NotAnArdvark

joined 2 years ago
sorted by: new top controversial old
What do you guys use LLMs for, that is proven to work well with them? in c/[email protected]
[–] NotAnArdvark 1 points 1 hour ago

I guess my notes are unstructured, as in they're what I type as I'm in the meeting. I'm a "more is better" sort of note taker, so it's definitely faster to let AI pull things out.

Infosec ... I guess people will have to evaluate that for themselves. Certainly, for my use case there's no concern.

What do you guys use LLMs for, that is proven to work well with them? in c/[email protected]
[–] NotAnArdvark 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (2 children)

I use it to review my meeting notes.

  • "Based on the following daily notes, what should I follow-up on in my next meeting with #SomeTeamTag?"
  • "Based on the following daily notes, what has the #SomeTeamTag accomplished the past month?"
  • etc.

I'm not counting on it to not miss anything, but it jogs my memory, it does often pull out things I completely forgot about, and it lets me get away with being super lazy. Whoops, 5 minutes before a meeting I forgot about? Suddenly I can follow up on things that were talked about last meeting. Or, for sprint retrospectives, give feedback that is accurate.

To add: I've also started using AI to "talk to podcast guests." You can use Whisper to transcribe a podcast, then give the transcript to AI to ask questions. I find the Modern Wisdom Podcast is great for this.

Top American scientists just lost their jobs. Canada is rolling out the welcome mat in c/canada
[–] NotAnArdvark 27 points 1 week ago (3 children)

(I say this naive of all sorts of things, but...) I wish Canada would do something bold and actively court all these high-skill people who are probably interested in jumping ship. Make it easier for whole companies to move and bring their employees, make it easy for entrepreneurs to start a business serving this new migration, relax some tax rules for those in the process of moving, make it easy for extended family to tag along, make it clear it'll be easy for them to go back... ehh, and do something about housing.

Then, take out billboards in big cities. Put on events in the US. Partner with Canadian companies to handle logistics for potential employees, etc., etc.

Don't just go "Hey smart people, come to Canada" and afterwards say "I bet they'll do smart-people things!" Go for an unprecedented scale migration and actually shape the process for long-term benefit and payoff.

In the past I figured we didn't do this because we didn't want to piss off people in the US, but, I feel like who gives a shit now.

The Swastidumpster has an Extremely Generous Warranty in c/Cyberstuck
[–] NotAnArdvark 51 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Their brand-new car, their charger, and (evidently) on the spot Tesla says "yeah, this isn't our problem." I can't imagine they expect the person is going to go "Oh, dear." hang up, then pay thousands of dollars to fix whatever broke.

Microsoft Teams and their seemingly bizarre routing in c/[email protected]
[–] NotAnArdvark 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

No, all within the province. I thought... that would be a funny way to out someone who is "working from home" in Europe.

10
Microsoft Teams and their seemingly bizarre routing (self.homenetworking)
 

Purely a curiosity on my part... But has anyone ever looked at how their Microsoft Teams calls get routed? During Teams calls I'll check OpenWrt to see the endpoint IP I'm sending all my traffic to, then do a traceroute to that IP. So far, I think, it's always been a bizarre path.

For instance, today:

$ tracepath 52.115.76.111
 1?: [LOCALHOST]                      pmtu 1500
 1:  OpenWrt.lan                                           1.200ms 
 1:  OpenWrt.lan                                           1.511ms 
 2:  ...                              15.008ms 
 3:  ...                            18.429ms asymm  4 
 4:  ...                            22.477ms asymm  5 
 5:  six2.microsoft.com                                   39.117ms asymm  6 
 6:  ae32-0.icr02.mwh01.ntwk.msn.net                      40.610ms 
 7:  be-162-0.ibr04.mwh01.ntwk.msn.net                   190.062ms asymm 15 
 8:  be-2-0.ibr04.fra30.ntwk.msn.net                      78.997ms asymm 12 
 9:  be-8-0.ibr02.dsm05.ntwk.msn.net                      77.944ms asymm 12 
10:  51.10.19.124                                         78.474ms asymm 11 
11:  104.44.54.110                                        75.460ms asymm 10 
12:  no reply
^C

I think that:

  • mwh01 = Moses Lake, WA
  • fra30 = Frankfurt
  • dsm05 = Des Moines, Iowa
  • ibr04 = ??

Assuming I'm right on those names - and the hostnames can be trusted - what a strange way to route traffic...

Most the time when I check these Teams IPs I'm just routing through Southern states before being sent back to the Eastern US, but today's was weird enough I thought I should ask if anyone else ever looks at these things.

This Week in Plasma: File Transfer Progress Graphs in c/[email protected]
[–] NotAnArdvark 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

How long have you been using Kmail?

I tried maybe 3 years ago and I found it incredibly buggy. I've been using Thunderbird, but definitely wish there was a KDE or Qt-native mail app that did what I wanted.

Lightest-weight video conferencing? in c/[email protected]
[–] NotAnArdvark 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

One is a Pinebook Pro, which is an RK3399 processor. Another is a Surface Go 2 with an Intel Pentium Gold Processor 4425Y.

The actual issue is that the video conferencing works, but trying to do anything else is just suuuper slow. Well, the Surface Go 2 is actually fairly good as long as I'm not touching the ZRAM. But, trying to share a window in Google Meet will always involve a lot of waiting. Firefox and Chromium seem equivalent on the Surface, but the Pinebook seems better in Chromium lately.

I can bare-bones most apps I use on these laptops, but for video conferencing it seems like I have to drag along a whole browser.

26
Lightest-weight video conferencing? (self.linux)
 

Somehow I collect low-powered laptops, and it would be nice to video chat on them without teetering on the edge of my desktop being frozen while I do it. Unfortunately, aside from Zoom - which doesn't have an ARM+Linux client - most of the video conferencing software I know of are WebRTC-based.

My question - can anyone suggest video conferencing software that is speedier than your average browser-based solution? I expect that whatever it is will require the other end to run the same software, and that's ok.

For reference, Google Meet and Jitsi Meet are the two I've tried. I briefly tried Teams, but it was having none of it.

Thank you!

How the corporatization of vet clinics is driving up prices across the country in c/canada
[–] NotAnArdvark 6 points 2 months ago

My dog was getting dental work done and my vet was worried about her leg. She said while my dog was sedated she'd throw her up under the x-ray to take a look at the joint. "Well that's super nice!" I thought.

I leave my dog at the vet and get a call an hour or so later. It's the vet, she says she's really sorry but not only can she not do that x-ray for free, but I'll have to pay a consult fee too if they're going to look at anything not related to the teeth. She was very apologetic.

When I go to get my dog we're going over discharge notes and at the end this poor vet says "I now need to recommend this particular water supplement. I don't use it with my dogs. Some people think it's expensive and ineffective. If you think you might be interested I can also tell you about other options that may be more effective."

This poor woman who was all happy and concerned about my dog turned into someone who seemed supremely uncomfortable. I can only imagine it was VCA that was forcing this vet to go contrary to what she felt was best.

How long has your PC been on for? in c/[email protected]
[–] NotAnArdvark 1 points 3 months ago

I'm surprised how many people turn their computers off. My desktop uptime is 4 day, but, I do put it to sleep at night (which I think counts towards its uptime).

I will look into hibernating. The reason I don't shut down is because I usually end up with carefully placed windows and lots of ongoing projects all over. Restarting would mean I'd have to start all that up again - assuming I remember what I was doing.

Optimal ZRAM configuration for my device in c/[email protected]
[–] NotAnArdvark 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

For whatever it's worth - I have a laptop with 4GB of RAM and a 4GB ZRAM device, and it can't use all the ZRAM before everything grinds to a halt. I think the way ZRAM works best is if it can "swap out" (compress) anonymous pages that aren't actually needed again right away, freeing up the fast memory for disk caching and other memory needs.

In my case, I think I can reach a point where the amount of memory Linux needs simultaneously active goes beyond the 4GB of RAM, so it's just compressing/uncompressing forever and getting nowhere.

So, I think I'd argue that maybe you can't go too big? I think only anonymous pages can get compressed, and there's probably only so many gigabytes of those in memory at any given time.

Justin Trudeau slams Pierre Poilievre and Alberta's Danielle Smith for breaking ranks over Trump tariffs in c/canada
[–] NotAnArdvark 30 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I was watching CBC coverage of some press conference Poilievre was doing, going on and on about the need for an "axe the tax election" (??). Someone asked Poilievre what he was doing to fight against Trump's proposed tariffs and Poilievre says he's not the prime minister, but if Canadians give him a mandate, he'll fight for their interests, etc.

Then the CBC commentator cuts in and says "It should be noted that there are many people who aren't the prime minister who have decided to adopt a "team Canada" attitude and are doing what they can to make the case against tariffs."

The bluntness and absurdity I just found hilarious.

Not enough people buying Premium, eh? in c/[email protected]
[–] NotAnArdvark 6 points 3 months ago (4 children)

YouTube premium is one of the subscriptions I most often feel thankful for having. I watch enough YouTube videos that avoiding all those ads is really worthwhile, I hope that my view is worth more to the channels I watch, and YouTube music let me cancel Spotify.

I understand being pissed at YouTube and Google, but at the end of the day, of all the things I have to rage at, YouTube isn't worth it. I like it, there are creators that use it that I like, and I understand that it costs real money to run the platform.

25
Can a Flatpak control the file picker used by an app? (self.linux)
 

Here's the situation: I use the Obsidian Flatpak with Plasma on openSUSE Tumbleweed. For a long time the Obsidian file picker was the Plasma version, and life was good. After an update of openSUSE and my Obsidian Flatpak, I'm now getting the Gnome file picker. Life now makes less sense.

I've confirmed that other Flatpaks are still using the Plasma file picker. I've also been investigating my xdg-desktop-portal configuration based off of what I've been reading here, but it all looks correct to me.

I can't decide whether this change was because of Obsidian, the Flatpak packaging of Obsidian, or an openSUSE change. Does anyone have tips on tracking this down?

52
Why is OpenSSL able to use a key file my user shouldn't have access to? (self.linux)
 

The following command works even though I really don't think I should have permission to the key file:
$ openssl aes-256-cbc -d -pbkdf2 -in etc_backup.tar.xz.enc -out etc_backup.tar.xz -k /etc/ssl/private/etcBackup.key

I'm unable to even ascertain the existence of the key file under my normal user. I'm a member of only two groups, my own group and vboxusers.

The permissions leading up to that file:

drwxr-xr-x   1 root root 4010 Jul 31 08:01 etc
...
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root      206 Jul 14 23:52 ssl
...
drwx------ 1 root root    26 Jul 31 14:07 private
...
-rw------- 1 root root 256 Jul 31 14:07 etcBackup.key

OpenSSL isn't setuid:

> ls -la $(which openssl)
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1004768 Jul 14 23:52 /usr/bin/openssl

There don't appear to be any ACLs related to that key file:

> sudo getfacl /etc/ssl/private/etcBackup.key
[sudo] password for root: 
getfacl: Removing leading '/' from absolute path names
# file: etc/ssl/private/etcBackup.key
# owner: root
# group: root
user::rw-
group::---
other::---

> sudo lsattr  /etc/ssl/private/etcBackup.key
---------------------- /etc/ssl/private/etcBackup.key

Finally, it's not just the case that the original file was encrypted with an empty file:

> openssl aes-256-cbc -d -pbkdf2 -in etc_backup.tar.xz.enc -out etc_backup.tar.xz -k /etc/ssl/private/abc.key
bad decrypt
4047F634B67F0000:error:1C800064:Provider routines:ossl_cipher_unpadblock:bad decrypt:providers/implementations/ciphers/ciphercommon_block.c:124

Does anyone know what I've missed here?

35
Recovering from an openSUSE Tumbleweed update (self.linux)
 

Zoom is vital to my job this month and prior to an update last week I had the openSUSE version of Zoom's RPM installed and working fine.

I updated my Tumbleweed installation to openSUSE-20240704-0 last week, after which Zoom started crashing when sharing a screen. There was a message in the logs about the library libqt5qml.so and I thought I could fix this by backing out either the update for the libQtQuick5 package in particular, or just booting from the pre-update snapshot.

To make a long story short, I ultimately installed the Zoom Flatpak and resolved to get back to this when I had a bit more time.

My question - Can people suggest the right way in openSUSE Tumbleweed to handle the situation where an update breaks something on the system?

Assuming libQtQuick5 was the updated package that was at fault here, is there a way I could have downgraded just that package? Would booting from the pre-update snapshot and then just carrying on with my week have been a reasonable way to proceed?

To be clear - I'm not so much concerned about Zoom, I'm more curious about how to use the openSUSE Tumbleweed tools to recover from updates that cause problems.

Thank you!

56
What is the "right" thing to do when a website tells me to download Chrome? (self.firefox)
 

I'll be emailing the site admin... or some contact at the site, but, is there anything else that can be done to try to put pressure on these websites that tell me "you're not getting the best experience... download Chrome."?

I know Firefox has a "Report a broken site" feature, but, the site isn't technically broken. They're just telling me to switch browsers.

5
Where can I ask questions about iproute2 tools? (self.networking)
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/14107888

I have a very specific questions about Linux Traffic control and u32 filters in particular. However, I don't know where the right place is to ask such a question as it's fairly niche.

The Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control site says it has a mailing list for questions, but the last post was from 2019. There is also the incredibly busy 'linux-netdev' mailing list, but, the traffic there looks like strictly source changes.

Any ideas?

The question I'm trying to find an answer to is: The u32 tc filter seems to support negative byte offsets which allows you to examine the Ethernet frame header (I don't think I even found documentation on this, this is thanks to ChatGPT). However, when using u32 values to examine 8 bytes I can only use offsets in increments of 4 - like "at -8" or "at -12", with any other increment giving me the error Illegal "match".

This seems like only a curiosity, but, I've been struggling to get my bit-matching to match the way I expect, and I'm wondering if this suggests that matching doesn't function the way I think.

28
Where can I ask questions about iproute2 tools? (self.linux)
 

I have a very specific questions about Linux Traffic control and u32 filters in particular. However, I don't know where the right place is to ask such a question as it's fairly niche.

The Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control site says it has a mailing list for questions, but the last post was from 2019. There is also the incredibly busy 'linux-netdev' mailing list, but, the traffic there looks like strictly source changes.

Any ideas?

The question I'm trying to find an answer to is: The u32 tc filter seems to support negative byte offsets which allows you to examine the Ethernet frame header (I don't think I even found documentation on this, this is thanks to ChatGPT). However, when using u32 values to examine 8 bytes I can only use offsets in increments of 4 - like "at -8" or "at -12", with any other increment giving me the error Illegal "match".

This seems like only a curiosity, but, I've been struggling to get my bit-matching to match the way I expect, and I'm wondering if this suggests that matching doesn't function the way I think.

21
How are people with heat pumps faring? (self.alberta)
submitted 1 year ago by NotAnArdvark to c/alberta
40 comments fedilink
 

With the cold weather I was hoping to hear of some experiences people have had with their heat pumps.

What kind of backup heat do you have? Are you using it? Is there some temperature where you just stop using the heat pump, or are you even consciously thinking about it?

Thanks!

11
Charging for tech support (self.techsupport)
 

I really had no idea where on Lemmy to ask this, so apologies if this seems like a bit of a strange place to post.

I'm a computer guy, but "fixing computers" isn't usually my thing. However, I offered to migrate my veterinarian's accounting laptop to a new laptop she had bought. This involved getting an old version of Quickbooks running on Windows 11, a bit of back-and-forth with login details for various accounts. Generally though, it was straight forward.

This took me about 4 hours (more, really). The only other time I did contractor work like this I picked my rate based on what my mechanic was charging - $95/hour.

So my invoice, for my tiny-town vet, is going to be $380. Can I get input from anyone on whether that's high? The laptop itself probably only cost $500. Something that makes me feel a bit better about the number is that I've helped her out lots over the last couple of years and never billed her for it, despite her saying I should.

Thanks!

19
What is this small metal box my hood fan vents through? (photos.app.goo.gl)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by NotAnArdvark to c/[email protected]
5 comments fedilink
 

My hood fan vents into the top of this metal box, which then has a vent to the outside about halfway down the metal box. The box itself it maybe two half-height shoe boxes in size. I looked pretty hard, and the closest I could find was that it might be related to collecting condensation.

Does anyone know what this is for?

Thanks

I should say! The picture that comes up for this album is clearly the outside vent and is not what I'm talking about. Click on it to see all the pictures!

view more: next ›