RotaryKeyboard

joined 1 year ago
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[–] RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Biden can be an instant king-maker. All he has to do is hold a press conference where he endorses another Democratic candidate, along with an announcement that he is bowing out of the race to protect the country from Donald Trump. It would be the most potent endorsement ever made.

[–] RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja 12 points 1 year ago

What they’re doing is publicly signaling that they’re going to spend a lot of money in those districts if these reps vote for Jim Jordan. They’re already swing districts, so anyone who wants to keep his seat is going to have to raise and spend even more money. The Dems are betting that the pressure of having to fundraise and fight a contested election is more of a problem than just making up an excuse to not vote for Jordan.

[–] RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja 77 points 1 year ago (6 children)

For me it was playing Life is Strange for the first time. I bought it because it had been listed on Steam as “Overwhelmingly Positive” for ages, and at the time I was really enjoying the story-based games that companies like Telltale were producing. So, knowing nothing about the game, I picked it up and started playing it.

The first act was slow. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the writers were establishing Arcadia Bay, a city in the Pacific Northwest, as a character. All the people in it needed to be recognizable, so it took time for them to teach the player about who they were, what mattered to them, how they fit in to the city, and what their flaws were. I actually stopped playing for a while after the first act. But, luckily, I picked it back up over the holiday season.

I still remember playing it in my living room. I was so thoroughly absorbed into the story that when something tense happened in the second act and I couldn’t stop it the way I normally could, I was literally crushing the controller as if I could make things work by pulling the triggers harder.

I am decidedly not the demographic that Life is Strange was written to appeal to, but they did such a good job writing a compelling story that it didn’t matter. I got sucked in, the characters became important to me, and I could not. put. it. down. I played straight through a night until I finished it.

(If you’ve played it and you’re wondering, I chose the town the first time I played it.)

I’ll never forget that game. I’ll also never forget the communities that spawned around it. I read the accounts of people who had just played it for the first time for about a year because it helped me relive the experience I had when I played it. It was incredible.

[–] RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja 21 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Star Trek celebrates the diversity of humanity. The extremes of genetic engineering and (on the other side of the spectrum, perhaps) the Borg are symbolic of the corruption of that diversity.

For an in-universe explanation, I suppose you could just look at the degree to which cybernetics are tolerated. Rutherford-level cybernetics? No problem! Borg Queen-level cybernetics? Helm, warp nine, full reverse!

[–] RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja 42 points 1 year ago

This is Wyoming we're talking about. Wyoming is where Matthew Shepherd was brutally tortured and murdered. I wouldn't stop, either.

[–] RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja 2 points 1 year ago

Not beta, gamma, and delta?

[–] RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja 56 points 1 year ago (11 children)

It took me a lot longer than I'd like to admit for me to figure out that this was a reference to SNW, and not someone trying to push a far-right conspiracy theory. I think I need to take a break from the internet for a while.

Maybe it's time for a DS9 rewatch....

[–] RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja 9 points 1 year ago

I am so torn on this. On the one hand, this is sorely needed. Not everyone in an organization is aware that information they feed to an LLM is often fed back into the LLM to train it, or that the LLM reflects bias in its training material, or even that an LLM might return false information. A strong policy is important to help communicate these things.

On the other hand, LLMs have had the biggest impact on my productivity, well, ever. The speed with which I can write complex documents, write code, or help someone else solve a problem has been increased by an order of magnitude. My organization recently enacted something similar to this executive order, prohibiting the use of LLMs. Now I can't get those advantages at work anymore. I'm afraid a heavy-handed policy would effectively strip government workers of the same capabilities.

[–] RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja 7 points 1 year ago

This has been going on forever. Decades ago, it was common to be charged more on travel websites if you were using a Mac then if you were using windows. These days they use a lot more profiling to try to squeeze more money out of the people they think are willing to pay.

[–] RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That title makes me chuckle. He should go set up a fresh install of Windows and see what the default security experience is like. Mac OS makes it smooth and fast, and relatively unobtrusive in comparison.

[–] RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja 16 points 1 year ago

This is absolutely brilliant! I’ve tried to get results like this With starter images, but I have gotten nothing as nuanced and subtle as this! Great work!

 

Searching through communities can be a daunting task. At latest count, there are over 15,000 communities to choose from. In addition, it’s common to pick communities that you are already interested in. This forms a bit of a bubble, where the content you are exposed to is the content you already agree with and like. So how do you push those boundaries and find new and diverse communities?

One way is to visit a random community. Lemmy-Discover makes this easy by giving you an interface that will show you exactly one community. You’ll see its statistics as well as a few posts and their associated comments. If the community isn’t for you, you can press the big red skip button and see another random community.

(Those of us who are of a certain age will recognize this immediately — it’s just flipping through the channels on the TV to see what’s on. How many great shows did you discover this way?)

It looks like Lemmy-Discover is designed to be an alternative front-end for Lemmy communities. It provides a “Follow” button that, if you create an account, is like subscribing to a community. But for our purposes, it makes a great Community discovery tool.

 

What do you get when you mix corporate abuses of data, a shift from ownership to renting of software, and dozens of high-profile security breaches? You get a healthy distrust of putting your data on someone else’s computer (also known as “the cloud”). You also get Data Hoarder, a community dedicated to the practice of storing your data on machines that you control. Free from monthly subscriptions and free from prying eyes.

Even if you aren’t a self-hoster, there are a lot of things you can learn from this community. Do you own a PC? Saving money on new storage is a constant topic of discussion. For example, did you know that you can often find great deals on 3.5” hard drives by buying external enclosures with the drive already included? Manufacturers will often put very high quality drives in these enclosures because that’s the model they have the most unsold units of. When you buy the external enclosure, it can cost much less than buying the drive you find inside on its own. Buying the enclosure to take the drive out is called “shucking,” and it can save you a lot of money. (But watch out. It’s a lottery — you might get a different model of drive than you expect.)

If some of these topics sound interesting to you, give Data Hoarder a subscribe and hang out for a while.

Until next time!

 

I'm wondering: where does Lemmy UI get the timezone for the time stamp on posts?

We are using Lemmy in docker. Two of the five containers in the stack have tzdata, and all of them are set to UTC right now. But when I hover over a post's relative time stamp to get the precise time it was posted, I was surprised to see UTC -6.

I'm in UTC -6, and the host that the docker stack is running on is currently set to UTC -6.

Basically, I can go to all the trouble to set the env in docker-compose to set the correct time zone for the containers, but I'm wondering if I need to bother. Any feedback would be helpful as far as best practices for setting time zones to make posts have the right time stamp and for making logs readable.

Thanks in advance!

 

Yesterday's community spotlight about the PC Master Race community got me thinking: is there a similar community for deals on PC components? Anyone who has ever built a PC knows that component prices vary widely. Getting a good deal is probably half the work of building or upgrading a PC.

Luckily for us Lemmings, there is buildapcsales over at lemmy.ml! Each post in the community showcases a single deal. The titles of the post are strictly regulated to make it easy to find the component type you're looking for and to see its brand and price.

So are the deals any good? Well, that, my friends, is beyond the scope of this article. But at least it's an extra arrow in your quiver to help you keep costs down!

One additional note: PC sales are region-specific. If you're not in the US, you may want to check out these related communities for component deals:

And for laptop shoppers, you may benefit from Laptop Deals over at lemmy.world.

Happy hunting!

 

“He was trying to tell them that he was a doctor and probably trying to tell him who he was, to be honest. And they were screaming that they did not effing care who he was,” she said. “And the next thing I knew, they had him on the ground, grabbed him by the shirt, threw him on the ground, face first into the concrete and had him in cuffs.”

 

Deep in the warren of Lemmy communities lies a place that focuses on the venerable personal computer and everything around it: the technology, the process of building one, or even just celebrating what it looks like when it's all done. It's PC Master Race. Longtime Reddit users may recognize that community name. It was a staple of Reddit whose posts rose to the popular feed on a regular basis. With over 10,000 subscribers already, lemmy.world's version is similarly popular.

I've used PC Master Race to get support, help others with similar builds fix their problems, find good peripherals for my own upgrade projects, and just to see what's possible with PC gaming.

Let's help this community with some posts! Go take a picture of your battlestation and share it, or post your build specs and ask the group how you can improve them. You'll be surprised what you can learn from the discussion!

 

When I first learned how to put my media into Plex, I did it by using Handbrake, compressing the content down to .mp4, and doing my best to use “audio passthrough” for the highest quality audio tracks I could find. But nowadays a lot more discs are coming with TrueHD, which apparently isn’t supported by the .mp4 container.

I’m wondering what I should do for these audio tracks. I don’t really want to keep my media in .mkv format because of the challenge of getting subtitles to work and because the .mkv files are enormous. I’m assuming that hevc isn’t the answer, since I believe that still uses the .mp4 container. Any advice?

 

What’s more fun than a trip to Bozeman, MT on First Contact Day? What’s more satisfying than a plate of salmon on Federation Day? What’s deeper than self-reflection on the sands of Vulcan? That’s right, it’s the Star Trek community over at startrek.website!

If you are a Star Trek fan, this is the community for you. It’s very active and full of high-quality content. Here you can read about the behind-the-scenes details of any show in the franchise. The sidebar helpfully lists the shows that are in development, production, and release. Really, anything that is Star Trek-related is talked about here. So go refill your Romulan ale and drop by for a visit!

 

Just a quick bug report for Lemmy 0.18.3:

Today I received a reply from a bot account. I have the setting set to not show bot accounts enabled for my account. I still got a notification that I had a reply from it (next to the notification icon), but there was no way to mark the notification as “read” because it doesn’t appear in the inbox. The only workaround was to check the “Show Bot Accounts” setting and then visit the inbox to clear the notification.

 

It’s almost 11:00 AM, and I’m still exhausted. I can barely keep my eyes open. This seems like the perfect time to do a community spotlight for Espresso. Operated by our friends at infosec.pub, this community caters to lovers of espresso and the art of making it. It was created in response to the Reddit exodus, hoping to make a new home for espresso lovers here in the Fediverse.

It’s always a pleasure to find these smaller, niche communities on Lemmy. The moderators have thoughtfully migrated the wiki from the original Reddit community, and have filled out their sidebar with a ton of useful information. (All of that information is included in the bubble above this post. I feel a little guilty writing a spotlight article that’s shorter than the destination community’s sidebar!)

My only wish is that there was some sort of button that could deliver an espresso to me right now so that I could wake up the rest of the way. Oh, well. Maybe I should buy one of the espresso machines they’re recommending over there.

Until next time!

 

So here's my situation. I've been looking for a long time for a self-hosted photo library. I have pretty low requirements: I just want it to be able to show the videos and images I have stored on my NAS in a random order, and to support a slideshow of those files, also in a random order.

I thought I had finally found what I was looking for with PiGallery2 -- it supports a hidden file that triggers the random order sorting -- but it's not stable. It works for a while and then takes ages and ages to refresh the album.

Synology Photos would have been perfect, but it can't randomize!

Any suggestions? I'm looking to host this on Debian.

 

I'm back after a week hiatus where I was helping lemmy.ninja manage a large influx of new users. And that means it's time for a new Community Spotlight! Today I bring you Pitch A Youtuber, a community whose sole purpose is to spread the word about extraordinary youtube artists. I'm not much of a youtube-watcher myself, but I have to admit that there are some incredibly good offerings out there.

So today only, I'm going to give you a two-for-one deal. First you get this community spotlight telling you about the Pitch A Youtuber community! As an added bonus, I'm going to give you not one but two great Youtube channels that you should check out.

First there's Professor of Rock, a channel I only discovered last week when I watched the incredible Rick Roll episode. I'm not really a fan of rock culture, or music history. Sure, I loves me some techno, and I listen to all kinds of music; I just have never had that much of an interest in it. But there's such a level of quality in the Professor of Rock content that I couldn't put it down! I mean, have you seen my community spotlight posts? I have the attention span of a goldfish with dementia. And yet I watched that episode (and one or two others) from start to finish. Great content!

And for your other free gift, I present the irreverent but surprisingly insightful Red Letter Media. I'm an enormous film and television fan, having worked in the entertainment industry for a while and having seen probably every movie in existence. I love the horror genre, and I'm also a huge Star Trek fan. Put those together and you get the content of the Red Letter Media channel. There's a lot of snark, but so much more deeply informed content about the industry that I find myself coming back to this channel again and again. You'll have to watch a few to decide what you think. I don't really have a specific video to recommend. But I will say it was very interesting to see them come around on their opinions of Star Trek Picard.

So there you have it. My longest community spotlight post, with added bonuses. If you like content like this, head over to Pitch A Youtuber and contribute!

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