• 19 Posts
  • 288 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle



  • As the huntress, sometimes I like to camp in a garden to heal, level up a bit, and stomp grass with Rejuvenating Steps

    I hate to steal the thread but how good are gardens really?

    I never learned how to make proper advantage of them. Obviously they have some loot, and there’s the invisibility thing but every time I wanted to use it as a resting place mobs always found me what felt as just as easily as anywhere. But the fact that they get auto marked in the list of visited places tells me they should be valuable enough to return to, similar to alchemy labs, but they don’t seem to be. But then again, maybe I’m just missing something.

    (The Rejuvenating Steps part is great but any patch of grass can do that.)




  • I don’t have experience with Twitter or Mastodon but it reminds me of time when I quit drinking.

    When I quit drinking and tried to stay around people I used to drink with, I realized really fast how pointless this “engagement” (really just two people speaking past each other, and feeling like they have deep conversation) is. It’s almost insulting what a waste of effort such an “engagement” can be.



  • Why? Why ask for this from the creator?

    If someone can create new software and offer it for free, they should not also be expected to also create a comprehensive analysis of what other people did and list of differences.

    Just take it or leave it, it’s that simple. No need to act as if you’re trying to waste some door-to-door salesman’s time.

    Edit: I expected some downvotes but not that many.

    To my defense, the question in this thread is “you could elaborate what exactly you did different than all the others”. Look, I’m not a native English speaker either but I feel we could agree that is still pretty far away from simply being curious about design choices or “what led you to create this” sort of exploratory question.

    I might have overreacted, though, so sorry for that.





  • I could describe myself in similar terms as you described yourself; basically a nerd who can also program my way out of a paper bag (and maybe a leather one).

    To me the term “tech bro” always meant someone between Elon Musk and some low middle class douche-bag who feels smart and adult about “accepting” that AI needs to be everywhere and we also need to pay for SW every month. Someone person who would say “bUt iT’s fOrD mOdEl T” and has some Alexa non-sense in their house.





  • When it comes to identifying the server, hostname the first thing that counts. lemmy.world or mastodon.social or google.com are three different hostnames. At this point you can basically treat the period as no special character, it’s just part of the funny world. This basically answers your question: those are two different domains, ie. for all purposes, different instances.

    However, your computer does not really connect to hostname but to IP address, so the next important thing is to translate the hostname to an IP address.

    Aside: a valid hostname does not even have to have period in it. For example, localhost is a valid hostname! But generally hostnames without periods don’t get translated to any useful IP addresses. localhost is probably the only one widely used hostname but your OS will translate it to a special IP address which marks your own device.)

    So to translate the hostname to IP address is done using so-called DNS. So before you can connect, your computer already knows an IP address of a DNS server, and asks it to translate the hostname to IP address. Technically, this is still not where the period is strictly important.

    Where the period does start to be meaningful is when you think about: so we have billions of IP addresses, billions of hostnames, how do we organize it all? Who is going to maintain the huge massive list?

    So it works like this: There are dozens of organizations, each of which is assigned one or more “top level domains” (TLD). Then they are responsible for maintaining lists of all hostnames ending with those domains. Many of these organizations are local to certain states. For example, in Czech Republic, where I live, we have organization called CZ.NIC which maintains all domains ending with .cz. So it’s up to CZ.NIC how it manages permissions and gives out the domains. In this case, basically anyone can register any free domain ending with .cz, and what this registration means is that now they can get a server with an IP address, run whatever they want and have the registered domain name point to that IP address.

    Note that other organizations may decide to add additional rules. For example .uk domains are managed with extra rules, where non-government (commercial) entities are normally allowed to register only .co.uk and other .uk names are not handed out easily. I don’t actually know the details about .uk but my point is that if you are going to think about a hostname and how to begin to understand who owns it, first thing that matters is the TLD, and from that point the rules might be slightly different. To be fair, I haven’t seen much variance between this; almost all public TLD’s I’ve seen were either “simple”, meaning myname.tld or this thing that UK does (also New Zealand, from the top of my head).

    One almost universal rule is, though, that if I, say, register seznam.cz with CZ.NIC, then I automatically get not only seznam.cz but also any address I can possibly come up which ends with .seznam.cz. foo.seznam.cz, bar.seznam.cz, www.seznam.cz, I can now start organizing my servers using this whole infinite space, with any number of extra periods. I could totally start a business and start promoting my server foo.bar.baz.whatever.cz on billboards, as long as CZ.NIC grants me whatever.cz.

    So back to your question: mastodon.social and piefed.social are two completely different domains. All we know that they have in common is that whoever registered them, had to deal with the same organization; that is whoever maintains .social.

    So TL;DR: there’s really nothing that suggests that they would be the same instance.


  • What’s even worse that the stolen comment got much more engagement than the original.

    I’ve seen her comments all around YouTube, and this always seems to happen to her. (I’m assuming it’s because they are the most insightful, informative yet still on point.) Don’t give up Barbara, some of us are seeing through the scam and rooting for you!





  • Also in my experience LLM can often propose solutions which are working but way too complex.

    Story time: just yesterday, in VueJS I was trying to iterate over a list of items and render .text of reach item as HTML, but I needed to process it first. Note that in VueJS this is done by adding eg. <span v-html="item.text"></span> where content of the attribute is the JavaScript expression needed to get the text.

    First I asked ChatGPT to write the function for processing the text. That worked pretty well and even used part of the JavaScript API which I was not aware about.

    Next, I had a “dumb moment” when I did not realize that as I’m iterating through items I can just say <span v-html="processHtml(item.text)"></span>, that’s all I really needed. Somehow I thought (or should I say, “hallucinated”, ba dum tsss) for a moment that v-html is special or something (it is used differently than the most abundant type of syntax). So I went ahead and asked ChatGPT how to render processed texts while iterating.

    It came with a rather contrived solution which involved creating another computed property containing a list of processed texts. I started to integrate it into the existing loop: I would have to add index and use that index to pull the code from the computed property, which already felt a little bit weird.

    That’s when it struck me: no, no, no, I can just f*ing use the function.

    TL; DR: The point is, while ChatGPT was helpful I still needed to babysit it. And if I didn’t snap from my lazy moment, or if I simply didn’t know better, I would end up with code which is more complex, more surprising, which means harder to reason about for both humans and LLM’s. (For humans because now it forces you to speculate about coder’s intent, and for LLM’s because it’s less likely to be reminiscent of surrounding code in its learning data.)