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Is it getting less and less worthwhile to learn a language with the rise of AI?
  • No.

    Apart from everything else, also consider that it's just respectful to at least try and learn the local language of wherever it is you are going. Doesn't matter if it's on vacation or long term company deployment.

    Also, LLMs are absolute garbage at picking up on things like subtle language-based jokes, for example.

  • 'Baby shark, doo, doo.' Popular kids' song used to deter the homeless
  • I dream of a pure information protocol. Kinda like RSS, but... More.

    • allow any piece of information (news article, DM, sensor reading,...) to be wrapped in a standard format
    • subscribe to any number of source directly or indirectly (e.g. through a self-hosted relay server)
    • allow networks to define default data sources (e.g. get sensor data from machines as soon as you are connected to corporate networks
    • make the data declare what UI elements are required,
    • but allow clients to display them however the fuck they want
    • allow user to assign priorities statically or programmatically to any source, and to filter, sort, categorize based on it

    Essentially: I want "the feed" from universes like The Expanse

  • If money was not an issue, is there a movie, series, or a video game you would fund as a passion project with no intention on making a profit on it?
  • Iain M. Banks' Culture.

    I'm deathly afraid of the day some big studio manages to buy the rights and produce a Hollywood version of the Culture. Mostly because it is very easy to flip through the Wikipedia entries and then take the superficial aesthetic of the Culture and misunderstand or ignore the rest.

    For an example on how easy it is to do this: I remember vividly when the German translations of the later books came out, and they all had some variation of

    The Culture is the galaxy-spanning empire of mankind. Unbeknownst to its citizens however, their supposedly benevolent machine gods are about to dispense with the needs for humans at all"

    in the blurb. Someone scanned the wiki page until they read something about "superhuman AI" or the like, then went "ah, got it, I've seen Terminator".

    In a similar vein, I cannot imagine that Hollywood would portray the Culture as an unquestionably good Utopia. They'd not be able to resist to paint the luxury gay space communists as "...with a dark secret / actually dystopian /..." tones.

  • Late
  • Computer Science (at a rather "prestigious" university for CS, for that matter, at least as far as that's a thing here). Not in the US though, and none of the three universities I've studied at had mandatory attendance, for anything (exception: seminars, where attending talks by your fellow students was mandatory). As a result, I've never seen any prof take attendance.

    A lot of comments on this post say that attendance was called esp. for freshmen classes, but frankly, I don't see how that would even have been possible here, with sometimes 500+ students in a lecture hall.

    In regards to assignments, at least in my experience, studying the lecture material and consulting it while solving the exercises was usually the fastest way to understand them and get them done.

  • Late
  • Hi, I have been to lectures fewer than 10 times throughout my entire master's. No AI, no textbooks, just lecture slides and doing the (ungraded) weekly assignments.

    It probably wasn't a smart idea (incl. for my social life), but it also wasn't hard to do.

  • J.K. Rowling uses Harry Potter wealth to fund anti-transgender organization
  • YES!

    The books are also good, but very different. The show creators made an excellent adaptation of the world and its energy and feeling, but changed characters and plot to something more suitable for a show. Both are great though.

  • How would I go about gaining access to a locked-down Linux device I own.

    Five years ago, I bought a Supernote A5. It was (and mostly still is) a great device for reading and writing on an eInk display, and it runs plain old linux.

    The deciding reason I went for this device instead of the competition is that I was "under the impression" that they were about to enable full SSH access to the device! Awesome!

    "Why were you under that impression?", I hear the skeptics ask. Well, their spokesperson has stated that they would do so. Via mail, and on reddit, publicly, multiple times. I was still torn, so sent them a DM, asking if this was ineed factual. "Yes", they said, "the next quarterly update will enable SSH access!".

    Great!

    Well, it's been 5 years. They did not follow through. A couple updates were published, none contained the promised functionality, the spokesperson stopped answering questions about SSH. The last software update I received is from 2.5yrs ago. Mentions of the original Supernote A5 have largely been scrubbed from their website.

    Let me be clear, the device still functions perfectly. But it is in danger of becoming e-waste because it is so needlessly complicated to get stuff on the device. I'm currently in need of an ebook reader with (ideally) OPDS capability, and I am pretty confident I'd be able to get something like koreader running on this, or at least just run a script to sync files over SSH. Also, I frankly feel wounded in my pride having a Linux device in my possession which refuses to do my bidding (I'm joking of course, but also I am 100% serious).

    Here's all I know:

    • plugging it in via USB, the device reads as an MTP device, with access only to the documents/books/... stored on it
    • you can place an update.zip file (obtained from the SN website) into the root of that MTP directory, and upon reboot, the device will update. To me, this appears to be the most promising route of gaining access.
    • unfortunately, the zip file is encrypted. The decryption key clearly has to be known to the device, but since I have no access to it,...

    I'm a software engineer, but I have zero knowledge of the "dark arts", so to speak. If anyone could help me (or point me into the right direction!), I would really be grateful. I don't want this (generally nice) product to turn into a paperweight instead of a paper replacement :(

    29
    Self-Hosted setup for remote music lessons?

    Basically, the title. After years of inactivty, I'll be taking music (cello) lessons again, with my teacher of yesteryear, from whom I've moved half a country away.

    She has suggested Zoom but is open to alternatives. I don't particularly like Zoom, plus I have a feeling better quality can be had through a custom solution - but I'm at a bit of a loss as to what exactly would be a good fit for this project.

    Maybe Jitsi? Does someone here have experience with it and could tell me if it's possible to set something like a "target" audio quality?

    For hardware, I basically have two options. Both are already in use, for different things, and have sufficient processing capabilities - albeit no GPU:

    • host everything at home. Plus: lowest possible latency from me to the server. Not sure how much that is worth though.
    • root server in the Hetzner cloud: much faster network speed. Again though, not sure how beneficial that is, the ultimate bottleneck will always be my upload speed (40Mbit)

    OK, I realize that this post is a but of a random assortment of thoughts. I'd be really happy about suggestions and / or hearing about other's experiences with similar use-cases!

    33
    Can't use Crunchyroll via WireGuard

    Hi,

    not sure where else to post this. For a while now, I've unsuccessfully been trying to get WireGuard to work with Crunchyroll.

    Setup is as follows:

    • dedicated server hosts a wg-quick instance in [neighboring country]
    • OPNSense acts as peer on a single IP
    • I have a rule for routing the entire traffic of some source device via that IP

    This works just fine. Handshake successful, traffic is routed via the server. traceroute shows the server as the hop immediately after my device's local gateway. The connection is stable, and fast.

    ...except for Crunchyroll. The site / app itself is fine, but I can not, for the life of me, get a video to play. It just keeps loading forever.

    I don't think this is an issue with CR recognizing that I'm not where I say I am - looking online, it seems pretty easy to use CR with a VPN. I've also tried from multiple other devices, all with the same symptom.

    If anyone has suggestions, I'd love to hear them 😅

    EDIT: It was MTU. Had to manually set it to 1500 on both devices.

    Nope, still the same issues. I was using the fallback interface there briefly.

    EDIT: It WAS MTU related, I had to enable MSS clamping on the OPNSense.

    17
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)SM
    smiletolerantly @awful.systems
    Posts 6
    Comments 471