You Should Know

So if you do the Docker setup, obeying the instructions and substituting everything that needs to get substituted, but don't proofread the files in detail and so miss that line 40 of docker-compose.yml doesn't have the variable {{domain}} like in every other location you need to write your domain, but instead just says LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_EXTERNAL_HOST=lemmy.ml and so you fail to change it away from lemmy.ml... then, everything will work, until you type in your admin password for the first time, at which point your browser will send a request to lemmy.ml which includes your admin username, your email address, and the admin password you're trying to set. And, also, of course your IP address wherever you are sitting and setting up the server.

I have no reason at all to think the Lemmy devs have set their server up to log this information when it comes in. nginx will throw it away by default, of course, but it would be easy for them to have it save it instead, if they wanted to. And my guess is most people won't use a different admin password once they figure out why creating their admin user isn't working and fix it.

@dessalines@lemmy.ml @nutomic@lemmy.ml I think you should fix the docker-compose.yml file not to do this.

Edit: Just to increase the information-to-rudeness ratio of my post. The docs are at:

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/install_docker.html

And they recommend using wget to download:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/main/assets/docker-compose.yml

Which is pulled from:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/tree/main/assets

Which is what has the wrong line 40 in it.

Edit: They fixed it. Good stuff.

The Stop ICE Raids Alert Network let's you send and receive mobile alerts about nearby ICE activity whenever, and wherever it occurs.

No downloadable app required. StopICE works with technology already built into your phone. Send and receive mobile alerts via text message, or at stopice.net from any mobile device with a tap of a button.

Simple machines run on instant pulses. We run on chemical reactions that linger.

Think about your phone or computer—they operate on clean electrical signals that turn on and off instantly. Flip a switch, and the current flows. Turn it off, and it stops. No lingering effects, no chemical residue.

But we're not simple machines. We're incredibly complex bio-electrical systems that use calcium and magnesium channels to generate the electricity that moves our muscles and fires our neurons. The difference? Our electrical signals are created by chemical reactions—and chemical reactions take time to fully resolve.

Here's what happens when you get triggered, angry, or face danger:

Your body floods with stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. These chemicals don't just flip a switch—they create a cascading biochemical response. Your heart races, muscles tense, and your entire system prepares for action. Even after the immediate threat passes, these chemicals are still circulating through your bloodstream.

This is why you can't just "turn off" strong emotions the way you'd power down a device. The chemical reaction that created your emotional response is still happening in your body, slowly working its way back to homeostasis.

The civilized response often makes it worse. You feel angry or triggered, but you hold it in because it's the socially appropriate thing to do. You don't want to disturb others or escalate the situation. But here's the problem: those stress chemicals are still there, demanding completion of the biological cycle they started.

Your nervous system created that chemical cocktail to get you to safety or help you respond to a threat. But when you suppress the natural response, you're essentially leaving the engine running. The biochemical process needs to complete itself—those chemicals need to be metabolized and cleared from your system.

This is why you need to "finish the cycle." Go for a walk. Do some intense exercise. Have a good cry. Punch a pillow. Your body needs to burn through those lingering chemicals and return to its natural state of balance.

Understanding this difference between simple electrical systems and our complex biochemical machinery helps explain why emotional regulation is so challenging. We're not dealing with on/off switches—we're working with sophisticated chemical processes that follow their own timeline.

The takeaway? Honor your biology. When you feel strong emotions, remember that there are real chemical reactions happening in your body that need time and space to resolve. Give yourself permission to complete the cycle, even if it means stepping away to process what you're feeling.

Your body is an incredible bio-electrical machine, but it operates on chemistry, not just electricity. And chemistry takes time.

What strategies do you use to help your body process strong emotions? How do you complete the biochemical cycle when you can't express what you're feeling in the moment?

Puerto Rico has far more rescue animals than can be adopted by the local population, and being an island it's much harder to transport them to other rescues with more space or even who already have an adopter lined up for the animal. It's not feasible for volunteers to regularly transport them.

If you are visiting PR, you can sign up to escort a cat or small dog on your return flight. A volunteer meets you at the departure airport with the animal in a carrier, and another meets you at arrival to pick them up. It's a very easy process since PR is a US territory. The rescue pays for any costs associated with bringing the animal as a carry on, and you get an adorable travel buddy.

This is a little guy named Halo that I escorted a few years ago 🥲 I still think about him and am so happy I got to help him to his new life.

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A 2023 study at MIT made this discovery, which could be a boon for storing electricity.

The team calculated that a block of nanocarbon-black-doped concrete that is 45 cubic meters (or yards) in size — equivalent to a cube about 3.5 meters across — would have enough capacity to store about 10 kilowatt-hours of energy, which is considered the average daily electricity usage for a household.

3.5 cubic meters of material ought to be enough to make quite a comfy house

There is a tradeoff between the storage capacity of the material and its structural strength, they found. By adding more carbon black, the resulting supercapacitor can store more energy, but the concrete is slightly weaker, and this could be useful for applications where the concrete is not playing a structural role or where the full strength-potential of concrete is not required.

They talk about making roads with the material, but I suspect electrical posts (utility poles) could also be made of this, which would certainly last much longer than roads and be cheaper to maintain and fix

YSK: How to document that you are a US citizen

https://www.usa.gov/prove-us-citizenship

The most common way to show that you are a US citizen is to show a passport. However, only about 50% of US citizens have a passport.

An alternative to a passport is a Certificate of Citizenship.

Certificates of Citizenship and Naturalization show proof that someone is a U.S. citizen. The website https://www.usa.gov/prove-us-citizenship shows how you can get or replace these documents.

Prove your citizenship: born in the U.S. with no birth certificate. If you were born in the U.S. and have no birth certificate, learn how to get documentation to prove you are a U.S. citizen.

Prove your citizenship: born outside the U.S. to a U.S. citizen parent. Prove your U.S. citizenship without a birth certificate if you were born outside the U.S. to a U.S. citizen.

In Firefox and its derivatives, you can add the non-AI version of DuckDuckGo as a search engine by going into Settings > Search > Search Shortcuts > Add and then giving it a name of your choice with https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25s being put in the "URL with %s in place of search term" part. You have to remove the 25 part from the URL though, that seems to be a Lemmy quirk with posting a link.

I don't know when they made this available, but I'm learning about this now and it's super useful if you hate LLMs and also use a browser that clears cookies on close (such as Mullvad or LibreWolf).

Red meat has a huge carbon footprint because cattle requires a large amount of land and water.

https://sph.tulane.edu/climate-and-food-environmental-impact-beef-consumption

Demand for steaks and burgers is the primary driver of Deforestation:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-beef-industry-fueling-amazon-rainforest-destruction-deforestation/

https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-06-02/almost-a-billion-trees-felled-to-feed-appetite-for-brazilian-beef

If you don't have a car and rarely eat red meat, you are doing GREAT 🙌🙌 🙌

Sure, you can drink tap water instead of plastic water. You can switch to Tea. You can travel by train. You can use Linux instead of Windows AI's crap. Those are great ideas. But, don't drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.

You can even add a search like this to your browser's inbuilt search engines, with a string like this:

• https://searx.oloke.xyz/search?q=filetype%3Apdf+ %s &language=all (or pick another SearXNG instance here)
• https://duckduckgo.com/?q=filetype%3Apdf+ %s &ia=web

The %s is the placeholder string used by both Firefox, Chromium, and many of their derivatives like LibreWolf, ZenBrowser, and Vivaldi. You'll need to remove the spaces around it in the two URLs above (as Lemmy changed all my URLs without spaces to something different).

In the United States, Libraries usually participate in a program called ILL (Inter-Library Loan). You can request the book be sent to your nearest branch and they'll find a library that has it in stock. Just look up "[Your library name] interlibrary loan" in your preferred search engine

This is a general warning to most people, always focus on the accuracy rather than the advocacy part.

Don't read or share an article just because it aligns with your world view.

News organizations in general are the "middle man" between you and events happening in the world.

Don't let the middle man shape your view on reality, focus on accuracy and hopefully you will get a balanced world view.

I had the feeling I couldn't poop for some reason for two days, I also had some sickness from being exposed to too much AC (the doctor said), the doctor gave me medicine against the other stuff which works wonderfully. But my stomach hurt a lot so I ordered a 1 liter bottle of prune juice because I heard it helps against constipation.

Once it arrived I drank the whole bottle at once just to be sure, because I heard it's a natural mild laxative and my stomach hurt so much.

And it worked very well, after 2 hours I was running to the toilet and getting rid of whatever was stuck in there. It worked very well, my stomach stopped hurting after one more hour, wonderful!

But I didn't need to drink the whole bottle, I'm stuck on the toilet the whole afternoon now because as soon as I get out, 2 minutes later I need to run back in, so it's just easier to stay on it.

I think like a cup or two might have been enough.

With the recent event the US just pulled, it is a good idea to freshen up or learn what a Proxy War is and is not.

This makes it much easier to set your screen's brightness to a comfortable level at each time of the day, and to save energy.

(For Windows, see the very bottom of this post.)

On Linux, if you currently have no keyboard shortcuts for that available, a good way to create them is via ddcutil. Once you have ddcutil installed, have your displays' properties printed in the command line by typing ddcutil detect.

This should show you a list of parameters for each of the displays you have connected. For a display of your choice, try these commands:

ddcutil -n <Serial number> setvcp 10 - 5 # reduces brightness by 5 %
ddcutil -n <Serial number> setvcp 10 + 5 # increases brightness by 5 %

ddcutil -n <Serial number> setvcp 12 - 10 # reduces contrast by 10 %
ddcutil -n <Serial number> setvcp 12 + 10 # increases contrast by 10 %

ddcutil -n <Serial number> setvcp 10 0 # sets brightness to minimum
ddcutil -n <Serial number> setvcp 10 100 # sets brightness to maximum

If these commands all work, you can create in your desktop environment's settings (e.g. KDE) custom keyboard shortcuts that execute these commands. Personally, with my two displays and with dedicated "Brightness up" and "Brightness down" keys (macros) on my keyboard, I am using combinations with the modifiers Alt to address the secondary instead of the primary display, Shift, to adjust contrast instead of brightness, and Control to set an absolute value (0% or 100%) instead of going by increments.

Further notes:

Instead of addressing your displays via their serial number, you can also address your display via most other parameters shown in ddcutil detect by using another option than -n, e.g. via bus number or manufacturer name, but I've found that bus number is not persistent over the years, and manufacturer name ("Mfg id") may contain spaces which may lead to problems.

A full list of all other possible vcp commands (the numbers after setvcp) can be obtained through ddcutil vcpinfo.

If you're using a laptop, brightness adjustments for its internal screen are of course almost always a no-brainer.

On Windows 10 and perhaps 11 as well, you can apparently do the following:

Step 1: Press the Win + A to open the Action Center.

Step 2: Press Shift + Tab to select the brightness slider.

Step 3: Use the left and right arrow keys to adjust the screen brightness.

We all know WD-40 works for making things move when they’re seized, but it also works better than anything for getting rid of all traces of adhesive left behind after peeling off stubborn stickers from things you buy.

It works on nearly all surfaces* – even coated paper! (just be sure not to leave it to soak into the paper.)

Instead of peeling slowly for ages with your fingernail or doing that peel-stick-peel-stick thing for half an hour, soak a paper towel in WD-40 and dab it on the offending sticker remains, wait a few minutes, then wipe off. (*if on coated paper, don’t let it soak, just gently rub it.) Clean the item afterwards to remove the oil left behind.

*it’s best to test a small area first if the object is painted or porous, and be careful with items meant to be food safe, because WD-40 is obviously not food safe.

This is something I wish more people knew, because soooo many manufacturers and retailers put stickers in the worst places and with near-permanent adhesive. I hope this helps you!

Most people either use google as their search engine, or one of the "privacy friendly ones" (ddg, qwant, brave, startpage, ...), or use self hosted or publicly available metasearch engines, like searxng, or whoogle, etc.

This websites lists out websites which have their own indexes, and which depend on big providers.

Why YSK?

It is good for your privacy to not use a big provider like google, which now prefers to serve you ai generated ssummaries, which are based on a few giant websites, and this is not good for a open web.

I am also a person who almost always uses "(insert query) reddit" to get better results, because I mostly do not want SEO spam, and reddit results used to be human generated content. Now even that is hit and miss. Also, reddit made a deal with google, so for newer results from reddit, you can only get them from google.

Then we have the "privacy friendly ones" which most of the time are wrappers for other bigger indexes, for example ddg famously uses bing, brave "suppliments" (read this suppliments as almost always) it's results from google, startpage is basically a google frontend, etc. Brave, qwant, and few others also claim to have their own indexes, but they are small and not rich as google and bing. Also, wwhen you think about it - what is their business model - how do they get money for the search apis - most either serve ads or have some form of tracking. Also, bing has "kinda" closed it's search api (not really clear about this), so many of these privacy friendly options will have to either switch to google, or only serve using their indexes.

Meta-search engines kinda seem like better options, as you can run searxng on your own machine, or use the public ones, but it still has problems. You are still bringing the big providers traffic, which makes their advertisement clients happier and prefer them over smaller search engines. If you use a public instance, then it is good for your privacy, but the public instance would now generate a lot traffic, and often get banned or rate limited, and hence you can not rely on them. If you use your personal instances (I did this for a long time), you will still be tracked as your IP is still visible. You avoid their annoying ui and popups but still are tracked.

So what should you use?

You can only decide this. I would prefer something which has a reasonable business model - if they do advertisement, that should ideally be non tracking. Ideally their client and server code should be foss (so you can verify their claims), or have paid plans or apis if you do not want ads.

For example, Kagi has only paid plans, but I do not prefer or use them, because they are expensive (5 dollars for 300 searches per month or something similar. I am from one of third world countries, and 5 dollars is a lot. plus 300 searches seem less to me) but that is subjective, and your privacy has a price, so this is not neccessarily a objectively bad thing. But their code is closed source, and they do not completely use their own indexes.

I have also used Mullvad's Leta search engine for about a month, and they are now effectively frontends for brave search or google (you can choose). Their business plan initially was that Leta was only available to their VPN clients, and VPN subscription would supplement the search cost. Now they have it available for free, so I do not really understand their business plan (maybe the number of clients they have is large enough, and number of leta users is small, that they can afford to run leta for loss, and maybe as possible advertisement for mullvad. Mullvad to me is a good privacy centric company. I am not their client, but they seem to be trust worthy. You can try them, but you would still support some big provider.

You can also try the independent search providers listed in the article. They are often small, serve bad (subjectively speaking; your taste regarding search engines is also heavily tuned to google like results because of years of exposure to it) results, but using them also supports open web (you would often find that these smaller providers do not have good indexes for big websites, and sometimes it is intentional, sometimes it is a byproduct of them being careful, or the websites banning/rate limiting then).

I have now started trying stract, and will try others too. You should also consider trying some independent search engines.

In my personal case - I have a offline setup where I have large sections of wikipedia and a few other websites (like programning language docs, or my favorite manga wiki, will be adding much of stack overflow soon) available offline, and I use my custon launcher to search through them (faster then searching them online). I bookmark a lot of sites (~ 2000) and do this to stop searching the same stuff over and over again. This has reduced at least 30-40% of all my searches. But I still need a search engine for anything I do not have currently, or stuff I do not/ can not get. I am trying stract, because it is open source, they seen to have some fine plans for business in future (non tracking, current search term related ads or subscription service ; currenlty they are running on previous funding from nlnet); search results are acceptable (not good, but servicable); and finally - it is written in RUST (I an a rust fan). I am not affiliated with the project, but just spreading a good word because I just found them, and could not find much online.

PS: I am not used to writing much, and not a good typist. Please forgive the brevity. Feel free to correct me, both on spellings and content

Amazon Prime is particularly heinous about using dark patterns to confound users into risking forgetting but ultimately you've already paid for the month, year

I can confirm this to also be the case with most streaming giants plus the less-giant Shutter

Edit: comments have pointed out some notable exceptions such as services through Apple and HP Instant Ink

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/46695440

I found this zine interesting and on-topic for Anarchy. These tactics should be in everyone's mind, specially nowadays.

You have several different formats in the link, pdf, doc, etc.

db0 set up an AI image generator bot both on the Threadverse and Mastodon some time back for anyone to use. All one needs to do is mention it in a comment followed by the text "draw for me" and then prompt text, and it'll respond with some generated images. For example:

@aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me An engraving of a skunk.

Caused it to reply back to me with:

Here are some images matching your request

Prompt: An engraving of a skunk.

Style: flux

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The bot has apparently been active for some time and it looks like few people were aware that it existed or used it

I certainly wasn't!

I don't know whether it will work in this community, as this community says that it prohibits most bots from operating here. However, I set up a test thread over here on !test@sh.itjust.works to try it out, where it definitely does work; I was exploring some of how it functions there, and if you're looking for a test place to try it out, that should work!

It farms out the compute work to various people who are donating time on their GPUs via AI Horde.

The FAQ for the bot is here. For those familiar with local image generation, it supports a number of different models.

The default model is Flux, which is, I think, a good choice

that takes English-like sentences describing a picture, and is pretty easy to use without a lot of time reading documentation.

A few notes:

• The bot disallows NSFW image generation, and if it detects one, it'll impose a one-day tempban on its use to try to make it harder for people searching for loopholes to generate them.

• There appears to me in my brief testing to be some kind of per-user rate limit. db0 says that he does have a rate limit on Mastodon, but wasn't sure whether he put one on Lemmy, so if you might only be able to generate so many images so quickly.

• The way one chooses a model is to change the "style" by ending the prompt text with "style: stylename". Some of these styles entail use of a different model; among other things, it's got models specializing in furry images; there's a substantial furry fandom crowd here. There's a list of supported styles here with sample images.

db0 has encouraged people to use it in that test post and in another thread where we were discussing this, says have fun. I wanted to post here to give it some visibility, since I think that a lot of people, like me, have been unaware that has been available. Especially for people on phones or older computers, doing local AI image generation on GPUs really isn't an option, and this lets folks who do have GPUs share them with those folks.

Why YSK?

Because a lot of older games require immediate response from the controller (think jumping over pits).

Each TV is different, and may or may not have a game mode. For the longest time, I thought my lag was because of my Raspberry PI (model 4, 4gb). Turns out that turning on the game mode/game optimizer was all I needed. I also added a link to a post that has suggestions for Retroarch changes that can decrease input lag. Relavant content from post:

1. Set max swapchain to as low as possible, I think 1 and 2 run pretty similarly.
2. Turn on hard gpu sync and set it to 0
3. Set frame delay as high as you can go before you get stuttering. On the pi 1, I can go to about 8 with NES core and 4 with SNES. On Pi 3 you can probably go higher, but systems with higher graphics like N64 and PSX won't let you go as high before you run into problems.

And:

(when asked where the settings are) You need to access the retroarch rgui menu while you are in a game. You can do this by pressing X button and select at the same time. Once you get to the rgui menu, you want to click on settings, then video.

Once we isolate key people, we look for people we know are in their upstream -- people that they read posts from, but who themselves are less influential. (This uses the same social media graph built before.) We then either start flame wars with bots to derail the conversations that are influencing influential people (think nonsense reddit posts about conspiracies that sound like Markov chains of nonsense other people have said), or else send off specific tasks for sockpuppets (changing this wording of an idea here; cause an ideological split there; etc).

The goal is to keep opinions we don't want fragmented and from coalescing in to a single voice for long enough that the memes we do want can, at which points they've gotten a head start on going viral and tend to capture a larger-than-otherwise share of media attention.

(All of the stuff above is basically the "standard" for online PR (usually farmed out to an LLC with a generic name working for the marketing firm contracted by the big firm; deniability is a word frequently said), once you're above a certain size.)

https://archive.is/PoUMo