TheHobbyist

@TheHobbyist@lemmy.zip

Just a stranger trying things.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

TheHobbyist ,

He is linking to a specific panel, with a given resolution and thus aspect ratio.

Am I the only one preferring low quality media over high quality one?

I have a very slow Internet connection (5 Mbps down, and even less for upload). Given that, I always download movies at 720p, since they have low file size, which means I can download them more quickly. Also, I don't notice much of a difference between 1080p and 720p. As for 4K, because I don't have a screen that can display 4K,...

TheHobbyist ,

To be fair, resolution is not enough to measure quality. The bitrate plays a huge role. You can have a high resolution video looking worse than a lower resolution one if the lower one has a higher bitrate.
In general, many videos online claim to be 1080p but still look like garbage because of the low bitrate (e.g. like on YouTube or so). If you go for a high bitrate video, you should be able to tell pretty easily, the hair, the fabric, the skin details, the grass, everything can be noticeably sharper and crisper.

Edit: so yeah, I agree with you, because often they are both of low bitrate...

TheHobbyist ,

Exactly, this is about compression. Just imagine a full HD image, 1920x1080, with 8 bits of colors for each of the 3 RGB channels. That would lead to 1920x1080x8x3 = 49 766 400 bits, or roughly 50Mb (or roughly 6MB). This is uncompressed. Now imagine a video, at 24 frames per second (typical for movies), that's almost 1200 Mb/second. For a 1h30 movie, that would be an immense amount of storage, just compute it :)

To solve this, movies are compressed (encoded). There are two types, lossless (where the information is exact and no quality loss is resulted) and lossy (where quality is degraded). It is common to use lossy compression because it is what leads to the most storage savings. For a given compression algorithms, the less bandwidth you allow the algorithm, the more it has to sacrifice video quality to meet your requirements. And this is what bitrate is referring to.

Of note: different compression algorithms are more or less effective at storing data within the same file size. AV1 for instance, will allow for significantly higher video quality than h264, at the same file size (or bitrate).

TheHobbyist ,

Title mixed up Wayland and Nvidia :) I don't think you typically get a new GPU assigned on the fly as you select one window manager over another :D

TheHobbyist OP ,

I don't know if the content is of particular interest to everyone, but I did want to follow the topic as it was a source of disagreement between FUTO and Rossman and I wanted to see whether they had come to terms.

Do you have a copy of the now deleted/removed video, or are you referring to a videoviseo which is now publicly available?
If it is now publicly available, is it at the same link as my edited original post or something else? Thanks!

TheHobbyist ,

Perhaps it would be worth checking with the !homelab community and see if they have any advice? They are more likely to have dealt with such situations, by nature.

TheHobbyist ,

Never thought I'd welcome DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) with open arms and a tear in my eye.

Introducing a new RISC-V Mainboard from DeepComputing ( frame.work )

We’re excited to share a preview of a Framework Laptop 13 Mainboard with a new CPU architecture today, and it’s probably not the one you think it is. The team at DeepComputing has built the first ever partner-developed Mainboard, and it uses a RISC-V processor! This is a huge milestone both for expanding the breadth of the...

GIF
TheHobbyist ,

I'm not gonna lie, I was caught initially in thinking this was going to be a Snapdragon based mainboard, but this is great news nonetheless!

TheHobbyist ,

An equalizer does not have to sum up to any specific number. Each frequency range is basically being amplified or attenuated individually. You are boosting or reducing specific frequency ranges. If you reduce them all equally, then the end result is that your song is lower volume. If you boost them all, your song is louder.

Of note: boosting songs may cause occasional crackling sounds. If this is the case it is because the boosting is clipping the top end of the amplitude of your signal at various frequencies. So boost moderately. You are better off reducing some frequencies and leaving the rest normal and increase the volume of the source to compensate whenever possible.

TheHobbyist ,

I feel that the questions around community and integration should not depend on the gender selection in question 2, imo.

TheHobbyist ,

I'm not disagreeing, but the poll prevents reporting a bad community experience of you select "male" as gender.

TheHobbyist ,

I think these questions may be, depending on the context, but I'm willing to assume that these are not intended to be. If they come from a legitimate wish to better understand the community without prejudice, then these questions are acceptable to me. It's also a standalone poll, self reported and with no tie to any identity.

But maybe I'm unique in thinking that these questions may have circumstances in which they are acceptable?

TheHobbyist ,

As Mozilla, you probably don't have much choice. What's the alternative? Get yourself banned? How is that better? At least this way, locals can use Firefox despite not having access to those extensions. And people find clever ways to get those extensions anyway, so it's the lesser evil I guess?

TheHobbyist ,

Why? Do Russians not deserve a good browser?

TheHobbyist ,

I'm sorry, I don't have any specific suggestions for you, but I am wondering: is there no open source app you yourself wish existed because you would need it?

Working on an open source app because some else (and not you) needs it, is not a good way of staying engaged and caring about the solution. Being the user and target of a project yourself is usually a much netter way of caring and proposing something tailored to at least one individual, maybe more.

Of course, if you are looking for a programming exercise, go for it, but then you don't need ideas, you can reimplement something which already exists, perhaps which you like, but in your own way. But if you want to have an impact in the open source, it starts by needing something which you don't really find anywhere and taking matter in your own hands to fix it :) this is not meant to disincentivize you, quite the opposite! I hope you stay attentive to your digital ecosystem to see which holes can be plugged :)

I maintain a private list of ideas I just think of as I go about my day, of things I would like to write/create for myself and while I won't be going through with all of them, I hope to be able to pick up one or several of them whenever I have time. I can through some ideas here, not as a hint that you should do it (I'll probably do them myself regardless), but just to inspire you, maybe:

  • I am subscribed to a teachable program which has no app and the program is just static information. I want to pull it all and represent it to me offline, not requiring internet to manage my progress. It is also intended to help me archive what I paid for and not depend on the goodwill of teachables to allow me to continue access the resource.
  • an RSS feed manager which uses embeddings to automatically organise the content by topic rather than by source.
  • an anki plugin to highlight content in the browser based on words from anki that I have and have not learned, to improve my language learning and reading ability.

I have a few more, but this should give you some hints, I hope!
Good luck!

TheHobbyist ,

Is that a resolution which is proposed elsewhere? Sounds very unique to me. Or did you mean 1920x1200?

TheHobbyist ,

I see. In that case a 1920x1200 display with an adjusted frame might be enough? The top and bottom would just need to be slightly thicker to bridge the gap of the missing 80 vertical pixels? Just a thought, not important at all :)

TheHobbyist ,

My personal experience with Linux over the past few years has drastically changed from before being limited by how few games work on Linux when many tools do a decent job, to almost all games running thanks to proton and being limited to some windows specific tools not existing/working on Linux (mostly adobe suite). I'm really in awe how much the Linux ecosystem has improved over the last few years. I'm daily driving it with so few roadblocks for day-to-day use that unless there is a specific program required for work, there's no hurdles for the majority of my tasks.

TheHobbyist ,

4 years in can still be a bit early for a startup to have to prove profitability before deciding on its fate. I'm willing to give it up to 10 years but where it would ideally show an iterative improvement up to that point with regular loss reduction over time. 4 years should give some sense on whether profitability is reachable I think, though I'm not financial analyst so my words are just a stranger's two cents.

TheHobbyist ,

The phone industry is very competitive and I don't know if there is enough for framework to compromise with to make modular/user repairable phones both viable as a business model and a distinguishing factor. I hope to be proven wrong by all means!

TheHobbyist ,

Me too, either the expansion bay or the inside PCB format (for other outer form factors?)

TheHobbyist ,

In this kind of debate, to people refer to tabs as actually entering the tab character, or to the use of tabs involving immediate replacement with a specified number of spaces?

For instance vscode allows the usage of the tab butting to enter 2 or 4 spaces when pressed, would that be considered tab or spaces?

TheHobbyist OP , (edited )

You're right, but the model is also not quantized so is likely to be in 16bit floats. If you quantize it you can get substantially smaller models which run faster though may be somewhat less accurate.

Knowing that the 4 bit quantized 8x7B model gets downscaled to 4.1GB, this might be roughly 3 times larger? So maybe 12GB? Let's see.

Edit: sorry those numbers were for Mistral 7B, not mixtral. For Mixtral, the quantized model size is 26GB (4 bits), so triple that would be roughly 78 GB. Luckily, being an MoE, not all of it has to be loaded simultaneously to the GPU.

From what I recall, it only uses 13B parameters at once, so if we compare that to codellama 13B, quantized to 4 bits, that is 7.4GB, so triple that would be 22GB, so would require a 24GB GPU. Someone double check if I misunderstood something.

24GB GPUs include the AMD 7900 XTX and the nvidia RTX 4090 (Ti), non-mobile.

TheHobbyist ,

Are there any instructions to follow?

TheHobbyist ,
  1. There is no GrapheneOS account.
  2. GrapheneOS has some built in apps, namely for SMS, gallery viewer, camera, PDF reader, calculator, contacts, files, phone and web browser (vanadium, based on chromium). GrapheneOS offers no cloud. You are responsible for using the service of your choice to manage and backup your data. It is currently undergoing a transition for backup management, but otherwise you can make use of a selfhosted service like nextcloud.
  3. GrapheneOS does come preinstalled with its own app store but that it is reserved to GrapheneOS apps and the distribution of certain google services which can be optionally installed using their sandbox. Besides that, you can indeed install the aurora store to get access to the free apps on the google play store, or actually use the google play store. They can all be installed and used simultaneously. Though you might want to be mindful of you install an app on one store to not update it on another as the two versions could work differently (e.g. an app installed on f-droid might have a different notification system than one on the google play store). You do not need to use nextcloud if you don't want to. GrapheneOS has no dependencies on any other additional app. It is a standalone OS. Once you install it, you use it however you want.

Edit: one key advantage of GrapheneOS is the possibility of using multiple users. You can (and I recommend it) separate apps into different user profiles. You can for instance dedicate one user profile to apps requiring Google services, let's call it Gapps. GrapheneOS then allows you to then pipe your notifications between user accounts, so if you are in your main user profile you can get notifications from apps running in Gapps in the background. Very convenient.

TheHobbyist ,

You are right. What I want to highlight was not that, but the notifications piping which is what makes the multi user profile interesting and usable for a single person, IMO. And that is what I think is unique to GrapheneOS. I did not express myself well in that regard, my bad.

What are you all doing for android "provisioning"?

Hi! I'm swapping my daily android phone for the nth time today and going through my set-up "check-list". As apps are updating/installing, I thought I'd check in with the hive-mind, what are you all doing to make the process easier? Maybe you know of a way to self-host some sort of android profile server? I'll post my process +...

TheHobbyist , (edited )

It's pretty new but if you are interested in degoogling and looking for ways to use android auto, there is apparently a working solution with GrapheneOS but I have not tested so can not verify it.

https://grapheneos.org/features#android-auto

Edit: typo

TheHobbyist ,

No clue about this instance but I'm pleased to see in general the business model where the code is all open source and support can be paid for. That would be a pretty fair business model for me as a (company) customer, assuming the product meets my needs.
One example of this is XCP-ng, a virtualization OS, competing against VMware, but all open source and with paid support. Great for homelabbers too

TheHobbyist ,

On this note, I feel it should be totally illegal to change the terms of services or user licensing agreement unilaterally and force a user to either accept the new tos (or ULA) or be forced to stop using the service.

You should have a third option being "let's keep the old terms of services"/ula

TheHobbyist OP ,

Thank you, your suggestion is exactly what I was after.

TheHobbyist ,

I am not convinced that Apple cares about user privacy the way we think it does. Rather, I am suspicious they are entering the advertisement business, requiring them to profile their users for the purpose of better advertisement capabilities, simultaneously preventing advertisement competitors from actually competing. The fact that it seems to provide better privacy to its users is the cherry on top.

The result is we now have privacy services by Apple such as Private relay (and even earlier, Apple Card) which give them a heap of information, in addition to the fact that they host their users emails and imessages (which even though is e2ee, allows for a great social graph) while their competitors had their hands cut off with Privacy nutrition labels and app tracking transparency (which doesn't apply the same way to apple or might even be irrelevant to them).

And they own the keyboard, the browser, the location tracking and many more features. In the end, it's in my opinion just a matter of time before they expand on their advertisement business. They are already doing advertisement in their online stores after all.

So yes, I'm suspicious and if we see anything with how Apple behaves in China (easily following all the rules by the government instead of standing up for their consumers who deserve privacy) and how they keep pushing malicious compliance in the EU to secure their turf, this should not be a surprise. If some people are idolising Apple for being a good company, I'm afraid to say, today's Apple is not the company from 20 years ago and also, this is not a surprise if pulling these actions make you rich: it is after all a profit driven company, responsible for generating profits to its shareholders.

TheHobbyist ,

You're right. I think we should mostly take the stance of "look what great progress we made" while also remembering "the fight isn't over, let's keep pushing!"

TheHobbyist ,

You are right and I would add that this is even a privacy and security measure, to make use of wildcard certificates. The reason is, those subdomains will be public because of websites like crt.sh which show all subdomains which have their dedicated certificate. Obfuscation can be helpful in not disclosing which are some services or naming schemes you use for yourself even if it is only meant to be for internal use.

TheHobbyist ,

Can you elaborate on why it is a bad security practice? It's the first time I'm reading about it and I'd like to read more about it. Thanks!

TheHobbyist ,

People could be using WhatsApp if they cared about it, but they chose signal for a reason. And making signal weaken its privacy for the purpose of reaching more people is against everything they stand for.

TheHobbyist ,

Former reddit user, deleted my accounts just a few weeks back, should I feel concern that my data may still be involved? I guess there would be no GDPR recourse for me anyway?

TheHobbyist ,

Yes, all content possible, before deleting my account.

TheHobbyist , (edited )

What does the yellow exclamation mark show? Any useful information in there?

TheHobbyist ,

Would you mind sharing the resource you used to resize the partition please? Thank you

EFF’s Street-Level Surveillance project shines a light on the surveillance technologies that law enforcement agencies routinely deploy in our communities ( sls.eff.org )

These resources are designed for advocacy organizations, journalists, defense attorneys, policymakers, and members of the public who often are not getting the straight story from police representatives or the vendors marketing this equipment....

TheHobbyist ,

Is the app still working? Doesn't seem to have been updated in 6 years

TheHobbyist ,

We Shouldn’t Have to Let Users enroll Service With a Click.
Customers may “misunderstand the consequences of enrolling,”

Sounds ridiculous? Because it is. Clicking the cancel or enroll button is pretty much what you expect... This is utter nonsense, obviously.

TheHobbyist ,

That sounds like saying "I was driving on the highway on the wrong side of the road and without seat belt and nothing happened to me. See? It was completely unnecessary to wear any seat belt and it was wrong to advocate for it!"

TheHobbyist ,

I dont know about patents, but you can check out https://www.semanticscholar.org/ which works well in my experience.

Polish Hackers Repaired Trains the Manufacturer Artificially Bricked. Now The Train Company Is Threatening Them ( www.404media.co )

The situation is a heavy machinery example of something that happens across most categories of electronics, from phones, laptops, health devices, and wearables to tractors and, apparently, trains. In this case, NEWAG, the manufacturer of the Impuls family of trains, put code in the train’s control systems that prevented them...

TheHobbyist ,

And allow selfhosting servers for (at least after) when the publisher/developer stops supporting the game.

TheHobbyist ,

What are you talking about? Google is not encrypting their emails, where did you get that info from?

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