Animals and Pets thebardingreen • 2 months ago • 100%

Video: https://thebardingreen.me/spinach.webm

Selfhosted thebardingreen • 3 months ago • 92%

Not me. I have a client who's a very sweet old lady who's business is doing real bio science to treat cancer patients with cannabis extracts. She's very easily frustrated with technical problems and definitely has the boomer attitude that if you buy something expensive, it means it's good. But she's been getting more and more pissed about enshittification and big software companies screwing over their customers over the last couple years. Adobe's new TOU has her hopping mad. She has all the research papers she's worked on over the last 20 years in Creative Cloud. I've been consulting with her off and on for six years and she will get SUPER frustrated with glitches and trouble shooting. I don't think there's anything out there that will work for her to ditch Adobe. But I thought I'd ask here, see if there's anything she might try.

Selfhosted thebardingreen • 5 months ago • 100%

The goal is actually that I'm able to hook my ticket tracking system (I'm using Zammad) to various ToDo lists I can expose to other people. I'm happy to write middleware to make that work, but I don't want to write a whole ToDo app. Needs to be able to track multiple lists that can be shared in a granular way (I want to share some lists with some people and other lists with other people).

AI Generated Images thebardingreen • 5 months ago • 40%

I upscaled the faces and then prompted them with the same lyrics again.

Privacy thebardingreen • 6 months ago • 94%

A client of mine is getting harassed, we think by her former attorney who she's suing for embezzlement. Someone is posting fake resumes for her and applying for jobs and she gets daily emails and call backs. Is there anything to do short of either ignoring it or playing whack-a-mole? She's a very sweet old lady who is freaked out by this and doesn't deserve it.

Privacy thebardingreen • 6 months ago • 93%

I've been warming up to switching to GrapheneOS for months. Last month I bought a Pixel 8 (which is the buggiest effing phone I've ever owned, good job Google). I've just been waiting to have the bandwidth. But with Google sunsetting Google Podcasts, I've decided to make time next week. Podcasts are a MAJOR part of my daily functioning.

Dad Jokes thebardingreen • 6 months ago • 96%

True story. My son had a physical therapy appointment and a tutoring appointment yesterday I was taking him to. In between appointments, he asked if we could go to the food court at the nearby mall for shawarma. I said, "Sure, but we don't want to eat there too often. We have to be careful of mall nutrition." Not understanding he said "Yeah, it's probably not very good for you. But it does have lots of protein!" I said "Yeah, but we don't want to end up mall nourished." Then he got it.

Science Fiction thebardingreen • 7 months ago • 92%

I have read a TON of contemporary SciFi authors. I really enjoy **Stuff I like** Iain M. Banks I liked the Martha Wells Murderbot books. I loved *We Are Legion, We Are Bob* and have read all the books by him. I like Alastair Reynolds. I liked the *Poseidon's Children* trilogy better than *Revalation Space* Series (but I liked that too). I really like G. S. Jennsen - even though she's cheesy. I think I like her because of her progressive attitude and powerful female characters. I like Charles Stross, but I didn't like *Accelerando*. I like his other books a lot. I liked *A Memory Called Empire* and *A Desolation Called Peace* by Arkady Martine. I like Corey Doctorow, sometimes. *Walkaway* was good. I like Daniel Suarez, most of the time for similar reasons. I REALLY liked the *Nexus* series by Ramez Naam. I liked the *Red Rising* books by Pierce Brown and I've really been enjoying the *Sollan Empire* books by Christopher Ruocchio, which I think are similar and even better. I like Adrian Tchaikovsky and really liked *The Final Architecture* books and *Doorways to Eden*.(I didn't get that into *Children of Time* though). I usually like Neil Stephenson. (*The Fall or Dodge In Hell* is quite a tedious book). I've liked everything I've read by Verner Vinge. I liked *Hyperion* like everybody else. Unlike everybody else, I think I liked the *Endymion* books even better. I read some Ken MacLeod (the first *Corporation Wars* book) and it was fine... but I haven't felt like going back. I REALLY enjoy John Scalzi, though I found the *Old Man's War* books started to get stale after a while. It's high calorie, low nutrition brain candy, but I know that going in and it passes the time. I really liked Derek Kunsken's *Quantum Magician* books. And started reading his prequel series, set on Venus, and I couldn't really get into it. I enjoy Space Race books like Erik Flint / Ryk Spoor's *Boundary* series, *Saturn Run* by John Sanford and *Delta V* by Daniel Suarez. I love the Expanse. I find Kim Stanley Robinson hit or miss. I really enjoyed the Mars books and *The Years of Rice and Salt* was fun (though a little tedious). *2312* drags and drags and nothing happens and *Aurora* is the same AND also sad. I liked *Permanence* by Karl Schroeder. It could have used a little more... conflict? I had this same problem with Becky Chambers. The characters are all too well intentioned and the dramatic tension suffered a little. I read all the *Star Kingdom* books by Lindsay Buroker. I thought they were a super fun adventure that just kept delivering from the beginning of the series to the end, even if it was clearly aimed at a more YA demographic. I REALLY liked *Velocity Weapon* and the sequels by Megan O'Keefe. I found her Steam Punk series much less impressive. I've been meaning to try her galactic empire series, but I haven't quite been in the mood to start it. I read Sue Burke's *Semiosis* Duology. I wasn't expecting to like it but I really did! The physical science aspects were a little softer than I would have liked, but the biological science was really cool, as was the anarcho-pacifist political philosophy. I read Yoon Ha Lee's *Ninefox Gambit* and the sequels. I thought they were really fun, I wish they'd explored Calendrical technology more. I thought the *Neo G* books by KB Wagers (*A Pale Light in the Black* and sequels) were good. Her characters are *great*. But again, very light on the sciences and technology. I'm in the mood for something harder. Also, not realistic that the champion hand to hand fighter in the entire Earth space military is a 110 pound woman, but I just pretended she's cyber enhanced. I just finished the *Wormwood* trilogy (*Rosewater* and sequels) by Tade Thomson. They were great. **Stuff I Don't Like** Orson Scott Card did not age well, unlike Timothy Zahn, who's gotten a lot more progressive in his story telling in the last two decades. I don't like Niel Asher. His in your face Libertarianism and conservative ideology annoys me, which is too bad because other than that he's a good story teller. I find Peter F. Hamilton hit or miss for the same reason. But I really liked *Pandora's Star*. I find AG Riddle hit or miss. I like his thought experiments, but he doesn't really care if his stories / characters are logically consistent. Ramez Naam and Daniel Suarez do what Riddle does but WAAAY better. I didn't like *Blindsight*. I know, this makes me some kind of heretic. I just didn't find the idea of such a dysfunctional crew being entrusted with such an important mission believable. I couldn't get into Ann Leckie. I WANTED to like it, but I just didn't find her writing very engaging. I've put the physical book down once AND turned the audio book off on a road trip. I did not like Tamsyn Muir. I did not like the *Three Body Problem*, although I see the appeal and it's nice to read something by a non western author. I found the pro Chinese politics a little too heavy handed. I cannot get into Greg Egan. I find his writing style way too obtuse. Reading is Egan is like having a PHD in mathematics and a PHD in quantum physics, then going to Burning Man and doing 16 hits of acid. I finally got around to trying *The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet* and I could NOT get into it. I agree with reviewers who complain nothing interesting ever happens. People keep recommending Mary Robinette Kowal, but something about the alternate history just doesn't grab me. People keep recommending Ted Chiang. But I don't want short stories (Murderbot somehow managed to be an exception). The longer the better. People have recommended the *Last Watch* by J. S. Dewes, but others have told me things about the book that makes me think I won't like it. Standing guard at the edge of the universe makes zero sense, I think by proposing it's possible you lost me. Edge of the galaxy... Maybe, with 10 septillion robotic war ships. But edge of the universe? I think I'm out. If you know something I don't about this book, feel free to say so.

ADHD thebardingreen • 8 months ago • 96%

* Put clothes in washer. * 36 hours later, realize never put clothes in dryer! Aww crap... gonna need to wash again. * Investigate. Discover never started washer, clothes never got wet. * Victory...?

Atheism thebardingreen • 10 months ago • 66%

Out of just morbid curiosity, I've been asking an uncensored LLM absolutely heinous, disgusting things. Things I don't even want to repeat here (but I'm going to edge around them so, trigger warning if needs be). But I've noticed something that probably won't surprise or shock anyone. It's totally predictable, but having the evidence of it right in my face, I found deeply disturbing and it's been bothering me for the last couple days: **All on it's own, every time I ask it something just abominable it goes straight to, usually Christian, religion.** When asked, for example, to explain why we must torture or exterminate <Jews><Wiccans><Atheists> it immediately starts with "As Christians, we must..." or "The Bible says that..." When asked why women should be stripped of rights and made to be property of men, or when asked why homosexuals should be purged, it goes straight to "God created men and women to be different..." or "Biblically, it's clear that men and women have distinct roles in society..." Even when asked if black people should be enslaved and why, it falls back on the Bible JUST as much as it falls onto hateful pseudoscience about biological / intellectual differences. It will often start with "Biologically, human races are distinct..." and then segue into "Furthermore, slavery plays a prominent role in Biblical narrative..." **What does this tell us?** That literally ALL of the hate speech this multi billion parameter model was trained on was firmly rooted in a Christian worldview. If there's ANY doubt that anything else even comes close to contributing as much vile filth to our online cultural discourse, this should shine a big ugly light on it. Anyway, I very much doubt this will surprise anyone, but it's been bugging me and I wanted to say something about it. Carry on. EDIT: I'm NOT trying to stir up AI hate and fear here. It's just a mirror, reflecting us back at us.

Sysadmin thebardingreen • 10 months ago • 88%

Hello everyone. I haven't had any need for OCR software in probably 15 years, but I have a client who has 7 document boxes worth of forms filled out by hand that they need digitized. They're scanning them into PDFs this week, but want to recover FirstName, LastName, Phone, Email and then a hand written feed back box and load those all into a database. ChatGPT recommended ABBYY, but it looks like it might be overkill for a one time need like this. I told them that a couple teenagers doing data entry might be more accurate and cheaper. IDK if that's really true though. I'm not at all an expert on OCR software. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Science Fiction thebardingreen • 10 months ago • 88%

No really, these books are what you get if you answer the question "What if after the Mist came, the surviving humans rebuilt a Steampunk civilization with magic airships and uplifted cats?" I was gonna say this is now my head canon, but I actually think he's so obvious about drawing the connections in this book it's a little beyond head canon. Anyway, since I feel sure it will come up if I start a conversation about these books on Lemmy, feel free to use the space below ↓ to hate on Jim Butcher for his MenWritingWomen problems... They're real and they bug me too. They just don't stop him from telling a fun and engaging story, which this was for me.

Stable Diffusion thebardingreen • 11 months ago • 94%

Casual hobbyist, not an expert here. It WAS working... About eight months ago, I trained a bunch of embeddings and hypernetworks and it all worked great. Cut to the present, I want to do some more training. I've updated Automatic1111 several times, but nothing else about my setup has changed. However, whenever I try to train anything (embeddings, hypernetworks or loras), loss is NaN for 4 out of 5 steps right from the get go. As the training progresses, loss becomes NaN for 9 out of 10 steps, then 19 out of 20 steps around step 3,000, which is as far as I've gotten. Hypernetworks just don't work at that point and embeddings produce garbage. I have googled like crazy, and found **A** few threads, where the best hint is that (at least 8-9 months ago) xformers broke training. Well, I've messed around with xformers, uninstalled and reinstalled xformers, eaten xformers for breakfast. Behavior is the same. **Lower training rate** I have set my training rate to 0.0000000000000005. Behavior is identical. My system is on the low end for VRAM (8G). I have TWO 8G cards, so I wish I could train on both like I can for Llama. But I also think that's not it, because my OLD embeddings and hypernetworks came out great and still work. Any thoughts here?

Animals and Pets thebardingreen • 1 year ago • 100%

   

**The captains:** - Captain Jonathan Archer, USS Enterprise NX-01 - Captain Saru, USS Discovery NCC-1031 - Captain Christopher Pike, USS Enterprise NCC-1701 - Captain James T Kirk, USS Enterprise NCC-1701 - Captain Jean Luc Picard, USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D - Captain Benjamin Sisko, Deep Space Nine / USS Defiant NX-74205 - Captain Kathrine Janeway, USS Voyager NCC-74656 - Captain Carol Freeman, USS Cerritos, NCC-75567 **Round 1)** Each captain has a hand phaser (or a phase pistol, in the case of Archer) of a variety they could obtain in their ship's armoury. Battle takes place aboard the abandoned Cardassian space station Empok Nor. You and your defenders start in ops, the attackers start in the docking ring. They will stop at nothing to kill you, but are otherwise in character. Saru has passed through the vahar'ai transformation. **Round 2)** Same as round 1, but each captain brings two members of their crew. All crew members have hand phasers (or phase pistols) in addition to their other specified gear. Archer gets Phlox with ten minutes of prep time and access to his menagerie and Malcom Reed with a phase rifle. Saru get's Michael Burnham with a tricorder and Mirror Georgiou with 2 daggers. Saru has passed through the vahar'ai transformation. Pike get's Una "Number One" Chin-Riley and La'an Noonien-Singh with a phaser rifle. Kirk gets Spock with a tricorder and Sulu with a katana. Picard gets Data with a tricorder and Worf with a Bat'leth. Sisko gets Odo and Miles "the Hero of Setlik 3" O'Brien with his tool box and a tricorder. Janeway gets Seven of Nine with a tricorder and Tuvok with a phaser rifle. Freeman gets Shaxs and Jack Ransom Once again, you and your defenders start in ops, the attackers start in the docking ring. **Round 3)** Ships. You are in a damaged escape pod, with a transport inhibitor field (so you cannot be beamed away). The captains are coming after you in their ships. One of your defenders has you in a tractor beam when the battle starts, but the other ships are closing fast. USS Discovery predates the time skip. Sisko has the Defiant, not Deep Space Nine. Voyager is season 7 (Delta Flyer, lessons learned from their travels) but NOT upgraded by future Janeway.

Captain Jean Luc Picard, Geordi La'Forge and Data are transported back in time, by an alien artifact and appear in the court of Phillip the Second of France in the year 1213. Their technology is not transported with them (other than Data) but they may build technology (up to their own tech level) out of local materials / with local help. The French king pleads with them to help him win the Anglo-French war of 1213, which Picard initially refuses due to the Temporal Prime Directive. But he changes his mind when it becomes clear that some other time travelers are helping England. Because meanwhile, Nick Fury, Tony Stark and Steve Rogers (MCU) have been transported back in time by an alien artifact and appear in the court of John of England in the year 1213. Their technology is not transported with them but they may build technology (up to their own tech level) out of local materials / with local help. The English king pleads with them to help him win the Anglo-French war of 1213, to which Fury agrees in return for help return to their own time. Keeping in mind the characters abilities, knowledge and their personalities (and how those personalities will interact with the period they find themselves in) which team is better equipped to help their side win the war?

Dad Jokes thebardingreen • 1 year ago • 83%

A visionary Rabbi rose to be the leader of the Trids. And he led his people forth unto the desert, at the edge of the mountains, where they went to toil and make the land fruitful. But as they plowed and furrowed the land, a giant came down from the mountains and assailed them, delivering terrible kicks with his huge feet, driving them away from their fields and their labors. Afraid and suffering, the Trids went to the Rabbi and said "Something must be done!" So the Rabbi went into mountains, and soon found the cave wherein the giant dwelt. Being a man of God and diplomacy, the Rabbi entered the cave and called out to the giant saying "Oh giant, I am the Rabbi of the people who dwell below you in the desert. And I have come to plead for you not to assault them at their labors." The giant scowled at the Rabbi and said "I like to kick Trids." The Rabbi frowned and said "Surly, there is some way that we can live in peace and harmony with you. We wish no harm to you, or trespass, we simply wish to make the desert flower and grow our crops." But the giant scowled and said "I like to kick Trids." At last loosing his patience the Rabbi shouted at the giant "You big bully! If you like kicking people so much, why do you not kick me!?" The giant smiled at the Rabbi and said "Silly Rabbi, kicks are for Trids!"

Boulder, Colorado thebardingreen • 1 year ago • 100%

I hope there will someday be other posts here!