hendrik

I have a business internet connection as well. I’m going to cancel it though, eventually. It’s a bit pricey. And they don’t do IPv6 for longterm customers, I just got my static IPv4 and that’s it.

Yeah, what I meant with DNS: I run a DNS Adblocker. And the big German ISPs do some silly DNS censoring, mostly for movie piracy websites. So I run my own DNS server. I had that configured on all my devices. Which is kind if great, I’ll get a good amount of ads and trackers blocked without any additional effort. But it’s a huge single point of failure. So now I have some services like DNS run on a VPS.

I’ve been selfhosting at home for quite a while. And we had power outages, construction work cut the internet cable, I messed up the computer… And the annoyance level just varies a lot depending on the specific service. I’m completely fine without mail for a few hours, Peertube and the Fediverse being unreachable. There will also be error notifications on my phone because Nextcloud can’t sync the calendar etc any more. But all that stuff will recover and I’ll manage to find something else to do. What I found more annoying is my instant messenger go down, because I use it to communicate more time-critical stuff with my family. Also annoying to hardcode the DNS server onto every device, they’re now all offline and I need to google the phone number of the power company. Though changing the DNS settings back isn’t too hard. And my Home Assistant sometimes does weird stuff so I’m gonna need to check on all the devices. And the Ikea lightbulbs will turn on anyway the moment power has been restored.

Hmmh. Maybe you’re right and I shouldn’t recommend her videos to a general audience… I feel there’s also some kind of cultural(?) difference buried here?! I like science, I listen to a bunch of other podcasts, mostly long-form content though. I think at the end of the day science is not about identity or belief, or even manners. It’s a method to build a model of reality, and concerned with factual truth… And I’m able to laugh about string theory not really being part of it unless they come up with a way to test it. Though, Angela Collier’s critizism how physics hasn’t done anything in 50 years isn’t what I (personally) got from the videos at all… But if some other people do… That’s very unfortunate. And I see how people make things like that part of their identity. I think it’s way more pronounced in places like the US. Less so where I live… So maybe I am a bit oblivious to the fact.

I’ll watch her anyway. I mean it’s hard to convey anything about theoretical physics in 5min videos. And being mean and a contrarian is kind of part of the scientific method. You’ll come up with a hypothesis and then spend the next year trying to disprove it 😆 So it’s kind of fitting… I get what you’re saying, though. She’s special. And not always in a good way… She is funny, though. And also understands precisely how the Youtube attention game works…

Sabine Hossenfelder, Numberphile, Computerphile, Vinheteiro, bigclivedotcom, Map Men, Robert Miles, fern, …

Currently not looking too good… We have a pretty constant 1 million active users. Despite all the previous enshittification of mainstream social media. But yeah, that’s the spirit 👍

What’s the security model and permission system like? Can I run this as my regular user, or can this nuke my projects directory or pull random code from the internet and execute it like most of the other agents?

There will be a trace. First of all, the way the Fediverse it set up, the instances all cooperate from distributing posts and comments, to deleting them. There’s no guarantee every instance does it (correctly). And as the Fediverse is made up of different software, it also depends on the specific implementation.

And then we also have AI scrapers, the Wayback Machine and other internet archives. It’ll end up there as well.

So better treat everything as easily traceable which you post in public. And it’s notoriously difficult to really remove stuff from the internet anyway.

Plus the US has some absurdly large datacenters for surveillance. Idk if it’s clever to lie to them about your social media history. They certainly have the capacity to scrape posts and store them forever.

Yeah, a few years ago, most of that was Google Translate. To be fair it has some limited on-device features. All of this used to be proprietary technology, though.

Not sure if I need tools for business meetings, at least on a regular basis. We kind of all agreed to use either the local language or English as the universal language in software development. And people are expected to be somewhat fluent. And if you clients are abroad, you better hire a real translator at some point. Or you’ll end up like Microsoft with all the messed up translations in Windows 11. It’ll be handy at times, though. Or if you work on a construction site. And some other jobs.

I recently learned about the Offline Translator app. That’s awesome. Allows to translate text, documents and what’s in front of the phone camera. Completely on device and no external services needed.

I’m also a regular user of Mozilla Firefox Translate. Allows me to read news articles from other European countries, occasionally visit some Japanese websites…

They’re all massively helpful. I like talking to people. Listen to perspectives beyond the standard American one (or German in my case). Or go shopping in an Asian supermarket. Sometimes I’ll read a datasheet of some obscure electronics and it’s in Chinese. And I live in one of the more multicultural regions, so it wouldn’t hurt to be able to give directions in other languages. People get lost here all the times because the Deutsche Bahn sucks. And all I can do is speak German, English and 50 words of French. Which sometimes isn’t enough. So I’m all for more translation helpers.

Story writing is a bit difficult in my experience. I had more fun with older models like Mistral Nemo. I feel newer AI models are often way more tuned to fulfill the role as a “helpful assistant” / chatbot, which I think tends to make their style of writing worse. You could also try to use some of those “base models”. They’re not tuned in that way. They also won’t follow instructions, they’re more autocomplete. You’d provide them with something like a word problem, give the first few paragraphs and see where they take it.

And honestly, I don’t think AI is super clever, on a book-author level. It’ll always get the pacing wrong. Push for story tropes like sudden plot twists. Introduce random characters to make something happen. And brush over / summarize other parts which would be interesting to tell in detail.

What could help is an elaborate (strict) process. Something like the computer programming / coding agents do. Make it first come up with a story idea. Make a plan, a todo list of the framework story, side stories and arcs, devise chapter names and a short summary of what needs to happen in those chapters. Write short character cards. And only then feed that plan back to the AI and make it begin writing the actual text.

How about you have a look at some public instances, scroll through some content, watch a few videos and see which one you like better from a user perspective? I mean technically, they both work. Setup of an instance is just done once, and I guess uploading videos has about the same complexity… So it’s down to what interface you like, and where you’d find your audience.

Uh. I kinda dislike all these closed-source additional moderating systems flange-mounted to the Fediverse. I think in the long-term, we should come up with a good system with good effectiveness, plus (/despite of) transparency, and share it amongst the entire Fediverse.

The thing is, a link to a Wikipedia article isn’t structured data either. It could very well link to the article about The Little Mermaid. Or the List of fictional pirates. So in that regard, both approaches are about on the same level. The hashtag just cuts off the unnecessary “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…”

I’m afraid if the idea is something like that, it won’t allow users to search for content nearby. That’d require some coordinates to calculate distance. If it’s just names, it’s closer to the concept of hashtags. You could as well add #Melbourne in the text (on Mastodon for example). And people would then be able to click on #Melbourne or maybe subscribe to the hashtag once/if that feature is ready on Lemmy.

Really hard to tell. I mean there are situations in which people think they’re doing someone a favour. But they’re really not. Upside of doing it individually is: affected people get to pick the model they like best. And they can prompt it however they like. Depends a bit on your expertise on the matter if your pre-generated stuff is on the same level or more a disservice. Upside of pre-generating it once is: maybe a bit less CO2 in the atmosphere and a few less trees killed. But that certainly depends on how many people read those descriptions. If there’s just 2 people with screenreaders out there, who don’t even click on all the images, you might very well be wasting compute. And have a negative balance on the environment.

I’d ask someone who needs these transcriptions first. I tend more towards “Nay”. I mean if they want AI transcriptions, I guess they could just run their own AI. And that way they get to choose between human and AI ones. I’m kind of against flooding the internet with AI content as long as the recipients can do it themselves.

Uh sorry, is there a good way to tell RAM usage on a different phone with more RAM? I didn’t find any usage number in the settings. It’s a ~50MB app. So at leat they didn’t include as much bloat as other apps do… You can try it. It allows you do watch videos right away, without signing up.

https://joinpeertube.org/

• https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Panoramax
• https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Commons