(and has E2EE)

Normally my policy is “E2EE or GTFO”, but the concept only applies to a subset of Discord use cases. A good Discord alternative needs to handle the same variety of use cases as Discord.

E2EE for a public forum makes no sense. Lemmy doesn’t have E2EE either, obviously. That’s an absurd idea.

Discord is mostly used for public or semi-public spaces. I’m in Discord servers for some of my favorite games and game studios, for example. The only barrier to entry is clicking a link, which is usually publicly advertised. I’m also in some semi-public Discords that are locked behind a membership of some sort (like Patreon), but those are still full of an arbitrary number of people I do not know. It’s not a private space. E2EE would be counterproductive.

That said, I have a few friends who habitually DM me on Discord, and I’m like “dude, I know you have Signal. Use it FFS”. One thing I like about Lemmy is that when you go to send a DM, it literally warns you against using it for DMs:

Warning: Private messages in Lemmy are not secure. Please create an account on Element.io for secure messaging.

The problem is that there are very few people who are familiar enough with both Discord and Matrix to give a meaningful answer.

Personally, I use both, but for completely different use cases. I do not understand how one could be used as a substitute for the other. Perhaps I’m missing something, or perhaps everyone who thinks Matrix is a good substitute for Discord just don’t use Discord very much.

If you have a small group of friends who occasionally hang out in chat, sure, Matrix is fine. If you’re in dozens of Discord servers, each with dozens (or even hundreds) of channels, and hundreds or thousands of users, no. At least, not with Element. Perhaps there’s a better client out there for that?

Sounds interesting. What kind of data can it reliably ingest with “attach”? If I dropped, say, the entire Python docs in there, would it be able to get anything out of that? Or does it need to be minimalistic plain-text statements? How is it actually performing retrieval?

A poly group (also known as a polycule) is a network of polyamorous people’s relationships. Polyamory, in case you’re unaware, is the practice of having multiple romantic or sexual partners at the same time, in contrast to monogamy.

If you were polyamorous and wanted to graph out your relationships, you could do it a few different ways. For example:

• Just you and your partners. If any of your partners are also in relationships with each other, you’d draw lines between them as well.

• Extend an extra level and include all of your partners’ partners (known as metamours), again connecting any pair on the graph who are partners.

• Extend that further and include all of your partners’ partners’ partners (no specific term for this as far as I know). This would likely include people you don’t personally know, and it would be difficult to build a complete graph of all their relationships.

Etc.

Does it do that even if you set it to “use device MAC” for the wi-fi network you’re on?

The exact location might depend on brand/OS, but in stock Android it’s in Settings > Network & Internet > Internet > gear icon next to active wi-fi network > Privacy.

Alien meaning “external”.

Electrical interference can come from all kinds of places, near and far. I guess technically you might get interference from other planets but I don’t think that’s what they meant. :) Solar flares are a possibility, though.

Better yet, use borg to back up. Managing your own tars is a burden. Borg does duduplication, encryption, compression, and incrementals. It’s as easy to use as rsync but it’s a proper backup tool, rather than a syncing tool.

Not the only option, but it’s open source, and a lot of hosts support it directly. Also works great for local backups to external media. Check out Vorta if you want a GUI.

do they just want everything to be crawled

Yes. Web crawling has been a normal and vital part of the web from day 1. We’d have no search engines without crawlers.

The web is user-centric by design. I’m sick of tech companies trying to flip the script and hoard information, most of which is not theirs to begin with (e.g. Google, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).

Let me put it this way: I audit open source software more than I audit closed source software.

Ebooks.com has a ton of DRM-free ebooks. They have a whole DRM-free section, plus a search filter, and they clearly display all available formats before purchase. That’s my first stop for ebooks.

I’ve been using cryptpad.fr (the “flagship instance” of CryptPad) for years. It’s…fine. Really, it’s fine. I’m not thrilled with the experience, but it is functional and I’m not aware of any viable alternatives that are end-to-end encrypted.

It’s based on OnlyOffice, which is basically a heavyweight web-first Microsoft Office clone. Set your expectations accordingly.

No mobile apps, and the web UI is not optimized for mobile. I mean, it works, but does using the desktop MS Office UI on a smartphone sound like fun to you?

Performance is tolerable but if you’re used to Google Sheets, it’s a big downgrade. Some of this is just the necessary overhead involved in an end-to-end encrypted cloud service. Some of it is because, again, this is a heavyweight desktop UI running in a web browser. It’s functional, but it’s not fast and it’s not pretty.

DNS over HTTPS. It allows encrypted DNS lookup with a URL, which allows for url-based customizations not possible with traditional DNS lookups (e.g. the server could have /ads or /trackers endpoints so you can choose what to block).

DNS Over TLS (DoT) is similar, but it doesn’t use URLs, just IP addresses like generic DNS. Both are encrypted.

But any 50 watt chip will get absolutely destroyed by a 500 watt gpu

If you are memory-bound (and since OP’s talking about 192GB, it’s pretty safe to assume they are), then it’s hard to make a direct comparison here.

You’d need 8 high-end consumer GPUs to get 192GB. Not only is that insanely expensive to buy and run, but you won’t even be able to support it on a standard residential electrical circuit, or any consumer-level motherboard. Even 4 GPUs (which would be great for 70B models) would cost more than a Mac.

The speed advantage you get from discrete GPUs rapidly disappears as your memory requirements exceed VRAM capacity. Partial offloading to GPU is better than nothing, but if we’re talking about standard PC hardware, it’s not going to be as fast as Apple Silicon for anything that requires a lot of memory.

This might change in the near future as AMD and Intel catch up to Apple Silicon in terms of memory bandwidth and integrated NPU performance. Then you can sidestep the Apple tax, and perhaps you will be able to pair a discrete GPU and get a meaningful performance boost even with larger models.

Have you used Facebook in the last 5 years?

The UX is godawful. More than half my feed is just random crap suggestions and ads.

Haven’t heard of Hiren’s BootCD in like 15 years. Good to see it’s still around!

It’s worth mentioning that with a large generational gap, the newer low-end CPU will often outperform the older high-end. An i3-1115G4 (11th gen) should outperform an i7-4790 (4th gen), at least in single-core performance. And it’ll do it while using a lot less power.

I think it helps to think of browsing as a basic form of searching. Everything you can do in a browsing context, you can by definition do in a searching context…if the client doesn’t suck. The information needed to browse is embedded in the tags.

So this strikes me as entirely dependent on your client software. A good client should let you browse by tags. You could add Dewey numbers as tags to start with, so you can browse that way if you want, then add any other tags that might be useful (like genres, for example) on top of that.

The only difference with tags in this context is that books will appear in multiple places.

OP must have it set to the lowest compression level. All levels are lossless, but higher compression levels are smaller, at the expense of increased encoding time. Should be half the size or less in general.

Gotcha. Typically lowercase b=bit and uppercase B=Byte, but it’s hard to tell what people mean sometimes, especially in casual posts.

Come to think of it, I messed up the capitalization too. Should be a capital M for mega.

1mbps is awfully low for 1080. Or did you mean megabyte rather than megabit?