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Otter

@ otter @lemmy.ca

Posts
306
Comments
753
Joined
3 yr. ago

I waddled onto the beach and stole found a computer to use.

🍁⚕️ 💽

Note: I'm moderating a handful of communities in more of a caretaker role. If you want to take one on, send me a message and I'll share more info :)

  • How do people in cities have fun without spending money at every turn?

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  • Pretty much this :)

    A while back I switched to using RSS feeds for news, and there are so many free and low cost events out there in my city. Free shows, food festivals, cultural days, free admission days at attractions, music in the park, etc

    I've been posting some of them to !vancouver@lemmy.ca, but that's only the events that I was interested enough to click on + think that people here would be interested in as well

    For example:

    [Science World will have free admission on Friday, Sept. 19, as a part of their 'Tech-Up' initiative]

    https://lemmy.ca/post/51805885

    There are also free activities you can do anywhere, with lots of good ideas in this thread. Some extras that I haven't seen mentioned yet:

    Sometimes cities also have scavenger hunt type guides where you can explore an area

  • Self Hosting Guide

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  • I'm not sure which guides to recommend, but in case it helps narrow down your search, you could share more about your situation:

    • Do you have any existing hardware or are you planning to buy? If so, what is the budget for the equipment and where in the world are you approximately?

    • What did you want to self host? Some services would benefit from a certain type of setup. For example, if you're serving lots of media, if you need redundancy and uptime, if you're running AI models or something that needs a GPU

    General tips:

    • take lots of notes on your process. This will help you iteratively improve your setup. If it all falls apart, it will be easier to quickly get going again since you know what options you picked at each step.
    • Make more posts here when you get stuck on something :)

    For Linux, a lot of people go with Ubuntu server because there are a lot of existing guides for it. You don't need much Linux knowledge to start self hosting since you can learn by doing over time. Some concepts to explore before getting started might be cron, the Linux file system, and user permissions.

    For Docker, you should be fine if you know the basics. I'd recommend using Docker Compose since it's easier to understand what's happening when its written out in a nice yaml file. Install Docker and Docker Compose on the server, and then install something like DockGE to manage the compose files. When you want to run a service, copy the Docker compose file and then swap the port to what port you want to use, and the volume to the location you tend to use.

    For a very basic setup, I'd find a video guide for

    • installing Ubuntu server on the machine
    • basic setup of the Ubuntu server (file permissions, docker, docker compose)

  • Disney+ cancellation page crashes as customers rush to quit after Kimmel suspension

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  • crashes

    Maybe, but could it also be an intentional dark pattern to make it difficult to cancel?

  • Removed

    What’s your go-to hiking gear in 2025? Here’s what worked best for me

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  • TIL: Wikipedia has this absolute bonkers (as in "cool") 2000s skin called "Cologne Blue".

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  • [META] Could people here just FOLLOW THE RULES?

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  • Looks good, I've added it to this post and the two pinned ones

  • Firefox is Ending Support for 32 bit Linux

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  • It could mean faster development if they can spend that time on other things

  • [META] Could people here just FOLLOW THE RULES?

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  • For people asking about alternative communities, we put together a list a while back when closing !askmen@lemmy.ca: https://lemmy.ca/post/48642221

    “Ask” communities (for starting a discussion):

    For questions that are more specific to your situation:

    Group specific communities:

    Broader in topic (not necessarily questions):

  • Campfire (the self-hosted group chat) just became free and open source!

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  • Google gets to keep Chrome, judge rules in search antitrust case

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  • https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/09/google-antitrust-ruling-firefox-search-deal

    United States District Judge Amit Mehta has ruled that Google can continue to pay other companies, including browser makers like Mozilla, to be their default search engine.

    I see, I'll edit my other comment. So what even changes then, were they even making exclusive deals in the past? The discussion I remember was about how being the default made it difficult for others to compete since most people don't change the defaults.

  • Google gets to keep Chrome, judge rules in search antitrust case

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  • I think they're referring to Firefox's funding, a lot of which was through search deals

    An article from 5 years ago: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-google-search-deal-for-firefox

    edit: seems like that hasn't changed by this ruling either

    United States District Judge Amit Mehta has ruled that Google can continue to pay other companies, including browser makers like Mozilla, to be their default search engine.

    https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/09/google-antitrust-ruling-firefox-search-deal

  • TIL that soda crackers were shipped in barrels, and that's where the name of the store came from

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  • That's what I was surprised by. Maybe barrels were very common and the round shape was more resistant to stress/impacts than crates at the time? Although someone said the crackers at the bottom didn't hold up that well so ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

  • Just keep coding

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  • Also brick walls don't really go through iterative changes, which is an important issue with tech debt.

    If the wall works, then it works

    A software project will work now, but may not hold up when you need to change something

  • Social Web Foundation is Betting Big on Client-to-Server API

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  • I blame all the similar sounding terms and organizations in the fediverse space. It's actually pretty cool

    What SWF is:

    In a gesture that’s been a long time coming, Evan Prodromou, co-author of the ActivityPub protocol, has launched The Social Web Foundation. The organization aims to tackle the various headaches and challenges the ActivityPub ecosystem has faced over the last decade of its development. Their mission? A bigger, better Fediverse.

    From this article:

    the SWF has been working on several interesting projects outside of these stated scopes, and it’s something Evan Prodromou has been bullish about: leveraging the ActivityPub Client-to-Server API. Historically, this piece of the ActivityPub protocol is rarely ever implemented, due to complexity as well as the fact that Mastodon’s own client API has seen widespread adoption.

    To really understand the C2S API, we have to go back in time to when the protocol was being developed. The basic concept was that any ActivityPub implementation would effectively act as a generic server, with clients providing unique experiences. Compared to Mastodon’s dedicated API, C2S isn’t explicitly limited to microblogging or statuses. Instead, clients dispatch activities to and from an Actor’s inbox and outbox.

    Instead of every new social experience in the Fediverse acting as a bespoke server, the C2S API instead lets a wide range of clients interact with an instance. Instances no longer become specific delegates of what activities can or cannot be used. C2S opens the floodgates for any kind of application to hook in to a Fediverse account. Instead of an instance doing all the hard work, clients would handle much of the advanced logic themselves.

    Setting aside unique applications for a moment, one of the key killer-features that ActivityPub C2S could offer the Fediverse is a coherent and streamlined login system for any Fediverse account.

    It then has some other examples of how this protocol is being used

  • Any FLOSS alternative's to Ground News?

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  • They do make it possible to adjust the ratings on your own account for the ones you disagree on. It doesn't affect the newsletters, but I find those to be too american-specific anyway

  • ChatGPT offered bomb recipes and hacking tips during safety tests

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  • specifically trained chatgpt not

    Often this just means appending "do not say X" to the start of every message, which then breaks down when the user says something unexpected right afterwards

    I think moving forward

    • companies selling generative AU need to be more honest about the capabilities of the tool
    • people need to understand that it's a very good text prediction engine being used for other tasks

  • cat

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  • is there any legitimate use of blockchains?

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  • https://xkcd.com/2030/

    I appreciate that when you find a relevant xkcd, the explainxkcd page also has relevant information to the discussion:

    https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2030%3A_Voting_Software

    When the reporter follows the interview up with a mention of blockchain technology, Megan and Cueball reflexively tell the reporter to avoid any voting system using the technology at all costs. Blockchain is a relatively new technology that is intended to solve some computer security issues by making it difficult to doctor old data. However, in the process of solving the old computer security issues, it has introduced new computer security issues that have not yet been ironed out; for instance, it doesn't solve input fraud issues, only data-doctoring fraud, so if a program caused the voting machine to record a vote for candidate B whenever a vote for candidate A was cast (such a program could be uploaded to the voting machines through USB, or through the internet which the voting machine must be connected to for blockchain), blockchain would not prevent it. Blockchain has also had a large number of high-profile scams, thefts, and implementations with critical security holes. Thus, Megan and Cueball may not trust this blockchain solution because of this history.

    Blockchain is really great at preventing post-facto data changes. With blockchain you can somewhat guarantee that no one comes in after the election and changes the votes on the machines. (Unless they're handling the blockchain in a stupid fashion, for example without the distribution.) But you cannot prevent tampering with the machines themselves, such as making them record votes that didn't happen, or tampering the data before it's written to the blockchain.

    Also, the security issues that Blockchain solves could also be solved via write-once memory, which would be more secure and more difficult to doctor.

    Most computer security specialists are more worried about programs that randomly and/or deliberately misreport a vote, than people changing the votes after they're already recorded, so blockchain would solve an issue that most computer security specialists are less worried about, while causing new issues (the perpetual internet connection among them).

  • GTK ported to Android — here we gooooo!

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  • This seems to be the popular method for dealing with AI scrapers. Is there a better method / tool?