PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]

Hexbear's resident machinist, absentee mastodon landlord, jack of all trades

Talk to me about astronomy, photography, electronics, ham radio, programming, the means of production, and how we might expropriate them.>

  • 395 Posts
  • 10.6K Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2020

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    • ends up asking on reddit
    • zero upvote, gets one answer three days later

    shrug-outta-hecks gonna chalk that one up to reddit

    • learn there are two folders, one is in the system the other in home

    This is not an immediately obvious thing, but consider this a learning experience. This is the way many things work on Linux. As much as possible, you want to let the distribution manage the files outside of your home folder (occasionally you might tweak some system-wide configuration files). It is possible to install all sorts of software and make a lot of configuration changes right in your home folder, without admin privileges (in other words, without having any impact on other accounts which share the machine). The distro package manager should be the first stop, but if you find yourself DIYing something because a package is not available for your distro, there is almost certainly a way to do it without raising privileges (or if you need to raise privileges, doing so to grant access to specific hardware, or to enable a service on start-up, not to just shit files all over the place and forget about them).

    In the case of .desktop shortcuts, you can drop these in ~/.local/share/applications. (more info)

    In fact, I realised waaaay too late that the home folder was "~".

    Yeah, this is a shell expansion. You can test it by typing echo ~ in a terminal. It is a shorthand for typing /home/myusername or $HOME. This dates back to at least the 80s, so the syntax is also copied by a lot of non-shell applications or even used in some documentation outside the context of using a shell at all. In a shell like Bash you can also use it as a shortcut for other user's home directories by typing e.g. ~root instead of ~. Good thing to know, as it will be taken for granted in a lot of places.

    everytime I saw a folder path starting with ~ I assumed it was some convention

    You're weren't wrong big-cool



  • Try LibreTranslate. It is a "language model," but it is not a "large" language model along the lines of something like ChatGPT. I am not sure what the training process entails, but it will run on a 10 year old dual core CPU without GPU acceleration. You can test it at libretranslate.org, or you can install it on your own machine if you have Python by running pip install libretranslate. I run LibreTranslate on a meager VPS (the CPU I just described) and the headroom left over from running Mastodon is enough to handle the translation queries locally, without making any remote requests.


  • Yeah PET/PETG is good. It is UV resistant and can be used outdoors. I've used it to print parts for a hydroponic gardening system. It is a bit more complicated to work with than PLA, but way easier than ABS and like 95% close enough in durability. It is the material soda bottles are made of.





  • Anyone have experience with it?

    No.

    Is it okay?

    Probably not.


    Bluesky was created by Jack Dorsey, the same tech bro who created Twitter. I think it is an absolute farce that we give these morons second chances like this. That said, it has absorbed the vast majority of Twitter's post-Elon refugees, and with Elon being closely involved with the incoming Trump administration, any Liberal politicians and institutions would be absolutely stupid to keep all their eggs in that basket. Some independent journalists (good ones, who cover free palestine demos and labor issues) I follow have already switched, shutting down their Twitter accounts for good. As time goes on, we will probably have to dip our toes in to keep getting information from some sources. Twitter is only going to become more and more of a wasteland of Nazis.

    From outside looking in, the atmosphere on Bluesky seems to be very shitlib. Mastodon has its own problems, but thanks to federation the shitlibs don't run the whole game and there is somewhat of a radical cohort.



  • I've only heard it from this NGO dork, so take it with a grain of salt, but with the Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, they might just adjourn and do recess appointments to get everybody in and hit the ground running. Would be the smart play. Otherwise all these confirmation hearings would take months. It took over a year for Trump to fill some positions in his first term.



  • The FBI has raided the home of Shayne Coplan, CEO of Polymarket, a politics betting platform - NY Post (archive.ph)

    It’s “grand political theater at its worst,” the source told The Post. “They could have asked his lawyer for any of these things. Instead, they staged a so-called raid so they can leak it to the media and use it for obvious political reasons.” Coplan was not provided any reason for the incident, but the source said they expect it is political retribution since Polymarket accurately predicted Trump’s win – not traditional polls.

    The government is likely trying to accuse Polymarket of market manipulation and rigging its polls in favor of Trump, the source said.

    This "source" is an idiot lmao. I'm sure the raid has nothing to do with the fact that they flagrantly accept bets in cryptocurrency to bypass financial regulations.