It more sounds like “If you liked Baldur’s Gate 3, you should read this article… very very please” to me. 😂

I’m glad the title is not true, though. I do love Baldur’s Gate 3, but Lost Mine of Phandelver was the first campaign I DM’d, it would have been a bit heartbreaking to me if The Shattered Obelisk was just a remake capitalizing on BG3 with a few references here and there. Phandalin deserves a full campaign, properly crafted. :)

Take back the control on your data, that’s the whole point… :) Where are you regularly saving data? Those are the prime candidates. Look at self-hosted alternatives for those services. I know big webapps hosted in docker containers managed by kubernetes is all the rage around here, but you can often find Unix style equivalent for such services, the main advantage of putting it on a server being to be able to access it from multiple devices. But you do you, if you prefer hosting big webapps, that’s fine too. :)

I organize my crontab by having group of tasks (the programs, the holidays, the housecleaning, etc). And of those groups, the events (the non recurring tasks) come last. So I just list the crontab (crontab -l) and the list of things to come print to the screen, that block being at the end of the file. It’s hard to do better than a text file to list things. :)

I don’t know if there is a program that lists like “what is coming this month” if you really want to filter out the rest, but it should be easy enough to write, given the format of cron rules:

crontab -l | grep '*' | awk '{print $4 "," $3 "," $2 "," $1 " " $0 }' | sort -n | grep -E "^$(date '+%-m')"

• crontab -l : list the crontab
• grep '*' : keeps only rules (removing blank lines and comments)
• awk […] : print the whole line ($0), prepend by the 4th field (the month), the 3rd (the day), the 2nd (the hour) and the 1st (the minutes)
• sort -n : sort everything numerically, so that all tasks are now in their execution date order (I made awk seperate the fields with a , character so it keeps sorting numerically past the first number)
• date '+%-m : prints the current month, not zero padded (thanks to the ‘-’)
• grep -E '^date' : keep only lines which starts with the current month number

You put that in a script (like ~/bin/upcoming_events) and you’re done. And then, you can call it from cron every monday get what’s coming next mailed to you. :)

This could but refined further to display dates in a more friendly format. But as usual, Unix is your friend. :)

I’m going to pass for the crazy person around, but so be it : cron.

Cron can be easily configured to send mails (MAILTO variable when using standard cron), provided sendmail is available on the system. If a command called by cron outputs anything, it will send a mail with the content, which is useful by itself to warn when something goes wrong with a cron task, but also allows to do things like this:

0 9 28 9 * echo birthday John

It’s really easy to get used to the syntax, it’s just going from more precise to less precise, so it’s “minute, hour, day, month, *”. The last one can usually be ignored (it’s the day of the week, I must have used it twice in my life). So here, “0 9 28 9”, you read it backward and it gives : September, 28th, 9:00. Piece of cake when you get a bit of practice. And cron is everywhere, so no need to install anything. Although, since I run it on my laptop, I use fcron, which has a nice feature to run ASAP tasks which should have ran if the computer was not shut down. This way, I never miss an alert.

I use it for recurring notes (like birthday, paperwork, house cleaning tasks, holidays, etc), but also as reminders of specific dates when I expect a delivery, have a meeting, etc. For the most important messages, I make it use a script that will make a destkop notification (with notify-send) and have a voice read the message (with mimic). And of course, I also use it to actually launch programs. :)

2033 is maybe a bit too far for me. :P Here one for 2027 : “Y (previously known as Reddit) finally shuts down after failing its pivot to b2b AGI support board. CEO says the world doesn’t deserve Y anyway.”

Bluesky already implemented that

Oh really? Awesome. I’m still not going to use a generalist social network, but they’re doing it right. :)

although most users will just stick to the default one

Yeah, indeed. My taste for tinkering may be showing, I should acknowledge it’s not something widespread. 😅

I would one up that suggestion : what could be awesome would be to allow users to choose which sorting algorithm they use, and possibly tweak it. This would allow people to share the sorting logic they like, and there would be no trust issue, since you can verify the logic is respected by changing it.

Not sure how realistic this proposal is, though, because this could lead to performance issues if users submit too complicated sorting logic, which could be exploited to DoS an instance. On the other hand, it could be solved with a timeout mechanism : “if your query takes more than 100 ms to load, we kill it”. And also, you can’t just let users run arbitrary SQL, obviously, so this would require to implement some sort of meta-language safely transpiled, this would be the real challenge.

I mean, as a DM you know you’re ready for acting when you maintain players immersed after one cast Speak with Plants.

In such a widespread usage, there would probably not be “the fediverse” anymore, but a galaxy of clusters of interconnected instances. Spam would be a serious problem, so instances would switch to whitelisting instances they want to federate with instead of just occasionally “defederating” from them. It would not only happen because of spam, by the way, but also because of political/cultural/ideological divergences. Maybe even because of laws.

There would be a boom of innovations, made possible because of the data openly accessible and the fact that we would finally have a standard on which to build upon to create third party applications (which, from a developer perspective, was the promise of the web-2.0 and its APIs, but never truly materialized). You would see alternative frontends for everything, and applications that allow to get new insights or use your data in new and smart ways.

The big businesses would still be around, by the way. They would open their own instances, publish lot of ads and add cool features found nowhere else so that most people join their instances, which would quickly become the go to instances for everyone, dwarving all other instances. We would spend a lot of time evangelizing so that people join smaller instances instead, but our folks would answer that it’s less convenient, they would have less easy to use features and their account is already at BigCo anyway. Plus, to fight spam, terrorism, child pornography, nazis or whatever is the scarecrow then, they would severely limit the possibility for small instances to interop with them, adding arbitrary technical barriers that most implementers won’t succeed in hoping. But we won’t care that much, because we will have our own alternative networks with more content on them than ever.

GitHub is a great platform, which has championed open-source for decades, now. I don’t think anybody has anything to blame them for (except people not liking the idea that AI is trained on their code, like sibling mentioned), it’s more about fears it may go bad. Because basically, it’s where most of the code of the world is hosted, it’s a single point of failure. People also have questioned the pertinence of having all open-source code hosted on a proprietary platform. And the acquisition by Microsoft also had a chilling effect on those of us who remember Internet Explorer 6’s Microsoft more than VSCode’s Microsoft.

For those reasons, it is desirable for those who love the idea of decentralization to look up for alternatives. But even there, it’s perfectly fine to stay on GitHub, “decentralizing” doesn’t require everybody to leave. :) Plus, even when using an other forge, it’s still good to keep publishing mirrors on GitHub for visibility and discoverability, currently.

Thanks for the link!

Interesting. I’ve been using ARM cores for low energy for so long that I haven’t bother to look if things were changing. :) How does it perform on the heat dissipation front? Because if it requires a fan, this should be included in the energy consumed.

I assume it’s a x86 CPU, being an intel processor? How does it manage to be as energy efficient as an ARM CPU? Or maybe it’s only when it’s idle?

Oh wow, thanks for that video, that was brilliant. :D

Indeed, if you had a teacher who made your class read Being and Nothingness without explaining phenomenology first, it feels like punishment or something. :) Not that Husserl and Heidegger are easier to read, but at least they don’t presuppose other readings to be understood. That being said, I kind of get it, existentialism can be seen as its own thing, especially in Sartre’s non-philosophy work (he wrote several novels and theater scripts). But not through Being and Nothingness. 😂

Oh, ok, your article sounded so close I thought it was inspired by it. :) It’s a very european thing, mostly developed in Germany and France. I have by blood with it, though. I’ve always been more interested in analytical philosophy so I didn’t like it. Which shouldn’t have been a problem, there are many schools of philosophy, right? Except I studied at a university where the philosophy department was specialized in it. Every day I was wondering what I was doing there. :) I actually consider it wasted my university years, so I’m probably not the good person to talk to you about it. 😅 (but your own articles stopped short of talking non-sense like phenomenology does in my opinion, so it was good to read, it’s like taking only the good parts of phenomenology ;) ). The main authors, if you want to know more, are Heidegger, Husserl and Sartre. A note of warning though that it’s very hard to read (well, at least if you have an analytical mind, I suspect it depends on people personality).

The same goes for your RPGs - they’re more than welcome if you feel they’re ready for public consumption

Oh, no, thanks. Actually, not being ready for public consumption is their whole point. :) I used to write (as an amateur) when I was younger, only to be confronted to a wall of indifference at each publication. So I was going back to it, doing my best, putting unreasonable amount of hours to make it likable, and still this indifference - in part because, I realized later, my folks just didn’t like reading anyway. But it turned out that trying to please people was a terrible experience. Nobody was having fun, including me. When I started playing my RPGs solo, the reason why I enjoyed it so much was because I put this simple rule : nobody will ever read it. From there, I don’t have to ask myself questions like “is it too long?”, “is it too short?”, “is it properly explained?”, “does the pace progress fast enough?”, etc. I’m just exploring and enjoying it. :) My oldest campaign (I play three different games) has a word count that would cover at least three novels, and it would be terribly boring to read, because of the slow moving pace, the returns to previous places that break the pace, the long sequences when there is just no narrative arc, the pages and pages of shopping narration, etc. And I don’t care, because it’s not meant to be read. :) I’m not writing, I’m exploring my imagination, spending just as much time I want where I want, with no regard to what makes an efficient story - or even just legible text, for the matter. It’s basically a videogame powered by imagination. :) The day I even consider it may be read, all of that collapses.

You’re welcome, if I did my part to fight online harassment, this is a good day. :) You should consider legal action, though, if you have laws against that in your country (I assume it’s most countries, nowadays?). The instance of this or those guys can be subpoenaed to provide their IP address, which then can be used to uncover their identity.

Thanks for the invitation, btw. The whole concept sounds fun. :) I enjoyed the article about imagination engine, it’s on the edge of phenomenology, but still keeping things rational (I have a history with phenomenology 😅). I have my own way of exploring my imagination (written solo RPGs, it’s basically how I spent my evenings), but I’ll have fun reading your content. :) Enjoy!

Oh, my bad, I have yet to get used to the fact that we’re having the same discussions over different apps. :)

If you can install custom stylesheets (some options are documented here), I’ve tested this rule to work for removing downvotes:

.vote__down { display: none !important; }

It will work only for you, though, not for other people on your forum (unless you’re an instance owner and can change the website stylesheets file).

An other rule to remove upvotes if you want to:

.vote__up { display: none !important; }

Hey Arotrios, sorry for what you have to go through. I imagine you already know that, but I think it’s worth reminding you : you can hide upvotes/downvotes in Lemmy’s preferences by unticking the “show scores” option. That way, stalking and serial downvoting is just wasting the abuser time and finger’s articulations. :) Honestly, rating everything people say is a toxic feature anyway, it’s both addictive and generating anxiety. I’m glad Lemmy allows to disable it, I’m way more at peace since I’ve done it.

It’s totally not crazy thinking. :) I think the main problem is that while Mastodon and Lemmy implement the server to server part of ActivityPub, they don’t implement the client to server part of the standard, and instead build their own REST API and client. This is why, while you can subscribe to actors from an other application, it looks bad : it’s supposed to be consumed in their own client, or something that tries to emulate it (that, and the fact that they each implement their own extensions to ActivityPub, it doesn’t help).

In a perfect world, ActivityPub based applications would implement the client to server part or the standard too, so that we have a multitude of third party clients that can consume data from any ActivityPub based application without looking broken. I certainly hope we go in this direction in the future, because interoperability looks half-baked, as it is right now, and the fediverse would be just more awesome with such upgrade.

Right. Gladly, you’re here to explain those masses of idiots who are having fun why they should not. You’re just being pedantic. And for the record, no, it doesn’t make you sound smart.