plenipotentprotogod

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I Ditched the Algorithm for RSS - and You Should Too in c/technology
[–] plenipotentprotogod 2 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Man, I feel you on the affiliate link fluff. I actually ended up unsubscribing from the Popular Mechanics and Popular Science feeds because the signal to noise ratio was so bad.

The creator of Nunti provided a very good primer on the algorithm design here. Basically, you indicate to the app whether you like or dislike an article and then it does some keyword extraction in the background and tries to show you similar articles in the future. I suppose you might be able to dislike a bunch of the fluff and hope the filter picks up on it, but it isn't really designed to support the kind of rules that would completely purge a certain type of content from your feed.

I Ditched the Algorithm for RSS - and You Should Too in c/technology
[–] plenipotentprotogod 25 points 20 hours ago

Most of the feeds I subscribe to came to me in one of two ways:

  1. I enjoyed reading an article posted somewhere else (Lemmy, etc.) so I sought out the feed of that publisher.
  2. Sometimes news outlets enter into agreements to republish each others articles. When they do this, the re-publisher will usually include a little blurb at the end giving credit to the original publisher. If a feed I'm already subscribed to has an article re-published from elsewhere then I click through and check out the original source to see if I want to follow them as well.
I Ditched the Algorithm for RSS - and You Should Too in c/technology
[–] plenipotentprotogod 10 points 20 hours ago (6 children)

It can be as simple as just putting an app on your phone. I use feeder which is fine. Pretty bare bones, but in that way it's easy to learn and use.

I've also been meaning to try out an app called Nunti, which I heard about a while ago from this Lemmy post. It claims to be an RSS reader with the added benefit of an (open source and fully local) algorithm to provide some light curation of your feed. It looks interesting, but I haven't actually tried it out yet because I'm still deciding whether I want any algorithm curating my feed, even one as transparent as Nunti's. It's also only available through F-Droid right now, which is a bit of a barrier to entry.

Anon buys a TV without researching in c/[email protected]
[–] plenipotentprotogod 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I've been trying to solve this problem for a while. I've not yet found a really good solution, but I can summarize what I've learned, partly for your information but mostly in the hope that Cunningham's law will finally put me out of my misery. Here are suggestions I've seen, organized roughly along some axis of easiest/most popular to hardest/least popular:

  1. Get an NVIDIA Shield TV. This isn't really what you asked for. It's just a commercial smart TV box, but it's generally considered the least annoying and highest quality of the lot. The unfortunate fact is that when dealing with DRM controlled media, having a big company like NVIDIA behind the product goes a long towards simplifying things.
  2. Install Kodi. Kodi (formerly XBMC) is the elder statesman of the FOSS smart TV world. You can run it on just about any hardware, including a SBC like a Raspberry Pi. You can even get it pre-bundled with a Linux OS like LibreELEC. It's got a clean interface and good community support, BUT it's primarily oriented towards viewing media from your own collection. If you're a person who consumes content via streaming services then you're gonna have a rough time. Apps (mostly unofficial / community made) do exist for many popular services, but installing them can be a pain, and you may have trouble streaming in high quality (DRM issues).
  3. KDE Plasma Bigscreen. Great concept, not maintained any more. See my comment here for all the gory details.
  4. Clean build of Android TV. I'm not aware of any major independent android distributions (Lineage, Graphene) providing official builds of the android TV operating system, but this site seems to provide relatively consistent lineage OS based releases. You can run them on a Raspberry Pi. I haven't done this yet, but it will probably be the next thing I try.
  5. EarlGrey TV. This one is a deep cut. EarlGrey TV mad a very small splash in the FOSS news cycle a couple of months ago. The concept is simple: install your favorite Linux distro and configure it to boot directly into a browser displaying a static webpage with links to your favorite streaming services and/or local media folders. The implementation is extremely basic, but the upside is that it's easy to tinker with if you're so-inclined.

As for remotes, there are some decent options on Amazon that connect via bluetooth or a USB dongle and basically act like a mouse and/or keyboard packaged in a remote control form factor. I bought this one a while ago and it's been fine. Nothing special, but fine. The play/pause/volume buttons on the front read on the receiving end like the media buttons on a keyboard. The air-mouse functionality isn't for everyone, but this model is one of the few with a little track pad on the back if you prefer using that. Honestly just get anything with a full keyboard. So much easier than using the arrow keys to click-click-click your way through an onscreen keyboard.

Do I have to build my own touchscreen thermostat? in c/[email protected]
Riot’s $250 Million ‘Arcane’ TV Series Was a Netflix Hit, Financial Miss in c/[email protected]
[–] plenipotentprotogod 19 points 1 month ago (4 children)

It seems that Netflix paid a flat rate of $3 million per episode for rights to stream the show. I wonder how much their internal accountants estimate that they made off of it. I wouldn't be surprised if it's a lot more than that.

For reference, Stranger Things season 1 was estimated to cost $6 million per episode, with season 4 ballooning to an estimated $30 million per episode. I'm not suggesting that Arcane was worth that much to them. Adult oriented animation based on a video game is a pretty niche genre. But, I think it's safe to say that netflix came out way ahead on this deal.

Also, regarding the claim in the lede: can confirm. Despite thoroughly enjoying both seasons of Arcane, I was never even a little bit tempted to start playing LOL. That game has a well-earned reputation, and no amount of good television is going to change it.

We just don’t understand the stakes. in c/insanepeoplefacebook
[–] plenipotentprotogod 32 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I'm reminded of a quote from an old Tom Scott video. He's visiting a modern reconstruction of a Neolithic long barrow. Tom points out that the sun lines up with the entrance on the summer solstice, then it cuts to the owner who says

I think a lot of people would assume that getting the alignments of a monument like this... would involve complex calculations, a sharp pencil, and computing power. But in fact, you can do it just as easily by getting up at the right time with some sticks.

Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far in c/technology
[–] plenipotentprotogod 59 points 1 month ago (19 children)

I feel the same way about AI as I felt about the older generation of smartphone voice assistants. The error rate remains high enough that i would never trust it to do anything important without double checking its work. For most tasks, the effort that goes into checking and correcting the output is comparable to the effort I would have spent to just do it myself, so I just do it myself.

Memory is a fickle mistress in c/[email protected]
[–] plenipotentprotogod 71 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Remember kids: the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.

Actual quote from Adam Savage on an episode of Mythbusters.

Lower-cost sodium-ion batteries are finally having their moment - Ars Technica in c/[email protected]
[–] plenipotentprotogod 19 points 1 month ago (4 children)

I'm surprised the article didn't mention the possible market for sodium-ion in grid energy storage systems. Low energy density, the main disadvantage of this chemistry, isn't really a concern when you're just stacking a bunch of cells on a concrete pad in the middle of nowhere. But 20% lower cost and no risk of a massive self-oxidizing fire breaking out is a huge benefit. Even if sodium-ion never makes it to EVs, it could still be crucial to the green energy transition.

Lantern for home emergency lighting in c/[email protected]
[–] plenipotentprotogod 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Not a specific recommendation so much as a tip to get the most out of whatever you end up choosing:

No battery will last forever, but one important thing you can do to extend the shelf life of rarely used rechargeable electronics is to make sure they aren't always plugged in. Lithium batteries in particular degrade much faster if they're left continually charging for weeks or months at a time. I've got my battery powered emergency lights plugged in to a smart outlet which my home automation system turns on for one hour every 14 days. That's enough to keep the charge between 99% and 100%, and I'm hopeful that it will help maximize the useful life of the device. If you want a standalone solution you could try one of these, although I've never personally used one so I can't vouch for quality.

What's in a name? in c/noncredibledefense
[–] plenipotentprotogod 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I like the way they solved this for the global reference time standard. In English it's called Cordinated Universal Time (CUT) but in French it's called Temps Universel Coordonné (TUC).

Apparently, both sides wanted to use their preferred acronym globally and wouldn't budge. The problem was only solved by eventual agreement to use UTC, which doesn't make sense in either language, but I guess at least it's fair that way.

-51
Today I learned that the Brave Search engine has a tool that allows end users a high degree of freedom to customize the search results they're shown. (self.technology)
 

I know there's some controversy surrounding Brave as a company, and I'm not a fan of everything they do, but the goggles feature in their search engine is a really interesting attempt to give users more control over their search results.

The tool allows you to re-rank your search results according to custom rule sets. Each rule contains a regex style string to check against webpage URLs, and an instruction for what to do when a match is found. There are four basic types of instruction:

  1. Exclude matching URLs from your search results.
  2. Boost matching URLs so they appear higher in your search results than they otherwise would
  3. Downrank matches, causing them to appear lower in the results than they otherwise would.
  4. Highlight matches so they stand out in the list of results.

Brave has provided some premade rule sets (called goggles) that you can use right away, such as one that automatically removes all pinterest links, or another that boosts posts from tech related blogs. It's also relatively straightforward to create your own goggles, which you can either keep private or make public for others to find and use as well.

If you want to try it out for yourself you can go to search.brave.com and do a normal search for whatever you want. Then, on the results page, click the little "goggles" button just below the search bar. You'll be presented with a variety of premade filters along with a "discover more" button which sends you to a page with more information and filter options.

47
Has anyone here built a Beowulf Cluster? (spinoff.nasa.gov)
 

A university near me must be going through a hardware refresh, because they've recently been auctioning off a bunch of ~5 year old desktops at extremely low prices. The only problem is that you can't buy just one or two. All the auction lots are batches of 10-30 units.

It got me wondering if I could buy a bunch of machines and set them up as a distributed computing cluster, sort of a poor man's version of the way modern supercomputers are built. A little research revealed that this is far from a new idea. The first ever really successful distributed computing cluster (called Beowulf) was built by a team at NASA in 1994 using off the shelf PCs instead of the expensive custom hardware being used by other super computing projects at the time. It was also a watershed moment for Linux, then only a few yeas old, which was used to run Beowulf.

Unfortunately, a cluster like this seems less practical for a homelab than I had hoped. I initially imagined that there would be some kind of abstraction layer allowing any application to run across all computers on the cluster in the same way that it might scale to consume as many threads and cores as are available on a CPU. After some more research I've concluded that this is not the case. The only programs that can really take advantage of distributed computing seem to be ones specifically designed for it. Most of these fall broadly into two categories: expensive enterprise software licensed to large companies, and bespoke programs written by academics for their own research.

So I'm curious what everyone else thinks about this. Have any of you built or admind a Beowulf cluster? Are there any useful applications that would make it worth building for the average user?

167
Pi-Hole or something else for network ad blocking? (self.selfhosted)
 

I've been aware of pi-hole for a while now, but never bothered with it because I do most web browsing on a laptop where browser extensions like uBlock origin are good enough. However, with multiple streaming services starting to insert adds into my paid subscriptions, I'm looking to upgrade to a network blocker that will also cover the apps on my smart TV.

I run most of my self hosted services on a proxmox server, so I'd like something that'll run as an LXC container or a VM. I'm also vaguely aware that various competing applications have come out since pi-hole first gained popularity. Is pi-hole still the best thing going, or are there better options?

156
These cheap scissors are held together with a screw (instead of a rivet), which means they can be tightened when they get loose and sharpened when they get dull. (www.scotchbrand.com)
 

I'm aware that the plastic handles probably disqualify these from being true "buy it for life", but the exciting thing for me is that they are relatively cheap and can be found on the shelf in most stores with an office supply section. It's an unfortunate reality that the vast majority of BIFL items are special order and cost several times more than their mainstream equivalent, so I wanted to shout out Scotch brand for maintaining such good serviceability on an item you can literally pick up at Walmart.

I just pulled apart a pair of these which was cutting horribly, gave each blade a couple passes on an oil stone, then reassembled and tightened them up with a drop of oil in the joint. They cut as well as the day they were bought, and the handles are still in good shape so I could see doing this several more times before I even have to consider replacing them.

69
Give Your Yard Back To Nature (www.popularmechanics.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by plenipotentprotogod to c/[email protected]
2 comments fedilink
 

A garden that’s planted purely by aesthetic decisions is like a car with no engine. It may look beautiful, the stereo works great, but you’re going to have to push it up the hill.

This is a really informative article by Popular Mechanics describing how to effectively landscape with native plants, as well as the long term benefits you will see as a result.

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