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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • For anyone missing the show, there was a wonderful project called Streamlined Mythbusters where fans edited each episode down to remove the filler, pre and post ad recaps, etc. They usually also would reorder things so each individual myth was seld contained.

    It’s wonderful, but some episodes legitimately got cut down to be 16 minutes long with no real content loss, which can be kind of jarring.



  • I miss the “Tales from…” subs. Tales from tech support was regular reading material for me for many years, and in general just having a place to commiserate with others in the same field as you is wonderful. The other ones also helped me be more concious of what I could do to keep myself from being a nuisance to other professionals like my doctor and pharmacist.

    More niche, I miss the gunpla sub a lot. We have subs for model making and tabletop miniatures, but the gunpla community was very well run.

    In general, I think the lack of moderation tools has made it difficult for communities to do regular “event” posts and the like which used to really help keep subs alive, guide discussions, and gave good examples of the type of content that fit. Like it’s a lot easier to start a new conversation at a party where everyone is talking than to be the first person to speak up in a silent room.






  • Similar to your #2, but less serious, I once wrote a script to power down virtual machines for a data center move. It was a nice piece of work too, grouping them in batches, sending shutdown commands to the guest OS, falling back to forcing a power off through the hypervisor after a configurable timeout…

    I don’t recall the specifics of the problem or the virtual infrastructure I was working with, but in short I didn’t have sanity checks on what was being shut down. Ended up force shutting off the hypervisor/virtual infrastructure management system.

    Added an extra few hours the move with that.



  • Blockchain also has some useful applications. Most (but not all) of them are also possible with technology and such that existed when bitcoin was first created, at far lower cost for a minor tradeoff in accuracy. On top of that, almost none of them are related to speculative markets.

    It’s a way to do distributed transaction logs in a non-refutable and independantly verifiable way. That’s useful and important, but it was a solution in search of a problem. Even for the highest security, most at risk transactions, the existing international fincancial systems are “good enough” to ensure reliability of transaction logs.

    In the end, blockchain and now AI are just falling victim to con men trying to milk as much money as they can from things before people build a working understanding of them. They’ll just keep moving onto the next big thing as it comes.




  • Many. Technically most I still “know” through the advent of facebook, but I’m basing things off the period I interacted with them directly.

    • Numerous people I met in passing while I lived on campus during my failed attempt at college had long term effects on me. Watching other nerd’s socialization attempts fall flat helped me to learn when to keep my mouth shut when people didn’t get a reference. Being open to conversation with anyone about anything they were passionate about opened my eyes and mind to a whole ton of interests that I would have never thought about. On top of that, socializing with others is a skill that is improved with experience like any other skill. Being a freshman just figuring shit out in a nerdy degree gave plenty of excuse for me to be shit at socializing while I kept improving over time.

    • An upperclassman in an elective course I took freshman year chuckling at the same jokes the professor was making that the rest of the class didn’t get, which evolved into whispered chitchat, then study sessions helped open my eyes that there were other people with similar senses of humor to me persuing wildly different paths.

    • A girl who had a very obvious unrequited crush on my roommate helped pull me out of my shell, really demonstrated how wonderful it is to feel comfortable with who you are as a person, and her attitude of getting as much enjoyment out of any given situation (even the bad ones where her best friend started dating the guy she’d been pining after) really stuck with me. Also helped break me of the illusion that unrequited feelings are in any way worth it.

    • Many classmates and others that just suddenly had confidence in my knowledge and abilities after short talks with them helped build my confidence in my own knowledge, and helped ephasize that things that I saw as throwawy (because it came easy to me) shouldn’t be disregarded.

    • Some old high school classmates that I’ve ran into at college and now later in adulthood helped show me that despite my internal turmoil, I’ve been able to present well. It really hammered home to me that I’m my own worst critic, and that I’m the only one keeping such close tabs on my own blunders.

    • Just honestly and openly asking people how they were and truly being interested in listening to them opened my eyes to so many things, especially the sheer depth of human experience there is that each and every single person goes through.


    The biggest impact for the limited time though has to be an old lesbian couple that let me stay in their spare room for a few months over a decade ago.

    At that time I had dropped out of university. I was unemployed. I was in a deep depression, and my issues with my relationship with my parents were boiling over. I needed an out.

    My long term gf had went long distance a year or two before, and said she had these friends that could let me crash with them while I got my shit sorted.

    At the risk of doxxing myself with too much info, this couple was forced into early retirement due to a car accident leaving both of them unable to stand for extended periods, so they were partially wheelchair bound. One was a former autism spectrum diagnostician/social worker, the other was a practical effects tech for theater, movies, and other things.

    One of the biggest lessons I learned from them was to work within your own limitations. They regularly did physical therapy to improve their mobility, but they also designed and built their own tools so they could do what they needed to do around the house.

    Rather than hurt themselves trying to stand for too long cooking, they would find ways to do more sitting down. That sort of thing.

    It seems simple and obvious in retrospect, but I was raised by two fairly dysfunctional parents in denial of their own adult ADHD. I was used to watching them throw their bodies at the wall over and over again until it fell over when they could have just used a ladder to climb over. I could never count how many conversations I had with them that were the ADHD equivalent of them telling a depressed person to just be happier. Unfortunately, my parents often applied the same line of thinking to themselves, forcing themselves to fail at doing things the “normal” way that didn’t work for them instead of adapating to their own shortcomings.

    So meeting these women living full happy lives in cooperation with their own limitations and flaws was amazing to me.

    Success wasn’t just dogged application of will on the same path forward as everyone else, it was also choosing the best path for you.

    It’s something that has informed my entire life since and how I interact with the world.




  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mldeleted
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    27 days ago

    The rewind feature is only available officially on specialized hardware that has not hit the market yet. “Copilot ready” is the term.

    The PoCs are using multiple workarounds to get it running. It is also entirely disable-able using standard Windows adminstration tools.


  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlInternet Archive is in danger
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    27 days ago

    Archive has been around for well over a decade with no issues outside of sporadic DMCA claims against user uploaded content. For many many years they have been left alone, despite hosting a shit ton of copyrighted material.

    Occasional legal battles that they’ve handled with no problems with the help of the EFF. This is the first “existential threat” to them in quite a long time.

    This is absolutely because they pulled the emergency library stunt, and they were loud as hell about it. They literally broke the law and shouted about it.

    Libraries are allowed to scan/digitize books they own physically. They are only allowed to lend out as many as they physically own though. Archive knew this and allowed infinite “lend outs”. They even openly acknowledged that this was against the law in their announcement post when they did this.

    I can absolutely say this is their own damn fault while disagreeing with the law they broke. There, I just did.


  • This buries the lede so deep it’s popping out the other side of the globe.

    The entire core of this case is that (in abscence of more lenient agreements with publishers) traditional libraries are allowed to digitize physical books in their posession, as long as they do not lend out more copies than they physically own. The Internet Archive decided that they would lend out infinite copies, because “covid lol”.

    Boston Public Library isn’t being sued because they don’t lend out more than they own! It has precisely zero to do with fucking optics.

    Edit: Don’t get me wrong, I hope they win this case, but them continuing to play stupid helps nobody. Unfortunately, as discussed thoroughly online when they opened the covid19 emergency digital library, they fucked around. Now it seems they may have to find out.


  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlInternet Archive is in danger
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    27 days ago

    This is the worst kind of misrepresentation of tech. Nothing you said is explicitly false, it sounds true in passing, but it sure is effectively false.

    The amount of data you can actually store in any single node/transaction on a given blockchain is traditionally very small. Even most NFTs are not truly “on the chain” as in the image data fully stored in a node/element, it’s instead a “smart contract” which just says X identity owns Y (with Y itself being stored elsewhere). There have been many many attempts at actually storing data on various chains and there hasn’t been any successes significant enough to come even close to being able to store the classic 90’s Space Jam website, let alone the fucking Internet Archive.

    Beyond that, you absolutely can take down nodes in a chain, so to speak. Numerous major “heists” have been “rolled back” or had their nodes/transactions flagged to be ignored by marketplace admins.


  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlInternet Archive is in danger
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    28 days ago

    Exactly. I hate fucking everything about this. I love the internet archive and nearly all they do.

    In principal I love their “covid-19 emergency library” or whatever they called it. In practice? They absolutely know better than to pull stunts and I’m terrified that this will spell the end for one of the greatest knowledge and media resources of the modern age. For shit that was effectively already available to the public through ebook piracy sites.

    They already operated on shaky ground, hosting downloads for a metric ton of shit that is unquestionably still under copyright (despite their claims to only be archival of things that are not), skating by on technicalities and by not drawing too much attention to themselves.

    Plus, there were so fucking many better ways to do the “free digital library” thing without jeapordizing themselves.

    • Have some volunteers “misuse resources”: load an SSD up with the book files, “borrow” some compute power to decrypt/remove drm, pass batches off to existing ebook “dumping” groups to stagger releases and obsfucate the true source. This would ensure that any material they had which was not already available on the high seas would get there.
    • Make a big red banner on the site to a blog post with the generic “While we would never condone piracy or copyright infringement, we understand that times are extremely hard right now [blah blah] here are some links to community guides on how to access learning literature (pirate ebooks) during these trying times [blah blah] Please abide by your local laws.”