No Stupid Questions
How have you related pseudonymous online work/activity when applying for jobs?
RotaryKeyboard
10 months ago
•
86%
I hear you, and that’s great if it’s something the applicant wants to share. But none of the development work they’ve done at previous companies is work that they’ll be able to share. We take their word on that work. Not taking their word in the same way on other projects seems like a bit of a double standard to me.
No Stupid Questions
How have you related pseudonymous online work/activity when applying for jobs?
RotaryKeyboard
10 months ago
•
100%
Let's say you are applying for an engineering position and you want to mention that you contribute to an open source project. Mention the software stack used, maybe the number of downloads, and your focus on the project. Explain it in general terms. If it gets asked about in the interview, just answer questions without providing the name of the project.
Asklemmy
RotaryKeyboard
10 months ago
•
75%
You are describing Real Time with Bill Maher. People continue to watch his show. At least, I think you are, because I'm not sure what a "questionable guest" even is.
RotaryKeyboard
10 months ago
•
100%
My (red) state is one of those that changed the law to make it illegal for pornographic websites to be seen by children. To view them, you'd have to have some kind of central ID to prove that you are over 18. This is absolutely a precursor to having to have an ID to use the internet at all. Every bad thing that has ever happened on the internet will be used to convince legislators to enact a law like this. It's only a matter of time.
Selfhosted
Small Unraid PC with 2 HDDs. Silverstone SG13 case with Asrock N100DC-ITX, the SATA power cable was too short so I had to improvise.
RotaryKeyboard
10 months ago
•
100%
I like the choice of SIlverstone for the case. I got one of those for my proxmox server. It was compact, but not so compact that I left a lot of skin and blood behind after mounting components. I will say that other manufacturers (like Fractal Design just seem to understand how to design an interior a lot better, though.
RotaryKeyboard
10 months ago
•
80%
I have never been so glad that I talked myself out of buying the new iPhone this year! Siri is the primary input method I use for my iPhone. I would say I make around 20-30 vocal requests a day. It will be so nice to be able to do things like create a meeting on a calendar with a conversation instead of having to frame the request in a single sentence! I hope they do this rollout well.
RotaryKeyboard
10 months ago
•
100%
In 2005 or so, I got a tip about an application called LaunchBar, which would later be copied by Apple to replace the Sherlock search tool, and later by Microsoft in its PowerToys suite. The machine learning LaunchBar used to tailor its responses based on my previous behavior was life-changing. Instead of configuring an application, I just had to use it to change how it behaved.
This is how language models and AI are going to improve your products. Subtly. Behind the scenes. Slightly improving a thousand different use cases, only a fraction of which your regular usage patterns are going to intersect with.
Boost For Lemmy
Can't login to lemmy.sdf.org
RotaryKeyboard
10 months ago
•
100%
Thank you for posting this! I thought I had been banned.
sdfpubnix
RotaryKeyboard
10 months ago
•
100%
I thought it was just me! I woke up one day to find that I was logged out, and I couldn’t log in via my apps or even via the Lemmy UI. I thought I had been banned!
News
RotaryKeyboard
10 months ago
•
88%
Full results from the study, presented at the American Heart Association annual scientific meeting in Philadelphia and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggest the drug has other beneficial effects beyond the known health benefits from losing weight.
The heart risk difference between patients who received Wegovy, known chemically as semaglutide, and those on placebo began to appear almost immediately after starting treatment, researchers said.
So it’s not just from losing weight!
The associated risk factors include inflammation, blood pressure and blood sugar control, all of which can impact heart health.
Patients on Wegovy experienced decreases in C-reactive proteins, an indication of inflammation, similar to those reported with cholesterol lowering statins, which are known to significantly lower heart risks, researchers reported.
That is really promising!
politics
Big Insurance Met Its Match When It Turned Down a Top Trial Lawyer’s Request for Cancer Treatment
RotaryKeyboard
11 months ago
•
100%
Yep. That's what I get for having a ton of tabs open!
politics
Big Insurance Met Its Match When It Turned Down a Top Trial Lawyer’s Request for Cancer Treatment
RotaryKeyboard
11 months ago
•
16%
RotaryKeyboard
11 months ago
•
81%
Biden can be an instant king-maker. All he has to do is hold a press conference where he endorses another Democratic candidate, along with an announcement that he is bowing out of the race to protect the country from Donald Trump. It would be the most potent endorsement ever made.
RotaryKeyboard
11 months ago
•
100%
What they’re doing is publicly signaling that they’re going to spend a lot of money in those districts if these reps vote for Jim Jordan. They’re already swing districts, so anyone who wants to keep his seat is going to have to raise and spend even more money. The Dems are betting that the pressure of having to fundraise and fight a contested election is more of a problem than just making up an excuse to not vote for Jordan.
RotaryKeyboard
11 months ago
•
98%
For me it was playing Life is Strange for the first time. I bought it because it had been listed on Steam as “Overwhelmingly Positive” for ages, and at the time I was really enjoying the story-based games that companies like Telltale were producing. So, knowing nothing about the game, I picked it up and started playing it.
The first act was slow. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the writers were establishing Arcadia Bay, a city in the Pacific Northwest, as a character. All the people in it needed to be recognizable, so it took time for them to teach the player about who they were, what mattered to them, how they fit in to the city, and what their flaws were. I actually stopped playing for a while after the first act. But, luckily, I picked it back up over the holiday season.
I still remember playing it in my living room. I was so thoroughly absorbed into the story that when something tense happened in the second act and I couldn’t stop it the way I normally could, I was literally crushing the controller as if I could make things work by pulling the triggers harder.
I am decidedly not the demographic that Life is Strange was written to appeal to, but they did such a good job writing a compelling story that it didn’t matter. I got sucked in, the characters became important to me, and I could not. put. it. down. I played straight through a night until I finished it.
(If you’ve played it and you’re wondering, I chose the town the first time I played it.)
I’ll never forget that game. I’ll also never forget the communities that spawned around it. I read the accounts of people who had just played it for the first time for about a year because it helped me relive the experience I had when I played it. It was incredible.
RotaryKeyboard
11 months ago
•
100%
Star Trek celebrates the diversity of humanity. The extremes of genetic engineering and (on the other side of the spectrum, perhaps) the Borg are symbolic of the corruption of that diversity.
For an in-universe explanation, I suppose you could just look at the degree to which cybernetics are tolerated. Rutherford-level cybernetics? No problem! Borg Queen-level cybernetics? Helm, warp nine, full reverse!
Technology
Style guide for txt file documents?
RotaryKeyboard
11 months ago
•
100%
This is a great resource! Thanks!
Technology
Style guide for txt file documents?
RotaryKeyboard
11 months ago
•
100%
Wow, the world is a small place! I recently faced this challenge when I was writing a script that needed to store rich text in a CSV. It just so happens that I was a technical writing student at the right time to have learned the conventions that were used before word processors. (This was a weird fluke, since word processors were had been in wide use for many years before I got to college.)
What you need are the style rules that were used when typewriters were in use. If you find one, let me know! Below is an excerpt from ChatGPT that I vetted based on what I remember.
-
Headers and Titles: Typically rendered in all caps to distinguish them from the rest of the text.
-
Spacing:
- Two carriage returns after a paragraph or section to visually separate content.
- Double-spacing between lines was often used to make manuscripts easier to edit by hand.
[I was taught to write papers with two carriage returns between paragraphs so that there’s an empty line space between every paragraph. The exception was the end of a section before a header, where we were taught to use three carriage returns for a double linespace. Headers had a linespace between them and the first paragraph of their section.]
- Emphasis: Since typewriters couldn't italicize or bold text, underlining was the main method for emphasizing text.
[I never learned an alternative for emphasis. It was used all the time for citations, so I always used underlining. Since I’ve never seen a text file that supports this, I don’t know what you should do here.]
-
Indentation: A standard of five spaces (or one tab on some typewriters) was common for the start of new paragraphs. [Indentation depended heavily on what style your document called for. I almost always used block style or modified block style, so I never bothered with indentation.]
-
Page Numbers: Often manually typed, either centered at the bottom of the page or in the top right corner.
-
Footnotes and Endnotes: Numbered manually and typically indicated by a superscript numeral. The actual note would appear either at the bottom of the page (for footnotes) or at the end of the document/chapter (for endnotes).
-
Tables and Columns: Creating tables was tedious. Writers had to carefully count spaces to align columns. Some typewriters had a tab setting feature to help with this.
-
Citations: Followed standard style guidelines of the era (like APA, MLA, or Chicago), but were manually typed and often double-spaced.
-
Bullet Points: Since typewriters didn't have a bullet point function, a dash (-), asterisk (*), or number might be used to indicate list items.
—— —— ——
Numbered lists: I solved this by using this numbering format:
- One
1.1. One sub one
1.2. One sub two
1.2.1. One, sub two, sub one.
etc.
For some modern things like links and tables, just borrow from Markdown.
RotaryKeyboard
11 months ago
•
100%
This is Wyoming we're talking about. Wyoming is where Matthew Shepherd was brutally tortured and murdered. I wouldn't stop, either.
Damn, that's interesting!
Millennials, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Z and Gen Alpha: Generation Names by Year
RotaryKeyboard
11 months ago
•
100%
Not beta, gamma, and delta?
RotaryKeyboard
11 months ago
•
100%
It took me a lot longer than I'd like to admit for me to figure out that this was a reference to SNW, and not someone trying to push a far-right conspiracy theory. I think I need to take a break from the internet for a while.
Maybe it's time for a DS9 rewatch....
RotaryKeyboard
11 months ago
•
90%
I am so torn on this. On the one hand, this is sorely needed. Not everyone in an organization is aware that information they feed to an LLM is often fed back into the LLM to train it, or that the LLM reflects bias in its training material, or even that an LLM might return false information. A strong policy is important to help communicate these things.
On the other hand, LLMs have had the biggest impact on my productivity, well, ever. The speed with which I can write complex documents, write code, or help someone else solve a problem has been increased by an order of magnitude. My organization recently enacted something similar to this executive order, prohibiting the use of LLMs. Now I can't get those advantages at work anymore. I'm afraid a heavy-handed policy would effectively strip government workers of the same capabilities.
RotaryKeyboard
11 months ago
•
100%
This has been going on forever. Decades ago, it was common to be charged more on travel websites if you were using a Mac then if you were using windows. These days they use a lot more profiling to try to squeeze more money out of the people they think are willing to pay.
RotaryKeyboard
11 months ago
•
87%
That title makes me chuckle. He should go set up a fresh install of Windows and see what the default security experience is like. Mac OS makes it smooth and fast, and relatively unobtrusive in comparison.
Nintendo
RotaryKeyboard
12 months ago
•
100%
World News
Who Exactly Is Ashton Kutcher’s Anti-Sex-Trafficking Tech Company Helping?
RotaryKeyboard
12 months ago
•
14%
Don't whatabout me. If you're going to criticize a company because you don't like the founder, then at least own up to your faulty generalization.
World News
Who Exactly Is Ashton Kutcher’s Anti-Sex-Trafficking Tech Company Helping?
RotaryKeyboard
12 months ago
•
14%
I love how you completely disregard the people who actually work there and the people who actually run Thorn.
AI Generated Images
Forest
RotaryKeyboard
12 months ago
•
100%
This is absolutely brilliant! I’ve tried to get results like this With starter images, but I have gotten nothing as nuanced and subtle as this! Great work!
RotaryKeyboard
12 months ago
•
100%
My purpose in life is to be happy. My primary challenge in life is to find the things in life that make me happy and try to find ways that those things can make other people happy.
RotaryKeyboard
12 months ago
•
97%
I’m a 15-year user of Reddit. Lemmy right now is very similar to very early Reddit. Reddit’s users were more technical back then, too. I’m betting the early adopters of places like this are usually the technical types.
Another nice thing about Lemmy is that a lot of the low-effort, casual users on Reddit haven’t gotten here yet. Interaction here is definitely a lot more pleasant.
No Stupid Questions
is there a useful way for tech workers to express interest in a union? In USA.
RotaryKeyboard
12 months ago
•
96%
It's so amazing to see a comment like this. For years and years, the tech industry workers were heavily anti-union. I'm glad to see the sentiment turning around.
RotaryKeyboard
12 months ago
•
91%
Our system of measurement. There can be only one!
Programming
So Much for ‘Learn to Code’ - In the age of AI, computer science is no longer the safe major.
RotaryKeyboard
12 months ago
•
100%
I’ve just spent a few weeks continually enhancing a script in a language I’m not all that familiar with, exclusively using ChatGPT 4. The experience leaves a LOT to be desired.
The first few prompts are nothing short of amazing. You go from blank page to something that mostly works in a few seconds. Inevitably, though, something needs to change. That’s where things start to go awry.
You’ll get a few changes in, and things will be going well. Then you’ll ask for another change, and the resulting code will eliminate one of your earlier changes. For example, I asked ChatGPT to write a quick python script that does fuzzy matching. I wanted to feed it a list of filenames from a file and have it find the closest match on my hard drive. I asked for a progress bar, which it added. By the time I was done having it generate code, the progress bar had been removed a couple of times, and changed out for a different progress bar at least three times. (On the bright side, I now know of multiple progress bar solutions in Python!)
If you continue on long enough, the “memory” of ChatGPT isn’t sufficient to remember everything you’ve been doing. You get to a point where you need to feed it your script very frequently to give it the context it needs to answer a question or implement a change.
And on top of all that, it doesn’t often implement the best change. In one instance, I wanted it to write a function that would parse a CSV, count up duplicate values in a particular field, and add that value to each row of the CSV. I could tell right away that the first solution was not an efficient way to accomplish the task. I had to question ChatGPT in another prompt about whether it was efficient. (I was soundly impressed that it recognized the problem after I brought it up and gave me something that ended up being quite fast and efficient.)
Moral of the story: you can’t do this effectively without an understanding of computer science.
RotaryKeyboard
12 months ago
•
100%
Thanks for posting this! I was going to buy this on blu ray very soon after launch, but now I think I'll give it some time. The only thing I worry about is that the incorrect version will be sold to retailers, who will just sell me that when I go to buy it next year.
RotaryKeyboard
1 year ago
•
97%
Oh, man. Can you imagine the misery of being appointed to this post? Literally half of the government would hate and despise you and would look for ways to undercut you just to have an extra talking point while they stand in the hall talking to Fox News. And to top it off, what could you actually do to affect change? I sympathize with the poor workers of this office.
Selfhosted
Apple TV's tvOS 17 brings VPN support, which Tailscale now supports.
RotaryKeyboard
1 year ago
•
100%
Have we figured out if this solves the Netflix password sharing limitation yet?
RotaryKeyboard
1 year ago
•
100%
Thank you for posting this. I have been avoiding updating to synergy 3 and now I’m glad I did. I still like version 2. I would still recommend it. I even use it with gaming.
Star Trek
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 Arrives on DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K UHD December 5
RotaryKeyboard
1 year ago
•
100%
Season 1 has a couple fun extras on the disc. One in particular shows how they use the LED walls to create rich set environments.
No Stupid Questions
How do you currently handle Covid infections?
RotaryKeyboard
1 year ago
•
100%
If I think I’m sick, regardless of what I’m sick with, I try to isolate and mask as much as possible. Nobody wants to get sick from me. For the flu and Covid, I go and get tests to allow me to take the antiviral medications. If I have Covid, I mask for a couple of weeks just to prevent spreading it.
World News
Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands
RotaryKeyboard
1 year ago
•
100%
Unit prices are easy to remember when you buy a single product. I bet you know the price of gas per unit immediately. What was the price of Pepsi per liter today? What was the price of Coke per liter? There are dozens and dozens of soda products alone you would have to memorize. And that’s just soda.
I applaud a store using its data to communicate to customers how prices have changed. We should do this everywhere.
www.graphsaboutreligion.com
Ignore the article's over-sensational headline. This is actually a great look at how and why opinions on sensitive cultural issues have changed over time.
www.sportskeeda.com
www.pcgamer.com
www.techspot.com
Reddit user chain-77 discovered that a $95 Ryzen 5 4600G APU can do respectable AI work by telling Linux to see it as a 16GB GPU. Although the processor doesn't compare to dedicated cards in traditional graphics rendering, AI relies heavily on memory, where an APU's ability to allocate shared memory freely becomes an advantage.
www.pcgamer.com
www.pcgamer.com
>Interpretation one says that high-end GPUs are irrelevant to 99 percent of gamers and that AMD focussing on affordable graphics cards is actually a good thing. Give us 75 percent of the performance of a high-end Nvidia GPU for half the money, AMD, and everything looks pretty sweet. >
www.gamingonlinux.com
www.inverse.com
The title comes from the article, but I agree with some of these changes. It's making for an engaging show that also feels modern.
www.pcworld.com
www.wired.com
They knew when to hold em. Knew when to fold 'em. Just not when to walk away and when to run.
lemmy.dbzer0.com
You'd have to be living under a rock to be unaware of the profusion of AI-generated images on the internet. Some are [beautiful](https://weirdwonderfulai.art/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Stable-Diffusion-011.jpg), some are unsettling, but most of the ones people take the time to post are interesting. If you like the occasional artistic image to flow across your timeline, [Stable Diffusion Art](https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/stable_diffusion_art) will make a great subscription for you. Now, this is not to be confused with [Stable Diffusion](https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/stable_diffusion@lemmy.dbzer0.com), also at dbzer0.com. Stable Diffusion Art is the showcase community, whereas Stable Diffusion is a discussion community about the generative program. What I like the best about Stable Diffusion Art is that it has themed contests. Someone will post a theme (such as "zombie apocalypse"), and everyone is free to submit comments with the art they generated along that theme. Go give it a look. We can all use a bit more art in our lives!
www.youtube.com
This isn’t terribly long — maybe 6.5 minutes. It compares and contrasts traits of fascists and authoritarians to see where Donald Trump fits best. I’m curious to know if you agree with Reich’s conclusions.
Searching through communities can be a daunting task. At latest count, there are over 15,000 communities to choose from. In addition, it’s common to pick communities that you are already interested in. This forms a bit of a bubble, where the content you are exposed to is the content you already agree with and like. So how do you push those boundaries and find new and diverse communities? One way is to visit a random community. [Lemmy-Discover](https://stirante.github.io/lemmy-discover/) makes this easy by giving you an interface that will show you exactly one community. You’ll see its statistics as well as a few posts and their associated comments. If the community isn’t for you, you can press the big red skip button and see another random community. (Those of us who are of a certain age will recognize this immediately — it’s just flipping through the channels on the TV to see what’s on. How many great shows did you discover this way?) It looks like Lemmy-Discover is designed to be an alternative front-end for Lemmy communities. It provides a “Follow” button that, if you create an account, is like subscribing to a community. But for our purposes, it makes a great Community discovery tool.
What do you get when you mix corporate abuses of data, a shift from ownership to renting of software, and dozens of high-profile security breaches? You get a healthy distrust of putting your data on someone else’s computer (also known as “the cloud”). You also get [Data Hoarder](https://lemmy.ml/c/datahoarder), a community dedicated to the practice of storing your data on machines that you control. Free from monthly subscriptions and free from prying eyes. Even if you aren’t a self-hoster, there are a lot of things you can learn from this community. Do you own a PC? Saving money on new storage is a constant topic of discussion. For example, did you know that you can often find great deals on 3.5” hard drives by buying external enclosures with the drive already included? Manufacturers will often put very high quality drives in these enclosures because that’s the model they have the most unsold units of. When you buy the external enclosure, it can cost much less than buying the drive you find inside on its own. Buying the enclosure to take the drive out is called “shucking,” and it can save you a lot of money. (But watch out. It’s a lottery — you might get a different model of drive than you expect.) If some of these topics sound interesting to you, give Data Hoarder a subscribe and hang out for a while. Until next time!
I'm wondering: where does Lemmy UI get the timezone for the time stamp on posts? We are using Lemmy in docker. Two of the five containers in the stack have tzdata, and all of them are set to UTC right now. But when I hover over a post's relative time stamp to get the precise time it was posted, I was surprised to see UTC -6. I'm in UTC -6, and the host that the docker stack is running on is currently set to UTC -6. Basically, I can go to all the trouble to set the env in docker-compose to set the correct time zone for the containers, but I'm wondering if I need to bother. Any feedback would be helpful as far as best practices for setting time zones to make posts have the right time stamp and for making logs readable. Thanks in advance!
lemmy.ml
Yesterday's [community spotlight about the PC Master Race community](https://lemmy.ninja/post/228776) got me thinking: is there a similar community for deals on PC components? Anyone who has ever built a PC knows that component prices vary widely. Getting a good deal is probably half the work of building or upgrading a PC. Luckily for us Lemmings, there is [buildapcsales](https://lemmy.ml/c/buildapcsales) over at lemmy.ml! Each post in the community showcases a single deal. The titles of the post are strictly regulated to make it easy to find the component type you're looking for and to see its brand and price. So are the deals any good? Well, that, my friends, is beyond the scope of this article. But at least it's an extra arrow in your quiver to help you keep costs down! One additional note: PC sales are region-specific. If you're not in the US, you may want to check out these related communities for component deals: - **Canada**: [BAPC Sales Canada](https://lemmy.ca/c/bapcsalescanada) (484 users) - **Australia**: [bapcsalesaustralia](https://aussie.zone/c/bapcsalesaustralia) (137 users) - **UK**: [Build A PC Sales UK](https://feddit.uk/c/buildapcsalesuk) (123 users) And for laptop shoppers, you may benefit from [Laptop Deals](https://lemmy.world/c/laptopdeals) over at lemmy.world. Happy hunting!
www.cnn.com
>“He was trying to tell them that he was a doctor and probably trying to tell him who he was, to be honest. And they were screaming that they did not effing care who he was,” she said. “And the next thing I knew, they had him on the ground, grabbed him by the shirt, threw him on the ground, face first into the concrete and had him in cuffs.” >
lemmy.ninja
Deep in the warren of Lemmy communities lies a place that focuses on the venerable personal computer and everything around it: the technology, the process of building one, or even just celebrating what it looks like when it's all done. It's [PC Master Race](https://lemmy.ninja/c/pcmasterrace@lemmy.world). Longtime Reddit users may recognize that community name. It was a staple of Reddit whose posts rose to the popular feed on a regular basis. With over 10,000 subscribers already, lemmy.world's version is similarly popular. I've used PC Master Race to get support, help others with similar builds fix their problems, find good peripherals for my own upgrade projects, and just to see what's possible with PC gaming. Let's help this community with some posts! Go take a picture of your battlestation and share it, or post your build specs and ask the group how you can improve them. You'll be surprised what you can learn from the discussion!
When I first learned how to put my media into Plex, I did it by using Handbrake, compressing the content down to .mp4, and doing my best to use “audio passthrough” for the highest quality audio tracks I could find. But nowadays a lot more discs are coming with TrueHD, which apparently isn’t supported by the .mp4 container. I’m wondering what I should do for these audio tracks. I don’t really want to keep my media in .mkv format because of the challenge of getting subtitles to work and because the .mkv files are enormous. I’m assuming that hevc isn’t the answer, since I believe that still uses the .mp4 container. Any advice?
startrek.website
What’s more fun than a trip to Bozeman, MT on First Contact Day? What’s more satisfying than a plate of salmon on Federation Day? What’s deeper than self-reflection on the sands of Vulcan? That’s right, it’s the [Star Trek](https://startrek.website/c/startrek) community over at startrek.website! If you are a Star Trek fan, this is the community for you. It’s very active and full of high-quality content. Here you can read about the behind-the-scenes details of any show in the franchise. The sidebar helpfully lists the shows that are in development, production, and release. Really, anything that is Star Trek-related is talked about here. So go refill your Romulan ale and drop by for a visit!
Just a quick bug report for Lemmy 0.18.3: Today I received a reply from a bot account. I have the setting set to not show bot accounts enabled for my account. I still got a notification that I had a reply from it (next to the notification icon), but there was no way to mark the notification as “read” because it doesn’t appear in the inbox. The only workaround was to check the “Show Bot Accounts” setting and then visit the inbox to clear the notification.
infosec.pub
It’s almost 11:00 AM, and I’m still exhausted. I can barely keep my eyes open. This seems like the perfect time to do a community spotlight for [Espresso](https://infosec.pub/c/espresso). Operated by our friends at infosec.pub, this community caters to lovers of espresso and the art of making it. It was created in response to the Reddit exodus, hoping to make a new home for espresso lovers here in the Fediverse. It’s always a pleasure to find these smaller, niche communities on Lemmy. The moderators have thoughtfully migrated the wiki from the original Reddit community, and have filled out their sidebar with a ton of useful information. (All of that information is included in the bubble above this post. I feel a little guilty writing a spotlight article that’s shorter than the destination community’s sidebar!) My only wish is that there was some sort of button that could deliver an espresso to me right now so that I could wake up the rest of the way. Oh, well. Maybe I should buy one of the espresso machines they’re recommending over there. Until next time!
So here's my situation. I've been looking for a long time for a self-hosted photo library. I have pretty low requirements: I just want it to be able to show the videos and images I have stored on my NAS in a random order, and to support a slideshow of those files, also in a random order. I thought I had finally found what I was looking for with PiGallery2 -- it supports a hidden file that triggers the random order sorting -- but it's not stable. It works for a while and then takes ages and ages to refresh the album. Synology Photos would have been perfect, but it can't randomize! Any suggestions? I'm looking to host this on Debian.
lemmy.world
I'm back after a week hiatus where I was helping lemmy.ninja manage a large influx of new users. And that means it's time for a new Community Spotlight! Today I bring you [Pitch A Youtuber](https://lemmy.world/c/youtubepitch), a community whose sole purpose is to spread the word about extraordinary youtube artists. I'm not much of a youtube-watcher myself, but I have to admit that there are some incredibly good offerings out there. So today only, I'm going to give you a two-for-one deal. First you get this community spotlight telling you about the Pitch A Youtuber community! As an added bonus, I'm going to give you not one but *two* great Youtube channels that you should check out. First there's [Professor of Rock](https://www.youtube.com/c/ProfessorofRock/videos), a channel I only discovered last week when I watched the incredible [Rick Roll episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X76GPMxGr3Y). I'm not really a fan of rock culture, or music history. Sure, I loves me some techno, and I listen to all kinds of music; I just have never had that much of an interest in it. But there's such a level of quality in the Professor of Rock content that I couldn't put it down! I mean, have you seen my community spotlight posts? I have the attention span of a goldfish with dementia. And yet I watched that episode (and one or two others) from start to finish. Great content! And for your other free gift, I present the irreverent but surprisingly insightful [Red Letter Media](https://www.youtube.com/@RedLetterMedia). I'm an enormous film and television fan, having worked in the entertainment industry for a while and having seen probably every movie in existence. I love the horror genre, and I'm also a huge Star Trek fan. Put those together and you get the content of the Red Letter Media channel. There's a lot of snark, but so much more deeply informed content about the industry that I find myself coming back to this channel again and again. You'll have to watch a few to decide what you think. I don't really have a specific video to recommend. But I will say it was very interesting to see them come around on their opinions of Star Trek Picard. So there you have it. My longest community spotlight post, with added bonuses. If you like content like this, head over to [Pitch A Youtuber](https://lemmy.world/c/youtubepitch) and contribute!
bloody-disgusting.com
Netflix has announced this morning that “Castlevania: Nocturne” will premiere on September 28, 2023, with the first teaser trailer being promised for tomorrow, July 27.
As many tinnitus sufferers like myself know, the never-ending ringing in your ears can become unbearable at times. Sometimes white noise can help by making it harder to distinguish the ringing from other sounds. I know I've run fans in my bedroom while falling asleep to help distract me, for example. You can use the iPhone's Background Sounds feature to generate this noise for you. And with Airpods Pro, you can deliver the sound directly to a single ear *and* let external sounds in so you can still hear what's going on around you. Here's how you do it. 1. On your iPhone, go to Settings > Accessibility > Audio/Visual > Background Sounds 2. Turn on Background Sounds 3. Select the sound you want to hear. I like balanced noise for tinnitus relief. 4. Insert your Airpods Pro to get them to connect to your phone. 5. Activate transparency mode on the Airpods Pro to let environmental sounds through. The background sounds will play continuously, but will be suspended for announcements from Siri and phone calls. ~~Interestingly, background sounds are just reduced in volume by about 90% when you start playing Apple Music~~. There's a setting in the Background Sounds pane that will disable the background noise while media is playing. Otherwise it will continue playing but will be reduced in volume. Background sounds resume normally after stopping any of those activities.
This morning I was forced to ban about 18 users for being obvious spambots. That deleted their content on my instance. Are they now banned on other instances, too? I'm just trying to figure out what the best process is for eliminating these spambots for good before they flood all of our feeds.
www.zleague.gg
www.redbull.com
www.gamesradar.com
We were poking around the list of Lemmy servers, and we saw this crazy anomaly. 1.2 million comments in the course of a day or two .... what's going on over there? 
If you're looking for NSFW communities, [Lemmyverse.net](https://lemmyverse.net/communities) now provides a ``Show NSFW`` checkbox to help filter your search. Unlike a regular checkbox, however, this checkbox has three states. By default when you visit Lemmyverse.net, the checkbox is unchecked. That means that any search you perform will exclude any community marked as NSFW.  *Figure 1: The Show NSFW checkbox is unchecked, so no NSFW communities will be shown.* Clicking the checkbox once changes the filter to include both NSFW and SFW communities in the search result. This is indicated by a hyphen in the checkbox with a yellow background, as well as a tooltip if you over over it.  *Figure 2: After clicking the Show NSFW checkbox once, NSFW communities will be included in search results alongside SFW communities.* Clicking the checkbox again will set the filter to display only NSFW communities. This is indicated by a checkmark in the checkbox with a red background. As before, a tooltip will also indicate the state of the filter.  *Figure 3: After clicking the Show NSFW checkbox a second time, search results will be limited to displaying only NSFW communities.* As you may have guessed, you can click the checkbox again to uncheck the box and display only SFW communities again. In closing, here is a note about NSFW communities on Lemmy. If you are using the Lemmy UI on desktop or mobile, there is a ``Show NSFW Content`` setting in your profile. You will need to have this setting enabled before you can view the posts in the NSFW communities you subscribe to. If you've had this setting turned off, just be aware that your Lemmy experience could dramatically change when you enable it, especially if you spend a lot of time on the ``All`` timeline on a busy Lemmy server.
lemmy.ninja
INXS, Porno for Pyros, Presidents of the United States, The Primitives.... These are just a few of the large (large!) number of Alternative Rock offerings at [Alternative Nation](https://lemmy.ninja/c/alternativenation@lemmy.world). This is a genuinely busy place, folks, with 287 posts so far, growing by a dozen a day! It even has its own Spotify playlist, which I'm not even going to link to because I think you should visit this community that much! This community clearly has dedicated mods who love the content and work hard to curate and present it with quality. Drop in, subscribe, and be sure to post!
lemmy.ninja
Today we’re bringing attention to lemmy.ninja’s own [Team Red](https://lemmy.ninja/c/red_team), a community all about AMD and their products. Maybe you switched to AMD when NVidia’s video cards were impossible to find outside of a scalper’s den. Maybe you bailed on Intel and their space heater processors, opting for a Ryzen Threadripper. Or maybe you’ve been in AMD’s ecosystem for years. No matter your circumstances, this community is here to cater to you! Come on in and show us your build. Share a benchmark! Ask a question and get some help from your colleagues. It’s all welcome at [Team Red](https://lemmy.ninja/c/red_team)!
aussie.zone
For today's spotlight, I present [Australia](https://aussie.zone/c/australia). The most active and subscribed community of aussie.zone, this community boasts a whopping 246 users per week. So many, in fact, that I almost feel like writing this spotlight is moot, because everyone already seems to know about it! Then again, there's always someone whose Lemmy journey is just beginning, and who could benefit from learning about the popular destinations of the platform. If Australia is too broad, aussie.zone has communities for various cities and regions of Australia for a more local discussion. And, in a particularly neighborly fashion, they have even listed the other Australia-related communities in their sidebar.
lemmy.world
Today we highlight [ADHD Women](https://lemmy.world/c/adhdwomen), a community “for women to find support and discuss living with ADHD.” There are a lot of ADHD-related communities across Lemmy, but this is the first one I’ve seen that caters to women. It’s a recent addition to the Fediverse, with posts going back a month or so.
ew.com
lemmy.ml
Here we have a venerable community for today's Community Spotlight. [Linux Guides](https://lemmy.ml/c/linuxguides) has been around since 2021, which makes it one of the oldest communities we've featured here so far. It's a community where users are encouraged to post anything they find useful in the realm of linux. So that github page about creating LXCs that you starred a few years ago that you keep referring back to? That would be a good candidate to post here! It's not terribly active, which surprises me. It seems that every big project I do in Linux requires one or more guides to get through. So let's share our hidden treasures with the community and help it grow!
Going forward, the moderators of Community Search Tips will strongly encourage posts to use the *URL* of a community when linking to that community. We won't get upset at you for using the other methods; we just feel that the full URL provides the best user experience, especially for users of small instances. This is a bit of a meta post, but please feel free to comment on it if you like. ## Background There are [several ways](https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2023/06/11/lemmy-migration-find-subreddits-communities/) to link to a community in Lemmy. The two most common you will see are these: - **URL Method**. This involves using the URL found in your browser's address bar when you are visiting the community. For example, [https://lemmy.world/c/transformers](https://lemmy.world/c/transformers) - **Shorthand Method**. This method uses an exclamation point in the address, which tells Lemmy to load the remote community through the instance you are currently logged in at. For example, !transformers@lemmy.world. We had previously thought that both methods were interchangeable, but we have since learned of some issues with each. ## URL Method Drawbacks You have probably already encountered the main drawback with the URL method. When you follow a URL to a Lemmy community, you visit that community at the remote instance. You can still see the content there, but you can't comment, upvote, downvote, or subscribe to the community from this page. To subscribe, you'd have to go back to your home instance and follow the instructions we've [laid out here](https://lemmy.ninja/post/19301). You can see an example of that below. Here I've folled the URL to [https://math@lemmy.sdf.org](math@lemmy.sdf.org), and I cannot subscribe to the community because there is no subscribe button present.  At most you can view the community and its content. You can still return to your instance, search for the community using the same URL, and subscribe to it there. ## Shorthand Method Drawbacks ### 1. The Error Page As inconvenient as the URL Method is, the shorthand method can introduce even worse problems. In Lemmy, a community isn't linked to your instance until at least one user has searched for that community on the [search page](https://lemmy.ninja/search). This necessary step causes a serious problem when using the shorthand method on a site where that search hasn't happened yet. If you try to follow a link that uses the shorthand method to a community that hasn't been searched for, you will receive an error response.  This is much less of a problem on sites like lemmy.world, where tens of thousands of users have searched for communities already. As you can imagine, however, smaller instances and newer instances haven't necessarily searched for the vast majority of communities out there, making this problem much more pervasive on those instances. To make matters worse, the error page is cryptic and doesn't explain what the problem is or how to solve it. ### 2. Incompatibilities with other services This site is primarily focused on Lemmy, but other projects in the Fediverse, such as Mastadon, can -- and do -- interact with Lemmy communities. We can't test the shorthand method in all of these products, but we have received reports that it won't work for Mastodon users, and I suspect there are other projects out there that would run into the same problem. (Note that I did test this for kbin, and kbin can follow the shorthand method.) ## Conclusion We feel that the drawbacks of the shorthand notation have more severe consequences for user experience than the inconvenience of using the URL method. Neither approach is perfect, but a community link that leads to an error message completely defeats the purpose of the content in this community. We hope you agree. We have confidence that the error will eventually get fixed. Until that time, please use the full URL when linking to communities when making posts to Community Search Tips. Thank you!
I'm an admin on lemmy.ninja, a month-old Lemmy instance. Users are required to validate their emails, but the email sent to them to do this always ends up in the spam folder. There's nothing we can do about that. We've found, however, that if the users are told to go get it, they can find the mail and validate just fine. What's the best way to get this message to users while they're creating their new account? Is there a file we can edit to add instructions about checking their spam folder while they're creating the "create" button? I'm hoping someone has a creative solution. I know it won't be a 100% fix, but any little bit helps.