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Internet forums are disappearing because now it's all Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.
  • I feel like we need a better model. Reddits/Lemmys algorithm makes long conversations impossible and forums make long conversations dominate and this causes a lot of additional disruption. There has to be a design that meets a middle ground that can take over which better represents both the ephemeral nature of news and article discussion while also supporting a number of long standing more detailed discussions which expel low effort content.

  • Anyone using OSMC
  • Over the years I have used OSMC for my TV. I have never used it for streaming however always internal across the network streaming of my own content. It worked reasonably well for the most part although I have had issues with Samba in recent versions and have stopped using it. I can't say much about its streaming, mostly for that you need a supported android or similar device rather than an open source one.

  • Longi claims world record-breaking 34.6% efficiency for perovskite-silicon tandem solar cell
  • The main issue is with longevity, once they solve that, I am hopeful they will then this will dominate the Solar market completely and replace all the Silicon based single band gap panels. Even someone with relatively recent panels of 20-22% would benefit a lot from 35% panels, that is a lot of extra power in the same space.

  • [Question] Using DD to make a backup of an OS drive?
  • I have done this a few times, so long as the drive isn't mounted it works fine.

    One advantage of this approach compared to clonezilla is you can pipe it through netcat or similar and move it to another machine. You can also first pipe it through gzip as well to save on the transfer bytes a bit as well and then on the other end just store the compressed image or unzip it. Combine a few tools together and you have quite a lot of capability for complete image backups but its usually best done for the boot drives from a live USB.

  • Networking Gear Recommendations? (starting from scratch)
  • Ideally for your router you want something that runs an open source firmware (OpenWRT, DD-WRT, OPNSense, FreshTomato). Its better because you get a completely unlocked everything you need system with security patches for the hardware's true lifetime. Every router company stops with the security updates after a few years and then at some point it becomes part of a bot net or one of this mass hack events. Its best not to play in that game and instead run some open source firmware from the outset.

    The best way to start is to look at the website for openwrt.org and use their filtering to find a device that supports your needs (at least 5 LAN ethernet ports I guess and some wifi but AC sounds like it will do). The other option is a more typical 4 LAN port router which will give you a lot more options and then add a switch to that, doesn't sound like you care too much about it being managed or >1gbps so they are also dirt cheap.

  • Misunderstanding the harms of online misinformation
  • You only really get the choice between misinformed or uninformed, there is no option where you can be informed enough on the topics you need to know about.

    While they are right that misinformation in social media is causing a lot of the problem I think misinformation in the press is also driving people to seek information in social media. You can't have governments and the press repeatedly proven to be lying and have the population accept that version of reality they push. What replaces it is a variety of conspiracy theories, some are just genuine conspiracies but definitely not in the mainstream press. This second aspect the research is consistently ignoring and it matters because its a large part of what is driving people to conspiracy theories. Fake news is not about Trumpnews or theonion its about the mainstream media however much they try to deflect from it.

  • European elections: Centre left struggles to hold back surge from right
  • The rise of the far right is accelerating, fuelled by inequality. At the moment in the UK Right to far right are polling at 53% and 36%, actual left leaning parties just 6% and below. The swing to the right and far right especially is dramatic in the past 15 years.

  • Nearly half of journalists covering climate crisis globally received threats for their work
  • The refusal by governments and legal systems to pursue and jail corporate crime and corrupt politicians underpins a lot of the worlds problems today. Climate change has constantly had misinformation paid for in the press and then also suppression of real news and alas its not just climate change it applies to.

  • Are We in an AI Bubble?
  • Pretty much all technology goes through the same odd shape of adoption.

    https://www.infusedinnovations.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2020-10-10-at-8.46.48-AM-1.png

    What is often really hard to tell is where you are until your definitely in the trough of Disillusionment. We could be practically very early on the way up and human level or above AI is coming or near the peak of Inflated expectations and its about to crash down before finally finding a use that is less hype and more worthwhile. The regulation will certainly slow things down a bit towards the peak.

    I am not sure whether slightly better chat bots that still lie and image generators that do look reasonably good is the peak or just the beginning. Progress has been dramatic in the past years since invention but the cost of training is now immense and it requires a breakthrough to make big steps of improvement and I am not sure if we are going to make that. A lot of billionaire money riding on it.

  • It's been around a year since a lot of us quit Reddit, myself included. I'm happy with Lemmy, but I still feel a bit lost online since leaving the old site. Discussion?
  • Ultimately building a community involves posting content so that people subscribe and then end up adding their own content. Maybe there is some advertising you can do elsewhere to increase the flow a little but in essence its about making a place people go to look for new articles daily and they find it.

  • Small modular nuclear reactors get a reality check in new report
  • They are still going for big building size reactors that have site specific details even if the core is built in a "factory". This still doesn't scale well.

    I wonder if it can be economical to go smaller still and ship a reactor and power generation (TRG maybe or a small turbine) that then doesn't require much other than connecting wiring and plumbing and its encased in at least one security layer covered in sensors if something goes wrong its all contained. Then its just a single lorry with a box you wire in. That has a chance of being scalable and easy to deploy and I can't help but think there is a market for ~0.5-10 KW reactors if they can get the lowest end down to about $20,000, it would compete OK with solar and wind price wise.

    I suspect no one has bothered because the regulatory overhead means it has to be big enough to be worth it and like Wind power scales enormously with the size of the plant. But what I want is a tiny reactor in my basement, add a few batteries for dealing with the duck curve and you have something that will sit there producing power for 25 years and a contract for it be repaired and ultimately collected at end of life.

    You can sort of do this today using the Tritium glow sticks and solar cells but it doesn't last long enough and the price is not competitive. Going more directly to the band gap in a silicon or something else semi-conductive and a long lived nuclear material could maybe get a little closer price wise.

  • This is why GPU Drivers Might Not Matter [Hardware Canucks]

    This is a great look at a number of games over time from launch to months after launch benchmarking the patch releases as well as drivers. The end conclusion is the day 1 drivers that Nvidia/AMD/Intel produce are worth having and they improve performance and fix bugs but later drivers don't show as helping and the performance changes after that point are attributable to the game updates.

    What is wild is Baldur's Gate loosing a tonne of performance in a patch and has never recover its prior performance and it can't utilise the GPU at all well now but there are other games showing not just increases but degradation of performance as well.

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    Self-hosted YouTube downloader?
  • Metube is great and also has some browser plugins as well so it's as simple as right click and send to metube on a YouTube link. Wish there was one for android too but alas not yet that I have seen.

  • Nvidia will now make new AI chips every year
  • It doesn't really make much sense to go faster than silicon node changes unless there is a lot of optimisation on architecture that needs doing. Historically all these refreshes between nodes were largely pointless with small benefits and preparing them took development effort away from the big changes. It's progress in silicon that matters and brings the performance improvements and moving to a faster cadence hasn't historically worked out well.

  • Recommendations for cheap hardware upgrade
  • I don't think modern Raspberry pi's make much sense unless you are using GPIOs or really need the low power consumption. The 3 and the 4 were OK price wise but the pi 5 is quite close to all these N100 mini computers and they are a lot more performance and expansion compared to a raspberry pi 5 and still quite low power.

    Either a Topton or similar N100 based machine or a mini PC second hand is the way to go at the ~$100 mark. The mini PC will be faster and probably more expandable and cheaper but also more power consumption.

  • Tariffs on China aren't the way to win the EV arms race – getting serious on EVs is
  • There are mid Sodium Ion based EVs that do 150 miles and they are maybe $10k. Sodium Ion wont be able to get to the 300+ mile mark as they are heavier and bulkier and longer ranges will be dominated by li-ion and the upcoming almost solid state li-ion but that 150 miles covers a lot of peoples usual daily scenarios. The extra topping is the batteries last a lot more cycles too (6000) so after your car has long fallen apart you can use it in your home to buy cheaper night power or for solar storage.

  • Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production
  • Late last year they were talking about $40 for a KWH which compared very favourably to LifePO4 that was more like $130 at the time and Li-ion that was more like $200. However right now on alibaba you can get a 200Ah battery for about $60 and the LifePO4 300Ah are now down in the $50 range which is an incredible drop in the space of 6 months. So in practice they are less dense and more expensive but I think its new technology introduction pricing and at some point it should be about a third cheaper than LifePO4 for the same capacity, all be it a bit bigger and heavier and quite considerably cheaper than Li-ion for the same capacity.

    The small 18650 and other small sized cells have started appearing on aliexpress as well so its possible to get those too butt they are a lot more expensive than a basic Li-ion 18650 at the moment for a lot less capacity. I think its mostly the bigger cells that most people interested in Sodium Ion will be wanting (home battery and grid storage solutions and some of the low/mid range cars) more than small cells since typically the smaller stuff you want to maximise capacity even if it costs a bit more and most will want li-ion and ideally the newer nearly solid state li-ion that doubles capacity per KG.

  • Exporting YouTube Subscriptions to OPML and Watching via RSS
    www.wezm.net Exporting YouTube Subscriptions to OPML and Watching via RSS

    This post describes how I exported my 500+ YouTube subscriptions to an OPML file so that I could import them into my RSS reader. I go into fine detail about the scripts and tools I used. If you just want to see the end result the code is in this repository, which describes the steps needed to run it...

    This used to be a lot easier, Youtube had an export function to OPML and you could just import it.

    Its quite useful being able to follow all your Youtube channels with your RSS reader if you want to pick which you want to watch then also Metube and the browser plug-in makes it a right click and select to send it for download.

    5
    Pentium 4 – the CPU Intel got SO wrong
  • These early days of processors I was constantly upgrading between the companies. A Pentium to K6 to a PIII celeron to a Duron and then an Athlon XP and then a Pentium HT before finally the stable era arrived with the Core 2 duo and all the subsequent CPUs largely being small incremental upgrades at more or less the same clockspeed peak and lots of the performance coming from more cores. There was a lot of back and forth in price/performance and absolute performance as various innovations and pipline length increases and clockspeed were release. Things changed drastically in the 8 years we went from 100Mhz Pentiums through to the Core 2 Duos where both companies lead and trailed and you needed to upgrade your machine most years to keep up with modern games.

  • Leaked Task Manager image suggests Intel killing Windows XP-era hyperthreading on next gen
    www.neowin.net Leaked Task Manager image suggests Intel killing Windows XP-era hyperthreading on next gen

    Intel could be on the verge of bringing another major shift in its architectural design after going big.LITTLE hybrid route. The company is seemingly looking to Hyper-threading on the next-gen.

    Leaked Task Manager image suggests Intel killing Windows XP-era hyperthreading on next gen

    Task Manager of prototype Intel CPU shows Core and Logical processor count are the same at 8.

    This is still a relatively low end chip if its just 8 cores and a 13500 has 6 + 8 = 14 total so this is maybe a laptop processor. Hyperthreading probably doesn't make sense anymore.

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    Job titles of the future: Chief heat officer
    www.technologyreview.com Job titles of the future: Chief heat officer

    Miami’s public official is the first of her kind.

    Job titles of the future: Chief heat officer

    Florida’s Miami-Dade County hired a chief heat officer, Jane Gilbert—the first position of its kind in the world.

    3
    Ofgem energy price cap predicted to fall to £1,823 a year
    www.theguardian.com Ofgem energy price cap predicted to fall to £1,823 a year

    Bills likely to rise again from January and consumer groups say energy costs remain ‘dangerously high’

    Ofgem energy price cap predicted to fall to £1,823 a year

    I don't know if people are aware of the fact that you can see the wholesale price of energy but there are is a website that tracks it.

    https://energy-stats.uk/wholesale-energy-pricing/

    This clearly shows that wholesale energy prices this year have been lower than they were in 2021. Yet the price of electricity charged to people is much higher now than it was then.

    6
    Reddit undeleting comments and hiding them

    I came across today one of my own comments on Reddit with a search on duckduckgo. It was still intact. The problem is I used shreddit to randomise and delete the entire contents of my account. My account comments and posts all show empty on my account pages on reddit so there should be nothing.

    I did a site:reddit.com search using my username and found ~50 comments that Reddit has undeleted but also hide from my own account. I could still edit and delete them. Its curious that they don't appear on my accounts content on Reddit and yet a search engine can find them and they are still served by Reddit. Ex Reddit users who deleted their account contents should be aware this is happening and report it as a GDPR breach to their respective agencies if they are in the EU if they too find this has occurred.

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    Television @lemmy.world BrightCandle @lemmy.world
    Extrapolations - A gem of a single season series on the climate crisis

    Odds are many missed this one season show (a sort of mini series) looking at the progression of climate change and how it will impact peoples lives. Its a sci-fi show of sorts but also a science reality based on known consequences. It is not prematurely ended it is a coherent series telling a story which builds to a proper end with no intention to make it multiple seasons.

    I thought it was well done and worth a watch, its on Apple TV+.

    1
    Too many coffee creamera : A taste test

    Turns out all the creamers are kind of bad!

    1
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)BR
    BrightCandle @lemmy.world
    Posts 8
    Comments 124