• 0 Posts
  • 87 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

help-circle


  • Nobody talks like that. Nobody

    How do you think LLMs learned to talk like that? Plenty of people talk (or rather, write) exactly like that. It’s just now heavily associated with AI because AI has been specifically tuned to output sentences structured that way.

    Yes, AI has a vibe to it that can be very predictable and easy to spot, but that doesn’t mean every single instance of someone knowing how to string a few paragraphs together with certain verbiage is a bot.

    Idk maybe I’m being paranoid

    Seems that way. Healthy skepticism is good and necessary. Paranoia not so much.

    This attitude is essentially discouraging certain syntactic styles in writing. I and many others now regularly have moments when writing posts where we go, “Hm, I maybe shouldn’t word it this way or people might say I’m a bot,” and it’s obnoxious that it’s come to that.


  • I use Raspberry Pi Zero W’s with the cheapest wide-angle USB cameras I can find. PS3 Eyes used to be (pre-covid) ridiculously cheap on eBay (like $6 each if you could find them in the bulk packaging). I dunno if you’re gonna find anything that cheap in 2025, but if you can find PS3 eyes on the cheap, they get the job done (but don’t work great in low light). Mine (about 8 total) have been running well for about 7 years now, some indoors, some outdoors (mounted strategically to avoid rain and heavy wind).

    You can install Raspberry Pi OS (or your lightweight distro of choice) on each Pi and then install the Motion package, which supports pretty much any USB camera out of the box, and lets you set up things like motion detection, image capture, live streaming, etc with a little configuration. If you’ve got HA running smoothly, I suspect you’ll be able to tackle setting up a few Motion configurations. You just SSH into each headless Pi and configure Motion to start in daemon mode so it’s always running whenever the Pi boots. You can then access the camera feed remotely from the Pi’s IP address with an address like http://<local.ip.address.>:8080

    A bit of work to set up (and maybe more expensive than cheap, cloud-based, AIO systems), but it’s incredibly worth it to have a wholly cloudless, entirely local security/nannycam solution.

    A finished Pi Zero W + camera unit has a pretty small footprint, and can be mounted just about anywhere within distance to a power outlet with some velcro if it can’t just be sat on a table or something. My units typically look like this:

    Though this one uses a Ubisoft camera (didn’t wanna take down a PS3 eye for this pic so I pulled my crappiest unused USB cam from the closet. This camera is awful, but I got it for free so I can’t complain, lol)








  • Assuming this isn’t just a shitpost:

    Yes, calling someone a useless piece of shit when they are trying hard, but failing, at doing something very difficult makes you an asshole. It is the opposite of constructive feedback; it’s just an insult. In case it hadn’t dawned on you, the guy wasn’t just having to solo parent, he was having to solo parent while presumably worried sick about his hospitalized spouse.

    Do I blame you for being frustrated and snapping? No, but it doesn’t mean you weren’t a huge asshole in the moment. Own your mistake and apologize if you have the introspective wherewithal and didn’t just make this post seeking validation.



  • About 10 years ago, I read “Creativity, Inc” by Edwin Catmull, co-founder of Pixar. It detailed the ideas and events that lead up to the advent of feature 3D animation and filmmaking. I found it to be an inspiring story that mixed a passion for computer science with the desire for compelling storytelling. I was independently studying animation at the time, and it definitely lit a fire in me, as it was written by and for computer nerds who would like to make art.

    I’ve always been more technically-oriented than artistic, so it was nice to see a book written from a similar perspective. I spent most of my young adulthood working on my technical skills so I could get a decent job, but around the time I read this book, I actually started putting time into creative endeavours in my free time as well.





  • I’ll share my input, although it’s primarily speculation and a smidge of deductive reasoning.

    Given these three particular pieces of information:

    • Local network use is unaffected (for e.g. accessing SMB shares to a local server)
    • Happens with my current ISP (Leaptel), but also happened the previous ISP (Aussie Broadband)
    • Ping is unaffected and hovers around 12ms to geographically close remote servers, with no packet loss or jitter.

    My first instinct is the issue may be upstream (non-local) network congestion. Since it appears that connections are slowing to a crawl rather than dropping packets. Ping requests don’t seem to suffer, but they’re a lot smaller than loading content via CMMS, Reddit, etc. You mentioned it could happen twice or more in a 10 hour shift, or sometimes not at all; network congestion being highly variable could explain this.

    Are you in a remote area? If so, there may not be much nearby infrastructure (routers) to handle the big spikes in traffic when everyone in the immediate area clocks in to work at 9am, or gets back from lunch around 1pm, etc. If that’s the case, the local routers would get overwhelmed regularly by congestion and packet delivery times would suffer. This could also happen in more densely populated areas, depending on what the local infrastructure looks like.

    Though I’m not entirely sure how to explain speed tests not suffering if congestion is the issue; unless the particular routes to the geographically-close test servers aren’t congested (because large numbers of people are trying to connect to real services, not the speed tests, during these congestion times).

    The fact that some live services like Google & Facebook load while others like Reddit and Lemmy do not could be explained by the difference in those services’ respective high-availability (HA) solutions. Facebook and Google don’t typically drop below 99.95%-ish uptime because they scale their server infrastructure very aggressively to meet demand. But even huge services like Reddit have considerably more downtime than Facebook or Google (Reddit seems to have major outages several times a year, while Google and Facebook do not). Some upstream services having more servers to handle more requests more quickly could account for the inconsistent ability to load websites during this congestion.

    I’m not sure the best way to test this hypothesis, though. Given how much troubleshooting and information gathering you’ve already done, this is a tricky one.



  • A wojak image can’t really refute anything; it’s just depicting the original poster as being a seething dumbass (an ad hominem response). If the poster accompanies said wojak image with a counterargument, that could refute something, but most wojak responses don’t bother with actually making any kind of salient point. Which is why it’s such a popular format: it’s low effort.

    Edit: Realizing the error in my argument, I have included the following addendum: