I like to code, garden and tinker

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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: February 9th, 2024

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  • Fluent in finance is just another forum that says it’s your fault your poor. They say you don’t play the game right and they may be right for a rigged game. But the fact is you shouldn’t be required to play a game to get whats your fair share, and fluent in finance just says you didn’t invest right and didn’t setup your future right to live off the backs of other workers.

    The rest is just hyperbolic headlines which drive engagement which is the cancer of any social media platform. No one makes a billion dollars in income as defined by the US tax code, they make a billion dollars in equity which can be used to back loans which is part of the whole issue of obscuring cash flow. Then they can just use this as fodder to call anyone supporting this idiots cause “No one makes a billion dollars a year” when we know they do, it’s just accounted differently.


  • My question would be, why do you need a more powerful server? Are you monitoring your load and seeing it’s overloaded often? Are you just looking to be able to hook more drives to it? Do you need to re-encode video on the fly for other devices? Giving some more details would help someone to give a more insightful answer. I personally am using a Raspberry Pi 4, Chromebox w/ an i7, an old HP rack server, and an old desktop PC for my self hosting needs, as this is cheaper than buying all new hardware (though the electricity bill isn’t the greatest haha, but oh well). If you are just looking for more storage, using the USB 3.0 slots on the Raspberry Pi 4b you can add a couple extra SSDs using a NVMe to USB 3.0 enclosure. For most purposes the speeds will be fine for most applications.

    As for SSD vs HDD, SSD hands down. The only reason you’d pick an HDD is if your trying to get more storage cheaper and don’t mind a higher rate of failure. If your data is at all valuable, and it almost always is, redundancy should be added as well.

    And as for running Linux, if it can’t run Linux I wouldn’t want to own it.

    Edit: Fixed typo


  • This might help, sorry if it doesn’t, but here is a link to CloudFlares 5xx error code page on error 521. If you’ve done everything in the resolution list your ISP might be actively blocking you from hosting websites, as it is generally against the ISPs ToS to do such on residential service lines. This is why I personally rent a VPS and have a wireguard VPN setup to host from the VPN, which is basically just a roll your own version of Tailscale using any VPS provider. This way you don’t need to expose anything via your ISPs router/WAN and they can’t see what you are sending or which ports you are sending on (other than the encrypted VPN traffic to your VPS of course).


  • A blockchain is just an verifiable chain of transactions using cryptography and some agreed upon protocol. Each “block” in the chain is a block of data that follows a format specified by the protocol. The protocol also decides who can push blocks and how to verify a block is valid. The advantages it has comes from the fact the protocol can describe a method of giving authority across a pool of untrusted third parties, while still making sure none of them can cheat. Currently the most popular forms are Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS).

    Bitcoin for example is just an outgoing transaction to a specific crypto key (which is similar to a checking account) as a reward for “mining” the block, followed by a list of transactions going from a specific account to another account. These are verified by needing a special chunk of data that turns the overall hash of the entire block to a binary chunk containing a number of 0 bits in front, which makes it hard to compute and a race to get the right input data. This way of establishing an authority is called Proof of Work, and whoever is first and gets their block across the network faster wins. Other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum use Proof of Stake where you “stake” currency you’ve already acquired as a promise that you won’t cheat, and if someone can prove you cheated your stake is lost.

    The problem it solves is not needing a trusted third party to handle this process, such as a government agency or an organization. Everyone can verify the integrity of a blockchain by using the protocol and going over each block, making sure the data follows the rules. This blockchain is distributed so everyone can make sure they are on the same chain, else it’s considered a “forked” chain and will migrate back to the point of consensus. This can be useful for situations where the incentive to cheat the system for monetary or political gain outweigh the cost of running a distributed ledger. It can also be useful when you don’t want anyone selectively removing past data as the chain of verifiability will be broken. The only issue with this is you need some way to reach a consensus of who gets to make each block in the chain, as someone need to be the authority for that instant in time. This is where the requirement of Proof of Work (PoS) or Proof of Stake (PoS) come in. Without these or another system that distributes the authority to create blocks, you lose the power of the blockchain.

    Examples I’ve heard of are tracking shipments or parts (similar to how the FAA already mandates part traceability) and medical records. This way lots of organizations can publish records relating to these to a central system that isn’t under any single entities control, and can’t change their records to suit their needs.

    These systems are not fool proof though, PoW has the ability to be abused using a 51% attack and PoS requires some form of punishment for trying to cheat the system (in cryptocurrency you “stake” currency and lose it if you try to cheat the system). Both of these run into issues when there is no incentive to invest resources into the system, a lack of distribution across independent parties, or one party has sufficient power to gain a majority control of the network.

    Overall you are right to be skeptical of cryptocurrency, it’s been a long time since I participated due to the waves of scam coins and general focus on illegal activities such as gambling. The lack of central authorities also perpetuates the problem of cryptoscams, as anyone can start one and there are limited controls over stopping such scams. This is not dissimilar to previous investment scams though, it’s just the modern iteration of such scams. The real question is does it solve a real problem, as Bitcoin did in the sense it helps facilitate transactions outside of government controls. You might not agree with that but it does give it an intrinsic value to a large number of people looking to move currency without as much paperwork. Now if it makes it worth $68.5k USD (at current prices) is a different story, different people have different use cases and I only highlighted one of those.



  • I’ve never ran this program, but skimmed the documentation. You should be able to use the SHIORI_DIR (or a custom database table following those instructions) along with the -p argument for launching the web interface. A simple bash script that should work:

    export SHIORI_DIR=/path/to/shiori-data-dir
    shiori serve -p 8081
    

    To run multiple versions, I’d suggest setting up each instance as a service on your machine in case of reboots and/or crashes.

    Now for serving them, you have two options. The first is just let the users connect to the port directly, but this is generally not done for outward facing services (not that you can’t). The second is to setup a reverse proxy and route the traffic through subdomains or subpaths. Nginx is my go-to solution for this. I’ve also heard good things about Caddy. You’ll most likely have to use subdomains for this, as lots of apps assume they are the root path without some tinkering.

    Edit: Corrected incorrect cli arguments and a typo.


  • SQL is the industry standard for a reason, it’s well known and it does the job quite well. The important part of any technology is to use it when it’s advantageous, not to use it for everything. SQL works great for looking up relational data, but isn’t a replacement for a filesystem. I’ll try to address each concern separately, and this is only my opinion and not some consensus:

    Most programmers aren’t DB experts: Most programmers aren’t “experts”, period, so we need to work with this. IT is a wide and varied field that requires a vast depth of knowledge in specific domains to be an “expert” in just that domain. This is why teams break up responsibilities, the fact the community came in and fixed the issues doesn’t change the fact the program did work before. This is all normal in development, you get things working in an acceptable manner and when the requirements change (in the lemmy example, this would be scaling requirements) you fix those problems.

    translation step from binary (program): If you are using SQL to store binary data, this might cause performance issues. SQL isn’t an all in one data store, it’s a database for running queries against relational data. I would say this is an architecture problem, as there are better methods for storing and distributing binary blobs of data. If you are talking about parsing strings, string parsing is probably one of the least demanding parts of a SQL query. Prepared statements can also be used to separate the query logic from the data and alleviate the SQL injection attack vector.

    Yes, there are ORMs: And you’ll see a ton of developers despise ORMs. They is an additional layer of abstraction that can either help or hinder depending on the application. Sure, they make things real easy but they can also cause many of the problems you are mentioning, like performance bottlenecks. Query builders can also be used to create SQL queries in a manner similar to an ORM if writing plain string-based queries isn’t ideal.



  • How was the process before

    I could find this on the process from theconversation.com:

    For decades, UAW leaders were chosen through an indirect process common to many unions. Delegates to the UAW convention chose top officers, and regional conventions picked regional directors.

    Has UAW been a sleeping giant this whole time on account of its leadership selection process?

    I’m not sure how this affects overall union operations, but it appears there was a lot of corruption involved in UAW leadership that lead to this new voting process. Wikipedia has a summary on these events:

    A corruption probe by the Justice Department against UAW and 3 Fiat Chrysler executives was conducted during 2020 regarding several charges such as racketeering, embezzlement, and tax evasion. It resulted in convictions of 12 union officials and 3 Fiat Chrysler executives, including two former Union Presidents, UAW paying back over $15 million in improper chargebacks to worker training centers, payment of $1.5 million to the IRS to settle tax issues, commitment to independent oversight for six years, and a referendum that reformed the election mode for leadership. The “One Member One Vote” referendum vote in 2022 determined that UAW members could directly elect the members of the UAW International Executive Board (IEB), the highest ruling body of the UAW.

    Are stand up strikes common? Do they win concessions?

    I can not answer to the commonality or how successful these “stand up” strikes are. Overall, striking in any capacity is a tool at the union’s disposal when contract negotiations reach a disagreement. How effective this will be is yet to be seen.


  • For your own sanity, please use a formatter for your IDE. This will also help when others (and you) read the code, as indentation is a convenience for understanding program flow. From what I see:

    • Your enable and disable functions are never called for this portion of code
    • You use a possibly undeclared enabled variable, if so it never passes scopes between the handleClick and animation methods
    • You do not use any callback or await for invoke or updateCurrentBox, causing all the code after either to immediately run. As a result, enabled is never false, since it just instantly flips back to true. I’m not sure what library invoke is from, but there should be a callback or the function returns a Promise which can be awaited.


  • If you are expecting a more windows-like experience, I would suggest using Ubuntu or Kubuntu (or any other distro using Gnome/KDE), as these are much closer to a modern Windows GUI. With Ubuntu, I can use the default file manager (nautilus) and do Ctrl+F and filter files via *.ext, then select these files then cut and paste to a new folder (drag and drop does not seem to work from the search results). In Kubuntu, the search doesn’t recognize * as a wildcard in KDE’s file manager (dolphin) but does support drag/drop between windows.





  • I also fail to see how this applies here. What is the disinformation? Where is the Russian bias? If you are seeing something I am not, please elaborate, but the summary in the article is:

    No one would blame Zelenskyy for choosing the lesser of two evils here: Western banks over Russian tanks. Yet, the grim fact remains that even if his nation succeeds in repealing the Russian invasion, the future in store for Ukraine is not necessarily one of sovereignty and self-determination but, most likely, one of Western economic tutelage.

    Of course large global asset managers are going to see money signs in their eyes. The fact is that Ukrainians are being put between a rock and a hard place, and exploitation of those kind of situations is capitalism 101.

    Also, if you are assuming this is Russian propaganda, why is it coming from a website ran by a British political activist funded by a British investor. It also seems to be “mostly factual”. I’m failing to see where the tie to Russia is.


  • In my humble opinion, we too are simply prediction machines. The main difference is how efficient our brains are at the large number of tasks given for it to accomplish for it’s size and energy requirements. No matter how complex the network is it is still a mapped outcome, just the number of factors weighed is extremely large and therefore gives a more intelligent response. You can see this with each increment in GPT models that use larger and larger parameter sets giving more and more intelligent answers. The fact we call these “hallucinations” shows how effective the predictive math is, and mimics humans abilities to just make things up on the fly when we don’t have a solid knowledge base to back it up.

    I do like this quote from the linked paper:

    As we will discuss, we find interesting evidence that simple sequence prediction can lead to the formation of a world model.

    That is to say, you don’t need complex solutions to map complex problems, you just need to have learned how you got there. It’s never purely random attempts at the problem, it’s always predictive attempts that try to map the expected outcomes and learn by getting it right and wrong.

    At this point, it seems fair to conclude the crow is relying on more than surface statistics. It evidently has formed a model of the game it has been hearing about, one that humans can understand and even use to steer the crow’s behavior.

    Which is to say that it has a predictive model based on previous games. This does not mean it must rigidly follow previous games, but that by playing many games it can see how each move affects the next. This is a simpler example because most board games are simpler than language with less possible outcomes. This isn’t to say that the crow is now a grand master at the game, but it has the reasoning to understand possible next moves, knows illegal moves, and knows to take the most advantageous move based on it’s current model. This is all predictive in nature, with “illegal” moves being assigned very low probability based on the learned behavior the moves never happen. This also allows possible unknown moves that a different model wouldn’t consider, but overall provides what is statistically the best move based on it’s model. This allows the crow to be placed into unknown situations, and give an intelligent response instead of just going “I don’t know this state, I’ll do something random”. This does not always mean this prediction is correct, but it will most likely be a valid and more than not statistically valid move.

    Overall, we aren’t totally sure what “intelligence” is, we are just an organism that has developed more and more capabilities to process information based on a need to survive. But getting down to it, we know neurons take inputs and give outputs based on what it perceives is the best response for the given input, and when enough of these are added together we get “intelligence”. In my opinion it’s still all predictive, its how the networks are trained and gain meaning from the data that isn’t always obvious. It’s only when you blindly accept any answer as correct that you run into these issues we’ve seen with ChatGPT.

    Thank you for sharing the article, it was an interesting article and helped clarify my understanding of the topic.


  • Disclaimer: I am not an AI researcher and just have an interest in AI. Everything I say is probably jibberish, and just my amateur understanding of the AI models used today.

    It seems these LLM’s use a clever trick in probability to give words meaning via statistic probabilities on their usage. So any result is just a statistical chance that those words will work well with each other. The number of indexes used to index “tokens” (in this case words), along with the number of layers in the AI model used to correlate usage of these tokens, seems to drastically increase the “intelligence” of these responses. This doesn’t seem able to overcome unknown circumstances, but does what AI does and relies on probability to answer the question. So in those cases, the next closest thing from the training data is substituted and considered “good enough”. I would think some confidence variable is what is truly needed for the current LLMs, as they seem capable of giving meaningful responses but give a “hallucinated” response when not enough data is available to answer the question.

    Overall, I would guess this is a limitation in the LLMs ability to map words to meaning. Imagine reading everything ever written, you’d probably be able to make intelligent responses to most questions. Now imagine you were asked something that you never read, but were expected to respond with an answer. This is what I personally feel these “hallucinations” are, or imo best approximations of the LLMs are. You can only answer what you know reliably, otherwise you are just guessing.



  • Looking over the github issues I couldn’t find a feature request for this, so it seems like it’s not being considered at the moment. You could make a suggestion over there, I do think this feature would be useful but it’s up to the devs to implement it.

    That being said, I wouldn’t count on this feature being implemented. This will only work on instances that obey the rules so some instances could remove this feature. When you look up your account on my instance (link here), it is up to my server to respect your option to hide your profile comments. This means the options have to be federated per-user, and adds a great deal of complexity to the system that can be easily thwarted by someone running an instance that chooses to not follow these rules.

    If your goal is to stop people looking up historical activities, it might be best to use multiple accounts and switch to new accounts every so often to break up your history. You could also delete your content but this is again up to each instance to respect the deletion request. It’s not an optimal solutions but depending on your goals it is the available solution.

    Edit: Also if your curious about the downvotes, it’s not the subject matter but your post violates Rule 3: Not regarding using or support for Lemmy.