hendrik

This is a bit smart-home specific... I've long wanted to build some smart speakers with Home Assistant's voice assistant and a multi-room music solution. Sadly I could never get Snapcast work to an acceptable level, but seems there is a new kid in the block now.

Sendspin (formerly Resonate) is an open synchronized music protocol. Currently being implemented within ESPHome. A few days ago they fixed some more memory issues and seems it's getting along. Maybe we'll get an open and working multi-room audio solution added to ESPHome soon.

I got it working on both an ESP32-S3 and an old ESP32 (with PSRAM). It's got nice features like the title, artist, album and cover art being transferred so we can just display that on a small TFT. And it's just about starting to work well enough. Now they need to finalize it, get some more things changed around in ESPHome and I can finally assemble some synced speakers for the kitchen and livingroom. Yay!

Seems it's early days for the server-side of it as well. We got support by Music Assistant. Other than that the (few) libraries warn they're still more or less just a tech demo. So as of now this is somewhat limited to tinkerers, but IMO looking really promising.

• https://esphome.io/
• https://www.music-assistant.io/
• https://www.sendspin-audio.com/
• https://github.com/esphome/esphome/pull/12284 (plus a bunch of related PRs)

Wir können in den letzten Monaten einen deutlichen Rückgang der aktiven Nutzenden feststellen. Doch was genau sind die Gründe dafür und was können wir dagegen tun?

Interessanter Artikel. Bin nicht sicher was ich davon halten soll. Hier ist die Statistik auf die der Artikel sich bezieht. Meine Instanz sieht auch einen massiven Ausschlag an neuen Nutzern letzten Februar/März aber auch hier im Threadiverse war es eigentlich immer schwer neue Nutzer zu halten. Wenn es denn tatsächlich auch echte neue Nutzer waren. Wir haben immer wieder diese Ereignisse mit einem Zustrom von Leuten. Aber ansonsten gehen die Statistiken für Lemmy eigentlich regelmäßig bergab. Und das ist auch schon eine ganze Weile so.

Und ich denke ich beobachte auch einen gesellschaftlichen Wandel. Also vielen Leuten ist das was mir wichtig ist zunehmend unwichtiger?! Oder wir haben resigniert? Aber eigentlich wäre doch im Moment ein guter Zeitpunkt um von den Plattformen die schon lange zunehmend kommerzieller und manipulativer werden zu Alternativen zu wechseln, die von Menschen für Menschen geschaffen werden?

Ich wollte nun mal endlich auf einen moderneren Passwortmanager wechseln und hatte dafür Bitwarden und KeePass im Auge. Ich hatte mich gerade schon fast für Bitwarden und zugehörigen Vaultwarden Server entschieden... Und nun muss ich feststellen, dass der Bitwarden Desktop Client überhaupt nicht in meinem Debian-Repository ist. Im F-Droid Store auch nicht, allerdings bieten sie dort wenigstens ein separates Repository an... Warum?

Sollte ich meine Idee nochmal überdenken und vielleicht doch KeePass oder etwas ganz anderes verwenden? Ich hätte gerne etwas das einfach zu benutzen ist, so dass ich es auch Freunden/Verwandten andrehen kann, gerne so dass man direkt seine 2FA Codes und Passkeys drin speichern kann. Aber bitte Freie Software und keine komischen Geschäftspraktiken und Snaps oder manuelle Installation, gerne auch kein Flatpak sondern einfach die gute althergebrachte Funktionsweise von Linux-Distributionen und ein "apt install ..." mit Updates, Maintainern die ein Auge darauf haben und wofür man generell so Linux-Distributionen überhaupt erst hat. Oder gibt es sinnvolle Erklärungen warum man das nicht macht?

Experten zeigen, wie KI Machtverhältnisse verstärkt und soziale Ungleichheit vertieft. Regulierung könne helfen.

• Heise-Artikel
• Der Talk als Video auf Peertube

Richard Sutton is the father of reinforcement learning, winner of the 2024 Turing Award, and author of The Bitter Lesson. And he thinks LLMs are a dead end. [...] LLMs aren’t capable of learning on-the-job, so no matter how much we scale, we’ll need some new architecture to enable continual learning. And once we have it, we won’t need a special training phase — the agent will just learn on-the-fly, like all humans, and indeed, like all animals. This new paradigm will render our current approach with LLMs obsolete.

Long interview from the Dwarkesh Patel Podcast. I like the more technical/philosophical arguments. And I think it's a more nuanced perspective than what we normally hear about AI.

https://piped.video/watch?v=21EYKqUsPfg

The Wikipedia article says Cloudflare has been used to host hate speech, websites with illegal content and forums connected to all sorts of illegal activities. And I see them being used by a lot of decent webservices but shady ones as well.

So my question, can Cloudflare be used for something alike "bulletproof hosting"? Does anyone know if they collaborate with law enforcement or care once someone sends a mail to the abuse contact? Or if there's a way to find information about a Cloudflare protected server for the public?

Hypothetical question, I'm just curious and I thought maybe someone here has first-hand experience with getting their account terminated or reporting content or doing piracy via them or whatever...

Short TED talk of Dustin Ballard, who runs the Youtube channel "There I Ruined It". About role of AI in music and creativity.

on piped.video | ted.com

Doesn't have to be a state secret. Just any Information to which access is restricted or it'd be dangerous or undesired if it were just handed out to the public.

Edit: Don't reveal any secrets here. This is a public forum. Proceed with caution when answering this question.

Tl;dr: I think we have too much "empty" content and noise here and it drags down the place for 2 years now. Does PieFed include an approach to change the situation?

I'm sorry, this is going to be a bit of a rant. And about PieFed's role in the "Lemmy" community and more broadly, what I think the place should be about. Feel free to skip this, unless you have a good amount of time to waste to read my long post and you want to think about the future of the community here.

To preface this: I'm mainly here on the Threadiverse for the comments. To have meaningful conversations with people. That could be the charm of this place. Yet, that's regularly not what happens here.

The high-frequency posters use Lemmy to dump the news of the day and re-post memes. And that's okay if people want that, I myself try to cut down a bit on news shaped by social media, so again it's mainly the comment thread underneath that I deem useful, not the post itself, since we have the news at a bazillion other places and it's not what sets this place apart. (Plus I think following the outcry of the day is corrosive and usually less informative than it seems, so I went further and actively unsubscribed from many of the big communities here.)

And the now more meaningful (to me) part isn't huge by any means. I comment on things and write answers to questions, some communities work very well and it leads to a conversation or I can help someone with their Linux woes. Half the time at least I type something into the void and it feels like I've wasted my time since I don't get any replies, maybe one or two upvotes at best and not even OP engages. So I wonder why they even made the post. Clearly not because they want to talk about something.

I think the interesting part of the Threadiverse needs to grow so I can have meaningful conversations here. When I look at the user count of Lemmy, I see how it stagnates at about 45k users for 2 years now. Sometimes we get an influx of a few thousand users but we're not attractive to them, so we always lose them again. And the place just stays whatever it is. I think not really attracting people and at the same time losing that many people constantly (who actively volunteered to have a look at the place) tells us something.

I think we could do better than that and set the place apart from countless other platforms in many ways. But that seems to a minority opinion in the bigger Threadiverse. The Lemmy devs regularly say it doesn't need to grow and it'll maybe grow organically (which it doesn't). Most users here tell me we need to dump more posts in an desperate attempt to kickstart engagement. I think we've tried that for 2 years now and it clearly doesn't work. On the contrary, it's kind of empty (or fabricated) content and I'll find out once I try to engage, that these are lower quality, less engagement than some other posts. And it actively drowns the few people talking to each other in added noise. I think the idea to address the issue this way is exactly why Lemmy stagnates and why we always lose all the users that come here, sign up to have a look and then leave again, because this isn't what they've been looking for. (And this is a multi-faceted issue, we have some other drama and issues here as well, but this post is long enough, so I'll skip that here, feel free to add your perspective in the comments.)

Now this week I've complained a bit, since I saw piefed.social communities with really high-quality conversation. And then the same people come, determine we need more content, and they dump re-posts of the lemmy.ml equivalent over their heads. And then I've taken tens of minutes out of my day to reply to posts elsewhere (not a piefed community) and give a nuanced perspective, only to find out it's unmarked Reddit re-posts, and I've basically wasted my time. It wasn't a genuine question in need for my answer, I was betrayed, tricked into increasing the number of comments underneath something that wasn't even genuine. When I could have spent that time interacting with high-quality conversations instead, which definitely exist as well. It's just that those people drain that. And I can't even tell which is which.

So it actively takes away from quality content. And I end up with a feeling like with the Reddit content bots, fabricating engagement. Which I dislike and specifically avoid. And it makes the entire place feel kind of empty to me, despite the many posts we have each day.

I think first of all people really need to stop dumping posts in an ill-conveived attempt to help. It's a misconception. We need more comments here, not posts. Yet they do the opposite and their user profiles rarely have comments, just hundreds of posts. If you want to grow and foster the place, add comments.

PieFed

That's my perspective, feel free to tell me how it feels to you. I'm definitely not against posts, just against fabricating them, and focusing on an unfit approach instead of doing the right thing.

Now my question: Does PieFed want to address that issue (if it really is an issue to more people than just me)? Is PieFed just a piece of technology, connecting me to the same community, just with an arguably better approach? Or does it go further? Push towards a certain atmosphere, change the community and behaviour? Do we do higher quality communities on piefed.social or are they basically the same thing as the ones before, just on a different domain? Do we go as far as to kick the re-posters so at least the posts aren't just exactly the same?

That'd be mainly social engineering. And I'd really welcome if we had ideals and a clear vision of where to go. We kind of have that. In contrast to some other Fediverse software where I can't see a clear vision.

And then we have technology. We could devise tools to address it. And PieFed already is about providing better tools to address some things. We have an ambivalent view of concepts like Karma. And algorithms to steer attention. I could try to address this with software. Calculate scores and devalue everyone who dumps posts and doesn't contribute to the conversation. That's likely going to give some advantage to conversation itself and foster genuine engagement. Do we want to do that?

And as a bonus question: What's with the entire voting system? Seems I deem different things interesting than what's popular. And that's all the scores underneath posts and comments tell us. So it's of little use to me. A post with 5 upvotes could be as interesting as one with 250 of them, and that happens each day to me. Once I switch the sorting method from "new" to something else, what it does is make lots of interesting content disappear from my feeds.

References:

• Are some questions here just to simulate activity?
• Please be Advised for Help Farmers
• Content jacking/reposting is a problem on Lemmy. and this comment highlighting how what makes other places "great is the community and not the posts."
• Statistics for Lemmy on the Fediverse Observer
• PieFed features for growing healthy communities and PieFed Features
• Moderation & the design of social platforms

I've "flaired" this "Feature request". Mind this is an opinion piece containing my perspective (and preaching). I'd like to hear your's and request the name PieFed to encompass a clear vision, to be not just technology but a broader approach to shape the nature of the society we want to create. And put in lots of effort to actively lead us towards accomplishing more than we do today.

And I definitely need some good ideas and tools to turn my feeds into something that caters to my own needs and wants. If there's some overlap with other people, we could talk about some specifics.

Connection: Another very famous masterpiece from one year earlier. Also very long and with many melodic parts. Both talk about driving fast on the highway.

I just found out I can buy a decent 400W solar panel in the local hardware store for around 90€ these days.

Are there people around with experience in off-grid solar? There is quite some supply in cheap MPTT charge controllers on the internet. And I can't afford a 700€ power station. But I would be able to buy a few power tool batteries or one of the lead-acid batteries people put in their caravan. Are there projects building a power station myself? Is this even worth it?

Maybe someone alredy wrote a blog post with recommendations or findings and failures along the way. Or has something similar running at home?

(Thanks to the mods for steering me towards the correct community.)

I'm developing a small Python webapp as some sort of finger exercise. Mostly a chatbot. I'm using the Quart framework, which is pretty much alike Flask, just async. Now I want to connect that to a LLM inference endpoint. And while I could do the HTTP requests myself, I'd prefer something that does that for me. It should support the usual OpenAI style API, in the end I'd like it to connect to things like Ollama and KoboldCPP. No harm if it supports image generation, agents, tools, vector databases, but that's optional.

I've tried Langchain, but I don't think I like it very much. Are there other Python frameworks out there? What do you like? I'd prefer something relatively lightweigt that gets out of the way. Ideally provider agnostic, but I'm mainly looking for local solutions like the ones I mentioned.

Edit: Maybe something that also connects to a Runpod endpoint, to do inference on demand (later on)? Or at least something which I can adapt to that?