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tal

@ tal @lemmy.today

Posts

32
Comments

3215
Joined

3 yr. ago

Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

12h ago

What sucks about having no internet and what is great about it?
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tal @lemmy.today 12h ago

The keyboard interface sucks
I'm not sure if you're going to see this if you're avoiding social media for two months, but...while I don't personally see much gain from using a phone rather than a PC for Internet access for two months, if it's enough of a pain and it doesn't violate whatever rules you're setting for yourself, you can connect a keyboard. There are a bunch of Bluetooth keyboards aimed at Android devices, some of which fold and are themselves phone-sized for portability.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=folding+keyboard
You can also get USB-C hubs with pass-through charging, stuff like this that will give you some USB-A ports to plug wired keyboards into, if you're using the phone at a desk.
Android won't show the on-screen keyboard if you have a connected physical keyboard, so you also get a lot more screen space while doing text entry.
Most if not all UIs for websites are shit in mobile.
Firefox (and probably other browsers, but I use Firefox) can request the desktop version of websites. Tap the menu button in the lower-right, and then choose "Desktop site".
Now, the desktop site may not work well on a small screen either, but you will have access to it.

12h ago

Someone Cut Down Every Single Flock Camera in This Town in a Single Night

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tal @lemmy.today 12h ago

Replacing the stolen license plate readers will cost Winona roughly $24,000 total.

That's one possible response to them being removed, I suppose.

13h ago

authenticity problem

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tal @lemmy.today 13h ago

cake...because of typos

Aha! AI!

13h ago

authenticity problem

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tal @lemmy.today 13h ago

I honestly don't even think it looks ai, to me, and I may be wrong but it looks like someone painted it on a canvas

Chiseled Etruscan stonework, that's what it is.

14h ago

authenticity problem

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tal @lemmy.today 14h ago

If you go through Unicode, there are a bunch of hyphen-like characters. In many typefaces, some may appear identical.

searches

EDIT: That's not an exhaustive list, either. Off-the-cuff, I can also think of the line-drawing characters, which also have a horizontal line.

14h ago

authenticity problem

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tal @lemmy.today 14h ago

The marking above the hyphen there is an underscore --- it's telling you that hitting shift-hyphen will give you an underscore.

You may be using software that supports inserting an em-dash when you hit that combination, but I don't believe that it's the keyboard layout that dictates that.

searches

It sounds like Microsoft Word does something similar:

https://www.avantixlearning.ca/microsoft-word/how-to-insert-an-em-dash-or-en-dash-in-a-word-document-4-ways/

Use Ctrl with keyboard shortcuts to insert an em or en dash
To insert an em dash, click where you want to insert the em dash and then press Ctrl + Alt + – (minus sign on the numeric keypad).
To insert an en dash, click where you want to insert the en dash and then press Ctrl + – (minus sign on the numeric keypad).

14h ago

authenticity problem

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tal @lemmy.today 14h ago

I was once told "I write like someone who thinks they are good at writing." That was met with rounds of applause by the people who can't (or won't) spell, capitalize, or punctuate anything.

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

Tall poppy syndrome is a term that originated in Australia and New Zealand in the 1980s that refers to people with notable public success or achievements that are ostracised by others as a form of egalitarianism.[1][2] Intense scrutiny and criticism of such a person is termed as "cutting down the tall poppy".[3]

"That one sounds uppity!"

14h ago

authenticity problem

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tal @lemmy.today 14h ago

You can write or draw stuff with a fountain pen with an AxiDraw, and that's an off-the-shelf system. I imagine that it could paint as well.

EDIT: Apparently the Inkscape plugin used to drive it was originally designed to drive a plotter that did watercolor painting.

14h ago

authenticity problem

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tal @lemmy.today 14h ago

I use a the Compose key (Compose hyphen hyphen hyphen) or emacs (C-x 8 _ m) on Linux, and on Android, my soft keyboard supports holding hyphen to insert one.

And the Lemmy Web UI converts a triple hyphen to an em-dash.

14h ago

The Lemmy Web UI converts a double hyphen to an en-dash and a triple to an em-dash when displaying text. However, not all clients do this. I'm viewing this in Eternity, and it leaves the hyphens intact.

This conversion happens when viewing the comment, rather than writing it.

14h ago

authenticity problem

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tal @lemmy.today 14h ago

Smartphone cameras are almost certainly the largest source of photography in society today, and those things default to doing all kinds of automatic processing on the images they take.

14h ago

authenticity problem

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tal @lemmy.today 14h ago

It does rather make one suspect that a number of people haven't read a great deal of properly-written English.

15h ago

DuckDuckGo Is Selling Anti Pervert Glasses That Contain Zero AI, Cameras, or Even Electronics Whatsoever

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tal @lemmy.today 15h ago

16h ago

Romance chatbot taken offline after TBIJ investigation: Seewa AI, whose developers we revealed were able to read its users’ ‘private and encrypted’ chats, has been shut down

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tal @lemmy.today 16h ago

Chief among them was Seewa AI, which offered its users the “perfect AI girlfriend”, drew them in with intimate conversations and promised that all chats were strictly confidential. (They weren’t.)

End of the day, if it's in the cloud instead of local --- and this applies for pretty much any service, not just LLM models --- you're relying on trust in the service provider (as well as anyone who might buy them, and trust that they are able to secure their network against people who might break into it).

Only real exception to that is situations where you use client software from another source and the service provider only gets to see any data in encrypted form --- think of someone providing storage for a restic backup, say.

In 2026, we don't have enough memory to do local LLM computation everywhere, so there's a real limitation versus most other forms of SaaS --- we can't choose to run LLMs locally for more than a fraction of society. Cloud-based LLMs require less memory to provision one machine in the cloud and share that hardware, since any one user is only using it a fraction of the time. But as the memory shortage ends, I expect you'll have more people running LLMs locally. Still be more-expensive from a hardware standpoint than cloud computation, though.

18h ago

Thousands of servers can be backdoored by exploiting buggy motherboard controllers

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tal @lemmy.today 18h ago

Right --- that's why I'm talking about a PMU and serial device server linked to a serial console and BIOS as an alternative. That's another way to accomplish that.

My guess was that IPMI might provide a more-standardized interface, and notabot said that this was the case.

20h ago

Thousands of servers can be backdoored by exploiting buggy motherboard controllers

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tal @lemmy.today 20h ago

You can mount an ISO image through the BMC and boot the server from there.

I mean, you can typically do a TFTP boot on the systems that I've seen that have serial-capable BIOS setups.

considers

Heck, I think that all of my modern personal non-serial-port-BIOS systems can do that, even.

1d ago

Thousands of servers can be backdoored by exploiting buggy motherboard controllers

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tal @lemmy.today 1d ago

Baseboard management controllers are miniature computers that are embedded into the motherboards of virtually every enterprise server. The microcontrollers, typically abbreviated as BMCs, run with their own operating system firmware, network stack, and IP address. Administrators rely on them to monitor the physical status of large fleets of servers and to perform a variety of tasks, including rebooting machines, installing updates, and even reinstalling operating systems. BMCs provide what’s known as “lights out” and “out-of-band” management because they work even when servers they’re attached to are turned off or are unresponsive.

Hmm. I don't really understand what the major benefit is to having an integrated management system over just providing a BIOS that can expose its interface on a serial port and having a serial device server attached to the thing, which then means that you aren't tied to a particular management system. I'd also kinda think that it'd be cheaper to use a serial device server if you have a ton of servers in a rack that need to be managed, since one serial port server can handle all of them. Use a smart PMU for power control.

Maybe interfaces are more standardized or something, for automated tasks?

2d ago

Man arrested after 'dressing as Grim Reaper' at hospital and staring at patients

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tal @lemmy.today 2d ago

"...pleaded guilty to causing a nuisance without reasonable excuse"
thats a crime?

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

The nuisance action began in twelfth century England as a criminal writ, belonging only to the Crown. It was used in cases that involved encroachments upon the King's land or the blocking of public roads or waterways. The King sought to punish these criminal infringements, commonly known as "purprestures", through criminal proceedings. Over time, activities prosecuted as public nuisances included everything from embezzling public funds to having a tiger pen next to a highway, from assisting a homicidal maniac to escape to placing a mutilated corpse on a doorstep, and from selling rotten meat to "subdividing houses to the point where they become 'overpestered' with the poor". As these examples demonstrate, early authority to commence public nuisance actions was derived from the sovereign's "police power".[10]
Spencer (1989 at 59) describes the offence as "a rag-bag of odds and ends which we should nowadays call 'public welfare offences'".[11] But the common feature of the crime is that members of the public suffer a common injury through interference with rights which they enjoy as citizens. The modern definition is found in paras 31–40 Archbold (2005):
A person is guilty of a public nuisance (also known as common nuisance), who (a) does an act not warranted by law, or (b) omits to discharge a legal duty, if the effect of the act or omission is to endanger the life, health, property, morals, or comfort of the public, or to obstruct the public in the exercise or enjoyment of rights common to all Her Majesty's subjects.[12]

can we arrest trump for that if he comes back to the uk?

I'm pretty sure that national leaders don't normally visit countries unless they are extended diplomatic immunity, so probably not.

EDIT: Hmm. Though...this says that it was abolished as a crime in England and Wales four years ago. There's still the tort, but the way The Mirror described it, he was "fined", and I think that you only get fined in criminal law, not civil law (in civil law, the analog would be called paying punitive damages, at least here in the US).

2d ago

Google Earth’s New AI Lets Anyone Fabricate Completely Bullshit Satellite Images

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tal @lemmy.today 2d ago

Eh, this one's fixable, because you only have a few sources of legit imagery, and it's all contemporary and digital. Just have Google Earth render the image server-side and add a cryptographic signature to any legit satellite images that someone saves.

You can have AI-generated satellite imagery and image-is-proof satellite images coexisting. Can't do that for most images, but for this particular niche, you can.

3d ago

Do you recommend Ocaml language?

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tal @lemmy.today 3d ago

I think that it's fine technically --- the ML family of languages have extensive static typing functionality that I like --- but Rust has enough overlap in functionality and has greater uptake. (I say this not having spent enough time to really come up to speed on Rust myself.) A quarter century back, ocaml was the language that I was most impressed with for strong static typing functionality. In 2026, I think I'd probably look at Rust and only go to ocaml if Rust doesn't suit your needs.

As to whether it can be a "daily driver"...I mean, you can use any language daily. I do think that it's hard to appreciate how helpful it is to have all the examples and library support and tools until you move from a popular language to a less-used one and suddenly discover that you want something that isn't there.

So can you use it? Sure. Is it the first option I'd recommend to someone who --- and I assume that this is why you're looking at it, if your alternative is Python --- wants to move to a statically-typed language? No. Is it a terrible choice? No, it'd also be a long way from the bottom of the list that I'd recommend.