I don’t. I use the timer on my microwave.

I boil water in a sauce pot on the stove. Slosh it into my mug. Plunk in a tea bag and set the timer on my microwave for 3:30 so that I don’t forget and over-steep it. No milk. No sugar.

Have you tried Resonance? It’s a mystery adventure game set in modern times where you play as four different characters whose stories interconnect. It’s been a while since I played it (a decade or so?) but I remember that it had an interesting game mechanic that let you use memories like items in various interactions, as well as a number of puzzles that I rather liked the design of.

It might be easier to just fire up Wireshark and look for relevant traffic when you trigger the action.

Frames Per Stratum

What I’d do is set up a simple website that uses a little JavaScript to rewrite the date and time into the page and periodically refresh an image under/next to it. Size the image to fit the remaining free space of however you set up the iPad, and then you can stick anything you want there (pictures/reminder text/whatever) with your favorite image editor. Upload a new image to the server when you want to change the note. The idea with an image is that it’s just really easy to do and keeps the amount of effort to redo layout to a minimum – just drag stuff around in your image editor and you’ll know it’ll all fit as expected as long as you don’t change the resolution (instead of needing to muck around with CSS and maybe breaking something if you can’t see the device to check that it displays correctly).

There’s a couple issues to watch out for – e.g. what happens if the internet connection/server goes down, screen burn-in, keeping the browser from being closed/switched to another page, keeping it powered, etc. that might or might not matter depending on your particular circumstances. If you need to fix all that for your circumstances, it might be more trouble than just buying something purpose built… but getting a first pass DIY version working is trivial if you’re comfortable hosting a website.

Edit: If some sample code that you can use as a starting point would be helpful, let me know.

My guess is that if browsers as we know them weren’t invented, HyperCard would’ve become the first browser eventually. No idea where things would progress from there or if it’d have been better or worse than the current clusterfuck. Maybe we’d all be talking about our “web stacks” instead of websites, and have various punny tools like “pile” and “chimney” and “staplr”. Perhaps PowerPoint would’ve turned into a browser to compete with it.

If browsers were invented but JavaScript specifically was not, we’d probably all be programming sites in some VB variant like VBScript (although it might be called something different).

Didn’t the GDPR have a data portability rule requiring that sites provide users the ability to easily export their own data? Does that not apply to Lemmy for some reason – or, am I misremembering it? (I remember account data download being a big deal a while back on reddit, but it’s been a few years…)

Yeah; I also tried subbing in case that kicks off federation and searched a few titles to see if they ended up in random incorrectly as well (stuff like that happens sometimes with kbin). The magazine has seen a few microblogs mentioning the channel, and it clearly picked up the avatar/icon, description, etc. somehow, but doesn’t seem to be getting any videos as threads/posts and I couldn’t find any floating around disconnected either. I think kbin most likely doesn’t understand what PeerTube is publishing through AP, but there could always be federation weirdness or something.

Doesn’t seem to work right on kbin, unfortunately, although it does show up as a magazine: https://kbin.social/m/thelinuxexperiment_channel@tilvids.com

So I either need something like this that I could host myself (is something like that even feasible?)

The closest thing I could find that already exists is GPT4All Chat with LocalDocs Plugin. That basically builds a DB of snippets from your documents and then tries to pick relevant stuff based on your query to provide additional input as part of your prompt to a local LLM. There are details about what it can and can’t do further down the page. I have not tested this one myself, but this is something you could experiment with.

Another idea – if you want to get more into engineering custom tools – would be to split a document (or documents) you want to interact with into multiple overlapping chunks that fit within the context window (assuming you can get the relevant content out – PyPDF2’s documentation explains why this can be difficult), and then prompt with something like “Does this text contain anything that answers <query>? <chunk>”. (May take some experimentation to figure out how to engineer the prompt well.) You could repeat that for each chunk gathering snippets and then do a second pass over all snippets asking the LLM to summarize and/or rate the quality of its own answers (or however you want to combine results).

Basically you would need to give it two prompts: a prompt for the “map” phase that you use to apply to every snippet to try to extract relevant info from each snippet, and a second prompt for the “reduce” phase that combines two answers (which is then chained).

i.e.:

f(a) + f(b) + f(c) + ... + f(z)

where f(a) is the result of the first extraction on snippet a and + means “combine these two snippets using the second prompt”. (You can evaluate in whatever order you feel is appropriate – including in parallel, if you have enough compute power for that.)

If you have enough context space for it, you could include a summary of the previous state of the conversation as part of the prompts in order to get something like an actual conversation with the document going.

No idea how well that would work in practice (probably very slow!), but it might be fun to experiment with.

[coreutils-announce] coreutils-8.31 released [stable]

stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils-announce/2019-03/msg00000.html

(found thanks to this blog post titled “File Creation Time in Linux”)

Any ways to get around the download failing

I did this incredibly stupid procedure with Firefox yesterday as a workaround for a failing Google Takeout download:

• backup the .part file from the failed download
• restart the download (careful – if you didn’t move/back it up, it will be deleted and you will have to download the whole thing again; found this out the hard way on a 50GB+ file… that failed again)
• immediately pause the new download after it starts writing to disk
• replace the new .part file with the old .part file from earlier (or – see [1] below)
• Firefox might not show progress for a long time, but will eventually continue the download (I saw it reading the file back from disk with iotop so I just let it run)
• sanity check that you actually got the whole thing and that it is usable (in my case, I knew a hash for the file)

[1] You can actually replace the new .part file with anything that has the same size in bytes as the old file – I replaced it with a file full of zeros and manually merged the end onto the original .part file with a tiny custom python script since I had already moved the incomplete file to other media before realizing I could try this. (In my case, the incomplete file would still have been useful even with the last ~1MB cut off.)

There are probably better options in most cases – like Thunderbird for mailbox as other people suggested, or rclone for getting stuff from Drive – but if you need to get Takeout to work and the download keeps failing this may be another option to try.

The attached picture says 133 qubits, so whatever that chip is (edit: Heron) it’s not this thing.

IBM’s post (that the article links) says:

Breaking the 1,000-qubit barrier with Condor

We have introduced IBM Condor, a 1,121 superconducting qubit quantum processor based on our cross-resonance gate technology. Condor pushes the limits of scale and yield in chip design with a 50% increase in qubit density, advances in qubit fabrication and laminate size, and includes over a mile of high-density cryogenic flex IO wiring within a single dilution refigerator.

So, it sounds like this is actually another fridge sized system.

It looks like this is the pre-print of the paper (“The Impact of Imperfect Timekeeping on Quantum Control”) in the journal the article links: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10767

Possibly also relevant from some of the same researchers: Fundamental accuracy-resolution trade-off for timekeeping devices

Interesting. The code format doesn’t work on Kbin.

Indent the lines of the code block with four spaces on each line. The backtick version is for short inline snippets. It’s a Markdown thing that’s not well communicated yet in the editor.

This story may be amusing, but it’s actually a serious issue if Apple is doing this and people are not aware of it because cellphone imagery is used in things like court cases. Relative positions of people in a scene really fucking matter in those kinds of situations. Someone’s photo of a crime could be dismissed or discredited using this exact news story as an example – or worse, someone could be wrongly convicted because the composite produced a misleading representation of the scene.

Photoshop would probably be easier if you have it (or are willing to pay for it), but I think it may also be possible to do with tools like Krita and some of the generative AI plugins people have made for it – e.g. https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion

I haven’t messed with it personally, but it’s on my list of fun looking AI things to try out eventually if/when I finally get a better GPU.

I don’t have a complete solution, but I do have some ideas:

• Have you tried hooking it up to an external monitor? Sometimes auto-config can help you recover from weird states if you plug in a different display.
• On my Deck, I can reach a terminal by using CTRL-ALT-F4 that is separate from the main desktop mode (CTRL-ALT-F1 switches back). Default user seems to be called “deck”. You may need to set a password to use sudo. I am not sure exactly how the desktop environment is set up on the Deck so I am not sure exactly what you need to change or where the files would be – maybe check under /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d to see if anything is set to an insane value there?
• You might try sending Valve a support request
• As a last resort, you could try a factory reset. You’ll nuke everything else on it too though…

Pokemon (1st gen and 2nd gen – plus some of the spin-off stuff from that era to a lesser extent) captivated me in a way no other games have before or since. Honestly, I hope nothing ever grabs me that hard again; it’s kind of scary how obsessed I was in retrospect.

A number of N64 games also made a big impact on me. Majora’s Mask was probably my second favorite game (after Pokemon) for many years. (OoT made an impression too, but I played MM first.) I loved the music in Diddy Kong Racing. I got 120 stars in Mario 64, and when I tried it again as an adult, I really appreciated how short and to the point levels could be (not that I played that way as a kid) – also the camera in that game sucked. Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness kind of disturbed me a bit as a kid, but it’s probably the first game I encountered a sort of “New Game Plus” in, which was neat. (People have since told me that’s the “black sheep” of the series and that it’s really weird that that’s the only one I’ve played significantly.)

Duke Nukem 3D was the first game I modded, I think (very simple graphical stuff). Definitely wasn’t age appropriate but I played the heck of it anyway. Didn’t really get much into other shooters other than playing through the main game of Perfect Dark on N64 and playing split-screen Golden Eye with friends.

I also played a lot of Sim\ games – particularly SimCity 2000, SimEarth, and SimTower. Also had a bunch of others like SimFarm and even some of the more obscure ones like SimSafari. Streets of SimCity and SimCopter being able to load SC2K maps was really neat though. Played a fair amount of other city builders and simulation games like Caesar III and Roller Coaster Tycoon too. My parents probably hoped I’d become some sort of business manager. :p

I had a lot of creative tools back then as well which I treated as not-that-different from video games. Various Kid Pix programs (one of which had a bunch of odd video clips integrated – including a short documentary about jackalopes of all things), Kid’s Studio, Digital Chisel, some version of HyperCard, etc. Game Maker – which I found around the year 2000 back when it was still on www.cs.uu.nl – ultimately led me to being a professional programmer.