TBH I just use the Feeder app on my phone. Fully self-contained. No account, no server, no middleman of any kind. Just the app.
I’ve been meaning to set up something more elaborate, but this really does work fine, and I like to mention it in these threads for anyone who’s interested in RSS but thinks it’s a big lift to set up. It can be complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Download an app and start adding publications that interest you. That’s all it takes to get started.
Time to quote Dan Olson again. This was originally written about NFTs, but just replace “crypto” with “AI” and it’s still 100% relevant:
When you drill down into it, you realize that the core of the crypto ecosystem … is a turf war between the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy. Techno fetishists who look at people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, billionaires that have been minted via tech industry doors that have now been shut by market calcification, and are looking for a do-over, looking to synthesize a new market where they can be the one to ascend from a merely wealthy programmer to a hyper wealthy industrialist.
From the incomparable line goes up
Alright, I’ll take the bait. Let’s do some recreational math
This web page contains average passenger car fuel efficiency broken down by year. The most recent year available is 2016, so we’ll use that: 9.4 km/L or 22.1 miles per gallon. A gallon of gas has about 120MJ of energy in it. So, an average car requires about 120,000,000 / (1/22.1) = 5.4MJ per mile
This web page has calories burned for different types of exercise. I separately searched and found that the average adult in the US weighs around 200LBS, so we’ll use the 205LBS data, and I’m going to assume that “cycling - 10-11.9 MPH” is representative of the average commuter who isn’t in too much of a hurry. That gives us 558 calories per hour, or 55.8 calories per mile (using the low end of the 10 to 11.9mph range). That’s equal to about 0.23MJ per mile (as an aside, it’s important to note that the calories commonly used when talking about diet and exercise, are actual kilocalories equal to 1000 of the SI calories you learned about in school.)
Moral of the story: an average bike ride consumes around 20x less energy than an average drive of the same distance.
I’m reminded of this video about how changes to the construction industry starting in the '50s resulted in the loss of ornamentation in architecture
Looks like it’s time to post my favorite SMBC again
I got 8 in the span of about five hours today. Absolutely insane.
Yep, I got a series of those recently claiming that I had unpaid paid tolls. Each messagr came through as a group text with two or three random numbers, which were immediately removed from the group after the text arrived. I’ve been wondering why they started doing this. I assume they’re trying to exploit some kind of loophole in the carriers spam filtering.
Yes, but it’s also the common ancestor of kale, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, kohlrabi, and (obviously) farmed cabbage.
All of those foods were bread from the same plant by selecting for different traits.
I’ve wondered before how large an order would be required to entice a white label manufacturer of robot vacuums into doing a production run of units with Valetudo preinstalled.
I would absolutely buy one if someone could work out a fair business arrangement with the developer and throw the project up on kickstarter.
All the Bardcore covers by Hildegard Von Blingin are amazing.
The sample data shared in the article includes
"c": "ES", // Country code,
ES is usually used for Spain, so it looks like these tests were run from within the EU.
Man, I feel you on the affiliate link fluff. I actually ended up unsubscribing from the Popular Mechanics and Popular Science feeds because the signal to noise ratio was so bad.
The creator of Nunti provided a very good primer on the algorithm design here. Basically, you indicate to the app whether you like or dislike an article and then it does some keyword extraction in the background and tries to show you similar articles in the future. I suppose you might be able to dislike a bunch of the fluff and hope the filter picks up on it, but it isn’t really designed to support the kind of rules that would completely purge a certain type of content from your feed.
Most of the feeds I subscribe to came to me in one of two ways:
It can be as simple as just putting an app on your phone. I use feeder which is fine. Pretty bare bones, but in that way it’s easy to learn and use.
I’ve also been meaning to try out an app called Nunti, which I heard about a while ago from this Lemmy post. It claims to be an RSS reader with the added benefit of an (open source and fully local) algorithm to provide some light curation of your feed. It looks interesting, but I haven’t actually tried it out yet because I’m still deciding whether I want any algorithm curating my feed, even one as transparent as Nunti’s. It’s also only available through F-Droid right now, which is a bit of a barrier to entry.
I feel the same way about AI as I felt about the older generation of smartphone voice assistants. The error rate remains high enough that i would never trust it to do anything important without double checking its work. For most tasks, the effort that goes into checking and correcting the output is comparable to the effort I would have spent to just do it myself, so I just do it myself.
Oh no! It’s a 1 2 3 4 5 6 ………………… ICOSAHEDRON!
Every episode seems to have one joke that really gets me. In this one it was Mariner stopping mid exclamation to make sure she correctly named the platonic solid that’s about to eat her.
If you were actually hoping to buy one but the rounded corners are a dealbreaker, then you may be interested to know that the DIY edition lets you mix and match the older display with the newer motherboards. Looks like opting for the older display even saves you $130 on the purchase price.
Searx is a search aggregator. It masks your identity from the search providers, but under the hood it’s still just a middle man for google/bing results. I don’t see how this helps if the results themselves are getting worse.
Are there any viable alternative sites you’re aware of?
Copy pasting my reply from the last time this came up:
Check how nearby colleges and universities dispose of used assets. The state school near me maintains a very nice website where they auction off everything from lab equipment to office furniture. It’s also where all their PCs go when they hit ~5 years old and come up in the IT department’s refresh cycle. The only problem in my case is that they tend to auction stuff in bulk. You can get a solid machine for $50 to $100, but only if you’re willing to pay $500 to $1000 for a pallet of 10.