boonhet

I just went down an interesting rabbit hole. I'm a huge car guy. Started off by some news videos about Koenigsegg that turned out to be long AI narrated videos of generic footage with very short interview clips with Christian von Koenigsegg himself interspersed in between. Tbh I only watched one, the rest I clicked on just to confirm my suspicion that they're all bs. Discovered the following YouTube disclaimer on some of the videos:

How this content was made Altered or synthetic content Sound or visuals were significantly edited or digitally generated.

Now those videos were clickbait and misleading, but they're far from the worst. They get some hundreds of thousands of views each, and get shat out by these channels at a rapid pace.

Things get more interesting with fake car reviews and such. Years ago you'd see videos that were looking at photos of concept cars and narrating them with a bunch of bullshit.

Now they have AI generate the concept car imagery. The supposed new car looks different in every "photo". Like completely different designs, down to the entire body shape. AI narrator talking about conservative styling on the Mercedes S-Class saying "around the back you see slimmer taillights" while the image being shown is the front quarter of an extremely low grand tourer type car that couldn't clear a speed bump, has tire only on the bottom of the wheel (it just disappears as you go higher up the wheel), has no possibility of suspension travel as there's no distance between the wheel and the top of the wheel well, the wheel itself isn't entirely round, the brakes look like a cartoon, and while there's a visible separation between the front bumper and the front quarter panel... There isn't one between the quarter panel and the hood, or the hood and the front bumper. So really it's all one piece that can never be removed. I'm surprised the door is separate from the front quarter panel at this point. This video is here. The S-Class is a luxury sedan, available also as a coupe or convertible, but never has it been whatever... this is.

Buick is also bringing back the Series 40 after a century. Looks almost the same too!. Featuring a rear license plate saying "Series 80" in the lovely font called AI slop.

These videos get shat out at an even more rapid pace. Most have relatively few views, some have quite a lot, and there are people asking if they can buy these cars for real. They come up on google when doing highly specific searches to see if some manufacturer has a car in some category, etc.

So it's similar to the fake movie trailers that have already been talked about, but this is distracting people looking for actual products. It might just be cars in my examples, but I'm sure the same is happening in all kinds of video genres and different product types. I know a lot of you already know about it too, but I was shocked to find out how prevalent it really is.

Also YouTube has the disclaimer that video uploaders can use, and that their own AI tools automatically add, so there's already a database field they could check. But thay have added no AI content filtering.

First watched this one ages ago and got reminded by a meme post about insurance claims with superheroes. This one is actually based on a true story.

They have German and Finnish data centers, as well as American. Pricing is pretty competitive, and unlike anything super autoscalable in AWS, it's predictable.

They offer an email service that comes with their basic webhosting service, which is a bundle that costs less for 100 inboxes than Google Suite or Proton for just one user, if all you need is email.

I saw the discussion the other day about the "Buy European" website having Google analytics, so it reminded me of this. Plausible uses no cookies (therefore no cookie prompt) and can be entirely self-hosted for free if you don't want to use their paid SaaS (supposedly EU hosted, but I haven't tried).

I get that a lot of people on the Fediverse are anti-analytics, but if you're running a website for a business, no matter how big or small, you likely need some form of analytics and I think it's nicer if you can avoid the (admittedly powerful) Google suite for this.

Oh and it's FOSS too. It uses AGPL, so you may want to read up on whether or not that "infects" your own code with AGPL.

So I was looking at google maps while working because of course I was. I'm not even kidding when I say that I was wondering if there's some nice place far enough south to experience 18+ hours of sunlight and nice weather in the southern summer as we do here in the northern summer in Estonia. But when I took a look, the closest thing would be the southernmost tip of Chile, which apparently is pretty cold in the (southern hemisphere) summer. And just a few more degrees south, we have Antarctica. Here, you go a few more degrees north and you just get Finland.

I was wondering what the reasoning is - is it something inherent to the Earth's orbit around the sun, or is it due to the shapes of the continents, the ocean currents, etc?

Edit: Many great answers here. Thank you!

Now that Stop Killing Games is actually being taken seriously - maybe we need to take a look at Stop Fucking Around In Our Kernels

I haven't really been personally affected by it before - I don't play any competitive multiplayer games at all. But my wife had her brother over, and he's significantly younger than us. So he wanted to play FortNite and GTA V, knowing I have a gaming PC. FortNite is immediately out of the question, it'll never work on my computer. Okay, so I got GTA V running and it was fun for a while, but it turns out all of those really cool cars only exist in Online. But oh look, now they've added BattlEye and I can no longer get online.

While this seems like a trivial issue (Just buy a third SSD for Windows and dual boot), it's really not. Even if I wanted to install Windows ever again, I do NOT want random 3rd party kernel modules in there. Anyone remember the whole CrowdStrike fiasco? I do NOT want to wake up to my computer not booting up because some idiot decided to push a shitty update to their kernel module that makes the kernel itself shit the bed. And while Microsoft fucks up plenty, at least they're a corporation with a reputation to uphold, and I believe they even have a QA team or 2. CrowdStrike was unheard of outside of the corporate world before the ordeal and tbh nobody has ever heard of it afterwards again.

So I think this would be a good angle to push. That we should be careful about what code runs in our OS kernels, for security and stability reasons. Obviously it'd be impossible to just blanket ban 3rd party kernel modules to any OS. However, maybe here in the EU at least we could get them to consider a rule that any software that includes a component running in the OS kernel, MUST justify how that part is necessary for the software to function in the best possible way for the user of the computer the software is running on. E.g I expect a hardware driver to have a kernel module, and I can see how security software needs to have a kernel module, but I do NOT see how a video game needs to have an anti cheat with a kernel module. How does that benefit me, the customer paying to be able to play said video game?

Yes yes I know, I could Google it or watch a YouTube video. But no, I want honest opinions from other people on what is, in my opinion, one of the last bastions of the old school Internet, where you'd get real opinions from real people.

I loved the original, but never really played multiplayer - mostly because as a young'un I had no money, so I pirated it, but also because I just loved the campaign as well as experimenting with stuff that was never going to work as a multiplayer strategy.

Do you guys feel it's worth the 30something euros it costs on Steam? That's not a lot of money, but more importantly, games take time to play and I have very little of it these days. And once I buy a game, I feel committed to play it.

I think many of us have noticed the trend that modern tech just... Doesn't make things better. There's little to be excited about, because anything even remotely innovative is going to be filled with tracking, ads, etc.

Let's say you had a bored software engineer or 2 at your disposal and the goal was to improve something you do often, by creating an application or website that isn't owned and enshittified by a megacorp looking to extract maximum short term value - what would your project be? Is it something you'd be willing to pay for, maybe with a free tier available?

The reason I'm asking is that I'm a software engineer and in the current hard-ass market, while I'm lucky enough to have a stable job, I know that experience alone isn't cutting it anymore in the recruitment process. You need to be able to show side projects too. Plus I have an unemployed software engineer friend who also has no interesting projects to show. So if we make any money out of it, that's awesome. If we don't, it's just something for our github accounts. Probably the latter.

PS: Yes, I know this is not a tech community - I want ideas from regular, non-techy people too.

PPS: This doesn't have to be something in your personal life, it could also be something that would help you at work if you had it.

I'm sure many of you are familiar with the issue of making excuses for everything. I don't just mean excusing your unfinished chores by saying "I have ADHD", I mean excuses and fabrications in general - at work, you might say you're nearly finished with a project, but really you're halfway done at best, at home you might say you couldn't start the dishwasher because of how angry your pregnant wife was at you for choosing the wrong program on the washing machine, so you were scared to start the dishwasher - fully ignoring the fact that you were supposed to start the dishwasher BEFORE even being confronted about the washing machine. The last one is a stupid example, but it happened an hour ago and it's a pattern I hate about myself.

If you've had a similar issue and identified it, what has helped you improve yourself? I may never be perfect to the point I'll get everything done that I need to, but I'd like to at least stop making stupid excuses that just bring up fights that could've been avoided.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/2871450

Getting GPU acceleration working is a common task for those of us running Plex or Jellyfin. There is not much documentation for getting the NVIDIA container stack to work with Podman, even less on Gentoo, plus there have been a lot of changes to NVIDIA's container toolkit lately.

I have been fighting with Podman for a while now and just recently got it working 1:1 with my Docker setup. Gentoo may not be the most popular or easy to use distro but I documented it in case some poor soul runs across it searching the web.

Feel free to poke holes in it or leave feedback.

And why do you prefer it over other distros?