A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.

I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2021

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  • You’ll find a different prevailing mood in different communities here on Lemmy. The people in the technology community (the example you gave) are fed up with talking about AI all day, each day. They’d like to talk about other technology at times and that skews the mood. At least that’s what I’ve heard some time ago… Go to a different community and discuss AI there and you’ll find it’s a different sentiment and audience there. (And in my opinion it’s the right thing to do anyway. Why discuss everything in this community, and not in the ones dedicated to the topic?)





  • I’m sorry, I’m currently in the process of setting up the Zed editor, since that one claims to have been designed with AI in mind. But I doubt that will teach electronics to ChatGPT or AIstudio. I already provided it with all the relevant snippets from Espressif’s Programming Guide (via the webinterface), so it knows how to access the correct peripherals. I even hand-picked which one to use and discussed with the AI, why that is. Still the resulting code isn’t combining it with the other specific requirements I have, but more some straightforward stepper motor example code. But that’s not what I want. And I’m not really sure what do do here. Do I need to feed it the hundreds of pages about the silicone as well, and some good books on electronics and microcontroller programming and why and how we use the peripherals on them? (And combining them was the specific task I wanted to use AI for, so I can’t feed that in, or I’d do everything myself.)

    And what I’ve also seen it do is bullshit me with the memory allocation. It will sometimes home in on C++ programming. But more how we do it on computers. I specifically instruct it to avoid dynamic allocation, but it’s super generous with everything and do it nonetheless. Then I tell it it the data structure is on the heap, and it says sorry and it’s going to fix that… Changes around the data structure and it again ends up on the heap. But I can’t use it that way for a library. This will work on an ESP32, but not on other microcontrollers. And you can’t just be very generous with everything on resource-constrained systems like a microcontroller.

    And in the third example I tried to make it do some more involved maths, with the same stepper motors I got from a broken 3D printer. I thought I’d build a robot arm and have AI do the kinematics. And then also the inverse kinematics and use vectors for that. And it’s been a while, so likely things have improved a bit since a few months ago. But back then it failed miserably at doing the maths. It could recite the Wikipedia article on what inverse kinematics is. But that was pretty much it. It had zero abilities to apply or understand the maths behind it… It was however capable of coding a nice 3D JavaScript visualization in the browser on how it failed and the angles and positions would look like in that imaginary robot arm. I had to assist a bit and fix several mistakes. But that was something that worked.

    I’m not really sure what you’re trying to tell me. Prompting these AI tools is a bit hard. And I frequently make mistakes. But I’m willing to learn. It’s just that my experience shows it’s somewhere between copying code from Stackoverflow like we used to do. And AI has the added benefit of being able to tie it into things and at the same time also write the boiler plate code around it. But I don’t think it’s super clever. I just see it struggle a lot with any more advanced programming concept, maths, electronics… That doesn’t mean it’s useless or can’t do other (easier) things. But I thought it had ingested some books on programming already and I don’t need to teach it for example what dynamic memory allocation is, and why we avoid it at times? But without that knowledge you just can’t go far from the usual blink LEDs and beginner examples. And I’m not sure whether the editor or webinterface is at fault here.

    Edit: I’m pretty sure just downvoting me won’t get a discussion going. We might not share the same perspective, that’s why I gave an outline of mine. But are you interested in learning something, or do you just want to push your uninformed opinion?


  • A bit weird that we write articles on how ChatGPT did something and it worked (for once). I also had some success with some use cases. Not so much with others. For example it can code JavaScript and write nice boilerplate, example clicker games and some colorful demos. It’s not so good at programming Arduino microcontrollers… Granted, patching binaries and BIOS files is a bit of a weird one. I wouldn’t have expected it do something useful there.


  • I run Windows software such as games with Proton, I used Wine before. The frontend to launch it doesn’t matter a lot to me. Lutris, Bottles, Steam… they mostly all work. But honestly, I don’t pirate many games these days. I’m more for older games and since we got Steam sales and Humble Bundles, I get a lot of them there. At least the Windows games. I haven’t found a legal source for old console games, but we have a lot of emulators for N64, PSP, Arcade machines … as well. And great frontends like Emulationstation.



  • Try finding out if it received an IP address, if the driver is loaded or if there are any error messages in dmesg. You might also want to give more information. Which ethernet card? Which version of Linux are you running? And there seem to be some similar reports on Reddit and in some Linux forums. I couldn’t find a solution, though. Maybe you just want to buy a cheap new network card.



  • Sure, I have an old PC with an energy efficient mainboard and a PicoPSU and I wouldn’t want anything else. I believe it does somewhere around 20W-25W though. And I have lots of RAM, a decent (old) CPU and enough SATA ports… Well, I would go for a newer PC, they get more energy efficient all the time… But it’s a lot of effort to pick the components unless some PC magazine writes something or someone has a blog with recommendations.


  • You’ll want to look up the QNAP as well. I’ve seen reports with quite some variety on the power consumption. Depending on the exact model, it could be somewhere in the range from 25W to 55W… So could be less, could be the same. And have a look at the amount of RAM if you want to run services on it.



  • I think Radicale, Baikal, SabreDAV or NextCloud are the most common choices. I read those names a lot.
    But I believe only one of those isn’t written in PHP.

    I’d really recommend digging into the “hacking” though. Unless you learn from your specific mistakes and avoid that in the future, you might run in to the exact same issue again. And I mean it could be a security flaw in the program code of the WebDAV server. But it could as well be a few dozen other reasons why your server wasn’t secure… (Missing updates, insecure passwords, missing fail2ban, a webserver or reverse proxy, unrelated other software… There are a lot of moving gears in a webserver and lots of things to consider.)


  • I don’t think this is a clever take on it. Why shouldn’t we be able to tackle it? I mean sure, it can’t go 100% away. But we might be able to improve substantially from where we’re now. Maybe to the point where it’s 95% correct, and that’s good enough for us? I don’t see a reason why it has to stay like now, where ChatGPT “invents” facts or misses the point with the majority of tasks I hand to it.

    And I think a few claims in the article are plain wrong. We know for example that it can memorize stuff. And it (LLMs) can generalize and form some “concepts” behind the words. That’s why we do machine learning the way we do it now, and don’t use markov chains for a chatbot any more.


  • I can’t remember the exact details, but I believe the attackers also targeted instances? So it’s not just that it happens with certain problematic instances, but everyone could have that uploaded to their media storage. And it can come from arbitrary places. I believe that adds to the problem. And it kind of requires to shut these things down for everyone. Or at least everyone except a few excellent hand-picked instances who cooperate closely, and the moderation tools actually work.

    Yes, they’ve done an excellent job. I just wish they wouldn’t have to deal with these things.

    (And I also think some of the child protection agencies should finally offer some open-source tool to scan content. Afaik there are still no image classifiers or hash tables I could use for my projects.)