Gravity is not just attraction to the closest thing but also the heaviest thing.
As the galaxies “pass” each other, all stars will be attracted to the dense cores of each galaxy. That is going to change the trajectory of individual stars and, as an aggravate effect, the overall shape and distribution. Unless the galaxies are aligned on the same angle, this is going to drag stars off the primary plane.
As the galaxies approach, the arms will stretch out to each other. As they pass through each other, the planes will tug on each other, and after they “exit”, the arms will reach back.
All this new motion will disrupt the natural shape and trajectory of the galaxy as a whole. Depending on the momentum, it could get pulled back and the whole process could happen again ( and again ) with greater disorder each time.
Just an update because I just figured what happened: I booted the iso through Ventoy, and just saw today that by default Ventoy injects register entries to bypass the online account requirement (as well as the hardware checks). Good to know.
I've been buying these little boxes from AliExpress for years to use as firewalls and routers. My oldest one is almost 9 years old now! OpenBSD installs just fine. Just a BIOS tweak to always boot up after power is restored.
Openwrt works great for gigabit networks with simple firewall rules and no IPS. But used 10-56gbps enterprise equipment is getting pretty cheap, and more complicated firewall configurations need more powerful hardware than the typical openwrt router.
And 56gbps on a home LAN might be overkill, but that's not important.
After putting my account into "hibernation" for the past few weeks, I finally closed it. But I'm still looking for work. Thankfully I can still find positions (SRE and software dev) by just going directly to the company's site and finding a Jobs page.
Good luck to everyone else out there looking for work!
I agree that going fedi doesn't automatically solve the issues.
However, moving it away from a multi tiered paid platform (they really tailored it so they could do this) and controlling the bots/scam accounts would be a completely different experience.
I think fedi would at least solve the first one, and I'd expect would help controlling the second.
Normally you use a separate AP to do that. BSDs don't normally have good support for WiFi cards. Consumer WiFi cards aren't really meant for use as APs anyway.
@fediverse Fediverse user growth jumped to ~50'000'000 users. What happened ?
The FediDB Fediverse User Growth graph shows a significant jump in user count in February. Software distribution is also 81% other, and the biggest server is fediverse.hanbitgaram.com with 39 million users ! What happened ? https://fedidb.org/
Essentially, their tiny bug brains think the light is the sunset, so they keep turning to keep the "sun" at the same angle so they can go "straight." No matter how far they fly, they don't make any progress. They are trapped in this little hell we made just for them, not understanding why they can't get to where they are going.
So I'm currently toying around with NeoCities, and decided to trial it by building your classic mid '90s Geocities/Tripod/Angelfire pastiche website.
Some of the most important elements are already in place.
Tile background? Large font? Heading in bright pink with a shadow? Unusual colour choices? Random cat gifs? Under construction gif? Check! Check! Check!
In the true spirit of the '90s DIY web, some more pages (including the links page) are coming soon.
(I'm thinking of adding a page dedicated to either Britney or a nu-metal band.)
My only question is about whether drop shadows on text was prominent. I’m having trouble remembering how that effect would have been accomplished in the 90s, since I don’t think CSS got it until later. Would it have been something on the <font> tag only supported in Internet Explorer?
@ajsadauskas@neil@asklemmy As for chat, probably the best way to do that today is to use Web Sockets but style it to look like frames or a Java applet on the page.
Yeah the amount of good ai can do for the world is staggering, even just giving a speed boost and quality improvement to open source Devs will unlock a lot of new potential.
The problem is people in a certain age bracket often fear change because they feel they've put effort into learning how things work and if things change then all that effort will be worthless.
It doesn't really matter though, gangs of idiots literally smashed the prototype looms when they were demonstrated because despite the cost of cloth being one of the major factors in poverty at the time a handful of people took it on themselves to fight to maintain the status quo -- of course we know how it turned out, the same that it always does...
Areas that resisted technological and social growth stagnated and got displaced by those which welcomed it
What have I done?! My abomination of an idea of bridging my email and
ActivityPub progresses. If you see this message, something is working!
Comments replies are welcome as it's a good test of this system :)
People keep saying ActivityPub is a lot like email. If it's so similar
to email, could I use my email client to interact with the fediverse?
Previously I did this by writing a SMTP interface to the Mastodon HTTP
API. That worked. But as we probably know, the fediverse is not
Mastodon; it's really ActivityPub. The real deal would be working
with ActivityPub directly, not the Mastodon HTTP API.
And that's now (mostly?) working! In shonky diagram form, sending
looks like this:
There's still a lot of bugs (of course) and unimplemented bits (of
course). I can't call this a proper fediverse service yet. I'm going
to roll with this for a bit and see how it holds up.
I guess the mods didn't find this very funny, since they nuked it. Disappointing, because I was able to read it through the magic of caching and it made me crack up laughing
Amazon isn't doing this, their sellers are. What this shows is how full Amazon's product listings are with counterfeits sold by lazy scammers from China. Don't trust Amazon for anything.
It's going to hurt, this century and even this half century.
The population is in massive overshoot beyond planetary carrying capacity (i.e., its resources that we find useful/necessary and their natural rate of self renewal) by anywhere from 8:1 to perhaps 10:1.
For anything even remotely resembling a smoother landing in the inevitable population decline (i.e., a slower and more just+equitable process involving more natural attrition and less war, murder, famine, and pestilence) the humans currently enjoying the highest levels of technology/development/lifestyle would need to cut their consumption by 80-90 percent -- they would need to start living as if it were (perhaps, approximately) the 1700s. This would need to be phased in both very soon and very rapidly.
Of course, those same population groups also have (for the time being, at least) the resources and might to resist that needed reduction by whatever means they can, including war and/or creation of closed enclaves that no longer allow immigration or participate in many forms of external trade. While blaming almost anything and anyone other than the real mechanics (simply massive and growing resource deficit relative to population) of what's going on.
It's just going to suck, this time ahead. We who are alive now have to bring this situation home and lay it to rest in the least awful ways we can, and we are rapidly growing very constrained in terms of remaining options.
In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?
Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.
These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.
Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.
Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.
Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.
(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)
By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.
Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.
And for a time, it worked.
But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.
And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.
My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?
Do we really want to search every single website on the web?
Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?
Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?
At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?
And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?
"Bullshit is 'any utterance produced where a speaker has indifference towards the truth of the utterance'. That explanation, in turn, is divided into two "species": hard bullshit, which occurs when there is an agenda to mislead, or soft bullshit, which is uttered without agenda.
"ChatGPT is at minimum a soft bullshitter or a bullshit machine, because if it is not an agent then it can neither hold any attitudes towards truth nor towards deceiving hearers about its (or, perhaps more properly, its users') agenda."
It remains to be seen if we can ever climb the Slope of Enlightenment and arrive at reasonable expectations and uses for LLMs. I personally believe it's possible, but we need to get vendors and managers to stop trying to sprinkle "AI" in everything like some goddamn Good Idea Fairy. LLMs are good for providing answers to well defined problems which can be answered with existing documentation. When the problem is poorly defined and/or the answer isn't as well documented or has a lot of nuance, they then do a spectacular job of generating bullshit.
@ajsadauskas@mxtiffanyleigh@technology Calling them "hallucinations" is the ultimate bullshittery. They are predicting machines. They lack the wherewithal to hallucinate! And GOD are they bullshit vehicles, and the bullshit merchants trying to peddle them to us are hoping for a HUGE payout. Let's deny it to them. This is how corporate greed devours the world. They promise you a pretty toy, but if you use it, the world is set on fire. You don't see the fire. Till it consumes YOU.
Noob question, how's the lag? Playing games like Sekiro for example locally on my desktop, I can't even use a shitty controller as it comes with high latency. I imagine a solution with a game hosted in a remote server would even suffer more than just a laggy controller.
My real worry with Google's voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.
Through YT, for the past 15 years, the world has basically entrusted Google to be the custodian of pretty much our entire global video archive.
There's countless hours of archived footage — news reports, political speeches, historical events, documentaries, indie films, academic lectures, conference presentations, rare recordings, concert footage, obscure music — where the best or only copy is now held by Google through YouTube.
So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?
Early 4chan -- before it's spectacular decay -- was quite conscious where it's memory resided -- in users.
You'd have to understand the peculiar software architecture to know why, but 4chan has no ability to preserve posts. When a thread maxes out it is deleted.
The /y/ and other board's user's were openly conscious that the communities memories were their responsibility, maintained by reposting older material, simply because the code didn't support anything else. But the result was real community and collective memory, explicitly maintained. Though conjured up by a teenage programmer there's much profundity in there, accidental or otherwise. (I suspect the former but having talked to him at a conference once he was at least aware of it after.)
@ajsadauskas@pluralistic@technology@fanf that is why @brewsterkahle created https://archive.org -- support them so we can keep an archive of important things, otherwise commercial companies will restrict and control the information in the future, and those who write the last are the real winners...