e0qdk @ e0qdk @reddthat.com

Interests: programming, video games, anime, music composition

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Joined

2 yr. ago

I ran into an example of the thumbnail issue again today -- this time on a post from kbin: https://old.reddthat.com/post/19193476

The thumbnail looks like this in the HTML:

        <div class="thumb">
      <a class="url"
         href="https://media.kbin.social/media/60/a4/60a45b8ff88b1b2e3a0f77b701feb323c5bbfb7ceeb75154ea7df5d6eea15ef8.jpg"
         >
        <div  style="background-image: url(https://media.kbin.social/media/60/a4/60a45b8ff88b1b2e3a0f77b701feb323c5bbfb7ceeb75154ea7df5d6eea15ef8.jpg?format=jpg&amp;thumbnail=96)"></div>
      </a>
    </div>


  

Note that it's making a request to kbin.social with ?format=jpg&thumbnail=96 parameters in the CSS -- which results in the full image being loaded since kbin doesn't run pictrs.

The versions in use on reddthat (according to the settings page) are:

lemmy: 0.19.4-beta.7

mlmym: 0.0.44

That requires turning every read into a write -- which is slow/expensive generally. (That might not matter much for Google -- who try to record everything you ever do already, basically -- but it matters for everyone else.)

Also, it tends to promote spam and offensive niche content. kbin's got a sidebar that tries to promote random low activity communities and posts, for example, and it's almost uncanny how much crap it pushes up...

Mrs Bighead?!

...

hangs up the phone

Personally, I prefer it when people do one of the following:

• upload the file to catbox.moe and link it here (for clips up to 200MB)
• upload the file directly to their lemmy instance (if their instance allows it)
• self-host it on their own web server (with no bullshit crappy JS interface, please -- just give me the file; I'll play it with VLC if it doesn't work in my browser)

PeerTube is also a reasonable choice -- although I don't like its UI very much.

I'm having trouble finding an example of the thumbnail issue again right now but I was seeing the pictrs conversion parameters passed to URLs from catbox.moe, i.postimg.cc, and other sources in the CSS for the thumbnail when I reported the issue to Tiff ~3 weeks ago. It's possible that it got fixed/suppressed by another change since then though. (0.0.44 was deployed a few hours ago and I think there may have also been a beta patch bump for the lemmy backend at some point since I reported the issue originally in our local support community.)

I'll let you know if I see it pop up again.

For the text handling issue, I was seeing text like "

<thread title>

<username>

<community>

You may recognize that text as the pattern for a recently fixed bug in the user profiles; I found the text handling issue while trying to explain the other issue to Tiff a few weeks ago.

Will edit this comment immediately after posting to let you know if I still see the text issue.

EDIT: I still see the text issue show up in this comment. https://old.reddthat.com/comment/10370610

Thanks! I'll go ask Tiff about getting reddthat updated later.

BTW, is there a community for discussion of mlmym itself somewhere on lemmy? I can't participate on GitHub, but those aren't the only issues I've found. (e.g. there's also ?format=jpg&thumbnail=96 on non-pictrs links and a text handling issue with angle brackets...)

That's great to hear!

You can open any profile with multiple pages worth of posts or comments on old.reddthat.com and it's jumbled. Even my own profile is jumbled: https://old.reddthat.com/u/e0qdk

The first page is mostly comments I made two weeks ago plus a thread from today and some very old threads. The second page has comments I made earlier today and during the past week. The third page starts with my most recent comment and then has a bunch of older comments.

The exact order might change after posting this, but my own recent comments mostly being on page two has been pretty consistent for a while.

If I look at a very active user's profile (like MentalEdge's), I see threads from today show up on page three(!) while there are threads from a week or more ago on pages one and two.

I'm not sure what's going on exactly, but it basically makes user profiles pretty useless right now through mlmym.

Edit: I can't even find this comment in my profile, but my other reply (regarding the envelope being fixed in 0.0.43) shows up on page 3.

I haven't had much issue with lag, generally, but I don't get notifications any more -- which is probably the most pressing issue. (I have to remember to manually check once in a while after I post since the envelope doesn't light up.) That might be an issue with reddthat being on a recent beta version of lemmy -- I don't know.

We do have lemmy-ui-next over here too. Thanks for reminding me about that. I've been meaning to poke at it a bit.

Right now I'm mostly using mlmym (the "old" interface on most instances that support it) because it doesn't require JS for basic viewing.

It's kind of buggy though, unfortunately -- things like user history show up as a complete jumble, for example. :(

One of these days, I'll probably get fed up enough to go write my own interface and set things up exactly how I want them to work... but I've got too many projects already so I'm just living with it for now.

There's some notable differences with numbering -- e.g. lakh, crore, and where to put commas when writing large numbers.

I wonder if this will actually cause an increase in the number of security vulnerabilities and breaches as there's now a fairly obvious way for employees to penalize their bosses financially for being assholes...

My old username from reddit and HN was already taken and I couldn't think of anything else I wanted to be called so I just picked some random characters like this:

        >>> import random
    >>> ''.join([random.choice("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789") for x in range(5)])
    'e0qdk'

  

I have that literally in my kbin profile, but it's not on my reddthat one. (I think I tried to copy it there originally when I set up the account but ran into some issue with Lemmy's UI -- been long enough that I forget what exactly.)

I spent a while looking thanks to your post and only found stuff from 2022 as well. My Chinese is basically non-existent though. (I can pick out a word here and there from knowing some Japanese, but that's about it.) Someone who knows Chinese might have better luck digging.

I did find this file from 2022 (14999x6982 -- ⚠️ 100+ MB PNG): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/The_geologic_map_of_the_Moon_at_1-2.5M_scale.png

Associated information (and preview): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_geologic_map_of_the_Moon_at_1-2.5M_scale.png

I assume that's the one you're referring to from 2022?

All the news stories just have low-res previews.

Is there a preview that looks different from this? I don't see a preview at all (just a picture of people at some sort of presentation) in your link -- but my browser might just not be loading it if there is one. (I generally block scripts.)

Edit: tweaked wording slightly

I think this is just using SpeechDispatcher from the system -- so it's not a Firefox specific thing. I get a similar (but very slightly different) voice on my own system by default -- which matches what I get when I run a command like spd-say --wait "Hello world" from the command line.

I'm pretty sure SpeechDispatcher can be configured to use a different synthesis engine -- Arch's wiki has some suggestions: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Speech_dispatcher -- but I haven't dug into it yet.

you might check out Trackless if you like interactive fiction

Thanks. I'll check it out.

BTW, I thought of another game that might be of interest to you. Have you seen Not for Broadcast? It's an unusual game where you play as the controller in the studio switching between multiple video feeds of actual actors presenting the news on TV. You get to make choices about what to show, what to cut, and what ads to play in your broadcast -- which affects the world in an exaggerated fashion. The game timeskips to show you how things play out over the years. There's some distractions that make it a bit more gamey than a VN but you can turn most of them off if they're too annoying, I think.

Have you explored text adventures / interactive fiction? They're even more niche than VNs but there's some good ones out there. I remember liking Worlds Apart back when I played it. (15+ years ago... o___o)

One of these days I should go dig back into them again.

I think the term would be "necrobump"

That's from old school forums where posting to a thread bumped it back to the top of the feed and thus thrust old info prominently into everyone's view again. You won't get that same bump effect with most sorts on Lemmy. ("New comments" sort might work like that though? I'm not sure exactly how that's handled.)

otherwise everyone has moved on

It's pretty rare to get much of a response even after just 24 hours or so -- not just in terms of comments, but even for upvotes. I think after that point, posts are usually so far down people's feeds that almost no one sees it any more. That probably also discourages most people from replying since basically no one will see it. (Maybe the poster of the thread or comment you're replying to will see it, but probably almost no one else will if it's more than a day or so old.)

Some people do dig through community archives and/or user profiles -- particularly after a new thread is posted -- and they'll occasionally upvote old posts, but they very rarely comment.

I quit YouTube along with reddit last summer. I don't use alternate interfaces. I haven't found a replacement for most of the niche content I liked to watch there -- and yes, that sucks.

I've mostly been watching offline content (like DVDs and things I downloaded years ago) when I want video entertainment, and doing other stuff with my free time.

You might think that'd mean more time playing games given my interests, but I've found I'm a lot less enthusiastic about playing through games if I can't watch an LP or two of it afterwards. So, I'm actually playing (and also buying) less of those than I used to too.