/tech/ - Technology

I managed to convince my mom to use SimpleX, but she complains that it drains her battery and messages don't arrive reliably. I guess I'm going to have to use Matrix further, because I tried to fix it and it never worked. Otherwise I really like SimpleX and think it's probably the best messaging application out there, if it wasn't for the issues normal people seemingly run in and can't fix (which is understandable I might add).

>>14430
Proof?

>>16589
She's better off using something like Signal; very similar to Whatsapp with an almost identical UX but open sores. I had family members use it and say it was fine.

>>12931 (OP) 
I do use it. I think it's the best instant-messaging app out there. I managed to convince my family and relatives to use it, but it's almost impossible to convince friends or other people to use that. This problem relates across all alternative messaging apps.

I have to say though, SimpleX has 2 major issues: sometimes (very rarely) messages won't arrive to destination, and calls (be it audio or video) are almost impossible to be made reliably, without the call crashing for high latency. Still, I think there's nothing better out there.

>>18323
Didn't tox already do this but better?

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>>17365
Based.

>>17368
Fair. As much as I like tablets, I'll admit the only demographics that use it a lot are children, elderly, homossexual men and college women.

>>17257
Well I find the idea delightful! My main driver is an iPhone Mini, and the consumption unit a full size iPhone (will probably get an iPad to replace it next). I've always found the idea of digital minimalism a worthy goal. Picrel is my last mini phone (Palm PVG100) before the market decided smartwatches were what gymrats wanted for a small comms unit.

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^---

>>17466
>>17468
It's cool to see likeminded people, it seems this idea of mine is mostly unpopular on /tech/ overall, but I still like it, might try Syncthing as I've heard good things about it. Nice to see smaller smartphones, I personally prefer them bigger because my hands are big and fat, so it's more comfortable for me, but I still find smaller ones charming and wish they'd be common.

>>8229
So the less code you need to look through the less that needs to be maintained?

>>15982
I see, fair enough.

>>15984
Thanks for the reply! Don't be hard on yourself, I think you're doing a great job, this place is pretty great.

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>>15983
Reddit is much worse, everything about it. And I don't think it was ever gud, unlike slashdot. Slashdot was decent in the late 90's, before they defaulted anonymous posts to -1 and changed the interface to a very painful browsing experience in Lynx.
Reddit mossad lady on the left.

installgentoo wiki link has changed:
https://igwiki.lyci.de/wiki/Main_Page

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>>15987
Reddit was never good, but before all the purges under Pao/SRS it at least wasn't BAD. Much like SA or opinionstube, it was at least mediocre back when it was sincere(le retarded) Randroid fedoralords instead of Blue Qboomer Langley spambots.
>Slashdot
Main structural advantage of /. versus its later knockoffs like Reddit was the Anonymous Coward feature. It's worth remembering that, in its early years, most 4chan posts were NOT anonymous! The cultural norm of anonymity by default evolved later, from something originally more like USENET where anon posts were commonly known but most weren't even pseudonymous.

>>17966
The old URL redirects to the new site. Shame the new URL is less memorable, but it's still likely a good idea to update the link.

>>18167
>Last time I used it guix pull was unbearably slow, however.
That's specifically Savannah being slow as hell as it is(/was?) getting hammered by bots.
I believe they have switched to Codeberg as default since then. If not, just add this to ~/.config/guix/channels.scm:
(list
  (channel
    (inherit (car %default-channels))
    (url "https://codeberg.org/guix/guix")))

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>>18167
>muh buttstrap
Asinine cargo cultism

If you actually cared about muh security you'd have somebody conduct a legit audit of every LTS release, but of course nobody does that except a handful of safety critical embedded platforms.

If you just want something unambiguous enough to trust gut feelings on, but easier to read than assembly, C is still a terrible choice because it's full of undefined crap and its bloated compiler's wizardry. Maybe something like Forth would be better.

>>18177
Guix uses a cryptographic (SHA256) hash of the source code and goes the extra mile to ensure 100% reproducibility.
It is not practical to verify a full-blown (and actually usable for common tasks) desktop OS without fully reproducible builds, so the work Guix and NixOS do is very important in this regard.

>>18181
>(SHA256) hash of the source
Cargo cultism. Hashed binary packages are exactly as trustworthy as uncompiled source nobody read.
>the work Guix and NixOS do is very important in this regard
The parts about ensuring bit-for-bit identical environments to those used by auditors can be deployed "the right way", instead of blindly dumping Docker images and Flatpak fake "sandboxes", yes. The arbitrary fetishism of C source as some sacred cow of transparency, not so much.

Security and bugginess aside, though, the ability to build everything the same way and roll everything backward and forward alongside multiple branches in the same install is extremely convenient for a ton of other reasons. Or at least it would be if the UI wasn't so autistically unpolished and the documentation wasn't so scattershot, for a project old enough to have kids in school.

>>18197
Assuming we are fine with starting "from scratch", how about something like this?

1. Specify a type of immutable object that isn't just bytes but also references other objects.
Specifically, make addresses not "just an integer/bytes" so it is possible to trace all objects to leaves from a single root node with just a single program/algorithm.
Instead of a single type of objects with both bytes and references, having two types of objects is fine too (one plain bytes, one only with references).
As the objects are immutable it is guaranteed they form a directed acyclic graph.
These references should be opaque to avoid exposing implementation details.

2. Use a cryptographic hash to refer to these objects.
This is possible due to the objects being immutable and not having any cyclic references.
The hash must differentiate (use a different domain) between plain bytes and references to avoid confusion attacks (e.g. tricking an implementation to interpret bytes as a reference).

3. Use "drivers" to transform objects.
These drivers take a single object as input and output a single object.

Dunno if OP is correct about his leak but it's pretty much a known fact you cannot trust modern AMD or Intel chipsets (would not be surprised if the same goes for those Mac M-series CPUs). On the upside of things you can use ARMs or ancient processors just fine and so long as you can run a modern graphics card you shouldn't really experience much bottlenecks. The issue with be running modern RAM alongside old CPUs. You'd practically have to make your own motherboard if you want that best-of-both-worlds situation. You can use ARMs of course, but then you're limited to shit that runs natively on ARM... unless you just make it into an x86-64 virtual machine with GPU passthrough. Your CPU speed will be shit in the virtual machine, but still fast enough for ordinary purposes and the GPU should work great while you use DDR5 RAM so all told it's a working option.

>>16043
>limited to shit that runs natively on ARM
Install gentoo, unironically.
>Your CPU speed will be shit in the virtual machine
About using old ARM socs.
The CPU is a massive bottleneck. But not as big as memory. Virtually all ARM boards you can buy are socs, that means there is no replaceable memory. The gpu on those machines don't have much acceleration capabilities. It drops frames playing 1080p vp8.
It struggles so much even when running natively, and you suggest running a vm?
Get any arm board and see for yourself. They are pretty cheap.

>>16049
The point is using new ARM for at least DDR4. If you want oldschool just use the AMD FX 9590 which has no PSP and use DDR3 RAM.

>>16043
making your own motherboard is not sufficient to use ddr5 if your cpu only supports ddr4, unless speed is of no concern to you.  even then, it might not be sufficient.  the memory controller is located on the cpu itself, and will not support ddr5 speeds.

>>8953
>It's not equivalent to ME/PSP
PSP is just rebranded TZ

>>17930
>portals
i2p

>>17930
Use the Wiby search engine, it indexes old websites and retro neocities sites so you can live on the old web forever. It also has a "surprise me" button for when you want to visit a random website.

>>17932
What's wrong with encrypted email?

>>17974
Current email protocols were designed in the 1960s, where the size of a "byte" was still undetermined and the only thing you could count on was every computer being able to output and parse English characters, so all the protocols are in plaintext. Security and encryption also wasn't a consideration at all in the original protocol.

Since then a bunch of extensions have been added on top of those mail protocols, all of which are horrible because mail servers can and will mangle plaintext, requiring more hacks to be resistant to mangling (take a look at DKIM "relaxed" canonicalization for example).

For encryption to be secure and private, you should:
- encrypt the message body, which is relatively trivial
- encrypt the subject, which probably isn't too hard
- encrypt the sender and recipient, which probably isn't feasible
- encrypt other metadata in the headers, which you can forget about
And that's just implementation. How do you ensure that encryption actually works? Even if your setup is perfect your contacts can still fumble it and end up leaking a whole conversation anyway.

If you want encryption to be effective, it needs to be always on at all times. Allowing non-encrypted modes carries too much risk. Email was never designed to be encrypted and it is very hard to make it airtight. A message protocol designed to use encryption always and everywhere from the get-g

>>16019
>Dick Sword
I think you mean Dick Sawed?

>>17711
How are you going to guarantee your indian h1b jewish bioweapon doesn't vibecode the firmware of your Boeing airbus (name any critical application) that will crash you absolute cretin. I swear i can smell the mcdonalds of your breath from here.

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>>17712
>name any critical application
<the most trivial of software
Like I said, any programming task that can be autogenerated is now subhuman.

Like (you)

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>>17714
First of all you dumb normalnigger: Shitskins but especially indians aren't people. They're not and never will be no matter how much that shitter orange pedophile trump keeps trying to convince you otherwise of their h1b bioweapons.

Now with that out of the way, faggot, Randeep will proceed sar do his vibecodeen sar programming saaaaar on your airplane, car, bank account, your faggoted walmart mobility skooters, ai pod car, smart home and anything else. How do I know this? Because everyone will cheat to get ahead. 

He's not just doing "trivial things" randeep is already vibecodeen all da critical appz saar and then one day you're ruined then randeep and shlomo will laugh at you. Non luxury non private anything goyim faggots. 

Then you will seethe and wonder to your muttbrain the following
>dis heah aint wut i was promised mangg 
>"yo why everything so fucked up am sheeit mangf dafuqqq?? 
>dey wuz just supposed to poogram da funny ha ha app.. sheet 
>fuk da problem be me need sum mo munney"(that you will never afford because you are a poor tard) 

When Art is obsolete it becomes retarded just like you. Enjoy your mediocre 56% brown fisher price ikea furniture mcFuture i guess retard. Have fun with that shit and go suck a nigger dick eternally you dumb jew.

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>>17717
>muh injuns
AI doesn't change that. If you already offshore your five nines infrastructure to zero oversight junior devs to shave a nickle off a megaproject, you were already neck deep in competency crisis land decades before AI hit.
>Art is obsolete
"Art" that was already generic commodity humanslop 

You're the only one guntguarding mediocrity, and the people who aspire to nothing greater, rather than allowing nature to take its course and true human talent to concentrate on what only humans can do.

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>http stands for hypertext transfer protocol
>it is supposed to transfer hypertext
>instead it is used to execute javascript on your machine without your consent
I propose a new name: the javascript-execution-without-consent protocol, or jewcp for short.

>>17875
Yes, please.

>>17873 (OP) 
>shape rotators and wordcels
>he's still stuck on people that can internally verbalize
You're retarded.
Internal verbalization is the inevitable internalization of rubber duck debugging.
The process of internal verbalization allows the practitioner to route concepts and ideas through alternate sections of the brain, which allows them to get outside of their normal train of thought.
The basis and benefits of internal verbalization are no different than internal visualization.

People who cannot program have feminized minds.
Feminized minds cannot chain logic; therefore, to the feminized mind anything that is not immediately obvious is a leap of logic.

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>>17882
I am retarded, of course, but I can recall that I was unable to make any sense of any of it until I had this insight:  a computer is a machine that executes instructions in exact sequence, exactly as you write them.  I taught myself BASIC on an old, old 8-bit micro and got into the mental habit of thinking of line numbers as being analogous to sequential memory locations and visualizing the instruction pointer going down line by line.

This allowed me to grasp and learn structured programming.  OOP confuses me badly.  I tried to take a course years back.  The instructor was a very enthusiastic young fellow who began by yelling "Everything is an object and objects are everything!  A dog is an object!  A potato is an object!"  As far as I can tell "objects" are little blobs of code containing both instructions and data, sort of like subroutines except for being ugly and inelegant and wasteful of RAM and clock cycles.  I still don't grasp how one object calls another object or communicates with it.  I have decided that my BRANE is too small and smooth for this and took up digital art instead.

>>17890
There's OOP and there's a whole bunch of other features that get associated with OOP but aren't really necessary, as well as implementation details that may confusing if you just want to grasp the concept.

IMO the simplest model is: an object is something that can perform actions in response to messages it receives.

Example: your computer is connected with the zzzchan server. It can send a message to request a page, to submit a post ... Your computer and the server are objects.
Your computer consists of a CPU, RAM, storage drives ... If your CPU wants to read memory, it sends a message to the memory controller. Likewise, if it wants to read from a hard disk it sends a message to the disk controller. Objects are composed of other objects.

Note that a lot of communication involves a request followed by a reply. Incidentally this maps very cleanly to call/return, so message passing can easily be implemented as method calls.

Other features like inheritance, interfaces ... may be useful but are not essential to model something as OO. OO is very general.

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>>17873 (OP) 
>Van Someren looked at novices learning Prolog [29]. He came to the conclusion that those who were successful had a mechanical understanding of the way that the language implementation – the Prolog virtual machine – worked.
>Mayer expressed the opinion that the formal nature of programming (he called it syntactic knowledge) is the difficult bit [20]. He believed that experts were able to think semantically.
>Thomas Green put forward the notion of cognitive dimensions to characterise programming languages and programming problems [12]. Like Detienne in [11], he rejects the notion that programming languages can be ‘natural’: they are necessarily artificial, formal and meaningless.
Couldn't you solve this through an education program built around the classical trivium? It attempts to teach semantic thinking and improve overall knowledge transfer through the study of a specific grammar (that of a particular language such as English or Latin) and general grammar, Aristotelian logic (which transfers over to writing and speech more easily than symbolic logic), and rhetoric.

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I've hacked something together that's good enough for now. I can go forward with a single press and back with double press (I keep long press reserved for other functionality). Going back is a bit awkward though, since waking from deep sleep is slow and you need to time the presses properly for it to register (I'd say ~1/3s press, ~1/3 release then 1/3 press again).
The documentation is atrocious. They seem to have nuked their previous documentation and replaced it with something that's blatantly incomplete. I wouldn't be surprised if it's partially "AI" generated. Their own README's have a bunch of links that are dead. e.g.:
>We support peripheral mode over UART! The commands are listed here [dead link]
Amazing...

The examples are better, though still nonsensical in a lot of places. e.g. the example that loads from HTTP manually does a lot of manual work, including pointless double buffering on the stack, while making no mention they provide a downloadFile function.
You need to be careful with having both WiFi turned on and drawing to the display. It seems a brownout occurs and the MCU resets because both the display and the WiFi slurp a lot of power. Digging through the provided library I see that WiFi gets taken out of sleep at the start downloadFile, then back to sleep if it was (and not if it wasn't). I just put the WiFi immediately to sleep right after connecting which is stupid but an easy hack.

Loading PNG images is very slow. I first thought something was wrong with their HTTPClient since I could see the request in the log, yet needed to wait multiple seconds for the image to appear. However, it takes multiple seconds to load an image from SD card too. Poorly optimized PNG decoder I guess?
FWIW I found that with 3-bit grayscale PNG compresses significantly better than JPEG. Yet, most images hover around 200KiB, while  1200*825*3/8=371250 bytes if you were to use raw bits to store the image. It probably makes sense to use a custom format with lightweight compression on top.

In any case, here's the code I cobbled together. I plan to make something more advanced, where the Inkplate is basically a dumb terminal for my desktop PC, but I'm not going to use arduino-cli for it since I find Arduino wrappers to be shit. Too bad the Inkplate library is specifically designed for "Arduino IDE". By the way, I did find e-reader software https://github.com/turgu1/EPub-InkPlate but I don't seem able to convert from PDF to EPUB properly, hence why I just convert to images and display that. For now this suffices.

(python3 -m http.server is pretty useful)

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>>17897
>Oh, they claim the Inkplate 10 is "not suitable as e-reader". Deceptive marketing?
So what the fuck is it good for?

>>17899
An educational experience, like falling off your bicycle or buying a Mac.

>>17897
From the problems you described, I assumed it must have some kind of dinky 8-bit microcontroller like an AVR or PIC, but no, it's got 8MB RAM and an Xtensa LX7 740MHz 32-bit VLIW, equivalent to dual PII/400.

I guess the provided libraries are just astoundingly unoptimized

>>17906
>Xtensa LX7 740MHz 32-bit VLIW
This one doesn't have that, assuming I have the right datasheet.
BOM here says ESP32-WROVER https://github.com/SolderedElectronics/Soldered-Inkplate-10-hardware-design/blob/main/OUTPUTS/V1.3.1/Soldered%20Inkplate%2010%20BOM.csv
Assuming it's the -E variant: https://documentation.espressif.com/esp32-wrover-e_esp32-wrover-ie_datasheet_en.pdf
>ESP32-D0WD-V3 or ESP32-D0WDR2-V3 embedded, Xtensa dual-core 32-bit LX6 microprocessor, up to 240 MHz
... which should still be pretty fast. The Inkplate library uses pngle https://github.com/SolderedElectronics/Inkplate-Arduino-library/tree/master/src/libs/pngle which is optimized for MCUs with little memory. Probably not the best choice for an ESP32 which does actually have a lot of memory.

>>17840
Well. I'm retarded.  I just had to make a symlink.  That's what I get for looking online for a solution instead of spending a few minutes thinking about it, I guess.

It does take minutes to load a big LLM like Mistral-Small from a spinning platter HDD, instead of seconds, but I can deal.  Never mind.

I noticed that AI search engines, aside from citing the top search results or Reddit, Wikipedia, Tripadvisor, etc tend to favor articles written by other AIs rather than ones written by real humans as sources. Has anyone else noticed this and have any ideas as to why, aside from the obvious (AI content being written with SEO in mind)?

>>17850
>SEO
You have successfully answered your own question

In a related phenomenon, GPT-4 required all the English-language content on the entire Internet, including gorillions of terabytes of digitized books and auto-translated content from other languages.  GPT-5 requires four to five more orders of magnitude of training material than actually exist, so the researchers have hit upon the brilliant strategy of having it write its own training data, in a never-ending digital Ouroboros of bullshit.  Sending the output of the sausage machine back into the grinder will surely create more sausage than existed before, and surely nothing can go wrong, amirite guise?  Amirite?  Because clearly the AI isn't just glorified ELIZA plus glorified autocorrect, clearly the AI is actually making new sausage that did not previously exist.  Amirite?

If you own stock in any company that's putting a lot of resources into this, I think it's just about time to start selling short.

>>17891
Muh AGI is a complete meme at this point, yet it's also the thing all the kikes invested so much money into they have to invest more to maintain the bubble so financial physics don't happen.
The real shekels lie in deepfakes, robotics and real-time conversational speech models, which also just so happen to see steady progress with plenty of room upwards compared to LLMs.

>>17840
>decent alternative
llama.cpp and vLLM exist.

>>17036
If you just want to coom then Rocinante-12B is probably the best option. Should be plenty fast as long as you have a decent GPU.