It’s impressive, just not particularly useful,

I will have to disagree with this. I have found LLMs to be remarkably useful in a variety of circumstances because they are pretty good at regurgitating API documentation and man pages in a relatively small context (effectively making them a very efficient google search).

For example, last week I accidentally deleted a partition from a USB drive. I asked an LLM how I might recover my data using GNU/Linux tools and it pointed me in the direction of ddrescue (and subsequently, gddrescue) and showed me how I could use the recovered disk image to recover my lost files.

I was already aware of ‘dd’ as a tool for disk management, but was wholly ignorant of ddrescue or gddrescue because I haven’t had a data recovery use case in over 15 years. It was a fairly simple affair, and it was much easier than asking StackOverflow.

I dunno if I’d say I’m “unimpressed” with AI. I certainly find the technology itself fascinating. I worked with machine learning for years before consumer generative AI became mainstream and it’s profoundly impressive what decades of research and development have yielded. I genuinely do admire the painstaking work that underappreciated computer scientists have put in to make such things possible.

That said, “AI” is the new “blockchain” insofar as virtually every company on the S&P 500 has decided this is the new be-all-end-all feature that must be integrated into every aspect of every project. I don’t need AI to be part of my OS. I will open a new tab in my web browser if I decide I have a task for it. Granted, I am not a representative sample of a typical computer user (I use GNU/Linux btw).

To say nothing of the unethical manner in which these models are trained, using works produced by actual writers, artists, programmers, etc. Obviously profiting from their works while offering zero compensation (and actively taking work away from them by offering AI as an alternative to their craft).

This picture has been floating around the internet for ages. I dunno if it’s entirely accurate, but it suggests Nutella is primarily palm oil and sugar. With hazelnuts and cocoa making guest appearances

Don’t get me wrong, though. The stuff’s addictive.

At least you’ll have an excuse to finally shoot the printer.

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)

If the brownouts don’t last long, you could maybe solve this issue with a moderately priced UPS to keep the AC unit from powering off during the brief moments when power goes out.

I got a relatively cheap (~$30) tire inflator by Slime (weird brand name, I know) like 8 years ago and it’s gotten the job done every time. I’d highly recommend it. It looks like they don’t sell the exact same model I have anymore, but this one looks closest: https://shop.advanceautoparts.com/p/slime-12v-tire-inflator-8-min-inflation-0-100-psi-dial-gauge-bright-led-light-compact-lightweight-40050/12061423-P

Plugs into the cigarette lighter port and has a built-in flashlight in case it’s dark when you need to pump up the tires.

I just discovered WarioWare, Inc in the Switch’s Game Boy Advance collection. I didn’t expect to get sucked into these little minigames so quickly. The rapid-fire back-to-back format is really engaging some hyper-focus-y part of my brain.

Kinda frustrating at times, though, lol. Some of the games are really obtuse. It took me dozens of attempts at one of the trampoline games before I realized I’m controlling the trampoline, not the guy jumping on it.

Old machine learning joke I used to enjoy cracking at work:

When an algorithm randomly changes things over and over and hopes it works better it’s “machine learning” but when I do it it’s “horribly inefficient”

That’s what the umbilical cord is for. It’s nature’s leash!

Kudos to Germany for pulling it off. Was also happy to see them mention

Last year […] the government began rolling out LibreOffice as the default office suite to replace Microsoft Office.

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.

as if Pyramid Head, Bowser, and Shadow the Hedgehog aren’t always topping the “God I wish they were real” lists for women.

How you gonna do my boy Shrek dirty like that, not even including him in the top 3?

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.

My parents and all their friends used to use PTT with their Nextel phones. It was a super handy feature. I wonder why it fell out of style. Seemed more convenient and less tedious than a phone call for short communications.

I dunno if I’d consider this in “dad joke” territory.

Per the sidebar:

Clean jokes only please. If you cannot tell this joke to a 5-year-old, you probably shouldn’t post it here. Please post edgier jokes to !unclejokes@lemmy.world

If you want a view to count you need to use an official client

I would think that parsing the website would count the same as any browser-based page load, since parsing the website requires first fetching the page (probably using something like wget or curl under the hood). I dunno if non-logged-in page loads are generally counted toward the overall view count on a given video, though.

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.