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Yaky

@ Yaky @slrpnk.net

Posts
4
Comments
270
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • Where are all the successful "red cities"?

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  • A small town, or a suburb of a city that is described as "a great place to raise a family". From what I have seen, that usually means one of two things:

    1. The town/suburb is closer to the city, but is wealthy, real estate is expensive, usually very car-centric, which excludes anyone poor (or even middle class, sometimes).
    2. The town/village is far away from the nearest city, not necessarily wealthy, but usually ran by a group of people that know each other (good old boys club), probably heavy on religion or other "traditional" values.

  • Pixel Phone app preps ‘Call Message’ live voicemail capability

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  • "Call Message" sounds like something you would see in a horribly translated manual.

    Call it "Live Voicemail" or something. And why would it need AI Core? Playing a recorded message is high tech now?

  • Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database

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  • That is also the premise of one of the stories in Asimov's I, Robot. Human operator did not say the command with enough emphasis, so the robot went did something incredibly stupid.

    Those stories did not age well... Or now I guess they did?

  • Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org

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  • What specific version/feature fragmentation and clients are you referring to? As is common now, newer Synapse drops support for older Postgres (for example). Voice and video calls is the only feature that I can think of that is half-assed in Element/ElementX or not implemented in some clients.

    Otherwise, Element, Element X, FluffyChat, Fractal, freaking Cinny on Ubuntu Touch (!), and terminal-based gomuks all support basic functionality, DMs, rooms, encryption, and attachments.

  • Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org

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  • You can interact with Matrix server through basic curl commands... and I thought the documentation was pretty good. There are plenty of third-party clients.

    Sure, E2EE, keys and cross-signing is not trivial, but I don't know where it is.

  • Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org

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  • Snikket is the rebranded-dockerized XMPP environment (uses prosody for server, Conversations clone for Android, and Monal clone for iOS).

    Worked pretty well for me in the past.

  • Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org

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  • I've been hosting a server without much problems for several years now.

    Synapse and Riot.im (now Element) became much better around 2019 or 2020. But not too long ago, I also found out that Synapse also bloats the DB with state_groups_state table. There are a handful of commands that come with synapse, but no built-in admin tool or panel, so I wrote my own. Moving server to another host has been seamless for my (few) users. TURN/STUN for calls seems to work okay (I don't really use it though).

    I appreciate Element being uniform across platforms (which I cannot say about XMPP clients), but the sign-in is pretty tedious, and registration with a token is still impossible last time I checked (which is either a hassle for the user to use another client and then their smart device, or a security issue if you open registration to anyone). Most normal people probably don't care and don't want to deal with keys, cross-verification, and all that jazz.

  • Is it wrong that i would like to start a small 3d print business?

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  • The somewhat successful 3D-printing businesses I have read about (reddit, maybe here) are those with a rather specific niche. One that I recall was for reproducing vintage car parts (knobs, levers, decor), modeling, matching color, high resolution prints. Another one, I think, was producing hundreds of very specific part for another company (how they had the connection I do not recall)

  • First look at Gemini Space: Google's Now Bar-like upgrade to Pixel's At a Glance (APK teardown)

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  • First look at Gemini Space: Google's Now Bar-like upgrade to Pixel's At a Glance (APK teardown)

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  • Thanks Google for now also taking the term "Gemini Space" away from geminispace.

    Quite ironic that both the tech giant's AI and intentionally-simple internet protocol are both named Gemini.

  • Fairphone 6 Teardown: Proof Phones Don’t Have to Be Disposable

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  • I hate to be that guy, but if FairPhone aims to reduce waste, be modular and repairable, why are there 6 models of them? Are they inter-compatible? What hardware (other than 5G antenna) changed since the first/second one? Even if it did, could it have been replaced (upgraded) on the original model?

    Not necessarily a dig at the manufacturers, but I wish collectively we would stop chasing more features / CPU / RAM, stuck with something for a decade, and made existing software more efficient instead.

  • Found a video guide to spotting posts written by LLMs. Thought it might be useful.

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  • I use it occasionally, when writing lists with lots of detail, or to separate parts of the sentence where I already used multiple commas.

    there are many thought-provoking ideas about conscience, the human brain, and alien life; yet it is wrapped in a mediocre sci-fi action movie script

  • What book(s) are you reading right now and recommend for others?

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  • Finishing the Imperial Radch sci-fi trilogy (Ancillary Justice/Sword/Mercy) by Ann Leckie. Despite the agender language feature (everyone is addressed as she) the books deal more with colonialism, imperialism, and personal identity, rather than gender. Writing style is very information-dense, lots of thoughts and actions happening simultaneously. Compared to other science fiction that I read, it gets much more into the cultural and interpersonal situations, especially the second book.

  • What book(s) are you reading right now and recommend for others?

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  • Revelation Space series (specifically the "future" part: Revelation Space, Chasm City, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap) might not have the best writing, but the wild (and sometimes insane) ideas and scale of everything is great.

  • NSFW

    [deleted]

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  • Late Soviet Union might be a similar to what you are looking for? I wasn't alive back then, but from what I recall from reading old science magazines as a kid, there were few home computers, lots of "radio-hobbyist" stuff (DIY electronics from radio to computers), and praise for "inventor and rationalizer" for the good of the people. On paper at least. I think most interpersonal communication was over the phone or amateur radio, or even telegrams.

    I don't know much about how modern China goes about it though.

    But TBF it's very difficult to speculate about message encryption. Thinking back from my own experience, digital communication (over the internet or even SMS over cell phone networks) was not common until 90s-2000s, and encrypting them became a concern not too long ago, early 2010s I think? Before that, it was HTTP (without the S) and unencrypted AIM chats over the Jabber protocol.

  • WhatsApp Deploys AI, for Those Incapable of Comprehending Straightforward Messages From Their Friends and Family

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  • My friend works for a startup that does exactly that - trains AIs on conversations and responses from a specific person (some business higher-ups) for purposes of "coaching" and "mentoring". I don't know how well it works.

  • Did PewDiePie Just Crack the Code for How to Present Libre Software?

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  • It's a Librem5 phone with cringe name and 100% markup, but it's their own product nonetheless. I.e. it is not a generic Android with a custom skin and preinstalled apps like Trump Phone, Freedom Phone, or Quantum Internet box.

    You can buy pretty much the same Librem5 assembled in China for ~$700. Take a look at Liberux Nexx Linux phone too (they are just staring out)

    (Not sure what you're calling racist here, appeal to "patriots"?)

  • What direction do you think tech in general will go in 5 years (ignoring AI)

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  • Another interesting exploration is in Light of Other Days by Stephen Baxter. New technology allows creating light-passing micro-wormholes at any location (and time!), erasing privacy nearly entirely. At first, tabloids run wild with "shocking" photos of famous people, but eventually the hype dies. There are people who outright do lewd things in public ("anyone can see me at any time anyway"), some go about their life as usual, and some join secret groups who meet in the dark and use touch language for the deaf-blind.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • IMO the best on-boarding I have seen in a chat app. Just scan each other's QR codes or click a link. No account management because ID is unique to each conversation.

    Signal and WhatsApp need a phone number, Matrix/Element is needlessly messy, XMPP/Conversations is sensible IIRC (ID + password)