bummer.

Ah. maybe hand it over to the next person? I suppose people still need to switch painlessly? But I get it. We used to host lots of stuff in my university years. A forum, chat, classifieds, filesharing… A big photo album for all our pictures and events… As far as I know all of that has gone. Either due to lack of interest or nobody was able and willing to pick it up.

Why both? Isn’t one enough?

Alright. I think I’m fine with that. I’ll read the documentation and see if I can find some time over the weekend to set it up. I’ll report my success in case I remember. It’s going to take me some time to notice missing information, though. And I’m not sure how caching of images works. We’ll see. I hope I don’t get banned, but I don’t really care that much. Thanks for the insights.

What does it do with threads, just display the messages sequentially? Or not at all?

Guess it’s mautrix then and I have my answer. Thanks!

Thanks. Why do you say appservice is old? Because of the used technology? Or because their last commit is from 9 months ago?

I don’t really need double puppeting. I’m just interested in funnelling out data from discord and it’s just me and my account. I should clarify that in my post…

Thanks for the suggestions. I’m gonna take a closer look at the features of both and probably choose mautrix, since I already run their WhatsApp bridge. Maybe someone else chimes in and can contribute their experience with the out-of-your-element bridge.

Thanks. Yeah I know most of the story/history of Matrix. I’m just now making the decisions for the years to come. And Dendrite has been the announced successor to Synapse for quite some time now… I’m not sure what to make of this. If it’s going to happen soon, I’d like to switch now. And not move again and relocate my friends more times than necessary.

Judging by the graphs on my Netdata, Synapse plus the database are currently eating more resources than I’d like for just chat. Afaik the other projects were meant to address that. But I’ve never used anything else. And I’ve always refrained from joining large rooms because people told me that’d put considerable load on the server. If there’s a better solution I’m open to try even if it’s not the default choice… It just needs to work for my use-case. I don’t necessarily need feature-completeness.

Yeah, with the multiple domains: I meant I have 1 VPS and like 3 domain names for different projects. I have a single email-server, one webserver and they just handle all three domains. Even Prosody (XMPP) has “VirtualHost” directives and I only need to run it once to provide service on all the different domains. With Matrix this doesn’t seem to be the case… I’d need to launch 3 different instances of Synapse simultaneously on that one server and do some trickery with the reverse http proxy. That’d be more expensive and take more time and effort. I don’t really care about how the identities are handled internally, I can provide them in a format that is supported. And the users are seperate anyways. It’s just: I’d like to avoid running the same software three times in parallel.

Out of curiosity: Do you have to deal with that much spam? If so: Is there a specific reason?

Because I only get some bot join one of the public rooms and start spamming every few months or so. And we deal with that pretty quickly. My own account has been perfectly safe for years… So my experience is different. Might be my usage-pattern vs yours?!

Make it 63 (31?) to align with what C99 can distinguish.

Also: I really like unicode in identifiers. So if at all possible don’t just have a random string of letters and numbers, make sure to include greek letters and all the funny emojis. (I just forgot which languages and compilers etc allow that.)

does dave know he’s a zero?

I suppose the license only counts after you aquired the program. Not before.

Free software means that the software’s users have freedom. (The issue is not about price.)

Specifically, free software means users have the four essential freedoms: (0) to run the program, (1) to study and change the program in source code form, (2) to redistribute exact copies, and (3) to distribute modified versions.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#selling

( https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html )

Agree. Not sure if I’d use the word “tool” to describe him… But he’s certainly “special”. Glad I found one of the few discussions where it’s not just his fans praising him for his " visions" despite him not delivering on the last 50 promises he made. Or the latest edgy memelord thing he read somewhere or came up with… Usually I just shut my mouth and don’t comment on that because it’s just so many people following the hype.

No? I left out the detailed info here as I thought it’s of no concern. I provided it with pretty much the same info I’d write to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. With computer bugs that’s usually steps to reproduce the issue, exact versions of everything, exact error messages and my findings from googling and looking at the code…

That was one of the issues I had that only gave me one or two search results and it’s unlikely that someone comes up with a solution since the hardware is outdated and not many people have that specific board lying around and also the expertise to understand the low level hardware coding involved.

I mean it kind of fits the rest of the picture I have from using ChatGPT and similar stuff. It can do easy stuff. And write boilerplate code pretty alright. With the Arduino code I’m tinkering around as a hobby… not so much. I once asked it to do the inverse kinematics for a small robotics project. And the AI can tell me about what I just read on the Wikipedia article about that topic. But that’s it. Not an idea how to apply that info. And that the complicated part is to come up with the specific Jacobian matrix. And not just tell me that using one is one of the few approaches to that problem. That’s obvious from reading the Wikipedia article or reading any textbook. And it did silly things like write code like equation.solve(parameter1, parameter2, parameter3) … Sure. I mean if I already had a framework that did that and was available on an embedded platform, I wouldn’t have had that problem in the first place…

So my attempts at using AI for the issues I have with computers regularly fail. I can see how that’s not the experience everyone has, but still… It doesn’t really help me with specific problems or rare issues.

And I still have a few I can try to question some AI about… An slow Wireguard VPN tunnel inside if another tunnel that I already fixed the MTU and it’s still unbearably slow… A few obscure webframeworks that don’t tie into things… But I’m pretty sure I’ll get the same results.

Have you ever been lucky with AI and issues that didn’t get you any search results because no one ever did it before? I mean I’d be happy to learn how to use AI properly as a tool. It’s just I’ve tried and I don’t think I’m too stupid to prompt it. It’s just that I’ve given up since it doesn’t seem nowhere near intelligent enough to tackle the real issues I have. I’m not opposed to AI. I use it and it helps me get small stuff done easier/faster.

I’ve tried. And usually the questions I ask are too specific. I mean I can answer the basic questions myself and often I get several result when it’s just that. The AI just mumbles general advice and is always wrong if it’s too specific. Like for example: Why does the graphics driver crap out on any OpenGL ES instruction on the old single board computer I have lying around, despite the SoC being supported?

I don’t get it. Where does he say “algorithm”? Does Google Gemini do PAC learning?

AFAIK “AI” means “machine learning” and machines with “intelligent” behaviour, whatever that means. It includes everything from expert systems, statistics, markov chains to LLMs. And people nowadays slap it on every product out there.

“Algorithm” means a (finite) sequence of (rigorous) instructions. At least that’s what Wikipedia says. It’s well defined and doesn’t talk about where the instructions come from or if it includes statistics.

And one of them is Java?

Make a request per the GDPR.

We seem to share similar ideas. I think we don’t necessarily have to be constrained by how stuff works in the real world. There, it is impossible to listen to everyone, you need to transfer power to a small amount of representatives. And one or few people at the top or it gets messy and nothing gets done. Also you need to come up with a single solution that applies to everyone.

I don’t think it has to be that way in the realm of online services. Technically, we can ask an arbitrary number of people for their opinion. Vote with less effort since networks are fast, databases quite capable and everything interconnected anyways. Have people just represent themselves or just 5 family members or transfer their democratic power to whomever they deem appropriate. It doesn’t even have to be a vote by majority. There are better weighted voting systems out there that are just impossible to implement in real-world countries. It doesn’t have to be one solution for everything, it could individually apply to communities of the platform or work differently for different topics. And big platforms already provide different content and algorithms for their individual users. We could also just everyone be provided with a unique perspective on the same data. Someone can be faced with something while another person has it buried at the bottom or not displayed at all. And we’d just choose things for ourselves, not vote on how other people are treated at all. (I mean that somehow emerges on it’s own… Once everyone chooses to not listen to trolls and annoying people, they’d just lose their audience and become meaningless.)

I see many technical challenges and negative consequences. We’d need to keep the crypto and blockchain people away from it. Everything I’ve seen that uses blockchain technology to achieve this has failed in the meantime. And was mainly intended to make money by some means. But things like ActivityPub are also not made for this. I’d really like to do away with the current voting mechanisms. I’d rather say I trust what this person says and my interests align with those people and this would replace global up- and downvoting. It’s certainly possible from a technical viewpoint. But would it really encourage good behaviour and foster a nice place? People sometimes like to engage especially with the things they oppose and comment on them. It would also be a massive filter-bubble. Algorithms confine people into small and similar-minded bubbles, not a diverse and realistic and stimulating world. I think it’s really difficult to find a delicate balance here, design choices that automatically push towards good behaviour and interesting engagement per default.

I completely agree on the admin stuff. Someone has to provide the computing power and take responsibility for what’s stored on their servers. And sometimes mistakes happen, things turn out bad or break. There are malicious people out there. Someone needs to have the power to fix things. I think that’s perfectly possible. Lots of platforms have succeded at that, there are people available, perfectly able to handle that responsibility. And ultimately, the whole internet is quite resilient and was designed with the idea of being a level playing-field and connect things and people.