IMO it had all the content and users some time ago. I follow mostly specific interest/hobby subreddits, but lately even they have devolved into illiterates asking the same exact questions repeatedly; some strange attention-seeking posts such as pictures captioned “getting started”/“this just arrived" or “what should I do with this thing that I got?”; and really dumb stuff such as “I inhaled solder fumes, will I get lead poisoning?” (These are at least entertaining in a way)
IMO Snikket (XMPP) is the easiest all-in-one solution with audio/video chat at the moment. Pretty good on resources too.
I currently host a Matrix Synapse server, but:
I ran prosody server and used Siskin IM as a client, it worked pretty well. But as others mentioned, since this is Apple, the client developer has to run a push server, no background processes and long-polling allowed. Some other XMPP clients (Secret Messenger I think) did not have that set up and do not have notifications.
IIRC this was partially elaborated on in Matrix 4, where
machines harness the psychological stress/torture of Neo and Trinity by putting them in a situation where their lives are entirely different, yet they occasionally interact and subconsciously remember each other.
It’s the Misery Nexus we were warned about.
Nice! Writing a similar converter was my first step when I set up my parallel site-capsule.
Love gemtext, it’s so simple yet pragmatic. (And there is just one version of it, unlike Markdown)
Those are called pivots, and what you are saying seems plausible: there are vision algorithms to recognize and selectively spray weeds (see Bilberry ), recent prototypes with light-pressure grabbers to gather fruits and soft vegetables.
Even for harvesters, there are projects to automate harvesting and swapping the grain trucks (see Outrun ). GPS-guided (or assisted) tractors are already a thing.
Agriculture has some interesting innovations, but it often gets bogged down in corporate acquisitions and monetization.
How good is LLM training data for a language spoken by less than 10 million people? Keep in mind that most of those people are probably multilingual (i.e. categorizing which language is which by person is harder), and language itself is similar to its neighbors. And then, again, terms.
I know someone who was a translator between two (less widely spoken) languages, and some specifics I recall from our conversations about work:
None of those would be addressed with LLMs. Small training set for language (and language being similar to a few others) is an issue. Anything technical or non-existing would be prone to hallucinations. And tone is difficult enough to convey through text to begin with, let alone with LLM translation.
Imgur had the social media element since mid-2010s at least, maybe longer.
Most useful was probably this holder for two 1/2in PEX pipes. Printed in ABS, it holds cold and hot pipes in parallel, and uses a #8 screw for attachment. All commercially available holders are for a single pipe, and use nails. Hammering nails in tight spaces (and doing so twice) is not particularly convenient for me, thus, this contraption was born.
Other than that, stuff that is so practical it is easily forgettable: wall mount for a garage door opener, Y splitter for an exhause fan, various covers and containers.
That’s one of the few subreddits that still has interesting stuff. I don’t care about benchies and shiny dragons.
If we can get food by going to the grocery store, who needs farms?
The complaints I see about custom OS the most:
Seeing lots of dislike for Matrix lately. Hosted a Synapse server for many years, never had issues with encryption keys, but have to agree that Element the company (formerly Vector, but they now control the protocol too?) rolls out more new things than they fix old ones. E.g: Element X is slower and calls are not backwards compatible (!). Synapse server keeps getting some (corporate-looking) auth stuff added while on-boarding and registration for plain accounts on self-hosted servers is still a pain. To give them credit, Element app is consistent across platforms (for purposes of convincing people and troubleshooting), and bridges work pretty well.
But it seems any self-hosted solution has its can of worms.
XMPP, being old, implements all modern-expected functionality as extensions, and servers are not guaranteed to have them (common argument). Spam was an issue as well (but simplicity of the on-device and server database allows easy message and attachment deletions). iOS clients for XMPP are meh and require integration with Apple push servers (Snikket and Monal do that, but for how long?)
Tried SimpleX years ago, loved the idea, but it was going through growing pains. In the same vein as metadata leaks for Matrix and XMPP, if you host your own SMP server with a few users, that exposes some info vs using default servers (along with thousands users)
The ones I know of are not really masquerading, but rather, funding themselves and/or directly related services (often hosting) via convenient ways.
What I do dislike is companies overusing “Open” or “Free” in their own or their product names, with no implication of Free or Open Source software. Similar to slapping “engineer” on non-engineering roles or “manager” on non-managerial ones.
That is also the premise of one of the stories in Asimov’s I, Robot. Human operator did not say the command with enough emphasis, so the robot went did something incredibly stupid.
Those stories did not age well… Or now I guess they did?
What specific version/feature fragmentation and clients are you referring to? As is common now, newer Synapse drops support for older Postgres (for example). Voice and video calls is the only feature that I can think of that is half-assed in Element/ElementX or not implemented in some clients.
Otherwise, Element, Element X, FluffyChat, Fractal, freaking Cinny on Ubuntu Touch (!), and terminal-based gomuks all support basic functionality, DMs, rooms, encryption, and attachments.
You can interact with Matrix server through basic curl commands… and I thought the documentation was pretty good. There are plenty of third-party clients.
Sure, E2EE, keys and cross-signing is not trivial, but I don’t know where it is.
Yeah, after seeing plenty of “quirky”/“edgy”/“ironic” culture in 2010s, and given the absurdity of current world and tech leaders, I cannot tell if something like this is genuinely delusional or just satire.