tal

tal, 11 months ago

If you search on either a lemmy or kbin instances, it should be able to find comments/threads on communities/magazines on Threadiverse (lemmy/kbin) instances that (a) are federated and either are local to the instance or (b) have a local user who subscribes to the community/magazine in question.

Neither will typically search the entire Threadiverse, because they only search content that they have a copy of locally, and no one server intrinsically gets a copy of all content on the Threadiverse.

I don't know how kbin deals with searching for comments off Mastodon. That's a good question. You can set a magazine to include comments with given hashtags, and I am wondering if basically it sees the content on local magazines or remote magazines with the same rule above as having a local user who subscribes to such a magazine.

tal, 11 months ago

For example, I might self host a server just for my account but I read all my content from lemmy.world. Am I not using their bandwidth and their resources anyway?

Well, it'd use your CPU to generate the webpages that you view. But, yeah, it'd need to transfer anything that you subscribe to to your system via federation (though the federation stuff may be "lower priority" -- I don't know how lemmy and kbin deal with transferring data to federated servers rather than requests from users directly browsing them at the moment, but at least in theory, serving the user browsing directly has to have a higher priority to be usable).

But what would be more ideal -- and people are going to have to find out what the scaling issues are with hard measurements, but this is probably a pretty reasonable guess -- is to have a number of instances, with multiple users on each. Then, once lemmy.world transfers a given post or comment once via federation, that other instance stores it and can serve up the webpages and content to all of the users registered on that other instance.

If you spread out the communities, too, then it also spreads out the bandwidth required to propagate each post.

As it stands, at least on kbin (and I assume lemmy), images don't transfer via federation, though, so they're an exception -- if you're attaching a bunch of images to your comments, only one instance is serving them. My guess is that that may wind up producing scaling problems too, and I am not at all sure that all lemmy or kbin servers are going to be able to do image-hosting, at least in this fashion.

tal, 11 months ago

The sheriff said the homeowners then disarmed the suspect, who was later identified as 62-year-old James F. Garrett of Seneca, and held him until deputies arrived.

I don't normally expect to hear about burglars in their 60s.

tal, 11 months ago

Japan has on the order of a 99.9% conviction rate, which a number of people would say is problematic itself.

tal, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

I use yt-dlp to pull down YouTube videos, and have ad blockers on my web browser (I didn't actually realize that YouTube even had ads until what was apparently years until after they'd rolled out, was stunned when I used someone else's computer).

However, I would assume that if a significant chunk of people go that way and YouTube decides that they're losing out on sufficient ad revenue and/or profiling data doing this, that they're going to start blocking those. I would guess that they can make life unworkably difficult for any third-party clients connecting to their service if they put their minds to it.

YouTube probably doesn't care about SponsorBlock, because they aren't getting a piece of that money. Heck, they probably benefit if it encourages advertisers to go through YouTube rather than content creators on YouTube. But the profiling and the YouTube-displayed ads are probably something that they are going to care about, if push comes to shove and the impact on their bottom line is large enough.

And one more point -- I can believe that the Threadiverse could potentially displace Reddit. Usenet was distributed and was once the norm for Internet forums, and something like that could be the situation again.

But the bandwidth costs of videos are a lot higher than the bandwidth costs of forum text. I am not convinced that PeerTube or something like that will necessarily work at the scale of replacing YouTube. At the least, it's going to be a rather larger chunk of money that has to come from somewhere than is the situation with forums. Someone is going to have to be writing checks, at the end of the day. Maybe it doesn't have to be via watching ads or users getting profiled, but the money's gotta be coming out of someone's pocket.

YouTube also has some of its content creators putting material up to be paid. Reddit doesn't -- well, didn't, as it looks like now they're exploring that -- have that commercial model, where they try to pay people who create content. For YouTube content where the creator is doing it with the aim of generating income, any hypothetical YouTube replacement would need to generate money to cover not just bandwidth costs, but also paying content creators.

tal, 11 months ago

In fairness, the amount of YT that I watch on TV/iPhone makes it worth the cost

Yeah, my take was "the good I get out of YouTube is worth that, so if I'm in a situation where I need to pay that, I'd pay it".

For me what I don't like is that I haven't seen anything about Google not using it to profile me. If I get an account with Google, pay them, then they have not just the usage data, but it linked to financial data, which makes it a lot easier for them to build a profile. And that I don't want.

Google provides some good services, and they are services that I'd be willing to pay for, but I don't want to be paying the bill and having Google building a profile on me. Maybe some people don't care about that, but I do.

Hell, even if Google were to say "we won't profile you", I'd have no way of knowing that they wouldn't change their policy in the future.

tal, 11 months ago

yt-dlp. Just "yt" rather than "youtube".

youtube-dl is an ancestor program of yt-dlp.

tal, 11 months ago

I have never subscribed to any video service where the service provider knows what I'm watching and has my financial data. The last service I got was (traditional, no provider-provided box) cable video service, about fifteen years back. All the provider knows there is that I got the basic cable package.

The closest I ever came was being in the random sample for a Nielson Ratings poll, which I did not respond to (and in any event, I am sure that they do not profile individuals, because their sample is too small to make doing so worthwhile).

tal, 11 months ago

I'd call AI-generated mods one of the best applications for AI-generated voice samples. It is extremely unlikely that a fan-made mod is going to ever get the original voice actor onboard, and without those voice actors, any mod necessarily cannot fit in with the rest of the game.

We could have a world where modding just doesn't happen, in general. But if we're going to have mods, that voice synth makes it practical to extend games that otherwise could not realistically be extended by third parties in a seamless way.

It's possible to make textures that fit in with original environments, or to model things that do so. Or to write text. But people are pretty good at distinguishing between voices, and so without the ability to do computer-synthesized voices for mods, one can't really create modified speech for existing characters.

tal, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

I'll also add that I'm skeptical that at least the US is going to treat AI models trained on something as intrinsically creating copyright-infringing derivative works, though I don't know for sure what the EU will do. However, even if one assumes that some jurisdiction does decide to treat models as a derivative work, there's a fairly straightforward way to continue to distribute mods that I would expect should remain legal, and has happened in the past to avoid distributing copyrighted assets: distribute them as a patch against the original work.

It is legal for the end user to modify a copyrighted work that he owns. So if I distribute a patch that takes in Voice Actor X's base-game audio as an input and then takes them as input to generate new ones, well, that's not a legal problem for copyright. Copyright only deals with distribution from one person to another. I can create all the derivative works I want myself -- as the end user -- as long as I don't myself distribute them.

In fact, while it's probably not a very CPU-efficient way to distribute it -- going to waste the world's electricity, do another Bitcoin -- one approach might be to just distribute Tortoise TTS or whatever it is that people are using to generate the audio, as well as any marked-up text to regenerate, then just have the regeneration run on the end-user's computer to generate the mod using the original voice assets. Tortoise TTS has expensive generation, but unlike, say, Stable Diffusion, where the training process requires a lot of computational capacity, has very rapid training time on a new voice. Would be bandwidth-efficient, at any rate.

But point is, that is unquestionably legal, and still winds up in a place where the end user has the mod with the same new voice data on his computer.

And given that, I don't really see the point in trying to prohibit distributing the AI-generated speech files, from the standpoint of someone who is trying to block someone from playing a mod for a game using AI generated voice, because that player is going to wind up in basically the same place regardless of which route they take. It's maybe marginally more-obnoxious to take the full regeneration route, maybe have to run the "regenerate the mod voices" process overnight, but it's not going to generally stop the player from getting and playing the mod.

tal, 11 months ago

"I've done so many games I've lost count, and there's so much of my voice out there that I would never be able to keep track of… There's credits that are not even on my IMDb that I've done. It's just frightening… It's kind of dangerous what they can do with it without my say."

This isn't really relevant to the larger point of the article, but a technical nitpick: I seriously doubt that anyone wants to generate voice that sounds like a voice actor so much as a character in a specific game. It's not that someone's likely going to take all the voice acting for different characters and produce some aggregate from that.

Take Mel Blanc. He's a famous voice actor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Blanc

He voiced Bugs Bunny, Foghorn Leghorn, and Barney Rubble, among others.

There is not now and I suspect will not be for the forseeable future some kind of useful voice model that you're going to get that involves merging information from the voices of those three characters.

Purely theoretically, okay, yeah, you could maybe statistically infer some data about the physical characteristics of the speaker that spans multiple characters, like I don't know, the size of vocal cords. Though I suspect that post-processing specific to individual characters probably mucks with even that. Most of what defines those characters is character-specific. The amount of useful information that you can derive across characters is gonna be pretty limited.

So I doubt that the number of different works has much impact on the accuracy of a voice model.

I'll also add that my experience playing around with Tortoise TTS and from what I've seen of "voice cloning" online services suggests that the training set size for a new voice doesn't need to be all that large, that the kind of information that they can use to learn about a voice doesn't presently extend much beyond the information present in a relatively small training set size.

https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts

Cut your clips into ~10 second segments. You want at least 3 clips. More is better, but I only experimented with up to 5 in my testing.

Now, I will believe that maybe that's a limitation of Tortoise TTS, and that a future, more-sophisticated generative AI could find useful data spanning larger datasets -- I recall once seeing someone British complaining that Tortoise TTS tended to make American-sounding voices, I presume because it was trained on American speakers -- but as things stand, I don't think that the difference between many hours of speech and a relatively small amount has a massive impact. That is, most of the useful information comes from the model's training on pre-existing voices, and the new voice mostly determines where the new voice lies relative to those.

tal, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

I can't speak as to why other people use their alternatives, but if you use mpv with yt-dlp like the guy above, and which I do -- which isn't really a full replacement for YouTube, just for part of it -- then you can use stuff like deblocking, interpolating, deinterlacing filters, hardware decoding, etc. Lets me use my own keybindings to move around and such. Seeking happens instantly, without rebuffering time.

Also means that your bandwidth isn't a constraint on the resolution you use, since you aren't streaming the content as you watch, though also means that you need to wait for the thing to download until you watch it.

There, one is talking about the difference between streaming and watching a local video, and that mpv is a considerably more-powerful and better-performing video player than YouTube's client is.

I generally do it when I run into a long video or a series of videos that I know I'm going to want to probably watch.

EDIT: It also looks, from this test video, like YouTube's web client doesn't have functioning vsync on my system, so I get tearing, whereas mpv does not have that issue. That being said, I'm using a new video card, and it's possible that there's a way to eliminate that in-browser, and it's possible that someone else's system may not run into that -- I'm not using a compositor, which is somewhat unusual these days.

tal, 11 months ago

I never really understood the purpose of it.

Like, I don't know whether the aim was to address some sort of abuse, or whether it was to reduce Reddit's storage costs in some way or what.

tal, 11 months ago

Not really the focus of the article, but I think that /r/place was a neat idea, but hard to produce much with.

I feel like maybe there are forms of collaborative art that might go further, like letting people propose various changes to a chunk of pixels on an artwork and letting people vote on the changes.

tal, 11 months ago

No. Why, are they doing something like that?

tal, 11 months ago

It looks like people have created /r/place alternatives. If you like /r/place, could just use one of those and go draw something neat and popularize that. I don't really see what drawing a bunch of images complaining about spez using the service that spez runs is going to accomplish. On the other hand, if people are doing neat things elsewhere, then other people might want to participate.

https://old.reddit.com/r/place/comments/64zlnw/an_easy_guide_for_r_place_alternatives/

That was six years ago, so could be newer stuff out.

tal, 11 months ago

I don't know what his argument is, but Stross's account seems to be @cstross.

tal, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

I remember, as a kid, once going to a Buddhist sand-painting exhibition at an art museum. They made these huge, beautiful mandalas by carefully shaking colored sand into designs. When they were done, they dumped it out into the ocean. I remember -- being pretty impressed with it -- asking something like "but why would you destroy it", and the Buddhist monk guy said something like "it reminds us not to be too attached to material things".

Don't know if I agreed with the guy, but I think that there is probably a very real perspective out there that ephemerality has intrinsic value.

tal, 11 months ago

I mean, that visualizes the changes, but what I'm saying is that I think that it'd be possible to go further with collaborative art than having a one-pixel-per-person cooldown.

tal, 11 months ago

Maybe it's phone autocorrect and it was supposed to be "leather" or something?

tal, 11 months ago

If you're serious, I would assume that it's not that hard to red-flag cases where fuel mileage drops after you have used the vehicle, as well as before. After it's happened a couple of times, should be able to identify the cause.

tal, 11 months ago

Large cities might have dedicated fueling stations, but I doubt that smaller places do.

tal, 11 months ago

It definitely works, as I've done it. Maybe there's some kind of bug you hit.

tal, 11 months ago

another motherfucking program running in the background taking resources (it may not be that much, but it’s still something. And when gaming, every resource counts!)

Honestly, it should really not be an issue to have a program running. Your computer has plenty of processes running all the time.

Steam is pretty resource-heavy, but a process shouldn't need to be.

tal, 11 months ago

We can cool OURSELVES by letting a regular fan blow on us = WE are the moist filter, and the evaporation of our sweat cools us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooler

You do do the same thing.

However, I have a small evaporative cooler which can evaporate 5 gallons of water a day. You aren't gonna do that yourself, and it'd drench you in sweat.

They're a couple of times more energy-efficient than air conditioners, though more maintenance heavy and require being in a dry climate. They also (normally) require outside air coming in, which is nice in that it keeps carbon dioxide levels down but means pollen or whatever too unless you filter that.

sauna

If you're using an evaporative cooler correctly, you have to keep (dry) outside air coming in so that it doesn't just act like a giant humidifier.

FWIW, you can actually use what's called an "indirect" evaporative cooler. That has outside air come in, go through an evaporative cooler to cool it, then sends that through a heat exchangerthat dumps heat from inside air into the heat exchanger, then sends the moist air outside without increasing inside humidity.

You can even extend that to use the cooled, humid air as the input to the "outside" side of an air conditioner's heat exchanger that dumps best to the outdoors. That is basically an indirect evaporative cooler plus a heat pump, a "hybrid" air conditioner, which will boost the air conditioner's efficiency.

Unfortunately, I don't see much by way of small indirect evaporative coolers or small "hybrid" air conditioners on the market, though it's not technically-complicated to build one. Seems to be done by large commercial installations.

tal, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

I'm not familiar with whatever this Sandisk portable thing is, but SanDisk is a drive manufacturer, in which case it may be drive-level.

googles

Sounds like when it's locked, the drive presents itself as a CD drive containing a Windows executable that unlocks it.

https://www.techrepublic.com/forums/discussions/how-do-i-fully-remove-sandisk-unlocker/

I wouldn't expect Linux to be able to write to it if that's it. It won't even see the actual drive, just the non-writeable CD drive.

Honestly, I'd probably just write off the drive if the data isn't important. The amount of time that's required to basically get a used hard drive is probably not going to be worth it.

tal, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

I'm on AnySoft, but it's not perfect, and I gotta say that the onscreen keyboard situation for Android was one of my biggest unexpected disappointments when moving to the platform. What I'd expected was that there'd be one FOSS keyboard that would be incredibly configurable and take over, but everything seems to significantly lack in some ways:

• Some keyboards aren't great when it comes to arrow keys/control keys/other keys useful in Termux or ConnectBot to Linux systems.
• Lack of keyboards that provide a straightforward way for users to create their own bindings. The ability to resize and relocate keys and to assign tap/hold/swipe bindings to individual keys seems like it'd be straightforward to me, but it doesn't seem to be a thing. I mean, why can't I remove a key that I don't use or want (say, the "mic" key if I don't use that functionality) and add my own key. Even better, my own modifier keys a la Shift to add more functionality to the other keys?
• Some keyboards don't have typo correction. My accuracy on onscreen keyboards on a phone-size screen isn't good enough for me to really operate without that. I really wish that typo correction was an external program that the keyboard program could just plug into, so that this gets solved once and every new keyboard developer doesn't have to deal with reimplementing this.
• Unicode input. I mean, we have this incredibly rich character set these days. Most on-screen keyboards seem to let one choose a language and to make it easy to input the common characters in that language, akin to a traditional physical keyboard. And they often provide for some common extensions to that, like superscript characters. And for some reason, a lot provide emoji support, though damned if I can see how that's essential other than maybe on something like traditional Twitter, where character count is artificially-constrained. But support for inputting Unicode seems to be remarkably limited. On desktop computers, I'm used to using emacs, which has a ton of arbitrary input methods for inputting characters. I can use various mechanisms that do things like ^2 becomes "²" or lets you search by name for Unicode characters (C-x 8 RET and then a tab-completable and searchable DIVISION SIGN becomes "÷") or lets you use TeX sequences (rightarrow becomes "→"), lets you input Unicode characters by codepoint, or a zillion other things and lets you switch among them as is convenient. An on-screen Android keyboard could do all that and unlike emacs has the ability to manipulate the actual keyboard in front of a user and could leverage "long press" and the like, but nothing like that actually exists.
• Chording seems remarkably underused. I mean, you've got the ability to detect multiple finger presses, but it doesn't really seem to be exploited. I get that one-hand use is a thing, but I'd think that there'd be at least a toggle between one-hand and two-hand use to be able to leverage that.
• The "drag on spacebar to move the cursor" isn't offered in AnySoft and some other keyboards, which seems like a reasonable way to deal with cursor movement where one doesn't have the precision of a mouse.
• No macro support. I mean, okay, in the absence of fully-configurable keys, I'd have at least expected some limited ability to assign user-specified snippets of text to some menu or keys.
• No external editor support. For some long chunks of text -- like, say, Markdown on kbin/lemmy -- I'd just as soon use one of the various dedicated Markdown editors than the in-browser editor.

tal, 11 months ago

I'd also kind of argue that it would be desirable to encourage creating communities other than on one or two instances, that for load and reliability reasons, it'd be nice to leverage the federated nature of the network.

If someone is tying up "documentaries" on every lemmy and kbin instance, okay, fine, that's a legit concern. But if they have it on one and it's not very active and a would-be moderator thinks that they can make a more-appealing community, then why not just go make a better community on another instance?

I mean, it's creating a fight over a resource that (a) isn't scarce in the first place and (b) would probably be better-spread out anyway.

tal, 11 months ago

I think that there are a few legit issues for mods who don't want to spread out, but I think that those are problems that either are going to have to be fixed at a technical level on the Threadiverse anyway or where we want to push people to spread out anyway:

• If you put work into creating a community, you don't want it to be on an instance that vanishes. Legit concern. Lemmy.world is the biggest lemmy instance right now, so "safety in numbers" -- if everyone else is there, then hopefully it is going to stay up. But (a) every other would-be mod is in the same camp too, and the only way to address that is to have people start spreading out, (b) having some mechanism for post-instance-failure community portability to another instance might be interesting, but we don't currently have it, and (c) right now I think that people look at user count and maybe community count to figure out where they should go, and so it'd be nice to have people spreading out.
• The way lemmy and kbin presently work, communities are only visible to users on other federated instances in searches that aren't specifically for community@instance if they have at least one subscriber on that other instance. However, they're visible to all local users regardless of whether there are subscribers. Setting up shop on an instance with a lot of users thus helps visibility. I think that this is legitimately a technical problem right now with both lemmy and kbin that will have to be addressed. Maybe messages don't need to go to other instances, but at least communities should -- not a lot of traffic there. Or maybe high-vote/high-traffic threads should have a chance of going to other instances. Or maybe some entirely-new mechanism to help improve discoverability of new communities should be introduced -- I don't think that either the lemmy or kbin developers are adverse to new things being implemented to improve community discoverability, but I suspect that they've had other things that they're busy with. Maybe in the meantime, someone will make an external website that tries to help users find interesting communities. This isn't fixed now, but I suspect that it's going to have to be. In the meantime, there's presently a straightforward way to mitigate this if you're a mod -- create a user account on the most-populated lemmy and kbin instances and subscribe to your community there. You can also post to [email protected], and my guess is that someone may create another community or communities for trying to promote or do reviews of or whatever existing communities. Community discoverability needs work, but everyone's in the same boat right now.

tal, 11 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicle

Chicle (/ˈtʃɪkəl/) is a natural gum traditionally used in making chewing gum and other products. It is collected from several species of Mesoamerican trees in the genus Manilkara, including M. zapota, M. chicle, M. staminodella, and M. bidentata.

tal, 11 months ago

Tineye says that it's from the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. This article is referenced -- so I assume that these are Dutch competitors -- but it has a different story and images visible there, talking about badminton.

https://nos.nl/artikel/2391074-geen-groepswinst-voor-badmintonsters-piek-en-seinen-verliezen-van-japans-duo

I think that it's the Dutch women's relay team.

https://deciliiter.com/relay-women-dream-of-success-at-the-tokyo-games-after-european-championship-gold-now/

EDIT: Yeah, it was a past post on /r/AccidentalRenaissance, though that community is currently private. "Dutch women 4x400 relay team looking at their score : r/AccidentalRenaissance"

tal, 11 months ago

For the slope to be meaningful, one would want to adjust for inflation.

tal, 11 months ago

Just looking at the start and end figure there, the number did something like double in inflation-adjusted terms, but in the US, new build house sizes (this not being specific to rentals, dunno if one can get that figure) also roughly doubled, and I'd expect costs to be something like linear in size of house. So my off-the-cuff take is that it's probably about reasonable.

That being said, Jimmy McMillan was specifically talking about rent in New York City when he did the "Rent is Too Damn High" thing, not rent across the US, and that is going to have a variety of other factors going on, including restrictions on construction, rent control, other regulations that specifically impact New York City, and I would guess transportation accessibility from outside New York City, to let that housing compete for people who work in New York City. It's very possible that New York City has local factors dominating and is doing other things.

tal, 11 months ago

Another proposal for which the EU would have available funding is the Far North Fiber, an internet cable to connect Scandinavia to Japan via the Arctic to avoid major choke points like the Suez Chanel and the South China Sea, revealed by EURACTIV last October.

Indeed, many EU countries that are not strategically placed or are landlocked have little interest in the geopolitics of internet cables. Those member states that are engaged are, more often than not, feathering their own nest.

Finland has vehemently advocated for the Arctic cable, which sees Finish company Cinia in the lead.

Yeah, the Far North Fiber one I recall reading about, and that was kind of weird.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_North_Fiber

That was originally going to run in the Arctic from Europe around Russia to Japan.

It sounded like they couldn't get sufficient funds, so the next proposal was apparently to run it around the world in the other direction -- north of Canada. Then IIRC they couldn't get sufficient funds for that, so tried modifying it to stop off in northern Alaska with the hopes of getting some funds from the US, and northern Canada with hopes of getting funds from Canada.

That sounded kind of unlikely to me -- there aren't many people in Alaska, especially not northern Alaska, and most of the US trans-Pacific cables ran further south, where they'd benefit a lot more people in the US. Similar situation for Canada -- not a lot of people in the far north. It might be useful to Europe, assuming that there was willingness to put the funds required up and they wanted a relatively-direct terrestrial connection to Japan, but I'm kinda dubious that there'd be a lot of potential upside for the US in putting much funding into a cable that far north, as if there was desire to subsidize a cable to Japan, the same thing could be done further south.

tal, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Well, you've posted two things, both memes, and given that one was talking about people not posting and the other talking about niche communities not getting traffic -- and I assume that [email protected] isn't niche -- I assume that you haven't posted to whichever community you'd like to see more traffic in. You could do so. Each new post also helps make the community more visible, at least on kbin, since it can show up in the random threads section on kbin instances.

tal, 11 months ago

I'm not actually sure that the war is as fantastic as it might seem for defense contractors, because a lot of the hardware is older stuff that I suspect would have fallen out of inventories at some point not that far down the line. Yeah, some will be replaced by new hardware and wouldn't otherwise have been, but I bet that some won't.

GMLRS rockets are being produced new. That's going to be good news for Lockheed Martin.

But the HAWKs that found a new life as an affordable way to shoot down the the Iranian Shahed-136s are quite old, and had already been pulled out of service. I doubt that their consumption creates a new hole that will be filled by something else.

Javelins were consumed to shoot mostly Soviet-era tanks that they were originally designed to shoot. I don't know if there will ever be such a large mass of tanks assembled again. Russia may rebuild tanks to some degree after the war, but I doubt to the same level. If there isn't a large stockpile of tanks, I suppose that one doesn't need as many anti-tank weapons.

tal, 11 months ago

https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/07/14/7411332/

16:55 Erdoğan says Putin agrees with him on "Grain deal" renewal

17:28 Kremlin denies having agreed to prolong grain initiative

Erdogan appears to be busy all over.

tal, 11 months ago

Another possibility I was thinking about last night is when federated servers obtain local copies of comments that reference images, if the server enables the option to do so, also replicating the image and causing users viewing the comment via that server to use that instance's copy of the image.

That does mean that keeping the original comment text and maybe signature on the image around might be necessary if pubkey signing of comments or something comes into play later -- so it's a design decision that might have some long-running effects.

Given that serving images might be a significant chunk of the bandwidth that kbin instances use, it has implications for where costs lie -- on the instance where the community lives, or on the instance that has the users -- so it might be worth careful consideration.

tal, 11 months ago

I used to store my operating system and all important applications on a single 400KB 3.5" microfloppy for my Mac 512K.

tal, 11 months ago

There's !@Polandball , though it hasn't seen a lot of traffic.

If you just want a feed of the comics submitted to /r/polandball, lemmit.online runs a bot that will create a community on that instance and automatically mirror the posts on a subreddit. If you go to !@requests and issue a request (post title consisting of "/r/polandball"), it'll create it and you can subscribe to that.

It won't mirror comments, though, which may or may not matter for you.

EDIT: @count_duckula also

tal, 11 months ago

I remember this story from about twenty years back hitting the news:

https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/

Missing Novell server discovered after four years

In the kind of tale any aspiring BOFH would be able to dine out on for months, the University of North Carolina has finally located one of its most reliable servers - which nobody had seen for FOUR years.

One of the university's Novell servers had been doing the business for years and nobody stopped to wonder where it was - until some bright spark realised an audit of the campus network was well overdue.

According to a report by Techweb it was only then that those campus techies realised they couldn't find the server. Attempts to follow network cabling to find the missing box led to the discovery that maintenance workers had sealed the server behind a wall.

tal, 11 months ago

Yes, they investigated UFOs during the Cold War because it was the COLD WAR and they wanted to see if Russians were sending spyplane.

Project Blue Book was Cold War, but military interest in unidentified flying objects and thus public interest was earlier, back to World War II.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_fighter

Royal Air Force personnel had reported seeing lights following their aircraft from as early as March 1942,[11][12] with similar sightings involving RAF bomber crews over the Balkans starting in April 1944.[13] American sightings were first recorded by crews from the 422nd Night-Fighter Squadron stationed in Occupied Belgium during the first week of October 1944. At the time, these were erroneously believed to be Messerschmitt Me 163 rocket-powered interceptors, which did not operate at night.[14] However, the bulk of the sightings started occurring in the last week of November 1944, when pilots flying over Western Europe by night reported seeing fast-moving round glowing objects following their aircraft. The objects were variously described as fiery, and glowing red, white, or orange. Some pilots described them as resembling Christmas-tree lights and reported that they seemed to toy with the aircraft, making wild turns before simply vanishing. Pilots and aircrew reported that the objects flew together in formation with their aircraft and behaved as if they were under intelligent control, but never displayed hostile behavior. However, they could not be outmaneuvered or shot down. The phenomenon was so widespread that the lights earned a name – in the European Theater of Operations they were often called "Kraut fireballs", but for the most part called "foo fighters". The military took the sightings seriously, suspecting that the mysterious sightings might be secret German weapons, but further investigation revealed that German and Japanese pilots had reported similar sightings.[15]

On 13 December 1944, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force in Paris issued a press release, which was printed in The New York Times the next day, officially describing the phenomenon as a "new German weapon".[16] Follow-up stories, using the term "Foo Fighters", appeared in the New York Herald Tribune and the British Daily Telegraph.[17]

In its 15 January 1945 edition, Time magazine carried a story titled "Foo-Fighter", in which it reported that the "balls of fire" had been following USAAF night fighters for over a month, and that the pilots had named it the "foo-fighter". According to Time, descriptions of the phenomena varied, but the pilots agreed that the mysterious lights followed their aircraft closely at high speed.[18]

The "balls of fire" phenomenon reported from the Pacific Theater of Operations differed somewhat from the foo fighters reported from Europe; the "ball of fire" resembled a large burning sphere that "just hung in the sky", though it was reported to sometimes follow aircraft. There was speculation that the phenomena could be related to the Japanese fire balloon campaign. As in Europe, no aircraft were reported as having been attacked by a "ball of fire".[19]

The postwar Robertson Panel cited foo fighter reports, noting that their behavior did not appear to be threatening, and mentioned possible explanations, for instance that they were electrostatic phenomena similar to St. Elmo's fire, electromagnetic phenomena, or simply reflections of light from ice crystals. The Panel's report suggested that "If the term 'flying saucers' had been popular in 1943–1945, these objects would have been so labeled."[2]

You then had the concern over the Japanese fire balloons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb

And then, the year after the war ended, the flying saucer craze:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_flying_disc_craze

tal, 11 months ago

Oh, yeah, not disagreeing with the high-level point you're making, just talking about the timeframe.

tal, 11 months ago

Fandom also uses Mediawiki, like Wikipedia.

tal, 11 months ago

Has to be some way of paying the bills too, though.

tal, 11 months ago

maybe 5 minutes

IIRC 3 minutes