That’s an issue in older versions of Lemmy that was fixed in the 0.19.x releases, I think. lemmy.world still seems to be on 0.18.5

Discussion on Github from last year: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3965

What upside down thing with a banana??

There was a viral video/meme maybe a decade ago about how monkeys peel bananas (might have actually been an orangutan or gorilla in the one I saw; been too long since I’ve seen it) where they peel it from the end opposite of how people are usually shown doing it. I’m guessing they mean that? Basically, instead of bending the stem bit (from where the bananas bunch up), you can pinch the tip at the other end and the peel splits open very easily – it’s easier to do, especially if the banana is still a bit on the greener side of ripeness and the stem part is flexible. (I tried it after seeing it and switched to peeling them from the “bottom” myself.)

What back bit?

There is a little black fibrous part of most Cavendish bananas near the tip I was describing; many people do not like eating it and avoid it.

Also…veins?

I’m not sure what they mean either.

What I’d do is set up a simple website that uses a little JavaScript to rewrite the date and time into the page and periodically refresh an image under/next to it. Size the image to fit the remaining free space of however you set up the iPad, and then you can stick anything you want there (pictures/reminder text/whatever) with your favorite image editor. Upload a new image to the server when you want to change the note. The idea with an image is that it’s just really easy to do and keeps the amount of effort to redo layout to a minimum – just drag stuff around in your image editor and you’ll know it’ll all fit as expected as long as you don’t change the resolution (instead of needing to muck around with CSS and maybe breaking something if you can’t see the device to check that it displays correctly).

There’s a couple issues to watch out for – e.g. what happens if the internet connection/server goes down, screen burn-in, keeping the browser from being closed/switched to another page, keeping it powered, etc. that might or might not matter depending on your particular circumstances. If you need to fix all that for your circumstances, it might be more trouble than just buying something purpose built… but getting a first pass DIY version working is trivial if you’re comfortable hosting a website.

Edit: If some sample code that you can use as a starting point would be helpful, let me know.

Hopefully both dishes come out great!

I’ve never tried to make a stew out of duck before, but if someone asked me to wing it anyway, I’d probably try to use it in a gumbo: Dark roux, Cajun Trinity (celery + onion + bell pepper), jalapeno, garlic, stock, fresh thyme, bay leaf, lots of fresh ground black pepper, spoonful of hot sauce (e.g. Crystal or Tabasco if I can’t get that), plus your meat – served over white rice. For chicken (e.g. chicken thighs), I’d sear it first but I’m not sure on the best treatment for gamey fowl. Personally I might try to blanch it first to try to reduce the gameyness (based on recommendations I’ve seen about cooking certain kinds of stewed pork – like pork belly in Chinese dishes), but you’d do better to get advice from someone who’s actually cooked with gamey ingredients more than I have if you can.

Adapting a coq au vin recipe might be another idea to try if gumbo doesn’t appeal, but again, I’ve never tried that with duck either.

And Sim Tower I was obsessed with that game for a long time when I was younger. Couldn’t stop playing until I got everything completed and filled every empty space on the map.

Single, double, or triple story lobby? :-)

I remember having a pretty good time with SimTower myself – I liked seeing all the little animations of people doing stuff throughout the building. I didn’t understand the apartment pricing thing as a kid, but as an adult thinking back on it, it’s clear that I was supposed to renovate the units if I wanted to keep renting them at the higher rates… (Delete and rebuild was not intuitive to me as a kid so I kept getting frustrated with the apartments and usually built massive amounts of hotel rooms instead.)

I haven’t heard of Sim Safari myself what was that one like?

I hadn’t played it for 20+ years so my memory of it wasn’t great when you asked this question – but I went down a bit of a rabbit hole digging through my boxes of old anime DVDs and strange things I burned to CD-Rs as a teenager and such – and it turns out I still have the original CD-ROM! It’s got orange and white stripes. It’s scratched up a little bit, but it’s still readable enough that I was able to install the game under WINE and IT WORKS! (The installer prompted me to install DirectX 5 to “improve performance”… lol)

The game opens with a short animated splash screen – a map of Africa with animated zebras and other animals shown over it before eventually displaying the game’s logo. It then dumps me onto a main menu with a lantern that toggles an interactive tutorial on and off – somewhat confusingly; it wasn’t immediately clear that it was a switch unlike the other options. I turned the tutorial on but didn’t find it very helpful.

The game itself is isometric and features a bunch of animals wandering around randomly while grass grows. (Screenshot) There are three different modes (park, camp, village) that I don’t really understand the details of. Park shows your animals, of course. I think the idea is you build up the camp site to get tourists to come (and bring you money), do gardening and animal management and such in the park which attracts more tourists, and hire people from the village to keep things running (otherwise they poach your animals, probably?) but it’s not clear how to actually get things going and most of the advisors seem pretty useless.

There’s an ecologist adviser who has a field guide about plants and animals and can also show you various graphs and things. You can click on binoculars and then on an animal and it will bring up a window with a little animation of that animal.

The game constantly plays animal sound effects by default including crickets and various birds and a bunch of animals whose sounds I don’t know well enough to name – but could probably learn from the embedded educational material if I cared to. (I have a feeling many parents of kids who had this game were probably driven bonkers by some animal or other going “AWEEEEE heee heee heee hee!” over and over.)

I remembered the game being presented as more serious than SimPark (which has a talking cartoon frog guide you through things like leaf identification) – and, indeed, the character graphics are more realistic cartoon drawings in this one, but it’s also more cartoony than I remember with the sound effects for things like a “boing-a-boing-oing-oing” failure noise if you misclick the binoculars.

The controls are not very good. Moving around the map is tediuous and unintuitive (you have to click in a particular region near the window border and hold the mouse down there – or else pull up a mini-map and navigate with that). The game also just builds paths immediately when you try to draw them with the mouse instead of letting you choose a route and drop to release to confirm the construction. You can “build” a 4 door car on your camp site for some reason as well as construct roads, but I think it may just be a decoration. There doesn’t seem to be any way to pick it up and move it if you plopped it in a bad spot (bye $3k!).

Unfortunately I don’t have the original box/paper manual/whatever else came with the disc and the README file (in an ancient .DOC format) is not very helpful. It does, however, contain some lines like:

By the time you read this document, the average home computer might be a 700MHz GazillaComp 2000 with 58 gigabytes of memory.

which is pretty amusing since the decade old machine I’m running it on has a 3.7GHz processor – obscenely far beyond their dreams of high performance – but a mere 32GB of RAM. :p

Somewhat oddly the game apparently has the ability to print – although I haven’t tried it.

I’ve seen Bubba Ho-Tep and Cemetery Man! Watched them during a movie marathon once that also included From Dusk Till Dawn and Jacob’s Ladder. That was a night well spent.

Out of the games, I’ve played Sim Tower. I never made it to 5 stars but got as far as building the subway in at least one of my towers. I played way too many sim games as a kid. SimSafari is probably the most obscure I tried – never really made much sense out of that one though.

I don’t know if it’s that obscure… but for anyone else who played a bunch of sim games – do you remember the song with the lyrics “I’m just a splatter, splatter, splatter on the windshield of life”?

Yeah; I also tried subbing in case that kicks off federation and searched a few titles to see if they ended up in random incorrectly as well (stuff like that happens sometimes with kbin). The magazine has seen a few microblogs mentioning the channel, and it clearly picked up the avatar/icon, description, etc. somehow, but doesn’t seem to be getting any videos as threads/posts and I couldn’t find any floating around disconnected either. I think kbin most likely doesn’t understand what PeerTube is publishing through AP, but there could always be federation weirdness or something.

Doesn’t seem to work right on kbin, unfortunately, although it does show up as a magazine: https://kbin.social/m/thelinuxexperiment_channel@tilvids.com

So I either need something like this that I could host myself (is something like that even feasible?)

The closest thing I could find that already exists is GPT4All Chat with LocalDocs Plugin. That basically builds a DB of snippets from your documents and then tries to pick relevant stuff based on your query to provide additional input as part of your prompt to a local LLM. There are details about what it can and can’t do further down the page. I have not tested this one myself, but this is something you could experiment with.

Another idea – if you want to get more into engineering custom tools – would be to split a document (or documents) you want to interact with into multiple overlapping chunks that fit within the context window (assuming you can get the relevant content out – PyPDF2’s documentation explains why this can be difficult), and then prompt with something like “Does this text contain anything that answers <query>? <chunk>”. (May take some experimentation to figure out how to engineer the prompt well.) You could repeat that for each chunk gathering snippets and then do a second pass over all snippets asking the LLM to summarize and/or rate the quality of its own answers (or however you want to combine results).

Basically you would need to give it two prompts: a prompt for the “map” phase that you use to apply to every snippet to try to extract relevant info from each snippet, and a second prompt for the “reduce” phase that combines two answers (which is then chained).

i.e.:

f(a) + f(b) + f(c) + ... + f(z)

where f(a) is the result of the first extraction on snippet a and + means “combine these two snippets using the second prompt”. (You can evaluate in whatever order you feel is appropriate – including in parallel, if you have enough compute power for that.)

If you have enough context space for it, you could include a summary of the previous state of the conversation as part of the prompts in order to get something like an actual conversation with the document going.

No idea how well that would work in practice (probably very slow!), but it might be fun to experiment with.

[coreutils-announce] coreutils-8.31 released [stable]

stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils-announce/2019-03/msg00000.html

(found thanks to this blog post titled “File Creation Time in Linux”)

This is a composite I stitched together from 12 screenshots taken from episode 5 of Penguindrum. I pretty much completely rewrote the tool I used for my last composite to make this. My old program could only handle solving two images; the new version solves a graph of correspondences one pair at a time to attach as many images as it can to a pinned starting image. I spent all weekend writing this specific editor, and much of my free time over the last couple weeks has gone into my broader art tool project.

I haven’t done much in the way of artistically changing the piece. Other than the final cropping (which I did in the GIMP), it’s as true to the imagery from episode 5 as I could get it. Notably though, the lower portion of the image and the upper portion of the image (with the reapers) are not from one continuous shot in the episode; part of my motivation for stitching this was that I wanted to see how it all looked when put together. I was surprised to find that the top portion with the reapers was actually scaled differently than the lower portion. I’ve cropped it for the main post, but if you’d like to see what it looks like without the final crop, you can see that image here.

The “lovers” are clearly a parody of The Kiss by Klimt – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kiss_(Klimt) – but I have no idea what the heck is going on with the cherubs in the middle…

I think they’re specifically wondering if using @@ mention syntax will result in a notification popping up for the user on Lemmy.

I’ve been wondering that too (in the context of threads though) – and if it does work, are there limitations regarding visibility between instances that people should be aware of. e.g. what happens if I @ someone in a post to a community on a lemmy server that is defederated from their home instance? Or, in a community that no one on their home server has subscribed to? Will they still get a notice?

I guess I don’t really have a good mental model for how @ works on the Fediverse.

I mentioned over on last week’s discussion thread over on ani.social that the oldest anime I currently have access to is the Lupin the Third Pilot Film – and so I dug it out and watched it! This version is from the DVD re-release a few years ago so I’m not sure if it’s exactly the same as the one from 1969 or if it has adaptations from when it was shown on TV later – thus the “?” in the title.

That’s exactly how I wrote the community links in my original post on kbin though. i.e. the literal text I posted for the first sentence is: I was introduced to the boykisser/girlkisser meme over in !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone recently, and today the power of memes compelled me to make this. I think something is not getting translated correctly when sending the message from kbin to lemmy. Maybe kbin is converting it to a link first and then sending that to lemmy instead of the literal text of my comment?

Related to linking, is there a syntax for instance-relative post linking? (Or even just a good recommendation for how to link threads without driving people insane?)

@rikudou

CommunityLinkFixerBot replied to my first comment here, but (1) bot messages do not federate to kbin (I checked the post on ani.social manually to make sure it showed up the way I expected and saw an extra comment counted; if I hadn’t done that I’d have never seen the message), and (2) I linked with the exclamation_mark-community-atsign-domain syntax as it recommended so I’m not sure what’s going wrong or how to fix it. Maybe there’s kbin/lemmy interoperability weirdness in how my post was conveyed?

I don’t think kbin and lemmy support mutual direct messages, so at-ing you on this post since I’m not sure how else to get in contact with you to see what’s going on with the bot.

I was introduced to the boykisser/girlkisser meme over in !196 recently, and today the power of memes compelled me to make this.

I’ve tagged it as OC since I made this meme image for kbin/lemmy specifically – i.e. it’s not a repost from reddit or 4chan or wherever – but the image is, of course, based on a screenshot from Karakai Jozu no Takagi-san. I asked recently on my “Shinobu Horror Story” post to !animepics about whether or not this is the right idea on how to use the OC flag, but didn’t get feedback. (Actually, does that OC flag even get copied over to lemmy or is that just a kbin thing…?) Anyway, let me know if you have opinions on this.

Is this related to the image from the “IT CANT BE” thread?

Edit – link to thread I’m mentioning (kbin + ani.social; should be equivalent +/- federation weirdness):
https://kbin.social/m/animemes@ani.social/t/628190
https://ani.social/post/998178

Meta question: Is there a way to link threads so that users can see the post on their own instance?

…and they claim they’re full of jelly but it’s really pickled plum! 🍙️ ;-)

This silly Pokemon/Nisemonogatari crossover idea popped into my head last night and I felt compelled to edit it together out of five screenshots. (Yes, five.) I was on the fence about marking this as OC; there’s some non-trivial image editing involved with the two Shinobu screenshots, and I made the comic, but I’m not really sure on what should or shouldn’t be marked OC. Let me know what you think.