baltakatei

Elves can live over a thousand years (one dark elf we know of is blessed by their evil deity and is over 5,000), but dwarves only about 2-400 years (I think?) and half lings about 100-150ish, humans standard 80.

After reading The Age of Em (2016) by Robin Hanson, I wish there were stories about races that went the other way, lifespan-wise: extremely small people who lived only 1 year, even smaller people who lived only 1 month, some very extremely small but very powerful ones that lived only a day, etc. The idea is that artificial people (emulated people, or Ems) could have subjectively similar characteristics and experiences to the larger physical entities (e.g. humans, but perhaps even dwarves, elves, and etc., since theyʼre just emulated minds), but their artificial emulated substrate allows their minds to develop and age orders of magnitude faster; they also could solve certain problems orders of magnitude faster but practical limitations on delays between thought and physical interactions (your mind would waste away if you had to wait a whole subjective hour between each physical step during a walk with a standard 1.5 meter body) require their bodies to be very small.

To ems that are smaller and faster, sunlight seems dimmer and shows more noticeable diffraction patterns. Magnets, waveguides, and electrostatic motors are less useful. Surface tension makes it harder to escape from water. Friction is more often an obstacle, lubrication is harder to achieve, and random thermal disruptions to the speed of objects become more noticeable. It becomes easier to dissipate excess body heat, but harder to insulate against nearby heat or cold (Haldane 1926; Drexler 1992).

A crude calculation using a simple conservative nano-computer design suggests that a matching faster-em brain might plausibly fit inside an android body 256 times smaller and faster than an ordinary human body (Hanson 1995).

Compared with ordinary humans, to a fast em with a small body the Earth seems much larger, and takes much longer to travel around. To a kilo-em, for example, the Earth’s surface area seems a million times larger, a subway ride that takes 15 minutes in real time takes 10 subjective days, an 8-hour plane ride takes a subjective year, and a 1-month flight to Mars takes a subjective century. Sending a radio signal to the planet Saturn and back takes a subjective 4 months. Even super-sonic missiles seem slow. However, over modest distances lasers and directed energy weapons continue to seem very fast to a kilo-em.

Call them speedlings, or some variant of sprite, but I think its an interesting world-building concept.

Or authors could preëmptively declare their works to be in the public domain upon their death.

I wish Creative Commons had a license like that. Something like CC PDD (Public-Domain-on-Death) which would activate upon the creator’s death, allowing them and publishers to freely monetize their work while they’re alive, but which would release the work into the public domain immediately after.

It might even incentivize music and book publishers to get their artists health insurance. 😃

PLATO: An automobile is craft with an internal combustion engine, crankshaft, and wheels.

DIOGENES wheels in a HONDA GX630 PRESSURE WASHER

DIOGENES: Behold! An automobile!

“That all life beyond this planet never existed, no matter how irrationally improbable that may be.”

If tech giants such as Google cannot be broken up, then their services should be required to be compatible and all data exportable to competitors. See the EFFʼs “Competitive Compatibility” concept. Buy a movie off Google’s YouTube but Google misbehaves? It must be exportable to a market competitor that you do support. Don’t like how Google handles your email? You should be able to switch your email address to a competitor just like you can change phone companies without losing your phone number.

Basically, if the US Federal government cannot discipline monopolies by breaking them up directly, they should break up the moats and walled gardens the monopolies built to keep customers locked in to maintain their monopolies. See Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow.

Can’t wait for the day when Uncle Sam to turns brown.

Just, buy a new iPhone and Mac every two years.

Termux, rsync and SSH.

Worked okay until I got overzealous and killed my battery from leaving Termux on for convenience.

The USB Type-C is useful for sharing files offline between smartphones while the USB Type-A is useful when you want to backup files to a PC at some point.

I landed at Domodedovo in Moscow in 2013. Ready to see this incredible new place I’ve never experienced before, I walked out into the main arrivals area, and right there was a Cinnabon.

Reminds me of the penultimate verse of the Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris (2010) by Pig With The Face Of A Boy.

And now the wall is down, the Marxists frown
There’s foreign shops all over town
When in Red Square, well don’t despair
There’s Levi’s and McDonald’s there
The US gave us crystal meth
And Yeltsin drank himself to death
But now that Putin’s put the boot in,
Who’ll get in our way?

Yours!

Are Pokémon people too?

Maybe try out FreedomBox? freedombox is a Debian package which automatically sets up apache2, firewalld, fail2ban and Letʼs Encrypt. It also automatically adds pre-canned configuration files for applications you install with it (e.g. Mediawiki, WordPress, Matrix, Postfix/Dovecot). The theoretical goal of FreedomBox is to allow anyone to set up a webserver and administer it via a webUI. So, although I would say itʼs not quite there yet for command-line-illiterate users, I have found the software useful as a turnkey server to see what makes certain web applications tick, albeït in mostly vanilla form.

For example, after installing a new app like WordPress, you could examine what exactly the FreedomBox scripts changed in the /etc/apache2/ or /etc/fail2ban/ configuration files.

fgallery

TL;DR: fgallery is a dumb static web gallery generator: EXAMPLE, SETUP.

There’s fgallery which is a small Debian package that takes an input directory (e.g. photo-dir) and creates a static website in a new directory (e.g. my-gallery).

$ fgallery photo-dir my-gallery

Description

From the Debian package details page.

static HTML+JavaScript photo album generator

“fgallery” is a static photo gallery generator with no frills that has a stylish, minimalist look. “fgallery” shows your photos, and nothing else.

There is no server-side processing, only static generation. The resulting gallery can be uploaded anywhere without additional requirements and works with any modern browser.

Among all the Debian packages similar to this one, this seems the most recently maintained (version 1.9.1 came out 2022-12-31). It is licensed GPLv2+ so the source code is available.

Upload to a web server

After running fgallery as described above, upload my-gallery to your static web page directory (e.g. /var/www/html/ with a typical apache2 setup) and open the index.html through a web browser.

Here’s an example gallery I made just now (setup procedure).

( Photo by Baltakatei / 🅭🅯🄎 4.0 )

Viewing locally with a browser

To view the gallery locally without uploading to a web server (e.g. a Digital Ocean droplet) or static content hosting service (e.g. AWS S3), you can do so with your own web browser. However, because the fgallery webpage uses Javascript and since modern browsers refuse to render Javascript in HTML pages at local file system addresses (e.g. file:///) due to same-origin policy, the easiest solution is to make a simple webserver via python3:

$ python3 -m http.server -d ./my-gallery

Then, you can visit the my-gallery/index.html file via a local http:// address at http://localhost:8000/.

Summary

fgallery lacks many complex features (no image database, no metadata editing, no dynamic server processes for editing images, etc.). However, I’d argue its lack of features is the main feature. It just takes a directory of photos and spits out a directory you can plug into your hosting service. Updating the the gallery is just a matter of running the same $ fgallery photo-dir my-gallery command again and re-uploading.

Edit(2023-07-07T12:05+00): Clarify python3 commend.

TL;DR: fgallery is a dumb static web gallery generator: EXAMPLE, SETUP.

If it’s anything like SMTP on a Mediawiki or Discourse instance (example notes, then what you probably need is something called “transactional email” (I’m guessing you’re looking at a guide like this?). I’ve made use of this guide for looking up vendors for that service.

In theory, the same server hosting a Lemmy service could also send and receive emails. However, in practice there’s a high probability of these emails landing in spam boxes. The defacto proof-of-work hurdle that inhibits email spam today is paying commercial transactional email companies a monthly fee. I’m hopeful that one day self-hosted email server software will become easier to set up through things like FreedomBox (via Postfix, Dovecot, and Rspamd), but the fundamental reputation problem remains, imo.

So, I doubt a Lemmy setup guide would automatically take care of email setup. In any case, the process involves creating at least one MX record (according to instructions provided by your transactional email service) with your DNS provider which depends on the name servers you have configured for your domain registrar. The transactional email service you select should provide instructions for what port to open, as well as what SMTP URL, user name, password, and postmaster email address to provide to Lemmy.