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zolax

@[email protected]

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zolax OP ,

the body of the post has the ringtone attached. I might need to edit it to make it viewable through Photon but you can also view it on a browser

zolax OP ,

no problem!

zolax ,

this is the ad-free version, which is available with the exact same (if I’m correct) features on F-Droid for free, along with the source code on GitHub.

the versions on the Play Store (paid version and free version with ads) likely just help pay the developer for their work

and as others have said already, free software is free as in freedom, not free beer.

zolax , (edited )

in terms of the quality of writing you can get models from 20GB at a similar level to GPT-4 (good for creative writing but much worse if knowledge of something is required)

the model I use (~20GB) would know what rclone is but would most likely not know how to use it

EDIT: now that I think about it is was based off of some benchmark. personally I wouldn’t say it performs at GPT-4 but maybe GPT-3.5

zolax ,

yeah, my bad. edited the comment with more accurate info

and this does apply to creative writing, not knowledgeable stuff like coding

zolax , (edited )

maybe it’s just me, but isn’t it quite hard (at least for people not confident doing technical stuff) to root a phone?

like a decade ago the bootloader may have been unlocked by default and for many phones there were exploits so that they could be rooted with an app, but nowadays you would have to:

  • unlock the bootloader by installing ADB and fastboot drivers, booting into download mode and run terminal commands that would reset your phone in the process; and for some phones, you would also need to shorten a test point and for quite a few of them nowadays, unlocking the bootloader is impossible
  • boot into download mode and flash a custom recovery with fastboot or potentially with Odin or some other proprietary software (or sometimes you can root from download mode)
    • for some newer (including Samsung) phones, you also need to disable dm-verity otherwise your phone wouldn’t be able to boot into Android
  • boot into recovery mode and finally flash (probably Magisk) an image to root the system

I guess there are usually detailed instructions for this, but I doubt that most people rooting their phones now would be non-techie people who are just watching generic online tutorials. they would most likely stumble upon XDA or other forums that would have proper instructions. and even then, they are not very beginners friendly as they aren’t usually supposed to be followed by people with little to no experience with using the command-line, drivers, how Android phones work internally, etc.

zolax ,

see my reply to @pacoboyd

zolax ,

ah, okay, that’s fair. in terms of short-form social media that tries to engage you, I’d expect little warning and for children especially to take more risks when encountering this type of content.

Folks with rooted android phones have a high chance of having watched a 12 year old tell them how to root their phone on TicTok.

I was more focused on this, though, because this sentence implied that you could successfully root your phone with short-form, likely phone-generic tutorials when the process nowadays is much more difficult and technical

zolax ,

qt as well

zolax ,

to clarify:

The developers of the Alpine Linux-based postmarketOS mobile distribution today that they’re now supporting the systemd init system alongside OpenRC and other alternative init systems.

and:

postmarketOS currently supports the Sxmo, Phosh, GNOME Shell on Mobile, and KDE Plasma Mobile UIs. While the Sxmo images will stay with OpenRC, the GNOME and KDE Plasma Mobile images will be built on top of systemd

zolax ,

another Terminus (and Catppuccin) user I see!
beautiful setup

zolax ,

me too lol

zolax ,

another cave story user on fedi!! very cool

i know someone with that exact bg too lol

zolax ,

haven’t compiled it in like months bc it keeps erroring out lol

please tell me you use ccache tho

zolax ,

oh wow another colemak-dh user

but I’d avoid converting until you’re able to touch-type. then you can show off to everyone w/ your weird-looking keyboard layout lol

zolax ,

oh another restic user

yeah restic is a very good choice

it even works with incremental backups so you don’t waste as much space as other solutions

[Solved] Window manager with no (or very small) minimum window size?

I need extremely small tiling windows, say something with only a width/height of 10px. However, by experimentation I found that my window manager Sway (and likely also i3) has a hard-coded minimum height of 60px and minimum width of 100px....

zolax ,

I think dwm can be compiled (and is very minimal so quick to compile) with different minimum widths and heights.

there’s also dwl, which is supposed to be dwm but native Wayland rather than X, but I haven’t tried it out

zolax ,

doesn’t it allow compilation and non-commercial distribution? I don’t agree with the license (not free or open source), but I’m genuinely curious on what specifically doesn’t allow source code modification.

zolax ,

ah, I see. thanks

[IDEA] self-hosted advertisements for personal sites

so I was looking at someone’s personal website from Mastodon, and noticed that they had banners to advertise other people’s servers. while server lists like fediring exist, I was thinking of a more automatic method of advertisement within someone’s website....

zolax OP ,

you’re right that abuse would be the biggest issue, made worse if people host ads for many people. ideally people would naturally host few ads in a similar fashion to smaller instances (ideally) federating with few instances? also didn’t realise that so many webrings still exist until I searched them up

zolax OP ,
  1. people would choose individual websites (likely their friends) to host ads of, although list making would be problematic
  2. ideally would just serve images or gifs with as simple an API as possible
  3. similar idea to point 1 but abuse of such a system would be an issue (eg. a website is hacked and changed to inappropriate ads). one of the concept’s main implications
  4. similar idea to point 2: videos could also be problematic though
  5. potentially some form of client-side (website) caching? this whole thing is just an idea, so I really don’t know how it work
  6. no revenue - and therefore breaches of privacy and tracking would be unlikely - as the servers would be individually hosted, and therefore decentralised. however, this approach would make it significantly easier for malicious parties to pay users for ads.
  • as to whether or not that happens would be the user’s decision, although (at least right now) such advertising sounds more costly and hard to enforce.
  1. you’re right that ad-blockers could (although probably not at first) be used to block ads, as the ads would be for other personal websites (no real ad protection needed as per point 6), some could unblock them knowing that they would be more ethical (again, just a concept). this would be a problem though as most visitors would have an ad-blocker regardless.

thanks for the points

zolax OP ,

the ads would ideally be limited to banners and gifs in the same style as these, with each user choosing whose ads they wish to host

no revenue or popularity (these are only for personal websites) would (hopefully) prevent users from hosting invasive ads. quite a few personal websites have banners linking to others, so this would be a more simpler approach

(although in principle, a whole project dedicated to automate this doesn’t sound good)

zolax OP ,

I’ll try explain the idea more concisely:

  • user wants to promote own website
  • user creates ads (small banners and gifs) like these and hosts them on an instance of the software through their website
    • the server-side implementation would have an API to fetch the URL of the advertisements from to embed to the website (just simple image files or gifs)
  • user asks other people (friends, others in the fediverse) to save their website on these peoples’ own lists of websites that they are willing to host the ads for
    • people would host based off of similar content, interesting topics, and general goodwill as opposed to exposure (as very few personal websites get constant exposure to large audiences) and revenue (as this would be a willing move)
  • the client-side implementation of those hosting other websites’ ads would randomly pick a URL from the user’s own list (similar to picking a random URL from a webring), use the API (something like /get_ad?) to retrieve the URL of a random ad from the promoting user and display that on their website
  • "automatic" was a bad word choice, I’ll change it now
  • this wouldn’t solve a problem, just automate the functions of webrings by giving every user their own decentralised “webring” (the list of websites) and displaying user-curated ads (probably at the bottom of the page where most banners are) as opposed to randomly picking from a webring
  • those using personal websites would be the users, while visitors would be the audience.

should’ve made the wording more clearer in the post, my bad I guess. and to clarify, this is just an concept I thought about though and I don’t actually have plans to develop this. (I’ve also edited the post with my final opinion on the subject.)

zolax OP ,

yeah, that sounds like a similar idea.

has anyone implemented this in a decentralised manner?

zolax OP ,

mostly, but webrings seem closer

zolax OP ,

oh, ok. thanks

zolax OP ,

ah I see. thanks

zolax OP ,

I’ll just copy a previous reply:

the ads would ideally be limited to banners and gifs in the same style as these, with each user choosing whose ads they wish to host

no revenue or popularity (these are only for personal websites) would (hopefully) prevent users from hosting invasive ads. quite a few personal websites have banners linking to others, so this would be a more simpler approach

(although in principle, a whole project dedicated to automate this doesn’t sound good)>

zolax OP ,

these simple type of ads used in the early internet was exactly the idea I was going for, having little involved to breach privacy or be used as an attack vector. more individual user ads was also what I was imagining, and looking at them, they are quite funny too

zolax ,

what’s ram usage like?

zolax ,

you could use Termux::API to get stats (battery percentage, notifications, calls, some other stuff) of your phone from your PC.

this video gives good examples

zolax ,

also didn’t know you could pipe text into lolcat like that

zolax ,

oh that’s cool

zolax ,

good bot

zolax ,

oh ok

I do appreciate the fact that more private Piped links are provided instead of direct YouTube links (my bad btw), although direct ways of saying thank you (messaging developers, sending donations, providing feedback) would be more useful and productive

thanks for the advice. I’m also not a fan of those type of comments too lol

zolax ,

that’s ok. we all make mistakes

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