You know, I wish I could enjoy IRC - or chatrooms in general. But I just struggle with them. Forums and their ilk, I get. I check in on them and see what’s been posted since I last visited, and reply to anything that motivates me to do so. Perhaps I’ll even throw a post up myself once in a while.

But with IRC, Matrix, Discord, etc, I just feel like I only ever enter in the middle of an existing conversation. It’s fine on very small rooms where it’s almost analagous to a forum because there’s little enough conversation going on that it remains mostly asynchronous. But larger chatrooms are just a wall of flowing conversation that I struggle to keep up with, or find an entry point.

Anyway - to answer the actual question, I use something called “The Lounge” which I host on my VPS. I like it because it remains online even when I am not, so I can atleast view some of the history of any conversation I do stumble across when I go on IRC. I typically just use the web client that comes with it.

I like Konsole.

It comes with KDE, supports tabs, themes, and loads very fast.

I don’t really need more from a terminal than that. When I, rarely, need more advanced features like window splitting and session management I also use Zellij (previously I used tmux).

Interesting. That’s not something I’ve heard about until now, but something I’ll surely look into.

Mistral-large is probably the best large model for practical purposes at this point.

What makes you say that? I have not performed my own comparison, but everything I have seen and read suggests that GPT4 is king, currently.

A seemingly unpopular opinion, but Christian Bale’s Batman is my favourite live action version of the character.

Celebrities, politicians and businesses will be more likely to show up on the platform, if that’s your jam.

When corporations inevitably arrive to the platform, we can use it to shame them into offering a decent service after they ignore our calls and emails.

The same reason a lot of companies support a community edition. It means that people can use, learn and become experienced with the product without forking over a tonne of money.

This results in a larger number of developers, add-ons and community surrounding the product.

This makes it a more appealing product for companies looking to build a business using it.

It’s the same reason you can use AWS for free, get some JetBrains products for free and often find community editions for similar products to Magento.

Care to give a summary on why you think they should be blocked ahead of any bad acting? Yes, there is some concern about Meta attempting EEE, but ultimately they’re a large platform that can bring a lot of users and attention to the Fediverse. There’s nothing preventing large instances from blocking them down the line, and with user level instance blocking coming in 0.19 to Lemmy (not sure if Mastodon et al have something similar), you can block them personally yourself if you wish, rather than having that thrust upon you by your instance admins.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

You could implement ‘drive sync’ giving options of NextCloud, GDrive, Dropbox, etc

It doesn’t really matter, but worth knowing, only a small amount of your national insurance goes toward NHS costs. The NHS is primarily funded by general taxation. Your National Insurance contributions largely go to paying for state pensions.

Well, the reality is, search costs money. Quite a lot of money it seems.

So that is either paid for by you, or by someone else. Nobody is going to run search as a charity. So it’s going to be paid for by parties interested in paying for your attention.

Even if you run ad blockers or use meta search engines like searx, you are going to be finding results by companies that have paid to be there.

I am a heavy search user. My search quantity is reasonably large just from personal use (I’m a curious dude, what can I say?) but my professional use of search as a software developer is staggering some days. My anecdotal experience is that that Google search has been declining in quality for years, and especially over the last two or three. DuckDuckGo is a nice alternative for privacy (potentially), but I while I find myself feeling less in a walled garden with them, I don’t actually find their results to be any better than Google’s.

I have tried Kagi recently. So far, I really like it. I genuinely feel like I get good results (read: find something quickly that is relevant to what I searched). I love their lensed searches that let you search the indie-web, and I love that they let you add weightings to websites that you trust.

It is expensive, no doubt. But for a certain audience that relies on quality web search, prefers to not be walled in by paying search engine optimizers and values paying for a product rather than opting to be the product, Kagi offers a solution.

Having said that, I would love to see the cost come down and make it more accessible to the many and I appreciate that for most people, the “free” search engines are good enough.

Fair enough. And I’m sure the people who volunteered were probably thrilled to be involved with the project, it really is a brilliant piece of work.

Absolutely loved this. Never heard of the artist before this (though clearly she is very popular!). She seemed to have a lot of fun making the video.

The only thing that disappointed me was learning that a bunch of people had to volunteer their time to make this. Surely this made lot of money for the artist and video producers, could it really be that the margins were too thin to compensate all the people working on this?

That will deduce the liar and truth-teller, but won’t give you any information about which door leads where.

Let’s number the dudes in your image form left to right: 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Dudes 3 and 4 have no useful information. They stay silent.

Dude 1 can see one of each hat colour on the dudes in front, but cannot determine their own colour without knowing the hat colour of dude 4. They stay silent.

Dude 2 can see the hat colour of dude 3. They can determine that either they themself or the dude behind must have a different hat colour. The dude behind - dude 1 - can see both of the hat colours in front, but stays silent. This lets dude 2 know that they and dude 3 must be different colours (otherwise dude 1 would have known their own hat colour).

Therefore, dude 2 knows their own hat colour must be different to the dude in front and announces the colour of their own hat.

Good question. I am now a software developer, but in a previous career I was a logistics manager. In that job I had a lot of repetitive report downloading and creating. It would take hours each day. I used techniques taught in that book to automate downloading reports directly, as well as generating some in SAP by automating mouse and keyboard movements, as well as generating CSVs and Excel spreadsheets. In all cases I either cut the time required or at least the time I had to be physically present. Many jobs could have similar applications of a little Python, I imagine. Certainly not all jobs though, of course.

I do, via the !s bang. I was thrown off of using Startpage exclusively after the System1 acquisition. Since then, I’ve also experienced more downtime with Startpage than I find acceptable. It is nice getting the Google results via another interface though.

I default to DuckDuckGo as well. I don’t really like it, and I certainly don’t trust it any more than I do any other for-profit organization. I just wanted something that isn’t Google, Amazon or Microsoft.

It’s really quite fruitless though. Maybe 80% of my searches end up having a !s or !g (really just for variety…) thrown in, as Google’s results are just better.

DDG image search spits out porn as often as it does something relevant. I can change content moderation options if I want to reduce it, but I don’t have to do that with Google.

Kagi has caught my attention lately. I’m going to try it and see if it feels good value for the money. I’m not opposed to paying for search, but this does feel expensive (I say that having no idea of the true cost of running a search company). Obviously, privacy is out the window as it’s paid for and linked to an account. But as I feel I’m not really getting that anywhere else either, I’m more hoping that it will just provide good search results.