It might be that the pict-rs instance on lemmy.ml has size restrictions that disallows uploading a full-resolution screenshot or something.

Musk sued Altman and OpenAI in 2024, claiming the artificial intelligence company that he helped start almost a decade earlier “assiduously manipulated” and “deceived” him into donating $38 million, based on promises that the entity would remain a nonprofi

Musk’s attorneys previously said, in a January filing, that their client should receive up to $134 billion in damages

That seems a little disproportionate.

I’m still not using one. The problem is that you’ve got two classes of devices that haven’t quite converged to what I want.

UPS

Traditionally, the purpose of UPSes isn’t to keep systems running (other than through very short outages). It’s to do one of the following:

• Provide a small amount of buffer until a backup power system, like a generator, has time to come online.

• Give the systems time to shut down cleanly. If the user is right there, they have time to save their work. This was particularly an issue before journaled filesystems became the norm, since an unclean shutdown in the era when Windows was using FAT, Linux was using ext2, and MacOS was using HFS had at least the possibility to corrupt your filesystem. They have the ability to report their charge level to an attached computer so that it knows when the battery level is critical and then software on it can start it shutting down. On Linux, the most-common software package to do this is Network UPS Tools, or NUT.

These things don’t need a lot of capacity. They rarely get drained, so they usually use lead-acid batteries, which are heavy and don’t have many full charge-discharge cycles in them (but are pretty happy staying fully charged all the time). You can still get these. The lead-acid batteries are replaceable, though, so an old UPS can keep going for a very long time.

Powerstation

These are designed to keep attached devices running for a longer period of time. Unfortunately, they have a couple of important limitations for powering computer systems.

• They do not normally have the ability to report their charge level. Irritatingly, they do nearly always have a voltmeter rigged up to some software to map voltage to charge remaining to drive a ‘charge remaining’ display on the device, and there are USB HID device classes for reporting charge levels to a host OS, but for some reason, powerstation manufacturers don’t seem to have an interest in making a powerstation that has the latter functionality. NUT does have a USB HID backend, which means that it can monitor and shut down a system if they’d expose it. I’d really prefer the ability to treat one of these as a laptop-style battery, as Linux (as well as other OSes) have the ability to hibernate on low battery. On Linux, these show up as /sys/class/power_supply/BAT*, and there’s lots of software to display charge information and act based on low levels…but AFAICT from looking around the kernel, there is no way to get the kernel to deal with a USB HID device reporting remaining charge like this as a BAT device.

• Computer power supplies can only smooth out so much of an interruption in their power. Computers rely on something on the order of a 10 millisecond transfer time after AC goes out until the UPS needs to be running full-tilt. searches ATX PSUs apparently are only required to operate for 16 milliseconds without power. Other hardware attached may or may not actually deal well with interruptions, but obviously the shorter the transfer time, the better. It looks like line-interactive UPSes tend to do something like 3-6 milliseconds. The problem is that a lot of powerstations have a transfer time in excess of this.

There are some LFP UPSes now, but these have their own disadvantages. They tend to be fairly pricey, and the batteries are often not replaceable, which means that unlike the old lead-acid UPSes, when the battery dies (which will take longer than with a lead-acid battery), the whole device is also going to the landfill.

And lastly, you have the problem that while lead-acid batteries are pretty mature and prices are pretty stable, LFP battery prices are coming down (and sodium-ion might start competing with them for fixed batteries). If batteries are cheaper in the future, waiting means a better deal.

I don’t currently run a UPS on my systems (though I have in the past). I kind of decided that if I’m going to run a UPS, I’m probably going to just bite the bullet and use the combination of a traditional lead-acid UPS and an LFP powerstation, with the UPS plugged into the powerstation. In that configuration, the powerstation provides provides the longer-running power, and the UPS deals with short transfer time and warning computer systems that power is about to go out. This isn’t perfect, because (a) your computing devices can’t see the remaining charge on the powerstation in an outage (b) at some point, one still has to toss the LFP powerstation, and (c) there’s a little extra hardware involved. However, it also has a number of benefits:

• Lead-acid UPSes pretty much always have replaceable batteries. One can keep the UPS around, though the batteries will have to be periodically replaced.

• The UPS will provide time for the system to shut down.

• UPSes are designed specifically for this, and have short transfer times. You don’t need to worry the way one might about a powerstation having marginal transfer time.

• You can get a lot of AC-related functionality in UPSes, like online capability (which will clean up the power, if you want), which isn’t generally available in powerstations.

• You can upgrade the “powerstation”, even (if you want) doing a build-your-own thing with separate cells and an inverter and charge controller (which is generally more cost-effective for larger systems) down the line. These discrete-component systems are also a lot easier to provide human monitoring of remaining charge, since you can pick the components (and worst case, all you need to do is connect a voltage sensor that can talk to a computer to it), though they don’t integrate as nicely off-the-shelf with something like NUT as do traditional UPSes.

I’m not saying that this UPS+separate-battery-system is the only route to take, but I spent some time banging my head on it, and wanted to share if anyone else is similarly thinking about the same thing – that there may be a good argument to have a traditional UPS and some kind of separate battery system.

I remember looking at Sysracks racks a while back when I was trying to find sound-absorbent enclosed racks (which they do make, though I didn’t get one; wasn’t willing to pay for it, as they come at a very large premium). They were one of the very few companies making them. I don’t think that those particular ones are the sound-absorbent models, but their name stuck in my head.

Old system 76 machine from a while back. Its what is running a majority of my services for self hosting. Only one screw keeps the case together, since I get into the insides quite often.

If you get bored and adventurous:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_case_screws

Computer case screws are the hardware used to secure parts of a PC to the case. Although there are numerous manufacturers of computer cases, they have generally used three thread sizes.

The #6-32 UNC screws are often found on 3.5" hard disk drives and the case’s body to secure the covers. The M3 threaded holes are often found on 5.25" optical disc drives, 3.5" floppy drives, and 2.5" drives. Motherboards and other circuit boards often use a #6-32 UNC standoff. #4-40 UNC thumb screws are often found on the ends of DVI, VGA, serial and parallel connectors.

You might be able to get a box of thumbscrews in the appropriate diameter and go toolless. I’ve had a number of computer cases that ship with those (my current desktop case just uses magnets, doesn’t even have the thumbscrews). I have had a lot of less-than-ideal toolless things in the past, including poorly-designed toolless hard drive mounting stuff that wound up being a lot more work than the traditional tool-requiring stuff, but for the screws that keep the case closed, going toolless has always been a big win for me.

Re: the cabling up top there, there’s some Reddit subreddit devoted solely to people showing off their spiffy cable-routing.

searches

Might be:

https://old.reddit.com/r/CableManagement/top/?sort=top&t=all

Though that looks like in-PC-case cabling. I thought that it dealt more with network cables.

searches more

Ah. I think this:

https://old.reddit.com/r/cableporn/top/?sort=top&t=all

It looks like we do have a !cableporn@lemmy.world, but basically nobody is posting.

beverages

That desk is about a million times cleaner than mine.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

You want a double-backslash in Markdown.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

yields

¯_(ツ)_/¯

Whereas:

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

yields

¯\(ツ)/¯

Those HP Elitedesks are all over Amazon as refurbished machines. I was actually considering getting one earlier today for a server.

In the indirect sense that an engine might impact a game’s visual appearance, hardware compatibility, or performance, sure. But I don’t care about the engine specifically as an engine. That’s just an implementation detail. It’s just “does the game look appealing” or “does the game run well on my hardware”?

There are some cases where I can look at an engine and know that it’s very likely that some feature that I want is or isn’t there. For example, the (open-source) Twine engine supports interactive fiction multiple-choice Web-based games, usually written in a language called Sugarcube.

There’s a similar proprietary engine and language, Choicescript, which runs in a proprietary viewer. This is used by Choice of Games LLC, which has published a large number of commercial text-based games.

The developers of the Choicescript engine decided that an “undo/go back/save” feature would be undesirable, probably because it reduced the gravity of a player making choices; they basically require a player to play the game in “ironman mode”, where if anything happens that the player doesn’t like, the player has to go back and play a new game from scratch to avoid it. The Twine developers decided that “undo/go back/save” was a good idea and enabled it by default (and even if a game disables it, there are typically ways to modify a Twine game to re-enable this feature). I very strongly disagree with “undo” being disabled; I feel that it’s not respectful of my time, so when I purchase a Choicescript game, I know that I’m probably going to have to live with this particular decision that I do not like.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_that_support_PlayStation_light_bar

Also, (a) userspace could have some higher-level encoding or encryption or compression that happens without the kernel seeing the non-encoded data, and (b) whatever particular Unicode encoding OP is probably thinking of isn’t the only Unicode encoding out there.

That doesn’t, strictly-speaking, mean that it’s impossible to have kernel-level blocking — you could create some kind of emulated system that inspects everything, but it does mean that you couldn’t just inspect data at points where one normally enters the kernel.

The answer that is probably most useful to OP is that if it’s a problem for his application, he should validate it in userspace.

I probably wouldn’t use something specialized to home maintenance. Just any todo/task management system that lets you have a recurring task to tick off. There are tons of those out there.

Personally, I use repeated tasks in org-agenda in emacs for most of this, but I wouldn’t recommend picking up emacs simply to use org-agenda. But if you are an emacs user, then it might be a good option.

I haven’t used Taskwarrior myself, but I’ve seen a few people recommend it for Linux use, and if I weren’t using an emacs-oriented system, I’d probably look into it. It supports recurring tasks.

I’m waiting for release, myself, since I want to get the full experience all at once, so I’m not the best person to advise there.

Looks in approval at use of antimicrobal bronze handles.

I’d point out, for those not aware, that there’s a spiritual successor in the form of Kitten Space Agency.

Every time I get an Android update, my first reaction is “what workflows that had been working am I going to need to relearn?”

I’ve had some similar comments about Windows in the past. Like, a lot of the lock-in value that Microsoft enjoys isn’t anything special that they’ve done — it’s because people are expert in using their platform. If you make them change their workflow, you throw that out. And people profoundly dislike changing their workflow, once they’ve put the effort in to become accustomed to one.

Could be worse.

https://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/sc-man-gets-30-years-2008-halloween-killing/223289164/

SUMTER, S.C. — A 27-year-old Sumter man has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for killing a trick-or-treater who knocked at his door on Halloween 2008.

Quentin Patrick was sentenced Tuesday after pleading guilty to murder in the death of T.J. Darrisaw.

Prosecutors say the 12-year-old boy was shot at least a dozen times as he stood on the porch of Patrick’s home. The boy’s stepfather and a brother were wounded.

Patrick is a convicted drug dealer and said he fired his AK-47 because he thought a rival drug dealer was back to shoot him again. Patrick has already been sentenced to more than 16 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to being a felon in possession of a weapon.