• 2 Posts
  • 425 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: October 4th, 2023

help-circle



  • The reason many AI image generators do multiple images is as a simple way to trade compute cycles for quality. The idea is that you generate a couple and pick the best, using your human knowledge of what you intend.

    You could generate it in one place, copy the URL of the best image, and embed it in your response. That’s what I did when I pasted the links to the skunk engraving images in my post; the images were generated elsewhere. I just pasted all four rather than only one, to show what the response looks like.

    The syntax for an inline image on the Threadiverse’s Markdown variant is:

    ![](URL)
    

    I assume that either that syntax or a similar one will work on Mastodon, but I don’t know Mastodon’s syntax, as I don’t use it.




  • 1986 – The Mindbender derails and kills three riders at the Fantasyland (known today as Galaxyland) indoor amusement park at West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton, Alberta.[10]

    Huh.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindbender_(Galaxyland)

    On January 30, 2023, the mall decommissioned and closed the Mindbender after 37 years of service, in order to redevelop its space for new developments in the park.[4] Its trains were reused for All American Triple Loop, at Indiana Beach, United States.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_American_Triple_Loop

    All American Triple Loop (formerly Montaña Infinitum [“Infinity Mountain”] (2007–2014), Montaña Triple Loop [“Triple Loop Mountain”] (2014–2016) and Quimera[1] [“Chimera”][2] (2017–2019)) is a steel roller coaster at Indiana Beach in Monticello, Indiana.

    Manufactured by Anton Schwarzkopf, it was originally purchased by showman Rudolf Barth in 1984 who operated it as Dreier Looping for 12 years on the German fair circuit.

    After this, it was the main attraction in three major theme parks: first spending 2 years in Sunway Lagoon as Triple Loop Coaster, next, it spent 5 years in Flamingo Land resort as Magnum Force, and finally at its third and most recent location at La Feria Chapultepec Mágico, as Montaña Triple Loop. In 2017 it was renamed Quimera. In 2024, it opened at Indiana Beach as All American Triple Loop.

    I feel like a secondhand German roller coaster that went from Germany to Malaysia to England to Mexico now running secondhand Canadian trains arguably isn’t best named the “All American Triple Loop”.


  • It’d theoretically be possible to run a straight GNU/Linux tablet or laptop

    “GNU/Linux” is the full way to say what sometimes gets shortened to “Linux” — a family of operating systems based on the Linux kernel and a lot of software from the GNU project. This explicitly distinguishes it from Android, which also used the Linux kernel.

    The former is not, in 2025, typically used to run smartphones. The latter is the most-common smartphone operating system in the world. If you buy a smartphone that isn’t an Apple smartphone, it almost certainly runs Android.

    with a 5G cell modem for data

    5G is the current generation of cell phone radio protocols. Communicating directly via voice over this protocol is not something that I believe is available to GNU/Linux in 2025. However, it can send non-voice data.

    , use SIP service

    SIP is a protocol for running voice over a data connection to the Internet. If you have an Internet connection, you can use SIP. There are companies, SIP service providers, which will, for a fee, provide a phone number at which one may be called or call others from a computer that can make use of SIP.

    and a GNU/Linux dialer,

    A dialer is the piece of software that on a smartphone, a user would probably call something like “the phone app”.

    and then run Waydroid for any specific Android apps that one has to run.

    Waydroid is a piece of software to run Android apps on a GNU/Linux system.

    Idle power usage is gonna be a lot higher than on a phone, though.

    Phone hardware and software has had a lot of work put into optimizing it for very low power usage. A larger device, like a laptop or tablet, will probably also have a larger battery, but it will consume more power as well.

    And a lot of Android apps are made with a touch interface

    Smartphones, due to physical space constraints in one’s pocket, typically have an entire side be a touchscreen. They do not have a keyboard. In general, software optimized for this works somewhat differently from software optimized for use with a keyboard and mouse.

    Most GNU/Linux software is written with the intent that it be used on a system that almost certainly has a mouse and keyboard available. Most Android software is written with the intent that it be used on a system with a touchscreen available.

    This means that even if one can run GNU/Linux software on a phone, much of the (large) collection of GNU/Linux software available will not be designed with an interface ideal for use on a phone.

    and small screen in mind and are aware of things in a cell environment, like “only update X when on WiFi”. Not really common for GNU/Linux software to do that.

    Smartphones have two widely-used mechanisms of accessing the Internet — connecting to the often slower cell network, or to a much-shorter range, but faster, WiFi network. Many people connect their smartphone to a WiFi network at some times and a cell network at others. Because this is so common, a lot of Android software has behavior designed to support this and act more-appropriately, like having an option to only transfer lots of data when on a WiFi netwprk. This is not the case for most GNU/Linux software.


  • tal@lemmy.todaytoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldOpen Source Paid Remote Desktop
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    edit-2
    4 days ago

    The last time I used a commercial VPS, I’m pretty sure it used VNC to provide console access.

    The VNC software I linked to above appears to support TLS. If TLS isn’t sufficient transport security, then most Internet-using software is going to be in trouble.

    I’m not sure what you mean by subjective.

    I haven’t looked at the VNC protocol for a while, but I don’t think that it imposes any terrible inefficiencies. A couple of decades back, I needed to implement something quick-and-dirty similar to VNC, and went with rendering window contents and handling dragging of windows locally, which I don’t believe that VNC can do (or didn’t then) but IIRC VNC has a tile cache, which, if intelligently used, should avoid most traffic. Dunno if it can deal well with efficiently rendering visual effects.









  • I think in the US (and english speaking parts of Canada) they have a weird conception that “North America” doesn’t include “Central America”.

    I’m in the US, and that’s certainly not how the US classifies things.

    Some countries, like Spain, use a continent model with fewer continents, where there is no North America or South America, just one very large continent, “America”.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent#Number

    • The seven-continent model is taught in most English-speaking countries, including Australia,[43] Canada, the United Kingdom,[44] and the United States, and also in Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Suriname, parts of Europe and Africa.
    • The six-continent combined-Eurasia model is mostly used in Russia and some parts of Eastern Europe.[45][46]
    • The six-continent combined-America model is taught in Greece and many Romance-speaking countries—including Latin America.[37]

    I’d guess that they might not be familiar with where the division occurs.




  • You’re mostly drinking water that has, at some point, passed through a dinosaur!

    https://what-if.xkcd.com/74/

    Dinosaurs, as a taxonomic group, have been around[10] for 230 million years, but their heyday was the mid-to-late Jurassic period. In this period, there were probably around 5 trillion kilograms of dinosaur alive at any given time.[11] (Today, there are probably only a few hundred billion kilograms of living dinosaur,[12] 50 billion of it chicken).

    If we assume Jurassic dinosaur water requirements were similar to mammal ones,[13] then this suggests dinosaurs drank something like 1022 or 1023 liters of water during the Mesozoic era—more than the total volume of the oceans (1021 liters).

    The average “residence time” of water in the oceans—the amount of time a water molecule spends there before moving into another part of the water cycle—is about 3,000 years,[14] and no part of the water cycle traps water for more than a few hundred thousand years. This means we can assume that, over timescales of millions of years, Earth’s water is thoroughly mixed—and dinosaurs had plenty of time to drink it all many times over.

    This means that while the chances are that most of the water in your soda has never been in another soda, almost all of it has been drunk by at least one dinosaur.