TheBaldness

I'd like to purge some of my info from the interwebs, and was considering trying one of these services. Does anyone have any experience with them?

This dude made a simulation of what it would look like from a spaceship accelerating towards the speed of light. Click in the upper half of the acceleration slider to move forward.

https://dmytry.github.io/space/

Recently, most images on Facebook have stopped loading for me. Sometimes it's just a few images. Other times it's almost all images. The longer I scroll, the worse it gets. Today, I couldn't even see my own pictures. Are any other Firefox users having this problem, or maybe it's a server issue on Facebook's end?

I use Firefox and uBlock Origin. Not sure what kind of experience anyone else is having with YouTube, but recently my home page has been empty because I "don't have watch history turned on". Okay, fine. I won't be able to browse suggested videos, and I'll spend less time on their platform.

Then I began to get warnings about using an adblocker. Okay, fine. I know they need to make money, so I turned off the adblocker. Now when I'm having my time wasted by ads, I have to ask myself, how bad do I really want to watch this video? Not badly enough? I close the tab and spend less time on their platform.

Finally, I began experiencing glitches when playing videos. The video stops, but the audio continues. This never happened before. Perhaps mistakenly, I attribute this to YouTube, which is owned by Google, trying to force me off Firefox and on to Chrome. That was the last straw.

Now I use YouTube to simply follow the channels I'm subscribed to. When I want to watch something, I copy the URL, paste it into YT-DLP, download the video and spend zero time on their platform at all.

To summarize; Now I'm watching zero commercials, and YouTube is streaming the entire video to me, even if I only watch a small portion of it, and they're collecting less information about my watching habits than ever before.

Nice job, YouTube. Nice job.

It looks like I've injured myself in a way that will not heal. This is partially due to age, and partially due to my own overconfidence and refusing to accept that I'm not a teenager anymore. Long story short, I used to be able to ride long distances on my bicycle, and now I can't do that anymore.
I had big plans to go on long bicycle tours and basically live off my bike for weeks at a time. With this new limitation, it's very unlikely that I will ever be able to do that. I was just getting started on the pathway to fulfilling a lifelong dream, and now I'm faced with this hard reality; I will never get to do what I've wanted to do since I was a child. People age. We can't help that, but we can help getting old. I feel like I let myself get old. I feel like I fucked up, because I did. The injury was easily avoidable, and was totally my fault. Now I'm blaming myself.
I can still ride my bike, just not very far. I've spent the past year trying to push through this new limitation, and now I'm seeing that's not going to happen.
I know I'll eventually find a bright side to this. Maybe it'll cause me to have some experience I wouldn't have had otherwise? Maybe I'll figure out a compromise of some kind? I've been fortunate enough to have been healthy my whole life, so this is all new for me. I suppose I should have expected it eventually, but now here it is, and I'm not ready. I'd like to hear about how others have learned to accept a sudden limitation in their life.

I'm posting this in Socialism, so the obvious answer is that most people here would think socialism is the perfect system. But what do you mean by socialism?

Most Scandinavian countries are social democracies with regulated capitalist economies, progressive taxation and strong social programs. People who live in countries like this, Finland for instance, are consistently rated as some of the happiest people in the world. What would your perfect system look like? Try to give some details.

I identify as a capitalist who thinks government should provide things that are vital, like healthcare, education, military, etc. I also think the government should take the initiative on matters vital to modern life and national security. For instance, baseline energy generation, smart grid energy distribution, a national public data network (that private companies could lease bandwidth on, like the US phone system used to be), funding scientific and medical research in order to put the results in the public domain. I don't think anyone making less than median income should have to pay any taxes. Taxes would be phased in progressively on income above the median.

Those are some of my ideas. I'd like to hear some of yours.

For a long time I've thought it would be cool to upload my consciousness into a machine and be able to talk to a version of myself that didn't have emotions and cravings.

It might tell me that being around my parents has consistently had a negative effect on my mood for years now, even if I don't see it. Or that I don't really love X, I just like having sex with her. Maybe it could determine that Y makes me uncomfortable, but has had an overall positive effect on my life. It could mirror myself back to me in a highly objective way.

Of course this is still science fiction, but @[email protected] has pointed out to me that it's now just a little bit closer to being a reality.

With Private GPT, I could set up my own localized AI.

https://generativeai.pub/how-to-setup-and-run-privategpt-a-step-by-step-guide-ab6a1544803e

https://github.com/imartinez/privateGPT

I could feed this AI with information that I wasn't comfortable showing to anyone else. I've been keeping diaries for most of my adult life. Once PrivateGPT was trained on the basic language model, I could feed it my diaries, and then have a chat with myself.

I realize PrivateGPT is not sentient, but this is still exciting, and my mind is kinda blown right now.

Edit 1: Guys, this isn't about me creating a therapist-in-a-box to solve any particular emotional problem. It's just an interesting idea about using a pattern recognition tool on myself, and have it create summaries of things I've said. Lighten up.

Edit 2: It was anticlimactic. This thing basically spits out word salad no matter what I ask it, even if the question has a correct answer, like a specific date.

Welcome to my ongoing saga of trying to use linux on an x86 tablet. Shouldn't be too hard, you say? One does not simply ride into Mordor.

The oddball tablet I purchased used on eBay (for $50 USD) is an AAVA Inari 10 (model: INARI10-WLAN-1 QC). This is a 10.1" tablet with an Intel Atom Z3795 @ 1.59GHz, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD, and no operating system. Not too shabby for fifty bucks, including shipping.

I've been using Linux Mint since 2016 because it just works. I'm not one of those people who gets moist doing crazy cowboy shit with their linux installation, or customizing everything after the fact. So, while I've been using linux for a long time, I'm not a pro at anything. Knowing that Mint on a tablet was probably going to be a bad time, I installed it anyway because it just works, and you go with what you know.

Unsurprisingly, with a keyboard and mouse hooked up to the tablet, I was left squinting at a very tiny and very familiar desktop. It was time to see what I had purchased. Wifi worked, no problem. The touchscreen was recognized as a generic two-button mouse. I'm fine with that, as long as I don't need multi-touch for anything. The sound and camera hardware do not appear to be recongized. Again, no problem. I'm planning on only using this for web browsing. Bluetooth was working so if I really needed sound, I could get it that way.

I knew I wasn't keeping Mint on this tablet, so it was time to search for some new distros that might be better suited to a touchscreen device. Asking in this community gave me a few good starting points. Here's how that went...

Android x86: This would have been perfect for my use case, and it looked great right up until it got to the screen where we were going to connect to a wifi network. Froze solid. This issue is repeatable. I tried it three times with the same result, and decided to move on.

Debian 12 with Gnome: I took various flavors of this for a spin several times before realizing I had to install an on-screen keyboard or I simply wouldn't have one, in spite of the fact that when you log in, there's an on-screen keyboard. I don't know how that works.

KDE Neon: Had a desktop user interface, not mobile, and couldn't connect to wifi. I fought a few rounds with this, mostly the UI, before giving up.

It was at this point that I thought I should go for something that was specifically made for mobile.

Mangaro with Plasma Mobile: This was the most promising. It was almost usable. Almost. I was able to boot up into a graphical user interface that had an on-screen keyboard that could log me into an actual mobile UI. Not only that, but the login screen UI matched the mobile UI. That was farther than I had gotten with anything else thus far. Unfortunately, I don't think the wifi was working well. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to change the background, which was blindingly bright, and all the app icons were truncated. Like, in half. Very tiny. With no text beneath them. So using apps was practically impossible.

But Plasma Mobile itself was promising, and this is one of the reasons why I like linux; It forces you to learn some shit. What if I could have a nice clean install of Debian 12 with Plasma Mobie on top of that? That would be great. So I did a clean install of Debian and booted to the command line. Then I sudo apt-get -y install plasma-mobile. Excellent. When I rebooted, the tablet went right back to the command line.

That's when I learned what a display manager was, and apparently I had to install one. I installed LightDM, don't know why, but I did. Awesome. Now I can boot up to a GUI, but I need a keyboard to log in.

I lost track of what happened here, but there were many different install combos happening. I learned a few things. Here's how it's going...

I'm running Debian 12 with SDDM and Plasma Mobile.
SDDM, for some reason I cannot fathom, in spite of being recommended for use with Plasma Mobile, does not have an on-screen keyboard. This forced me to set it up so I'm automatically logged in every time. Problem solved? Mostly. If I put the tablet to sleep, even though I've set it up NOT TO LOCK THE SCREEN, it locks the screen anyway. But no worries, when I go to unlock the screen, I'm shown an on-screen keypad. When I type in my password, it... Goes to a text screen that says "The screen locker is broken and unlocking is not possible anymore. In order to unlock it, switch to a virtual terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F2)..." yadda yadda yadda, as if I have a physical keyboard connected to the tablet.

When I try to get out of this by pressing the power button, I'm taken to something that looks different than SDDM, which requires an on-screen keyboard to log in, BUT DOESN'T HAVE ONE.

My only option is to reboot at this point by tapping the power icon.

So currently, this tablet is mostly useable and I learned a few things. One of the things I learned is that linux can still be difficult to use outside the comfy confines of a great distro like Mint. But this is not an insurmountable problem.

I'd love to get the stupid screen locking issue fixed and/or get a virtual keyboard working in SDDM.

After that, my next steps may be trying to figure out what the non-working audio & camera hardware is, and seeing if there are linux drivers for any of it.

Aaaaaand here come the edits!

1. I uninstalled SDDM and installed LightDM to see if the problem was with the display manager or the desktop environment. This didn't fix the problem. Instead, it got slightly worse because the device would shut down when pressing the power button instead of putting me back into the display manager.

2. Plasma Mobile is very nice, and I would have kept it if this issue was fixed. There's nothing like a brand new start, so I'm going back to Debian 12 with Gnome, and see what I can do with that.

3. For now, I'm sticking with Debian 12 and Gnome. It's more clunky, but unlike Plasma Mobile, this actually works well. I'd like to be able to change the on-screen keyboard to something else, but I'll deal with it for now.

I've never been a breakfast person, and I don't wake up hungry. I used to go a few hours without eating anything and then have a breakfast of two scrambled eggs, 1/2 cup of brown rice, and a sliced avocado with some salt or soy sauce. That's a very tasty and healthy breakfast, but I get hungry again within a couple of hours.

Normally I don't eat much carbs, like bread or pasta or potatoes, and I don't get my fats from butter or dairy.

This week I started eating a butter sandwich as soon as I wake up in the morning. And when I say "butter sandwich" I'm talking about eight pats of butter between two slices of whole wheat bread.

Why is this so satisfying? I'm not hungry until late in the afternoon, at which point I just wait until dinnertime.

I'd like to lose some weight, and with these butter sandwiches I'm consuming much less food during my day, but they can't be healthy for me. Clearly I don't know how nutrition works.

What do you eat in the morning?

Since we don't yet have a specific community for custom phone ROMs, let's discuss them here. Are you running a custom ROM? Which one? On what hardware? How is it?

I've always been concerned about privacy, and I'm ignorant of how the fediverse works at a low level.

What information does our server collect about us?

When we delete a comment or post, is it truly deleted on Beehaw?

Do deletions also propagate to federated servers?