GenderNeutralBro @ GenderNeutralBro @lemmy.sdf.org

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2 yr. ago

vd (VisiData) is a wonderful TUI spreadsheet program. It can read lots of formats, like csv, sqlite, and even nested formats like json. It supports Python expressions and replayable commands.

I find it most useful for large CSV files from various sources. Logs and reports from a lot of the tools I use can easily be tens of thousands of rows, and it can take many minutes just to open them in GUI apps like Excel or LibreOffice.

I frequently need to re-export fresh data, so I find myself needing to re-process and re-arrange it every time, which visidata makes easy (well, easier) with its replayable command files. So e.g. I can write a script to open a raw csv, add a formula column, resize all columns to fit their content, set the column types as appropriate, and sort it the way I need it. So I can do direct from exporting the data to reading it with no preprocessing in between.

Yeah, I've replaced phones in the past that were perfectly fine except the battery was terribly degraded. With an iFixIt repairability rating of 2 stars and a new battery costing more than the phone was worth, it just didn't make sense to fix it.

My current phone is only two years old and while it's still "fine", the battery life is noticeably lower than it used to be. I doubt it'll remain useful for another two years.

Many brands now provide software support for longer than the hardware will remain useful (thanks to non-removable batteries). Strange times!

Consumers partly killed replaceable batteries by demanding things they couldn't deliver. Waterproofing

Ehhhh...no, not buying it. We had water-resistant phones before the switch to non-removable batteries. For example, the Galaxy S5 (the last Samsung flagship with a removable battery) had an IP67 rating. The current Galaxy S24 has an IP68 rating. Go ahead, ask your average consumer what the difference is between IP67 and IP68, and how much they care.

Oh yeah, and the S5 also had a headphone jack and SD slot. You can do all these things and still have water resistance, so let's all please stop perpetuating these myths. If you're not on Apple's or Samsung's payroll, you do not need to lie for them.

Mathematicians: "First time?"

My experience might be a bit outdated, but I remember finding the default Mac OS X Terminal extremely slow. A few years back I ran an output-heavy command, and the speed difference between displaying the output in terminal vs outputting it to a file was orders of magnitude. The same thing on my Linux system was much, much faster. I'm not sure how much of that was due specifically to rendering, vs memory management or something else, though.

I might see if I can still reproduce this in Sequoia and if Ghostty is faster on Mac.

According to Rtings, the Samsung has a notably worse viewing angle than your other two. Take a look at the graphs:

Samsung: https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/samsung/odyssey-g5-g50d-s27dg50#test_1417

Asus: https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/asus/tuf-gaming-vg27aql1a#test_1417

Acer: https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/acer/nitro-vg271up-pbmiipx#test_1417

Not sure if that explains your experience or if there's something more to it.

Full paper with no paywall that I can see in private browsing: https://arxiv.org/html/2408.10234v2

Totally agree.

I'll watch whatever Tawny Newsome does next. Lower Decks earned a ton of goodwill. It was a breath of fresh air.

I agree that the models themselves are clearly transformative. That doesn't mean it's legal for Meta to pirate everything on earth to use for training. THAT'S where the infringement is. And they admitted they used pirated material: https://www.techspot.com/news/101507-meta-admits-using-pirated-books-train-ai-but.html

You want to use the same bullshit tactics and unreasonable math that the RIAA used in their court cases?

I would enjoying seeing megacorps held to at least the same standards as individuals. I would prefer for those standards to be reasonable across the board, but that's not really on the table here.

I guess the idea is that the models themselves are not infringing copyright, but the training process DID. Some of the big players have admitted to using pirated material in training data. The rest obviously did even if they haven't admitted it.

While language models have the capacity to produce infringing output, I don't think the models themselves are infringing (though there are probably exceptions). I mean, gzip can reproduce infringing material too with the correct input. If producing infringing work requires both the algorithm AND specific, intentional user input, then I don't think you should put the blame solely on the algorithm.

Either way, I don't think existing legal frameworks are suitable to answer these questions, so I think it's more important to think about what the law should be rather than what it currently is.

I remember stories about the RIAA suing individuals for many thousands of dollars per mp3 they downloaded. If you applied that logic to OpenAI — maximum fine for every individual work used — it'd instantly bankrupt them. Honestly, I'd love to see it. But I don't think any copyright holder has the balls to try that against someone who can afford lawyers. They're just bullies.

Even today I don't know how to share files to or from my Android phone as easily as I can with AirDrop. Bluetooth sharing is slow as balls and requires setup. Is Quick Share better now, or is it just a new name for the same old feature? I haven't tested it recently myself.

AirDrop operates over wi-fi with autodiscovery over local networks. No account or pairing required.

Laptops are a crapshoot, so I'd recommend sticking with distros that are known to support your specific model.

Desktops should, in general, just work.

That said, I've never personally had a seamless experience. There's always something I need to struggle to configure. Usually it's because I'm very picky and I like things to work MY way. The alternative on Widows would not be that it works my way; it would be that there'd be no way to do that so I'd just have to deal with it. If you're willing to just roll with the defaults, then yeah, most basic things should just work.

The biggest gotcha is GPU drivers. Not all distros ship with recent kernel versions with modern drivers. You should be pretty safe with Fedora and derivatives.

Why? This cannot possibly have any legal weight. Some adults look young. Some kids look old. The very idea is broken from the outset.

I can't tell if this is incompetence or malice.

This is probably the best solution I've found so far.

Unfortunately, even this is no match for the user-hostile design of, say, Microsoft Copilot, because it hides content that is scrolled off screen so it's invisible in the output. That's no fault of this extension. It actually DOES capture the data. It's not the extension's fault that the web site intentionally obscures itself. Funnily enough, if I open the resulting html file in Lynx, I can read the hidden text, no problem. LOL.

Thanks for the info. I was not aware that Bluesky had public, shareable block lists. That is indeed a great feature.

For anyone else like me who was not aware, I found this site with an index of a lot of public block lists: https://blueskydirectory.com/lists . I was not able to load some of them, but others did load successfully. Maybe some were deleted or are not public? I'm not sure.

I've never been heavily invested in microblogging, so my first-hand experience is limited and mostly academic. I have accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky, though. I would not have realized this feature was available in Bluesky if you hadn't mentioned it and I didn't find that index site in a web search. It doesn't seem easily discoverable within Bluesky's own UI.

Edit: I agree, of course, that there is a larger systemic problem at the society level. I recently read this excellent piece (very long but worth it!) that talks a bit about how that relates to social media: https://www.wrecka.ge/against-the-dark-forest/ . Here's a relevant excerpt:

If this truly is the case—if the only way to improve our public internet is to convert all humans one by one to a state of greater enlightenment—then a full retreat into the bushes is the only reasonable course.

But it isn’t the case. Because yes, the existence of dipshits is indeed unfixable, but building arrays of Dipshit Accelerators that allow a small number of bad actors to build destructive empires defended by Dipshit Armies is a choice. The refusal to genuinely remodel that machinery when its harms first appear is another choice. Mega-platform executives, themselves frequently dipshits, who make these choices, lie about them to governments and ordinary people, and refuse to materially alter them.

Do you think this is a systemic problem, or just the happenstance of today? Is there something about Bluesky's architecture or governance that makes it more resilient against that (particularly in the long term)? Or will they have all the same problems as they gain more users and enable more federation with other servers?

Absolutely. The existence of Amazon low-quality, often counterfeit SD cards is not a reason to abandon the technology entirely.

Google charges $100 to upgrade from 128GB to 256GB with the Pixel 9. You can get a high-quality 512GB or even 1TB microSD card from a reputable brand like SanDisk for less than that. And you'd be able to use it on your next phone, too.

Thanks! Got your reply right after I submitted my edit. Ultimately I like this change.

I do wish that it were easier to manage storage at an OS level, though. It would be super cool if I could have any arbitrary app data stored securely off-device. Backups are one thing, but offloading is another. I foolishly bought a 128GB phone and I am perpetually at the limit. My kingdom for an SD slot! (Though I'm not sure if many apps can actually use SD cards these days.)

It's great that this will be more private, but it's shitty that there's not an option to store it encrypted in the cloud. Most phone manufacturers (Google included) are still pretty chintzy with storage space, which is probably why they are limiting this to 90 days of history.

Edit: Actually, there is no hard 90-day limit. I misunderstood this part of the article:

Auto-deletion of data: Visits and routes older than three months will be automatically deleted unless users take specific action to save individual trips.

That "specific action" includes simply disabling auto-delete, or setting it to 18 or 36 months. It's not something you need to do for every trip you want to retain beyond 90 days. Not sure how much storage this will take up long-term though.

I’d rather have something like a “code grammar checker” that highlights potential errors for my examination rather than something that generates code from scratch itself

Agreed. The other good use case I've found is as a faster reference for simple things. LLMs are absolutely great for one-liners and generating troublesome (but logically simple) things like complex xpath queries. But I still haven't seen one generate a good script of even moderate complexity without hand-holding. In some cases I've been able to get usable output with a few shots, saving me a bit of time compared to if I'd written the whole darned thing from scratch.

I've found LLMs very useful for coding, but they aren't replacing my actual coding, per se. They replace looking things up, like through man pages, language references, or StackOverflow. Something like ffmpeg, for example, has a million options and it is always a little annoying to sift through the docs manually when I just need to do one specific task.

I'm sure it'll happen sooner or later. I'm not naive enough to claim that "computers will never be able to do $THING" anymore. I'll say "not in the next year", though.