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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • The problem with this question is your friends, if whatever you decide on isn’t something your friends have or are willing to get, then it’s not useful for you. Signal offers probably the best mix of adoption and security. It however misses a few notable features, for example the iOS client has no way to back up or restore your messages. I’m a big fan of matrix, which seems very extensible and has good security, but if you are in a sensitive application like an authoritarian country, it wouldn’t be my choice. All the messages are stored on the server and while they are encrypted it’s still not what I would use for a chat I never want to see in court.


  • A lot of people are talking about federation and access to admins. But what’s missing is defederation policy.

    Lemmy is a federated network of instances. If you’re on InstanceA and you make a community on InstanceA, and I’m on InstanceB, I can connect to your community on InstanceA. UNLESS, there’s a defederation- either InstanceA or InstanceB manually block the other. This is something the admins of the instance do.

    Different instances have different policies on when (if ever) they defederate. Beehaw for example defederated a number of instances, but that’s due to the experience Beehaw is trying to create- very inclusive and affirming and whatnot. That’s their choice, but it meant defederating some of the more popular public instances (including lemmy.world).

    //edit: Another thing relates to creating communities. Any communities you create will ‘live’ on your instance, and thus be under your instance’s rules. Some instancess are friendly to questionable subjects like piracy and NSFW material, others are not. So even if you don’t today intend to create any communities, it’s good to be on an instancewhose rules align with your own preferences.


  • I’d be interested. I have experience moderating Reddit communities (I’m /u/SirEDCaLot over there too).

    I’m Eastern time. But I can’t commit to any specific amount of availability for two reasons. 1. My real life is pretty hectic and many days I literally have no time at all to participate let alone moderate, and 2. Lemmy/Reddit for me is a hobby, not a job, and I have no desire to change that. So my availability is ‘when I have time and feel like doing it’. Sometimes that will mean I disappear for days, sometimes that means I’m on for multiple hours per day.

    What I will say though- is that whatever I do have time to do, I will do well. I believe in treating users with respect, even when they break seemingly simple rules. I’ve found that if you don’t assume bad faith and treat people with respect, even when they appear to be idiots, more often than not they return the gesture.
    I also believe that moderators are more like janitors than gods. So I’m not interested in ‘power’.



  • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.mltoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldSynology vs DIY
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    1 year ago

    Honestly I think you’ll be happy either way. Synology is very very good at some things. And the software makes it very easy and approachable to spin up a lot of private cloud type stuff without a lot of technical messing around. That said, you will get more hardware/performance for your dollar with a PC server. You can go the DIY route, or if you don’t mind a little more power consumption and want more performance buy a used Dell PowerEdge on eBay. Based on what you say, I think you’ll be happy either way. The real value you get from Synology is their software. Their photo app is very wife friendly. And I don’t think you’ll find any serious restrictions with it, you get full root SSH access into the box.

    So I guess my suggestion would be evaluate the photo management in TrueNAS versus Synology. You can spin up a virtual machine of TrueNAS on your desktop and play with it if you want. The only other gotcha is if you want Plex to do transcoding you definitely want the PC because you can throw in a GPU and accelerate that a lot.

    //edit- the one other thing to mention is backups- Synology has GREAT backup software and it’s free. Active Backup for Business will back up your desktop/laptop, versioned, deduplicated, very efficiently. And Hyper Backup will backup your Synology itself (or some parts of it) to the cloud, optionally with client-side encryption. I suggest Wasabi as the backend for that, it’s only like $7/TB/mo. Or just get another Synology and put it at the house of someone you know and you have an instant offsite backup with no recurring cost.





  • I love this whole cyberdeck thing.

    I remember back in the early 2000s, there was a lot more innovation when it came to portable devices. There were gadgets that sort of resemble modern smartphones just clunkier (iPaq), ones with keyboards below the screen (BlackBerry), ones with slide out keyboards (HTC and others), ones that flipped open like laptops but could fit in your pocket (HP Jornada), etc.

    Somewhere along the line all that innovation went out the window and now every single phone or gadget looks more or less exactly the same. Like take the top 10 or 15 smartphones, debrand them, and put them in a box, and 99% of people couldn’t tell the hardware apart.

    You would think there would be a market for some level of variation, or just have one company that makes the phone 5 mm thicker but the battery lasts for 3 days. But we don’t even see that.

    Foldable screens seem to be spurring a little bit of innovation so I have hopes. But until then, I would love to see some of these cyberdeck designs put into production. I would happily pay a couple hundred bucks for a raspberry pi equivalent of a Jornada 720 (as long as the keyboard is touch typeable like the old one).


  • Or, maybe they just don’t consider at an important enough problem to get fixed. A big part of my point is that if there was a specific reason why they chose not to do it, that reason would be communicated to the users. As far as I am aware, no such reason has been communicated. Don’t get me wrong, I like signal a lot. I’m a little bit critical sometimes because I feel that there are important features like this, which have a serious effect on usability, that are not getting the priority they need.



  • If privacy is the ultimate goal, I think Signal is a bit better.

    That said, Signal is doing a bunch of user-unfriendly stuff that turns me off a bit. For example, they had a great SMS integration on Android that they’re now killing for no obvious reason. And more problematic- on iOS there is NO backup/restore functionality. None. So if you lose your phone, all your chat history is gone. It doesn’t backup to iCloud or anywhere else. The ONLY backup or transfer option is if you get a new phone you can transfer data from old to new.
    Android has a full backup/restore function that backs everything up to an encrypted file. No idea why they don’t do the same on iOS.

    Matrix is also better for multiple device access. On Signal, you can connect additional devices (laptop etc) but they are always subservient to the main device. Conversation history doesn’t transfer from the main device to addon devices, although conversations stay in sync on both devices from the point you add the device forward. But if you get a new phone for example, that’s a new parent device, so your desktop convo history gets wiped.
    Matrix on the other hand, no device is primary and conversation history is stored (encrypted) on the server. So backup your crypto key and you can access everything from any device (including a web browser).

    For Matrix- Element is the one to use most of the time…



  • A lot of the value isn’t technical, it’s social. Each instance can set their own rules for acceptable conduct and what sort of content they want or don’t want. That’s one of the most valuable parts of decentralization, an instance like Beehaw can try to be an open and inclusive space and thus have a longer list of rules, while another instance can be more permissive and allow NSFW and more offensive speech. And thus the two can coexist in the same network with the same namespace.



  • This can really go either way and it’s up to the manufacturer. Also depends a lot on how the device is designed.

    The Logitech remapping of buttons is generally done on software side, that is, the mouse sends the same button no matter what and it’s the software that interprets it when it reaches the computer to send a different input to the software. Sounds like your keyboard is doing it in hardware, that is, when you change keymaps the keyboard actually sends a different signal to the computer rather than having a piece of software intercept the signal and send a different one to the operating system.

    If I were to guess, I’d say the manufacturer of your keyboard probably put a programmable controller, but the wireless function is a basic off-the-shelf wireless keyboard chip and dongle that they purchase off the shelf from a supplier rather than design themselves. The USB cable lets them reprogram the keyboards controller, but the off-the-shelf wireless keyboard chip and dongle don’t have a reverse channel to send programming to the keyboard. For a situation like that I would question why they don’t use Bluetooth instead of a proprietary wireless system as that would give them an easy programming channel.


  • While it has its benefits; is it suitable for vehicles, particularly their safety systems? It isn’t clear to me, as it is a double-edged sword.

    Perhaps, but if you are developing a tech that can save lives, doesn’t it make sense to put that out in more cars faster?

    I would be angry that such a modern car with any form of self driving doesn’t have emergency braking. Though, that would require additional sensors…

    Tesla does this with cameras whether you pay for FSD or not. It can also detect if you’re near an object and slam on gas instead of brake, it will cancel that out. These are options you can turn off if you don’t want them.

    I’d also be angry that L2 systems were allowed in that environment in the first place, but as you say it is ultimately the drivers fault.

    I’m saying- imagine if the car has L2 self driving, and the driver had that feature turned off. The human was driving the car. The human didn’t react quickly enough to prevent hitting your loved one, but the computer would have.
    Most of the conversation around FSD type tech revolves around what happens when it does something wrong that the human would have done right. But as the tech improves, we will get to the point where the tech makes fewer mistakes than the human. And then this conversation reverses- rather than ‘why did the human let the machine do something bad’ it becomes ‘why did the machine let the human do something bad’.

    I would hope that the manufacturer would make it difficult to use L2 outside of motorway driving.

    Why? Tesla’s FSD beta L2 is great. It’s not perfect, but it does a very good job for most parts of driving on surface streets.

    I would prefer they had no self driving rather than be under the mistaken impression the car could drive for them in the current configuration. The limitations of self driving (in any car) are often not clear to a lot of people and can vary greatly.

    This is valid. I think the name ‘full self driving’ is problematic somewhat. I think it will get to the point of actually being fully self driving, and I think it will get there soon (next year or two). But they’ve been using that term for several years now and especially the first few versions of ‘FSD’ were anything but. And before they started with driver monitoring, there were a bunch of people who bought ‘FSD’ and trusted it a lot more than they should have.

    If Tesla offer a half-way for less money would you not expect the consumer to take the cheapest option? If they have an accident it is more likely someone else is injured, so why pay more to improve the self driving when it doesn’t affect them?

    That’s not how their pricing works. The safety features are always there. The hardware is always there. It’s just a function of what software you get. And if you don’t buy FSD when you buy the car, you can buy it later and it will be unlocked over the air.
    What you get is extra functionality. There is no ‘my car ran over a little kid on a bike because I didn’t pay for the extra safety package’. It’s ‘my car won’t drive itself because I didn’t pay for that, I just get a smart cruise control’.

    Tesla is the only company I know steadfastly refusing to use any other sensor types and the only reason I see is price.

    Price yes, and difficulty integrating different data sets. On their higher end cars they’ve re-introduced a high resolution radar unit. Haven’t see much on how that’s being used though.
    The basic answer is they can get to where we need with cameras alone because our software is better than others. For any other automaker that doesn’t have Tesla’s AI systems, LiDAR is important.

    Another concern is that any Tesla incidents, however rare, could do huge damage to people’s perception of self driving.

    This already happens whether the computer is driving or not. Lots of people don’t understand Teslas and think that if you buy one it’ll drive you into a brick wall and then catch on fire while you’re locked inside. Bad journalists will always put out bad journalism. That’s not a reason to stop tech progress tho.

    If Tesla is much cheaper than LIDAR-equipped vehicles will this kill a better/safer product a-la betamax?

    Right now FSD isn’t a main selling point for most drivers. I’d argue that what might kill others is not that Tesla’s system is cheaper, but that it works better and more of the time. Ford and GM both have a self driving system, but it only works on certain highways that have been mapped with centimeter-level LiDAR ahead of time. Tesla has a system they’re trying to make general purpose, so it can drive on any road. So if the Tesla system takes you driveway-to-driveway and the competition takes you onramp-to-offramp, the Tesla system is more flexible and thus more valuable regardless of the purchase price.

    Do you pick your airline based on the plane they fly and it’s safety record or the price of the ticket, being confident all aviation is held to rigorous safety standards? As has been seen recently with a certain submarine, safety measures should not be taken lightly.

    I agree standards should apply, that’s why Tesla isn’t L3+ certified even though on the highway I really think it’s ready for it.


  • Not sure the exact details- I heard they were sampling 10 bits per pixel but a bunch of their release notes talked about photon count detection back when they switched to that system.
    Given that the HW3 cameras started being used to just generate RGB images, I suspect the current iteration is working by just pulling RAW format frames and interpreting them as a photon count grid, from there detecting edges and geometry with the occupancy network.

    I’ve not seen much of anything published by Tesla on the subject. I suspect most of their research they are keeping hush hush to get a leg up on the competition. They share everything regarding EV tech because they want to push the industry in that direction, but I think they see FSD as their secret sauce that they might sell hardware kits but not let others too far under the hood.