Have you ever tried to look under the hood and interact with a pdf programmatically? I assure you it only gets worse.

A while ago I tried to write a small script to scrape data out of some account statements that my idiot bank only made available in pdf format. As far as I could tell, the file was just a list of tiny chunks of text along with sets of x/y coordinates specifying where each one should be placed on the page. Answering seemingly simple questions like “are these two words on the same line?” Involved comparing raw y-coordinates because the file had no concept of a “line of text”, and even spaces between words were often simulated by bumping the x-coordinate over by a few pixels instead of using an actual space character.

I suspect those files were generated by a particularly bad piece of software, and a more competent one could probably do much better, but knowing that its even possible to create a file that cursed is still infuriating to me.

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.

I looked into it a while ago but I gave up on the idea after realizing how few programs can actually run on one. There’s no “reverse VM” software that allows you to seamlessly combine multiple physical machines into one virtual one. Each application has to be specifically designed to take advantage of running on a cluster. If you’re writing your own code, or if you have a specific project in mind that you know supports cluster computing then by all means go for it, but if you’re imagining that you’d build one and use it for gaming or video editing or some other resource intensive desktop application, unfortunately it doesn’t work like that.

Edit: I dug up a link to the post I made about it in /c/linux. There’s some good discussion in there if you’d like to learn more https://lemmy.world/post/11528823

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. 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.

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

That reminds me, we should also never forget that around the same time Mark Zuckerberg got so deep into Metaverse hype that he renamed his company after it and sunk 10s of billions of dollars into development with nothing to show for it

It’s not quite the same tone as internet historian, but if you’re looking for an entertaining takedown of NFTs, I highly recommend Line Goes Up by Folding Ideas.

Not sure if this is an intentional reference to the Lonely Island song “Sushi Glory Hole,” but either way here’s a link

https://youtu.be/XbGchfT3yMs

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBOXF-FION4

It’s an interesting piece of tech ephemera, but devils advocate here, I’m not sure that I agree with the implication that this is a bad thing. The UI works. It gives you all the options you need with no major downsides or pain points. In this case, I think there’s something to be said for: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

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.

Ceci n’est pas une rock

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.

I’m aware that pine64 sells a smart watch that they encourage flashing your own OS onto. I wonder how hard it’d be to just port the pebble code onto that hardware (a lot harder than I just made it sound, no doubt.) It could be a good way to get a pebble-like experience for people who prefer not to support this guys new company.

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:

1. I enjoyed reading an article posted somewhere else (Lemmy, etc.) so I sought out the feed of that publisher.
2. Sometimes news outlets enter into agreements to republish each others articles. When they do this, the re-publisher will usually include a little blurb at the end giving credit to the original publisher. If a feed I’m already subscribed to has an article re-published from elsewhere then I click through and check out the original source to see if I want to follow them as well.