@beejjorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

beejjorgensen

@beejjorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org

Instructor, author, developer. Creator of Beej’s Guides.

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How are you parsing JSON on the command line?

I want to extract and process the metadata from PNG images and the first line of .safetensors files for LLM’s and LoRA’s. I could spend ages farting around with sed or awk but formats of files are constantly changing. I’d like a faster way to see a summary of training and a few other details when they are available.

beejjorgensen,
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I hate to do this, but AI chatbots are typically pretty good at giving examples for things like this and you can learn from it.

beejjorgensen,
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I definitely use them a lot, but I think “very” is too strong a word. It’s pretty easy to get confident, contradictory information from them. They’re a good place to start and brainstorm, but all the information has to be verified either by running and testing the code, or by finding a human source.

beejjorgensen,
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Unix has been my favorite dev platform since I first used it 30 years ago. I’m typing this on a Mac, which also does just fine. But I’m happiest on my Linux box. Even WSL was OK, but the bloat of Windows overpowers the hardware. My Linux daily driver is a 9-year-old laptop that couldn’t handle Windows any longer.

beejjorgensen,
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The one thing that would drive my parents over the edge is ads in Windows. They already use Firefox and Libreoffice.

beejjorgensen,
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Since I moved my stuff off Google Drive, Libreoffice has been super useful. Great work.

beejjorgensen,
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Related: Internet Archive hosts zillions of abandoned games. Publishers are currently trying to sue it out of existence. They accept donations.

beejjorgensen,
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The double-edged sword of isolation.

On the one hand, poor communication between apps and waste of storage.

On the other, relative safety from malicious applications, or from otherwise-safe applications built on top of a thousand libraries none of which have been audited by the dev.

I don’t know how it’s going to go down, but I suspect something will come along to address these issues and snatch the market away from Flatpak.

beejjorgensen,
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Hadn’t tried it before, but went through the tutorial. Seems like a good editor; only modal editors for me, you know? :) I’ll probably stick with Vim for now, but it seems like something to watch.

YouTube screwing itself with adblockers again

I use Firefox and uBlock Origin. Not sure what kind of experience anyone else is having with YouTube, but recently my home page has been empty because I “don’t have watch history turned on”. Okay, fine. I won’t be able to browse suggested videos, and I’ll spend less time on their platform....

beejjorgensen,
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mpv also works well from the command line.

beejjorgensen,
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The author said they wanted maximum accessibility, so they didn’t opt for a particular platform’s voting system.

beejjorgensen,
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Disk is cheap. Always get a copy of whatever it is you “buy”. If that’s somehow not possible, consider the purchase a short-term rental.

beejjorgensen,
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What’s the pay rate for artists?

beejjorgensen,
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The real problem with the internet isn’t Facebook or Twitter or Reddit, it’s the fact the entire experience is pretty much controlled by Microsoft and Google. As they shape your content, lock you out of areas and generally dictate what’s “legal” or even what gets found during your searches.

I agree the Google and MS are a problem, but Facebook, Twitter, Reddit are also a problem, albeit a different one.

beejjorgensen,
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Algorithm-free solves a lot of problems.

beejjorgensen,
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I mean, I have a BS and MS in computer science, so you can use that as guidance as to whether or not I know what an algorithm is. :)

In this context, though, it should be clear that “The Algorithm” refers to a specific social networking algorithm that chooses the content you see in order to maximize advertising revenue.

So yes, Lemmy has algorithms that show different content based on your input, but that’s a wildly different animal. Notably, I’m the one deciding, and also they’re not trying to maximize ad revenue.

beejjorgensen,
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Recommendation algorithms are great for discovering related information and new stuff.

I agree that open, controllable recommendation algorithms would be great. But right now using none of the currently widespread social media recommendation algorithms at all (and just matching keywords instead) makes for a less-abusive, more positive experience. IMHO.

beejjorgensen,
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Another option here is GitHub. I keep my markdown notes in a repo that I just clone from there to my various machines… And then I get to edit them in vim. 😂

Google Books downloader?

I used to be able to download the available pages from books on Google Books with pysheng(3) and/or getxbook, but neither of them seem to work any more. On Firefox I can go into “More Information>Media Info” and download page images one by one, but this is slow and cumbersome. Any recommendations for a replacement?

beejjorgensen,
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If you’re up on your bash coding skills: in the Firefox debugger, you can find the URL to the page images and see if there’s a usable pattern in the URLs. If there is, you could script it in bash and repeatedly call curl to download the images.

beejjorgensen,
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As much as I hate ads and hate the concept that I would be forced to view them, these kind of legal wranglings freak me out. It seems quite possible that a ruling in my favor here would be used against me somewhere else. Courts and lawmakers don’t understand technology and don’t realize the effects laws have. And frankly, the rest of us don’t have much idea, either.

beejjorgensen,
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“Unless you give us all your money to put in our new bank, we might be facing insolvency issues.”

beejjorgensen,
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archive.is/tCWIM

beejjorgensen,
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I used to give Google money for services (Drive and YouTube), but I’ve already stopped doing that because of their evil ways. This just hammers it home that much more.

Edit: The shitty part is what a cool company it used to be. And to watch it destroy itself like this is just sad.

beejjorgensen,
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I took my money from YouTube and started giving it to Kagi. 🙂👍

beejjorgensen,
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Depends on your definition of “evil”, I guess.

beejjorgensen,
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Turns out if you get rid of ads and the algorithm, you end up back in the land of sanity.

beejjorgensen,
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I haven’t tried it, but anything that’s interoperable is fine by me.

beejjorgensen,
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Louis Rossmann: “when the pirate experience is better than the paid experience, you have a problem.”

beejjorgensen,
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I was a premium subscriber for a long time, and probably still would be if Google hadn’t turned so evil that I can no longer in good conscience pay them any money.

But what pushed me over the edge with an ad blocker was a page I got to where every paragraph had a video ad in between. That was it.

beejjorgensen,
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Use the right tool for the job, I say.

I made a decent chunk of change with capitalism. I have a modest house and am well positioned for a middle-class retirement.

Now I work for the government in a field for which I find the capitalist options wanting.

I give away my programming guides for free online with no ads, but sell paper copies of the books for profit.

Could I make more money by charging for the online versions? Sure. But some things are worth more than money.

The quest for money doesn’t ruin everything, but it sure ruins a lot of things.

Bell Labs of yore would be my dream company to work for.

beejjorgensen,
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It continuously blows my mind that computers function at all when constructed on these nanometer scales.

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