sxan

joined 2 years ago
[–] sxan@midwest.social 1 points 4 hours ago

Which is the why of picking Beethoven rather than a contemporary or post-WWII artist: so as to not digress into an uninteresting debate about whether Hitler liked Wagner because Wagner was an anti-Semite (which he was, among other things). I tried for a relatively uncontroversial figure with no relation to Naziism by sheer fact of predating the movement and no other association.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 6 points 8 hours ago (3 children)

It's also commonly used the other way around: whatever the artist believed does not invalidate the art. For example, if Beethoven had been a Nazi, it wouldn't take away from his work.

It's an interesting question in a lot of ways, and I think it's a spectrum and there's no absolute answer. For example, does Kevin Spacey's off screen behavior invalidate his work in The Usual Suspects? On the other hand, it's clear that Ayn Rand's beliefs are clearly expressed in Atlas Shrugged, and it's easy to see the expression of (some) directors' politics, or perversions, in the films they make; at what point does it stop being art and become propaganda, such as Triumph of the Will?

[–] sxan@midwest.social 4 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I was going to ask if anyone had experience with Maddy, which is an all-in-one solution I've been eyeballing for a while.

Getting DKIM and postfix set up correctly was such a PITA, and then dovecot, I'm nervous about having to go through all that again and fretting about accidentally configuring an open relay, so I haven't tried it yet. But it looks nice, and has been around for a couple of years.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 13 hours ago

There's so much media representing Dunk with external armor, it's going to take forever and cost a lot to clean everything up. AFAIK, the "internal" theory only became dominant recently, and I think it might have been because they found evidence of skin patterning in a recent fossil? I might be conflating that with the (also recent) Ankylosaurus find, which had spectacular preservation of skin patterns.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Get. Out. Really? So, if you shoplift a greeting card when you're in your teens, you have to keep looking over your shoulder and expect a knock on your door even when you're 80?

[–] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 13 hours ago

I wondered; I wasn't sure how the chemistry of this worked, because of the existence of edibles.

Chemistry is a massive knowledge gap for me.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 1 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Oooh, what's best about Dunkleosteus is that modern theory is that this was just their skull, and that they had skin over it:

Less bizarre looking than earlier renditions, which made them look a bit like turtles, but still... bad ass!

[–] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 14 hours ago
[–] sxan@midwest.social 20 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

I'm not sure that the Tea Party failed. I think they dropped the overt name, started calling themselves "Republicans", and that MAGA is the ultimate result.

The current MAGA Republican party is the Tea Party.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It does if you do it a lot and then resell it. Which is what happened to a bunch of people in the days of Napster, and is exactly what these fuckers are doing.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 1 points 1 day ago

Close enough. East coast.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Holy crap, that's it. Complete with the white wall I remember.

You, my friend, are not only impressive, but this year's MVP in my book. Now I can add an address to this photo that, for 15 years, has been an anonymous location.

Thank you!

Edit: no, seriously, you should be some sort of award for this. I've actually been back and walked around the area a bit and not been able to find him again. I can't believe you did this.

 

So, obviously not a real owl, but germane.

This was taken in Paris, in one of the side streets around Sacre Coeur, in 2010. It is a decoration set into a wall; the alcove was probably around 30cm high, so the owl figurine is small. I have no idea how long it'd been there, or why it was there; there was no plaque or other marking, and no other decorations on the wall.

I do recall that I took it from across the street and without telephoto, so this is massively cropped and this is the best resolution I have. The paint was more white and it was a brilliantly sunny day; I made it more warm in post-processing.

Sadly, this was before digital cameras came with GPS to stamp locations; I'm not sure if I could find this anymore.

 

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/55039423

 

The title sounds horrible. Maybe the concept is, too. But bear with me.

BLUF: A server extension that allows servers to replicate and relate user profile social scores, as defined by the community.

Caveat: I'm wiring from an essentially democratic values POV. Libertarians, anarchists, and fascists will disagree with some of my premises for differing reasons.

An idea I've had knocking around for years is that regulating all behavior is a bad idea. We want as few laws covering personal behavior as possible while still ensuring safety and basic harmony. Laws covering rape, theft, and assault I think most of us can agree are good. Laws covering how people dress, what music they listen to, the books they read are bad laws. Laws covering hate speech and noise in public spaces are in a gray area.

But this doesn't mean there's historically not been regulation for social behavior; it's just been done by peer pressure. Someone using racist language might not be illegal, but that person might be ostracized or booed, and that might affect their behavior. That can be good social pressure. A goth might also get dirty looks from people, and this might cause them to change how they present in public; this could be bad social pressure. However, I argue that there is a role for social pressure that starts where the law ends and helps preserve polite society. Of you disagree, then you probably disagree with this idea, and can stop reading.

What if, for every profile, servers maintain metadata about the profile that the profile owner does not control. This would be a set of labels assigned by other members of communities - arbitrarily, and without moderation. The metadata would be a label and a score, the score being a simple count of the number of users who agree or attach that label to the profile. This metadata would be communicated by servers when profiles are shared; we could imagine a central server hosting the data, but this is a federated ecosystem, so the data would also be federated.

The impetuous for this idea was the increase of troll accounts as Lemmy becomes more popular. A story might go:

I see a post, and a response which leads to a conversation. It appears to me that one of accounts is acting like a troll, so I mark the account "troll", giving it a "troll:1" score. Maybe several other people agree, and separately also add "troll;" eventually, through this and other interactions, the account eventually ends up with some high "troll" score.

Clients can handle this data in various ways. They could annotate the account in user views. Users could set thresholds, such as "hide comments by users with troll value > 100". They could ignore simple refuse to do anything with the data.

Ignoring the difficulty of implementation details (how do you ensure each user only gets to increment a value one time? Who defines the labels? Is it an arbitrary set, and if so, how can servers filter for offensive labels? How do you prevent bad actor servers from assigning their own, fake scores?), I wonder whether this would be a net benefit or net negative.

Honestly, while I am not interested in building an echo chamber, I have no interest in reading the opinions of pro-Nazi fascists. I do not enjoy watching the pass-time of trolls trying to foment arguments. And I'm happy to crowd source the evaluation of people's behavior to filter this content. A good troll can waste a lot of time by appearing to argue in good faith, only becoming obvious after a long series of exchanges that they're just being contrarian with the only goal of making people upset.

This was really more of a shower thought, except it occurred to me on the couch when I was reading a thread where one person was obviously arguing in good faith, and the other was obviously trolling.

I think it could balance itself if there were both positive, negative, and neutral labels. Maybe we all troll a little, at times; maybe we have bad days, or make poor judgments in our replies. But I think this tally idea would work if it's thought of and used as thresholds. Maybe an account has a "troll" rating of 50, but also "reasonable" score of 400. Maybe someone with a "communist" score of 1000 would be proud of it, while fascists consider it a negative and filter those accounts.

Mostly, I think it'd hurt troll-like behavior, agent provocateurs, and shill/advertisement accounts whose success relies on subterfuge and misrepresentation.

I have no doubt that this will be a controversial idea. I'm not sure that I love it or think it's a good idea, myself. But I had the thought, and now it's out there.

 

Despite the click-bait tite, I am thinking about a couple of factors. First, the context I'm considering is specifically about inviting well-known/published authors to an AMA. I'm posting this question here, because most authors write in one or maybe two genres, and the authors I'd like to see answer AMAs are fantasy and sci-fi authors. I haven't yet come across any "big name" AMAs in any community yet, but I'm impatient.

  1. Reach: the largest subscriber size I see is !books@lemmy.world. The issue there is that the topic is rather broad, but to make an AMA worthwhile for the author, I'd think the larger the audience the better.
  2. Moderation. Doing an AMA well is significant work. There's advertisement to reach people who may not be subscribed but who may be interested; there's reaching out to the author and coordinating the details; and then there's moderation to prevent it from being overrun by trolls.
  3. Interest. I haven't been on Reddit in a couple of years now, but something thing I miss is AMAs from authors I'm reading. Some, like Scalzi, had a Reddit account and both did AMAs and also responded directly to random posts aimed at him. I'm aware that it's possible I'm in a minority and the Lemmy community at large isn't interested in AMAs, and while I doubt that, it's still something that'd need to be cleared with whichever community hosted the AMA
  4. Adjacently, I wonder how many authors lurk on Lemmy, and how would one find out? Is there a channel where authors could express willingness?

I feel a hole here, and I'm not going to fill it with Reddit. It's an area where I think a federated platform like Lemmy may be at a disadvantage to a platform like Reddit: with Reddit, it's pretty clear who might host any given AMA, and Lemmy's decentralized -- and often redundant -- communities complicate matters.

I've been on a Miles Cameron binge lately, and have a couple of questions I'd like to ask him; I could write him through his publisher, but I find AMAs to be much more interesting.

Is Lemmy ready for AMAs?

 

First, a caveat: I'm not running pure DD-WRT, but a GL-iNet router that has some UI shim (and possibly other stuff) running on top of DD-WRT.

The issue I'm seeking help on is that I am seeing odd behavior with client resolution, where sometimes lan device names will resolve, and sometimes they won't. When they won't, there's a thing I can do in the UI and it'll start working again for a while, until it doesn't.

The other variable is that I've got all outbound traffic going through a VPN, and DNS servers configured by the VPN. This does, and always has, worked, and DNS tests always confirm that external DNS requests are going to those servers.

The issue is that I want all LAN hosts to resolve using the leases. And sometimes this works, but sometimes it stops working and LAN hosts don't resolve. I can fix this by toggling the "DNS Server Settings" between "DNS Proxy" with the IP of the router as the proxy, and "Automatic" (which, it appears to me, just sets resolution to the VPN settings). Toggling in either direction works, at least temporarily. Although I can't replicate it at the moment, there was a time where I'd toggle in one direction (to "Proxy" probably) and LAN resolution would work but no WAN domain names would resolve until I switched it back to "Automatic."

Oh -- one other oddity: I disabled the "Allow Custom DNS to Override VPN DNS" which made things behave better, in general -- it may be why I can no longer reproduce the "external domains don't resolve" issue.

The behavior makes me suspect a couple of things:

  1. Applying the switch is restarting some service -- probably masq -- and possibly temporarily changing the configuration thereof.
  2. I have dns-masq misconfigured s.t. it's not falling back to the VPN-configured servers

I had a third thought, but it's gone now.

So, my question really boils down to how I need this configured such that my .lan hosts resolve via leases, but everything else goes through the VPN DNS servers. I avoid going in and changing things via the shell, but I'm not afraid to; I just prefer to have it done through the UI.

In the UI, there are three toggles, all off: rebinding attack protection; override DNS settings for all clients; and allow custom DNS to override VPN DNS. Then there's the "Mode" with options "DNS Proxy," "Automatic," "Encrypted DNS," and "Manual DNS." I have only used Automatic and Proxy. Finally, when Proxy is enabled, there's a proxy server address which, as I've said, is set to the LAN IP of the router.

I think I need to be on "DNS Proxy" as I'm using dns-masq. But to ensure dns-masq is using whatever current VPN DNS configuration setting is active, do I need to configure something in dns-masq? I randomly choose a new VPN exit node once a day, which probably doesn't change the DNS configuration (they don't have that many DNS servers), but does restart the network when it happens (although, I do not think the restart triggers the issue).

 

I normally go for odroid for these sorts of things but have had a bad run recently.

What I want is a bare minimum computer I can hook to some externally powered speakers and run snapclient on. That's it; nothing else will run on it. It's part of a project to get audio casted into every room.

Arch, because I'm most comfortable with Arch; I don't have to learn any new peculiarities; Alpine would also work. deb and rpm-based distros aren't options.

It needs WiFi, or the ability to take a module. And of course an RCA out jack for the audio plug.

Cheap would be nice.

I have no experience with Pis, but there's a bewildering variety of them with varying capability; many don't come with WiFi, and some not even with audio out. It's frankly hard to tell what's the minimum Pi I can get away with for my use case, and what components I need to add on. I don't want to have to become a Pi expert just to get one device for this.

IME getting Arch running on odroid is a bit of work, and Mint or whatever they sell on the micro SD cards may be the worst distro I've had to deal with in recent years.

I'd love to try a RISCV board, but I feel like that's just asking for a whole different level of protracted tinkering to get what I want.

Basically, if I could get a plug-and-play Arch SBC with WiFi and audio out, even if I had to boot it first on ethernet the first time to set it up, for a good price, that'd be ideal.

What are good options here? So many Pis are for tinkering or as project components. Odroid seems like they're only half-heartedly doing business. RISCV is bleeding edge and still sounds fussy and iffy except for very specific problem domains. Micro PCs like Trigkey or Beelink are full desktop replacements and are both overkill for my use, and too expensive.

What do y'all advise?

 

This is an opinion. Not even a shower thought, but something that I just realized I could express succinctly.

I'm a TUI/CLI person. I look first for CLI programs, and only if I don't find a way to do it in a shell do I look at GUI alternatives.

I'm also a tiling WM person. I used i3 for several years, and then bspwm for a hot minute, and for nearly a year now have been in herbstluftwm. I'm at a point where hlwm not running on Wayland is the main reason I'm not on Wayland.

But at one point, before discovering the joys of tiling, I was a big KDE fan. So it's been interesting to find myself skipping Qt apps in favor of GTK apps when I have to use GUI apps; and just now I realized why:

When you pull a GTK app, only rarely does it link in a bunch of Gnome dependencies; when it does, it's usually pretty obvious in the name or description... "X for Gnome" or some such. But Qt apps are really bad about hooking in and pulling a bunch of KDE dependencies, launching KDE services, and generally trying to turn your WM into KDE, that I've learned to just avoid them. There's no reason for them to, unless it's because the KDE libraries provide so much functionality that isn't in the core Qt libraries.

Anyway, it just occurred to me why I have such a negative knee-jerk reaction to apps with Qt dependencies; I literally just filter them out as I'm scanning package lists.

I like Qt; I don't like that most Qt apps also depend on KDE libraries.

 

I have a situation where generics would be useful: a server (that I do not control or influence) with many API endpoints that each returns very similar json. There's an envelope with common attributes and then an embedded named substructure (the name differs in the return value of each call) of a different type.

Without generics, you could do something like:

type Base struct {
   // common fields
}

type A {
   Base
   A struct {
      // subtype fields
   }
}

type B {
   Base
   B struct {
      // subtype fields
   }
}

but then you'd need to either duplicate a bunch of API calling and unmarshalling code, or consolidate it and do a bunch of type casting and checking.

Generics to the rescue: subtypes become specific types for a general type:

type Base[T any] {
   // common fields
   Subfield T
}

type A struct {
  // subtype fields
}

type B struct {
  // subtype fields
}

It even looks cleaner! Ah, but the rub is that the marshaled field name Subfield is the same for every type: there's no way to specify a tag for a struct type so that Subfield is un/marshaled with a name specific to the type.

https://go.dev/play/p/3ciyUITYZHk

The only thing I can think of is to create a custom unmarshaller for Base and use introspection to handle the specific type.

Am I missing a less hacky (introspection is always hacky) way to set a default tag for any field of a given struct type? How would you do this?

This pattern - APIs using envelopes for data packets - is exceedingly common. I can't believe the only way to solve it on Go is by either mass code duplication, or introspection.

 

I do my keyboard configuration with Vial, which may or may not be relevant.

I am unable to momentarily switch layers from a particular layer, and I'm looking for tips.

I have a base Dvorak layer, with all of my layer switches as tap-dance keys under my left hand, with holds triggering a momentary layer switch and all of the other keys under my right hand: a layer for punctuation, a layer for numbers, a layer for function keys, for WM navigation, for tmux navigation... 9 layers in total. It all works well.

Recently, I started playing Factorio again, so I set up a combo switch to the 9th layer, which is bog-standard QWERTY, it being easier to just learn new muscle memory than to reconfigure all 9,000 Factorio key bindings for Dvorak. But now entering numbers was a PITA because my keyboard has no number keys, so I have to switch back to the base layer to use the MO binding to switch to my number layer.

Eventually, I decided this was too much trouble, so I created a tap-dance MO binding for the same physical key in the QWERTY layer... but it doesn't work, in that the layer is not switched to the number layer - except for "0": that combination works. The fact that one key works makes me think it is actually sorta switching layers? But all of the other keys just enter the un-switched QWERTY keys.

I've tried setting the trigger key to a different one, with identical results. All of the keys on the left hand (and under the trigger key) are KC_TRNS on the number layer, so in both cases I've tried the trigger key is KC_TRNS on the number layer. I have not yet tried duplicating the number layer and using that instead.

Does the target layer (the number layer) have to be a layer number greater than the starting layer? Number layer is layer 4, and QWERTY is 9 - do I need to move 4 to 10? Is there some other, common, issue I'm encountering?

 

On linux, this is trivial. I have my private subnet over Wireguard and hosts with static IPs all on the 10.79.x.y subnet. All other traffic goes through my commercial VPN provider.

Problem is, ya cain't do that on Android, as it supports exactly one VPN connection at a time. The best you can do is white/blacklist traffic to either go through the VPN, or not.

Do how do I achieve this? My commercial VPN provider will not nest and route on their end; I could route all traffic through my VPS servers, but that's a lot of traffic for my little VMs. It may, however, be my only option:

  1. Phone is connected to my VPS over WG VPN
  2. VPS is connected to internet via commercial WG VPN
  3. Routing tables on VPS send 10.79.x.y to destinations over the private VPS
  4. Public destinations get sent over commercial VPS

Am I missing an easier, more efficient work-around for Android's utterly stupid networking limitations?

 

Like, not technically how, but emotionally? If I spend too much time messing around on a platform, critters inevitably attack my base. Even if I build a fortress, I worry that something will run out and guns will run out of ammo... or that something will run out and The Factory will grind to a halt. I could just stack up a vast area of capacitors and rely on lasers and a fission reactor, but is this really what you guys are doing?

How do you emotionally detach from Nauvis and commit to not being able to troubleshoot on the home factory? Heck, once I establish factories on other planets, how do I leave them to return to Nauvis and not worry that they'll be overrun??

When Space Age was released I restarted, solo, with a new base, and I'm getting close to building a traveling platform; how do I ensure the security of Nauvis before I depart?

(My first, and as yet only, station attached for giggles)

 

I was thinking about this before the Tholian wave, but it's apropos.

It unscientifically appears to me that TOS had a far higher incidence on non-humanoid aliens than later series. Tholiens, Horta, the flying neural parasites on Deneva; while there were many bipedal aliens sometimes differing only by skins color, many were non-bipeds or were bipedal but radically different from humans, like the Gorn and the salt vampire. In later series, it seems nearly all aliens were reduced to bumpy head species.

TOS ran for only three seasons, and truly different aliens are expensive; I understand the economics of going the prosthetic forehead route. And it's difficult to have recurring truly alien biology in a series.

My question is whether anyone's done a statistical analysis covering the originality of aliens, per series, based on divergence from the humanoid base. Does it only seem like TOS had more different types of aliens (intelligent and non) because it was so short, or was the universe really more diverse in TOS?

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