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mberloveon Self Hosting 101 – A Beginner's Guide

I don't think it's so bad, but if I had to guess, it's from the division / breakdown of sections and lists, which reads a lot like the formulaic approach you get from an LLM (which is not necessarily bad, just common in the output). E.g. "Docker and Docker Compose can simplify the process of installing and managing services. They allow you to:" etc etc. This may sound like an LLM covering all its bases rather than a human explaining subject matter.

That's just my take, again I don't think it's that bad. The article would be a useful breakdown for beginners.

(Also, I'm sure you know, LLM content sounds that way because the LLM was trained on content just like this, so it's not really surprising that a guide generated by an LLM would sound like the kind of guide that was used to train an LLM...)

mberloveon Manjaro Linux 24

Glad to see the settings controls are getting an adjustment. That's been a minor pain point for me.

mberloveon Tiny Electric Trucks Are Coming to a Bike Lane Near You

It's not a poor idea, but to work it would require further revamping of roadways. The bike lanes in most major areas are unlikely to support this well (given proximity to traffic, breaks in the lanes, etc).

It may end up moot -- the article reads a bit on the speculative side, and this project might fall the way of many startups of "good idea, bad implementation," but I'm willing to eat my words in the future on this.

mberloveon Stack Overflow Is Down

I've been plugging search engine result links for reddit and stackoverflow into archive.org to "bypass" - works more or less.

mberloveon Show HN: FlingUp, a Reddit-like platform Ive been building for the last 2 years

Ditto on this... I also wonder how this meshes with "You can share just about any kind of link in FlingUp." and "Anything goes on FlingUp." (from the tour)

It seems as though users may share links to whatever, but only content which they own. A difficult line to tread.

For the op, I would ask for a little more clarity on the intent.

(N.b. this might cause some issues posting AI-gen content, which is sans copyright by law, at least in the US. Maybe that's the intent?)

mberloveon Scientists Use GPT AI to Passively Read People's Thoughts in Breakthrough

From the study: "...we tested whether successful decoding requires subject cooperation and found that subject cooperation is required both to train and to apply the decoder."

Reading the discussion in the paper, it looks like if you lie "out loud" in your head about what you're thinking, you'll fool the interpretation. For now.

Of course that can change -- will almost certainly change as the technology improves. But it's an important caveat at the moment and the researchers clearly paid attention to this aspect.

mberloveon Mastodon is doomed?

Probably like a number of users here, I used mastodon "before it was cool" -- and it was never in reality an "alt twitter", it was its own microblogging service, with niche communities, and with its own set of pros and cons.

IMHO the hopes of an influx of users to make it the next Twitter doesn't change the fundament of what Mastodon represents.

The author's statement that Mastodon's CEO has "no plans for monotization [sic]" does not, in my take, reduce the benefits of open-source & federated communities one iota.

mberloveon BASIC is anything but dead

IMHO the key distinction is between BASIC, the group of languages, and VB, the SDK. The article notes this but I think it is really the crux. In other words, did BASIC draw us in because it is a straightforward language? Or because of the power that VB provided?

As others point out, many hobbyists still use variants of BASIC...I don't think we can claim it's the most practical language for most uses, but it has its niche for sure, and is fun to use.

Visual Basic, however, while at the time representing a _fantastic_ entry point to development (at least it was for me), has been legitimately replaced by other, newer models, some of which the article notes.

mberloveon Chickens, cows, threatened in Ransomware on Canadian farms

"Farms are now complex technical operations that use networks of remote monitors that measure soil moisture, or robotic milkers that can detect an infection in a single teat, or environmental control systems that maintain the precise indoor temperature and air filtration needs of a poultry barn."

Both a completely understandable and even desirable outcome of advancements in animal husbandry, and an unacceptably vulnerable solution to a massively important system where low-tech solutions are well available.

Modern massive farming requires tech to be efficient? That feels like a reasonable statement though I have no proof of it. Maintaining or improving farm output at scale requires massive centralized farming? That feels like less of a reasonable statement, and again, I have no proof one way or another.

Are there studies on this? Can we decentralize, downscale, without compromising outputs?

Just ruminating here (pun definitely intended).