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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  • @jwmgregory@lemmy.dbzer0.com I feel we found parts of your problem here. It might be the case that it’s not just the anti-AI party who stirs up this drama. If there’s anything to this, it might be worth investigating. At least it should be easier to talk to the own party than to people who antagonize you per se. That is - if there is something to “settle” here, which I don’t really know.



  • I feel there is a general sentiment to fight each other (online), right now. It is one of the current topics which get people riled up, but not the only one. Not that fighting, trolling and hating on something (or being stupid) is a new thing… All of that has a long tradition on the internet. But I think we need to think hard about what we envision this place to be… Or become. A nice place to talk and maybe have an argument every now and then? Or a place where extreme opinions are very loud and drown out constructive discussions and push people to the side… And I think we need to be super careful once the hate turns not just against things, but people. Most of this is not healthy, neither for the individual users, nor for this online-space. And these storms in a bottle don’t create anything and they change nothing about the world. It’s just making everyone miserable once it dominates the atmosphere.

    (And I don’t think we need to discuss the facts, or what AI is and what it does. From my experience, nobody listens to that or is interested in facts. That’s not what the confrontation is about… Or at least people have a predetermined stance anyway and arguing facts does nothing to settle this.)

    Edit: But the example you gave serves other “controversial” topics as well… I’m not really surprised that it’s people with strong oppinions who gather there. And then it’s a meme and the entire community advertises with shitposting and being anti-imperialist. So I’d say that one specific post had it coming. And both sides are argumentative and escalate.


  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.detoLinux@lemmy.worldGithub- I don't get it!
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    11 hours ago

    Technically, a project can upload all kinds of files there. But the main point is use for development purposes. Developers share the resources and program code there and use it to collaborate. It’s often not aimed at the end-user.

    If you’re lucky, you’ll find a link to the project website either in the README further down, or in the description at the right, close to the top. That website is usually meant for the general public. Some projects also release binaries / executable files. It’s also on the right in the “About” description or if you click on “Tags” and then “Releases”.

    Other than that, a lot of open source projects don’t provide executable files. You’ll have to install it with the package manager of your Linux distribution, or follow the instructions to build it yourself.



  • I think I’d rather do something constructive than in-fight on the Fediverse. Sure, Lemmy isn’t perfect. Not at all. I’d say love it for creating this online-space and pioneering the threaded conversations to some degree, hate the bad things about it. But don’t make this about hate itself or fighting. Instead, focus on constructivism and to create something positive. Focusing on the negativity (and even attracting such people by naming things a certain way) isn’t a good approach for that, if you ask me. I think it’s the wrong way of thinking. I mean this also needs to be discussed somewhere… But be careful with this. We have enough negativity on the internet. And this isn’t the idea behind Piefed.



  • 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.