDN which auto-redirects to HTTPS and has an actual certificate signed by a trusted CA. This is probably the most “paranoid” thing I do, because of the aforementioned not being accessible on the Internet, but it makes me happy to see the little lock symbol on my browser without having to fiddle around with trusting a self-signed cert.
MostlyGibberish ,

Definitely a consideration. In my case, the vast majority of my services are running in docker on a single host box, including the reverse proxy itself (Traefik). That unencrypted traffic never goes out over a wire, so for now I’m not concerned.

MostlyGibberish ,

Yeah, the notion that no one uses torrents anymore is hilarious. I use both frequently. Usenet is great and has a lot of benefits, but it doesn’t hold a candle to torrents as far as breadth of available content.

MostlyGibberish ,

For the past month or so it’s been SPECIALZ by King Gnu. AKA the fourth OP of Jujutsu Kaisen.

MostlyGibberish ,

One factor I haven’t seen mentioned is that because of rising interest rates, tech companies have had to shift from being focused on growth to actually turning a profit. Because of this, companies are having to shed employees because they over hired in anticipation of that continued growth. People are expensive so that’s an “easy” way to try to get the line closer to positive.

This is kind of a rough overview and I’m by no means an expert on economics. Just someone who works in tech and so has been following things closely.

MostlyGibberish ,

Right. If you want to debate with people you have a rapport with, great. But if you’re just being a contrarian and only talking about why you don’t like something other people enjoy, they’re gonna think you’re a dick.

MostlyGibberish ,

I mean, that goes both ways. As an American, and especially as a guy, I often get sideways looks when I mention I have a bidet. If you can’t or won’t try it out, fine, but people are really acting like it’s strange to clean yourself off using water.

Should I move to Docker?

I’m a retired Unix admin. It was my job from the early '90s until the mid '10s. I’ve kept somewhat current ever since by running various machines at home. So far I’ve managed to avoid using Docker at home even though I have a decent understanding of how it works - I stopped being a sysadmin in the mid '10s, I still worked...

MostlyGibberish ,

One of the things I like about containers is how central the IaC methodology is. There are certainly tools to codify VMs, but with Docker, right out of the gate, you’ll be defining your containers through a Dockerfile, or docker-compose.yml, or whatever other orchestration platform. With a VM, I’m always tempted to just make on the fly config changes directly on the box, since it’s so heavy to rebuild them, but with containers, I’m more driven to properly update the container definition and then rebuild the container. Because of that, you have an inherent backup that you can easily push to a remote git server or something similar. Maybe that’s not as much of a benefit if you have a good system already, but containers make it easier imo.

MostlyGibberish ,

I’ve always been hesitant to host any services on a device with a non-removable battery. Having a battery constantly charging and discharging isn’t great for it and could potentially be a fire hazard. I know modern devices have gotten much smarter about how they charge, so maybe it’s not as much of an issue anymore, but still something to be aware of depending on how old your phone is or how you modify the firmware.

Personally, with how cheap you can find a mini PC or SBC, I would just save up a bit (maybe even sell the device you’re planning to host on) and keep an eye out for deals. You’re going to get a lot more freedom and power with those devices, and not have to try to hack around the limitations of a mobile OS.

MostlyGibberish ,

My advice for security is don’t expose anything to the Internet unless you’re sure you know how to secure it. If you want to be able to access self-hosted services remotely, setting up a VPN is the way to go. OpenVPN is gonna be the most widely supported way of doing that. In fact, based on a quick Google search, it looks like your router has an OpenVPN server built in. If you’re willing to put in some effort for something more modern and performant, look into WireGuard.

Another benefit of having a VPN is that if you set it up to allow access back out to the Internet, you can use it to mask your internet traffic while you’re connected to an untrusted network.

MostlyGibberish ,

I can’t wait for Lemmy to catch up with Mastodon in this regard. Between this and not being able to easily migrate your account to a new instance, it doesn’t feel like Lemmy users have as much of the freedom that the fediverse can provide.

MostlyGibberish OP ,

I looked at doing two vdevs but was put off by the lower usable storage. At a certain point, maybe that’s not as important as I think though.

Yeah, the choice for 6TB wasn’t my best. I got the two older drives a few years back on a Newegg flash sale, and it seemed like plenty, especially considering Unraid’s model of 1 parity drive and 100% usable storage on the data drive(s). Then, when I decided to upgrade, I was too cheap to go buy 4 whole new drives, so I just went with more of what I already had (to add insult to injury, they’re all WD Red drives…).

MostlyGibberish OP ,

Part of me is starting to wonder, honestly. I will say that the web UI for TrueNAS Scale is leagues better than Unraid’s, which to me always felt confusing and hacked together. ZFS is also really nice, although Unraid did recently add support.

One pain point I’ve run into with TNS is that access to Docker or Kubernetes seems to be intentionally locked down from access anywhere but the built in apps catalog. As someone who works with Docker and various orchestration engines professionally, I much prefer being able to define and stand up my own services to using a list of predefined templates. There are obviously ways of getting around the restrictions in TNS, but with Unraid, I could install something like Portainer or simply drop into the terminal and run docker commands myself. Not having that is frustrating.

Overall though, I think TrueNAS is a much cleaner and more modern user experience, so long as you stay on their rails. Which I suppose is the point.

MostlyGibberish OP ,

That sounds interesting. Thanks for the recommendation!

MostlyGibberish ,

It’s rough in the US. Most iPhone users will insist that iMessage is better and refuse to use anything else, and then whine when an android user is in a group chat and none of the features work.

MostlyGibberish ,

You might give kbin a shot. I haven’t used it much myself, but it has features from both Mastodon and Lemmy, so should interop well with both of those.

MostlyGibberish ,

Just wait until climate change kills the vast majority of coffee crops. That’ll probably remind people that it’s a luxury.

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    MostlyGibberish ,

    +1 for Jellyfin. It’s FOSS, doesn’t pollute your media collection with terrible streaming offerings, and doesn’t paywall hardware acceleration. Much better option than Plex these days imo.

    MostlyGibberish ,

    Ars Technica seems to really be embracing the fediverse. They have a very active official Mastodon account. mastodon.social/

    MostlyGibberish ,

    Taking the opportunity to get on my soapbox and remind everyone that free software still requires someone’s time and effort to maintain. If you’ve been using a free app for a while and you and you enjoy it (and you have the means to do so), consider sending a donation to the developers/maintainers! It’s a good way to help ensure that the great, free app you enjoy stays great and free.

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