Off-and-on trying out an account over at @[email protected] due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • You can probably do it, but I’m not sure how many users you’d get, as I think that it’d be a less-usable interface.

    • You’d need some way to handle voting; that doesn’t intrinsically show up. Maybe you could do it via expecting users to send specially-structured emails.

    • If by “fediverse” you specifically are talking about the Threadiverse — Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin — then you’re going to have to also deal with a lack of a way to handle responding to a given comment (unless you intend to forward all comments to all posts that a user has subscribed to to an email address, and then just only let them respond to those).

    • Email isn’t natively encrypted, so if that’s a concern and you want to deal with that, you’d need something like a PGP key that users could register, I guess.

    • Email clients don’t, as far as I know — I haven’t gone looking — natively have Markdown support, so either you need to throw out formatting or have some sort of mapping to and from Markdown to HTML. I don’t know if something like pandoc would be sufficient for that.

    • No native “report” functionality. Maybe you could do it via expecting users to send specially-structured emails.

    If what you want is to take advantage of existing native clients, my suggestion is that you’d probably get more mileage out of doing a bidirectional Usenet-to-Threadiverse gateway than an email-to-Threadiverse gateway. That has a much closer mapping in terms of functionality than email. You could do that a lot more efficiently in terms of bandwidth. Your “Usenet group list” would be a set of community@instance name entries, and you map posts to top level messages, and comments to responses to those.

    The major downside there is that I don’t think that any Usenet clients have native Markdown support and you still don’t have voting or native reporting functionality.

    The only obvious benefit I can think of from either Usenet or email is that there are clients for both that support offline functionality, and I don’t know of any Threadiverse-native clients that do. I think the major point I’d raise would be “you could probably do it, but…what do you gain that outweighs the drawbacks?” Like, I think that you’d probably get more good out of just picking your favorite native Threadiverse client and adding code to that (or starting a new one, if you absolutely can’t stand any of the existing ones).


  • tal@lemmy.todaytolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldCloser
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    3 hours ago

    A quarter-century back…

    https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3676

    World domination. It’s a powerful and faintly sinister phrase, one you might imagine some B-movie mad scientist muttering as he puts the finishing touches on some infernal machine amidst a clutter of bubbling retorts and crackling Tesla coils. It is not a phrase you would, offhand, associate with cuddly penguins.

    When Linus says he aims at world domination, it seems as if he wants you to laugh at the absurd image of a gaggle of scruffy hackers overrunning the computing world like some invading barbarian horde—but he’s also inviting you to join the horde. Beneath the deadpan self-mockery is dead seriousness—and beneath the dead seriousness, more deadpan self-mockery. And on and on, in a spiraling regress so many layers deep that even Linus probably doesn’t know where it ends, if it ends at all.

    The way Linux hackers use the phrase “world domination” is what science-fiction fans call a “ha-ha-only-serious”. Some visions are so audacious, they can be expressed only as ironic jokes, lest the speaker be accused of pomposity or megalomania.

    PC gaming is still only a bit over 5%, but it’s one of the last remaining computing environments where Linux hasn’t become the dominant OS choice, as it’s displaced embedded systems and servers and suchlike. Things have changed a lot.





  • I mean, it’s probably a good idea to have them higher, given that if someone wants to use it with some typical out-of-the-box desktop settings, that’s not unreasonable, but while I haven’t looked at the Ubuntu installer for a while, I strongly suspect that it permits you to do a minimal install, and that all the software in the Debian family is also there, so you can do a lightweight desktop based on Ubuntu.

    My current desktop environment has sway, blueman-applet, waybar, and swaync-client running. I’m sure that you could replicate the same thing on an Ubuntu box. Sway is the big one there, at an RSS of 189MB (mostly 148MB of which is shared, probably essentially all use of shared libraries). That’s the basic “desktop graphical environment” memory cost.

    I use foot as a terminal (not in daemon mode, which would shrink memory further, though be less-amenable to use of multiple cores). That presently has 40 MB RSS, 33 of which are shared. It’s running tmux, at 16MB RSS, 4 of which are shared. GNU screen, which I’ve also used and could get by on, would be lighter, but it has an annoying patch that causes it to take a bit before terminating.

    Almost the only other graphical app I ever have active is Firefox, which is presently at an RSS of 887.1, of which 315MB is shared. That can change, based on what Firefox has open, but I think that use of a web browser is pretty much the norm everwhere, and if anything, the Firefox family is probably on the lighter side in 2026 compared to the main alternative of the Chrome family.

    I’m pretty sure that one could run that same setup pretty comfortably on a computer from the late 1990s, especially if you have SSD swap available to handle any spikes in memory usage. Firefox would feel sluggish, but if you’re talking memory usage…shrugs I’ve used an i3/Xorg-based variant of that on an eeePC that had 2GB of memory that I used mostly as a web-browser plus terminal thin client to a “real machine” to see if I could, did that for an extended period of time. Browser could feel sluggish on some websites, but other than that…shrugs.

    Now, if you want to be, I don’t know, playing some big 3D video game, then that is going to crank up the requirements on hardware. But that’s going to be imposed by the game. It’s not overhead from your basic graphical environment.

    I’d also be pretty confident that you could replicate that setup using the same packages on any Debian-family system, and probably on pretty much any major Linux distro with a bit of tweaking to the installed packages.




  • I assume so. Here’s a video of someone floating a boat (apparently in air) in it, and then sinking it by pouring cups of sulfur hexafluoride over it:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee2NaYRnRGo

    If it avoids diffusing into air to the degree that you can scoop it up and pour it, I’d imagine that it’d pour out of one’s lungs the same way.

    But if you just want to get most of it out of your lungs — like, you’ve been breathing it and don’t want to asphyxiate — I imagine that exhaling all the air you can and inhaling air and doing that a few times would probably do a pretty good job, the way the Mythbusters video above did with the helium.



  • I’d guess that most industrial users of helium don’t consume it and could theoretically recover it from whatever process it’s involved in rather than just releasing it.

    EDIT: Hard drives being an exception, as apparently some ship helium-filled; there, it’s actually being consumed during the manufacture.

    EDIT2: I’d also point out that in the long run, we probably do have to be more conservative with our helium supply. We get it from pockets in the earth. It’s actually not all that common; it just happens, though, that we go to a lot of effort to extract natural gas, and that happens to sometimes also come up with helium, so we get that supply. But because it’s not reactive, it doesn’t bond to anything — it stays in gas form. When we let it go, it heads to near the top of our atmosphere and eventually gets lost to solar wind. Many users who today just release it — because why not, as the natural gas people will be providing more, and it’s cheaper that way — probably will need to capture what they’re using if we want helium to continue to be available.




  • I doubt that there’s actually a substantial impact on battery cell production. Might be on rack-mountable batteries containing those cells. But setting that aside:

    Panasonic plans to expand lithium-ion cell

    Non-rechargable AAA batteries are typically alkaline, and rechargeables are typically NiMH, not lithium-ion.

    EDIT: Looking at a handful of rack-mount lithium-ion batteries on Amazon price history using camelcamelcamel, prices are either unchanged or very slightly up. Could be Panasonic looking to get into the news, but it’s not clear to me that there’s a shortage of even rack-mount lithium-ion batteries.






  • I use “mono-9” in all my terminals, including for emacs. On my Debian trixie system, that maps to DejaVu Sans Mono in the fonts-dejavu-mono package.

    $ cat ~/.config/foot/foot.ini
    [main]
    font=mono-9
    $ fc-match mono-9
    DejaVuSansMono.ttf: "DejaVu Sans Mono" "Book"
    $ fc-list|grep DejaVuSansMono.ttf
    /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf: DejaVu Sans Mono:style=Book
    $ dpkg -S /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf
    fonts-dejavu-mono: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf
    $
    

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DejaVu_fonts

    The DejaVu fonts are a superfamily of fonts designed for broad coverage of the Unicode Universal Character Set. The fonts are derived from Bitstream Vera (sans-serif) and Bitstream Charter (serif), two fonts released by Bitstream under a free license that allowed derivative works based upon them; the Vera and Charter families were limited mainly to the characters in the Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement portions of Unicode, roughly equivalent to ISO/IEC 8859-15, and Bitstream’s licensing terms allowed the fonts to be expanded upon without explicit authorization.

    The full project incorporates the Bitstream Vera license, an extended MIT License, which restricts naming of modified distributions and prohibits individual sale of the typefaces, although they may be embedded within a larger commercial software package (terms also found in the later Open Font License); to the extent that the DejaVu fonts’ changes can be separated from the original Bitstream Vera and Charter fonts, these changes have been deeded to the public domain.[1]


  • ‘Toad-proofing’ farms could help stop the march of invasive pest

    invasive cane toads

    Australia’s most damaging invasive species

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad

    Because of its voracious appetite, the cane toad has been introduced to many regions of the Pacific and the Caribbean islands as a method of agricultural pest control.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia

    Native to South and mainland Middle America, imported cane toads had been used in Puerto Rico to control sugar cane pests since 1920, and an influential 1932 research paper by Raquel Dexter showed that they largely ate beetle larvae that in turn ate sugar cane.[3] Based on her findings, they were introduced to Hawaii by Cyril Pemberton in the early 1930s, and then introduced to Australia from Hawaii in June 1935 by the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations, now Sugar Research Australia, in an attempt to control the native grey-backed cane beetle (Dermolepida albohirtum) and French’s beetle (Lepidiota frenchi).[4] Those beetles are native to Australia and they are detrimental to sugarcane crops, which are a major source of income for Australia.

    The sudden inundation of foreign species has led to severe breakdowns in Australian ecology, after overwhelming proliferation of a number of introduced species, for which the continent has no efficient natural predators or parasites, and which displace native species; in some cases, these species are physically destructive to habitat, as well.

    Sounds like all we need is to introduce something that preys on cane toads. That’ll do 'er!