[-] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

That model is over a terabyte, I don’t know why I thought it was lightweight. Not that any reporting on machine learning has been particularly good, but this isn’t what I expected at all.

What can even run it?

[-] [email protected] 8 points 6 hours ago

I’m not in academia, but I’ve seen my coworkers’ hard work get crunched into a slop machine by higher ups who think it’s a good cleanup filter.

LLMs are legitimately amazing technology for like six specific use cases but I’m genuinely worried that my own hard work can be defaced that way. Or worse, that someone else in the chain of custody of my work (let’s say, the person advising me who would be reviewing my paper in an academic context) decided to do the same, and suddenly this is attached to my name permanently.

Absurd, terrifying, genuinely upsetting misuse of technology. I’ve been joking about moving to the woods much more frequently every month for the past two years.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

It’s as simple as getting the EU site and privacy policy when you connect from an EU IP. These systems are typically not as rigid as you might expect and the only friction might be around things like payment processing or things like that.

I get relatively uncensored internet access through UK/Ireland servers. This law and this type of law completely terrifies me.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

I do have an oversized battery buffer. Most people are discouraged from cooking or using any resistive load on the batteries, but I opted to invest in a bigger battery backup specifically to be able to do that, it’s why I said 85%+ and not like 40%. The battery buffer really is the point of this system, having 24/7 electricity in my home that I can pull over 20 amperes out of at the drop of a hat is without a question the most decadent luxury I have ever experienced. That’s not something I can just hook up to my house.

If I reconnect the grid-charging circuit, it is more than enough in the winter months nowadays (the grid was down more often in 2020-2023). But that gets really expensive, and relying on the grid is not wise.

If I use the secondary (mafia) grid more frequently (as I did in 2020-2023 out of necessity) I can pull a tiny amount of amps at an extortionate kWh rate, that’s enough to keep things like the fridge and lights and the water pump running. But turn on one hot plate or accidentally use the microwave, turn on the heater to the wrong setting (or the AC to the right setting but at the wrong time) and you have to cover up to get to the freezing street to switch the breaker back on. Sounds obnoxious? Well pre-solar that was the only option for 12+ hours of the day. I remember going down to flip the breaker over twenty times one day as a kid.

Let’s not get into the water situation. I just spent a weekend grappling with neighbors and floater valves.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago

They don’t, my current machine is a Maingear branded one that someone painstakingly hauled over from the US, and my potential new one would be an XMG branded machine, shipped at significant expense from the EU.

I’m in the armpit of the Middle East, I don’t have a local reseller, and even if I did, they’d want $1,000 more than just going through the pain of buying from overseas, alongside a blood sacrifice and the soul of my firstborn child, and a slap across my face for the insolence of asking.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago

I might be the wrong person to answer in this community since I daily drive Windows, but my Tongfang has been a dream and I’m thinking of buying a new one.

Although in OP’s case I’d probably still be looking for the cliche used Thinkpad. Unbeatable.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I live in a country with abhorrently unreliable electricity.

Even now that I have solar and even if I mostly (85%+) cook on a plug-in resistance hob and electric oven, gas is just unbeatable as a backup during the winter. No sun? Grid down? Milk boiled over and got into the hob’s thermostat? Need to cook more than one pot at a time? Israel decided to bomb a fucking residential substation for no reason again? Power company operator decided to accidentally pull an epic prank and route the wrong voltage to everyone’s house, frying a whole town’s fridges, during a year when people couldn’t afford to replace them (I can’t find an English article to link but I promise this happened)? No problemo

I also got a plug-in ~~induction~~ infrared plate and while it is pretty much magical it also makes my inverter shit itself uncontrollably (all my LED lights flicker and it makes an uncomfortable noise) so I really only use it when the ”good” grid is on (the bad one can’t handle it, the good one is the one from the prank above).

You can pry my backup butane from my cold dead hands. I replace the tank less than once a year, it’s fine. Not everyone who wants this option to stay is a regressive cultist.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

As someone who VPNs into the EU specifically for the privacy laws, this is troubling. I do wonder what my next move should be. I’d hate to lose my Steam account in particular.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It’s not, but you need over twice the current to supply the same power, and since many safety measures and physical constraints limit the current, it effectively means the power limit is more strict.

This is assuming the same cables and breakers etc being used for both voltage ratings. I know there are specific wiring and connection systems for high amperage stuff in 110v places (probably for some 220-240v places too, but I’m in a place with notoriously bad electrical everything, fuck if I know)

[-] [email protected] 23 points 2 days ago

Too many people here don’t understand that memes and shitposts are not the same thing.

Decent enough shitpost.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

The reward for playing the game in a way to protect yourself, as always, is the rules changing to fuck you over anyway.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

To be fair, I do this at work and while I get funny looks I do get complicated ideas across better when I can provide visual aid.

Frankly I need to improve my MS Paint skills. I need to get my mouse handwriting up to at least 70% of the Khan Academy guy’s level.

236
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Right into my veins please

I legitimately punch “Celtic fans Palestine” into Google images to make myself feel better every so often. Of course they know what’s happening, everyone knows what’s happening, but they use their visibility for the greater good. Even if they get in trouble over it every time.

Edit: here’s a few more

1
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Randomly remembered this song at work today, and it knocked the wind out of my sails after giving it a listen during a break.

I can't say the every line of translation is exactly how I would convey this song into English, but it's the official translation and has the artist's blessing.

10
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

It would be funny if this ends up being an unremarkable movie.

The image has stuck in my mind for what must be two decades now. Is this familiar to anyone? And should I even bother watching it? We all know of movies that peak at the moment you notice the poster, so...

45
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

This is a bit of a lower effort post, heads up.

I've always tried to be a bit less pessimistic about trends and platforms that are irrelevant to me. For a few years now I've been a bit apologetic when friends in group chats described TikTok as some kind of digital disease, for example, when they share some kind of egregious screenshot. I didn't use it, I didn't plan on using it, but I wasn't going to fault people for using internet platforms that they clicked with. I remember similar arguments about platforms like Pinterest, DeviantArt, or Tumblr in the past. Like they weren't for me but I got what they were going for there. They served a purpose, and they had a certain culture that was usually catalyzed by the platform's features.

My patience has been wearing thin, and the catalyst for it has been the nonstop torrent of what is affectionately being referred to as "AI slop" by the kids online. Every element of personality and personal escapism that seemed so foundational to the idea of cyberspace (remember the word cyberspace?!) is being mined and then worn down to dust in the pursuit of a nonsensical internet whose only interesting concepts seem to flourish in spite of the current trend.

I remember when things started transitioning from text and images to more usable video. Being in a part of the world with exceptionally bad internet, the video revolution was kind of a step back: video just took forever to load. But video was also more personal, and amateurishness was harder to cover up in a video than in a blog post. There were so many weird accents out there, regardless of English proficiency, that gave every clip of someone's voice a sense of place.

I only write this to contrast with the absolute hatred I have for AI-generated voice overs for slop content. I absolutely abhor the grating, EQed-for-loudness, syntactically perfect AI voiceovers I hear from people around me scrolling through short form video. This is a fucking waiting room, put some earphones in or do literally anything else. That type of voiceover really really gets under my skin. Robotic TTS was bad enough, but there is a "yuck factor" for me when a robotic voice feigns emotion or personality. It makes me think worse of whatever's being narrated. I cannot stress how much cheaper the average piece of internet "content" feels now that everything is gated behind multiple machine learning black boxes.


My internet upbringing came about a bit earlier than people my age. We still had dialup until around 2008 where I am, so until that point the internet escapades I was able to go on were quite limited. The bandwidth was extortionately expensive, and it was hard to check much out since we were still quite reliant on the landline for actual calls. It was only when the DSL came about in a few years (which we are still on... thanks third world!) that I was able to properly "surf". (I'd quite taken to the term used in French media for internet users - "Internautes" - basically like astronaut but for the online world... It carries a fragment of this sense of wonder I am chasing now. Cooler than "users" who "surf").

I loved the early web. 2010 or thereabouts was hardly the golden age of the web, of course. Web 2.0 was well underway and I was really exploring the recently-vacated ruins of an age in decline. But I loved what I saw. I would Google something that I wanted to know about - let's say, Windows keyboard shortcuts after a typing error and a subsequent eureka moment - and I'd click on what seems the most interesting. While I'd now look for something like a Microsoft help page, Reddit post, or a Github-hosted text file for such a query, I clicked on articles (I think the main one was from Lifehacker?) and naturally, blogs and personal pages. I remember discovering what gifs are and for the first month or so after that discovery I exclusively thought they were used for MSN emotes. "Dragonball Z emoticons animated gif" was probably my most searched query in like 2010.

I was never a blogosphere guy but I loved old hacked-together HTML personal sites. Sure most people were using Blogger or Wordpress (at least most people I could reach incidentally through tangential searches). I still return to Skytopia every few years, and sometimes write something in its now-desecrated guestbook. I'd found it while just looking for "3D fractals" online.

I have a few scattered memories that I look back upon fondly. I got really into origami and then papercraft models, for a duration of time that I can't quite remember. I very vividly remember stumbling upon a link to this model in a list of papercraft links, one cold winter. It was in an unremarkable HTML table list, that contained other, less impressive models. I still used that PDF's password as a sort of catch-all, basic zero-security password for years after finding this model, despite never putting in the effort to actually build it.

I'm rambling (I am full of too much alcohol and cheese as I'm still on vacation) but the point of this post is that I don't feel this way about the internet at all anymore. I don't feel like sitting in front of the computer and "experiencing the digital world" is giving me any escapism or inspiration, and it hasn't in a very long time. This is even worse, considering how much more time I spend now on an internet-connected anything now. Back when I was feeling the most connected to a bunch of cool scattered nerds online, I was spending a few hours at most every month in front of a web browser. Now it's multiple hours a day, split about evenly between business and pleasure. At least, pleasure in intent. The experience itself has been less than pleasing.

One step afterward was the early app age on iOS. It might sound very bizarre for the older and/or more privacy minded, but early app platforms were mostly populated by curious early adopters. Right before microtransactions and subscriptions absolutely blew up, these online communities were a small microcosm of the wider internet that skewed a little younger, and it is a strange thing to feel nostalgic about. My point is that there was some magic left in there. The main platform I have in mind is a defunct little proto-Discord (all groups were publicly listed with various privacy configurations) called Groupie, that was full of a very odd cast of characters. Of which I was one.

I don't know what I'm trying to say here. My post reads like old man yells at cloud, only the Cloud is a meaningless term and I'm by no definition an old man. I just miss the internet being magical. I'm sure there are parallels to people missing curated print media, missing having more options for quality (arguable) live television, missing the zeitgeist being transmitted through radio. I can't deny that there has to be a nigh-opaque layer of rose tint making this era of the internet seem like it's more than it was. But it meant something, dammit. The uncensored, fully customizable and unapologetically crusty looking personal pages carried a promise of some kind of techno-utopia that never happened.


A few months ago as I was looking back through the documentation for IndieWeb, this personal blog was linked. I got a tiny hit of that internet euphoria, in a weird way. Nothing about how this person seems to post their location appealed to me, as someone in a tiny country the size of a shoebox. But most of the early internet involved stuff I wouldn't do, so - experiencing things I dislike about modern social media but in the milieu of a personal website was a nice compromise.

What really got me was everyone's favorite article I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again. It is a generational piece of writing that I will treasure like the other Fediverse darling, Cory Doctorow's Tiktok's Enshittification. Alongside the Reddit exodus of 2023, these really made me feel like I could be doing more to interact with the side of the internet that is still trying to be more personal.

I have a bit of internet doomerism left inside me, even knowing about initiatives like IndieWeb. I'm fully aware that the early aughts web aesthetic and culture explicitly arose from the disconnect between people and the limited tools the average person was willing to wrap their head around. It's very different to now, an era where I find myself disgusted by people formatting videos that will only circulate among friends in a closed group chat in the same way that an Instagram video would be formatted, practically looking like an advertisement in terms of pacing... Like the main goal of being online is "content". We all have our own rant about the word "content", so I won't rehash mine right now - especially after writing this whole rant post.

I just hate how everything is converging into the very thing we complain about AI slop outputting. Garbage out requires garbage in and I can't help but feel like we are increasingly encouraged to create, gargle, and consume garbage, from even before this current era of machine-generated slop.

I wish I had a positive note to end this on. I don't want my writing to be whiny screams into the void. But at least it's my own writing - and unfortunately, the bar is just getting that much lower. I feel like I need to apologize for insufficient editing.


I originally posted this to my personal blog. I try to post better stuff on there than this, but hey - if I only posted posts that were perfect, I'd post nothing.

123
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

The issue is that I think there are Steam bundles that can’t be gifted, such as the Valve pack and that kind of thing. That also makes something like Civ 6 less likely, just because of the DLC bundles. I can also use Fanatical or Humble but frankly the region thing might be an issue.

This guy has played every console-available game under the sun before around 2020. So I’m focusing more on what he’s not likely to have played. He’s more of a soulslike/fighting game guy and I’m more of a simulation and eurojank enjoyer, so the recommendations don’t always carry across.

That said, I’ve been thinking newer games like Animal Well that are sure to be received well, but it’d suck if he already played it on something else. Would be a funny inclusion as well, a 35 megabyte 2D platformer for his new gaming desktop.

Any suggestions?

338
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Hi everyone.

I’m on my work computer on the perennially terrible Lebanese internet, in a relatively safe town. I’m talking about some stupid client KPIs in a meeting with a bunch of people around the world. An “important” meeting. The clients assume I’m in Dubai or somewhere like that, and I don’t correct them.

I’ll get asked “How are things in Lebanon?” by some coworker in Dubai or Europe after the call and I’ll say the classic “Alhamdulillah, my family and I are okay.” And we’re safe, we haven’t been bombed, not personally. I am lucky to work with decent people, but how could they understand. Will HR give me shit if they learn how much time I’ve spent out and about helping move essentials to shelters in the “dangerous outside world” instead of just burying myself at home “until it’s over”? Maybe I can get fired for putting myself in danger. Or maybe they give me leeway as a relatively senior person with the best English in my team who they get to pay less than everyone else because I don’t have a French passport - what a steal! (They pay me okay, and quite well compared to others around me, but we all know what this arrangement really is)

But corporate work, in normal times, rots the soul from the inside out. This is worse. I have to stare at the bad screen for hours while the EMTs dig people from under their homes. I have a duty to at least try to help my people, but I can’t. If I quit my job, my family loses this home and this security, and we have no place to go now that our original town is being bombed. I don’t come from money. I can’t just move or buy a house abroad or even a plane ticket (Lebanese people with no other nationality can’t go many places without a long visa process). I can’t “just move to Europe bro”, I can’t “just move to Dubai bro”. I have responsibilities. I’d love to move, but I can’t. Maybe I should.

Naturally, even nice coworkers cannot comprehend this. Besides, they need my input on the KPIs. This client is very important and number must go up after all. I hear another thud in the distance, through the crickets, I feel it in the pit of my stomach. Not close enough to threaten my life, but close enough to understand I might be next and that no area is truly safe.


This isn’t a woe is me post and I don’t want people in the comments feeling too sorry for my situation yeah. I still have my family, four limbs and two eyes, my home, a source of income in actual usable currency. Save your real sorrow for the people who have lost more both here and in the occupied territories. It could have been me in Gaza, it could have been you.


Please donate to the Lebanese Red Cross if you have the ability. Our people in the orange jumpsuits are our pride and they need everything they can get, especially now that they’re being hit as well. Relatively transparent and reputable org with boots on the ground and a functional donation platform, please consider helping.

512
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Been thinking of making a post like this for some time, apologies if some of this is not completely relevant: this community seems more like it's about Reddit the platform/product than Reddit the social "thing", but I'm sure a lot of people have similar experiences to mine. Maybe on some instances more than others.

Here's the one of the last comments I wrote as a regular Reddit user, on the eve of the blackout (almost a year ago to the day), under a post titled "Will your participation in Reddit change":

My comment

I will keep searching Google for Reddit help threads, but as a cultural and news aggregator I think this is the end for me. Maybe I will check it every so often. On desktop. On the old site. Until they sunset that too.
I wouldn’t be against using the first party app if it wasn’t so awful to use.
It’s a massive shame that we’ve all collectively agreed that Reddit is the de facto way to create open communities online. There were so many forums that could fill the void left by Reddit for things like tech and art and they’ve all shut down in the past decade.
I try not to be too negative about the evolution and constant growth of the userbase of the site and of the internet as a whole, but I’ve really felt like things are moving in a direction I can’t even be cautiously optimistic about lately.
I think of all the mod tools that will be defunct. The commonly cited example is that people who comment excessively on adult subs are automatically barred from commenting on the teenagers subreddit. Sure the admins can whip up functionality to do this, but this site was built on custom tools and custom CSS and all that. I think the API was one among the many secret sauces that give Reddit this staying power. These sites and forums I talked about - I used to hop from one to the next year after year. Until I found Reddit a decade ago.
I like that I choose my subs and that I don’t get algorithmically ordered sludge designed to game the algorithm on my homepage. Yes the sensibilities of the lowest common denominator redditors are gamed by people posting, but that’s (in my opinion) acceptable.
Frankly if they kept the old Reddit Gold pricing (4 bucks per month/30 annual) and gated unrestricted API access behind it I would have been inclined to finally give Reddit money. I use it a lot, I don’t mind paying now that I can afford it. But something about how it’s all going down really doesn’t fill me with confidence.
I’ve been trying to write a post about this for a while now, but I haven’t felt like it was relevant. Thanks for asking here

Reading through this is a bit funny, in retrospect, seeing how Reddit-centric my understanding of the internet had become at the time. I am happy to report that I have checked the home page maybe a half dozen times since the blackout, instead of once or twice a week like I expected. I suppose the disgusting state of the heavily astroturfed worldnews sub was a big part of it as well: for me Reddit was the one big online platform where the average visible user didn't seem to be very misinformed about Palestine (at least not by default), and it was frankly very sad to see where it got in the past few months.

I do miss Reddit, I haven't been able to replace it outright. I'm from Lebanon, and Lebanese Twitter is (if you can imagine it) even more of a toxic cesspool than regular Twitter. I'm not on Facebook (also cesspool here), I'm not on Instagram - my point is I don't get anything about my country on ostensibly user-curated social media. /r/Lebanon was very far from perfect, but it was nice to get a trickle of local news with users who were more in line with my own politics. The local news outlets focus on a lot of irrelevant crap, the sub's news feed was a bit more interesting.

One thing I loved about that subreddit was that users with more mainstream views in my country (eg. transphobia-as-default) were allowed to spout their bullshit in the subreddit with little mod pushback (if it's just JAQing off etc, not harrassing people obviously). Then the regulars would dogpile on that user's post - very refreshing! And very validating I would imagine for anyone who is used to hearing this shit everyday.

I was applying to be a mod to help keep the sub moving, at one point, but hey. Maybe that headache was never worth it. Still, I felt like I lost one of my online homes.

More generally, I have enjoyed my first year on Lemmy, although the experience has been lacking in many ways. For one, while Reddit has a reputation as a meme cemetery, the memes here are generally a bit moldier. But that's okay. The fact that there's fewer posts I think isn't necessarily a bad thing either, I think we all preferred Reddit's slightly slower homepage in 2013 than the one we left in 2023, that would regurgitate more and more from the bottom of the barrel if you were willing to keep scrolling.

I've toyed with opening a Lebanon community here on dbzer0, having opened one on FMHY that nobody used. But it wouldn't be the same, and I wouldn't know how to populate it. I posted maybe 2 non-question posts on Reddit in my decade+ of being a regular user, but I wrote tons of comments. It also helped keep my English sharper, I think.

I've reactivated my old Instagram account and it's pretty ass out there. The ad/post ratio is just egregious, and they'll just serve you random posts from random pages. I want to see my friends goddamn it, isn't this what your platform is supposed to be for? For those of you who don't know, the app will also send you a notification once or twice a day suggesting you look at "today's top reels". I have never watched a reel of my own will, fuck off.

Point being, the main platforms people use online haven't been up my alley. I can only hope the zoomer dumbphone pushback keeps expanding, and that social media starts being seen as something for older generations. Wishful thinking?

This is just a post about enshittification, everyone's favorite word, but every time I think about it for more than 2 minutes I can't help but miss a simpler internet. Some part of me was hoping it would kickstart me "growing out" of spending this much time online per day (not everyone spends a ton of time online), but it hasn't.

Also every time I ask something longer than 20 words on Discord some middle schooler will reply "yap", even in the channels designated for questions. Discord has had its uses (yes I know there's privacy concerns), but it's hardly a replacement for Reddit, or forums. Both of which are/were searchable. But enough yapping from me.

Thoughts? How has the exodus been for you? Is this how Digg users felt?

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ggtdbz

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