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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • I’m not familiar enough with Cloudflare’s error messages — or deployment with Cloudflare — to know what exact behavior that corresponds to, but I’d guess that most likely it can open a TCP connection to port 443 on what it thinks is your server, but it’s not getting HTTPS on that port or your server isn’t configured to serve up the right certificate for that hostname or the web server software running on it is otherwise broken. Might be some sort of intervening firewall.

    I don’t know where your actual server is, may not even be accessible to me. But if you have a Linux machine that can talk to it directly – including, perhaps, the server itself – you should be able to see what certificate it’s handing back via:

    $ openssl s_client -showcerts -servername akaris.space IP-address-of-actual-server:443
    

    That’ll try to establish a TLS connection, will send the specified server name so that if you’re using vhosting on the server, it knows which site to return, and then will tell you what certificate the web server used. Would probably be my first diagnostic step if I thought that there was a problem with the TLS handshake on a machine I was running.

    That might provide enough information to you to let you resolve the issue yourself.

    Beyond that, trying to provide much more information probably isn’t possible without more information about how your server is set up and what actually is working. You can censor IP addresses if you want to keep that private.


  • I could definitely use a supplemental e-ink display, though I think that the touchpad is too small. E-ink works very well in well-lit environments, like outdoors in the sun, where LCD displays don’t do well.

    I think that a more realistic route for laptops to have a supplemental eInk display is having the laptop have a protective cover that flips open and sticking a touch e-ink display on the back side of the laptop lid. Then you use the laptop as a tablet in that mode. I believe I recall seeing a smartphone manufacturer that did a dual LCD-eInk display on opposite sides of the phone.




  • This led to significant inventory buildup in America that will now need to be cleared, according to market watcher Canalys. However consumers are not biting because of several factors, including that tariffs have pushed up prices in a number of key spending categories already, meaning households are likely focusing on essentials and avoiding forking out on discretionary items.

    To put this in blunter terms, the Trump administration had already started taxing the poorer chunk of the population sufficiently on other items via tariffs that it had drained off their available disposable spending money, preventing them from buying the imported-before-tariffs-went-into-force PCs, since they don’t have the funds available to do so.




  • As @papertowels@mander.xyz said.

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

    Historically, if you were in a noisy environment, you could get closed-back, circumaural headphones — headphones that fit around your ears and had a lot of sound-absorption padding — to help soak up the sound. I still use decent non-ANC circumaural headphones at home.

    There are also some people who are more-willing to tolerate discomfort than I am who get in-ear buds, which block noise in their ear canal, and on top of that, fit ear protectors intended for industrial use, like 3M X5 Peltor ear protectors, which have even more passive sound absorption stuff than current circumaural headphones do, and are even larger.

    That sort of thing works well on higher frequency sound, but not as well on low-frequency stuff, like engine noise, large fans, stuff like that.

    ANC basically has microphones in your headphones, picks up on what sounds are showing up at your ear, and then tries to compute and play back a sound that produces destructive interference at your ear. That is, if you look at the sound waves, where the environmental sound is low pressure, it plays back high pressure signal, and when the environmental sound is high pressure, it plays back low pressure signal. It’s not perfect, or it could make environmental sound totally inaudible. But high-end ANC headphones are pretty impressive these days. I have a pair of Sennheiser Momentum 4 headphones — good, though not the best ANC out there in 2025, and I don’t personally recommend these for other reasons — and when they kick on, the headphones are designed to have the ANC fade in; same thing happens in reverse, fades out when you flip the ANC off. It sounds almost as if fans and the like around you are powering up and down when that happens, very eerie if you’ve never experienced it before. Even the sounds that it doesn’t do so well on, like people talking, it significantly reduces in volume.

    And ANC does best with the other side of the spectrum, the side that passive sound absorption doesn’t — the low-frequency stuff, especially regular sounds like fans. So having both a lot of passive sound absorption and ANC on a given pair of headphones let the two work well together.

    People often use cell phones in noisy environments, with a lot of people around, and ANC makes it a lot easier to hear music or whatever without background sound interfering. I think that it’s very likely that people will, long term, mostly wind up using headphones with ANC (short of moving to something more elaborate like a direct brain interface or something). It’s not really all that important if you’re in a quiet environment, and I don’t bother using ANC headphones on my desktop at home. But if you’re in random environments — waiting a grocery store line, in a restaurant with music playing over the restaurant’s speakers, on an airplane with the drone of the airplane engines, whatever — it really helps to reduce that background sound. ANC isn’t that new. I think that I remember it mostly being billed as useful for airplane engine noise back when, which they’re a good fit for. But it’s gotten considerably better over the years. For me, in 2025, good ANC is something that I really want to have for smartphone use.

    The problem is that in order to do ANC, you need at least a microphone, preferably an array, and somewhere you need to have a model of the sound transmission through the headphones and be running signal processing on the input sound to generate that output sound. In theory, you could do it on an attached computer if you had a fast data interface, but in practice, ANC-capable headphones are sold as self-contained units that handle all that themselves. So you gotta power the little computer in the headphones. That means that you probably have batteries and at least for full size headphones (rather than earbuds) you might as well stick a USB interface on them to charge them, even if the user is using Bluetooth for wireless connectivity. And if you’ve done that, it isn’t much more circuitry to just let the headphones act as USB headphones, so in general, ANC headphones tend to also be USB-capable. My Momentum 4 headphones have all of Bluetooth, USB-C, and a traditional headphones interface, but…I just haven’t really wound up using the headphones interface if I have the other options available on a given device. Might be convenient if I were using some device that only had headphones output. shrugs


  • I mean, there were legitimate technical issues with the standard, especially on smartphones, which is where they really got pushed out. Most other devices do have headphones jacks. If I get a laptop, it’s probably got a headphones jack. Radios will have headphones jacks. Get a mixer, it’s got a headphones jack. I don’t think that the standard is going to vanish anytime soon in general.

    I like headphones jacks. I have a ton of 1/8" and 1/4" devices and headphones that I happily use. But they weren’t doing it for no reason.

    • From what I’ve read, the big, driving one that drove them out on smartphones was that the jack just takes up a lot more physical space in the phone than USB-C or Bluetooth. I’d rather just have a thicker phone, but a lot of people wouldn’t, and if you’re going all over the phone trying to figure out what to eject to buy more space, that’s gonna be a big target. For people who do want a jack on smartphones, which invariably have USB-C, you can get a similar effect to having a headphones jack by just leaving a small USB-C audio interface with a headphones jack on the end of your headphones (one with a passthrough USB-C port if you also want to use the USB-C port for charging).

    • A second issue was that the standard didn’t have a way to provide power (there was a now-dead extension from many years back, IIRC for MD players, that let a small amount of power be provided with an extra ring). That didn’t matter for a long time, as long as your device could put out a strong enough signal to drive headphones of whatever impedance you had. But ANC has started to become popular now, and you need power for ANC. This is really the first time I think that there’s a solid reason to want to power headphones.

    • The connection got shorted when plugging things in and out, which could result in loud sound on the membrane.

    • USB-C is designed so that the springy tensioning stuff that’s there to keep the connection solid is on the (cheap, easy to replace) cord rather than the (expensive, hard to replace) device; I understand from past reading that this was a major reason that micro-USB replaced mini-USB. Instead of your device wearing out, the cord wears out. Not as much of an issue for headphones as mini-USB, but I think that it’s probably fair to say that it’s desirable to have the tensioning on the cord side.

    • On USB-C, the right part breaks. One irritation I have with USB-C is that it is…kind of flimsy. Like, it doesn’t require that much force pushing on a plug sideways to damage a plug. However — and I don’t know if this was a design goal for USB-C, though I suspect it was — my experience has been that if that happens, it’s the plug on the (cheap, easy to replace) cord that gets damaged, not the device. I have a television with a headphones jack that I destroyed by tripping over a headphones cord once, because the headphones jack was nice and durable and let me tear components inside the television off. I’ve damaged several USB-C cables, but I’ve never damaged the device they’re connected to while doing so.

    On an interesting note, the standard is extremely old, probably one of the oldest data standards in general use today; the 1/4" mono standard was from phone switchboards in the 1800s.

    EDIT: Also, one other perk of using USB-C instead of a built-in headphones jack on a smartphone is that if the DAC on your phone sucks, going the USB-C-audio-interface route means that you can use a different DAC. Can’t really change the internal DAC. I don’t know about other people, but last phone I had that did have an audio jack would let through a “wub wub wub” sound when I was charging it on USB off my car’s 12V cigarette lighter adapter — dirty power, but USB power is often really dirty. Was really obnoxious when feeding my car’s stereo via its AUX port. That’s very much avoidable for the manufacturer by putting some filtering on the DAC’s power supply, maybe needs a capacitor on the thing, but the phone manufacturer didn’t do it, maybe to save space or money. That’s not something that I can go fix. I eventually worked around it by getting a battery-powered Bluetooth receiver that had a 1/8" headphones jack, cutting the phone’s DAC out of the equation. The phone’s internal DAC worked fine when the phone wasn’t charging, but I wanted to have the phone plugged in for (battery hungry) navigation stuff when I was driving.



  • In fairness, rural America probably didn’t entirely understand the implications of said vote.

    As I’ve pointed out on here before, I feel like a lot of people in mostly-Republican-voting rural American are going to be even more disappointed when they discover agricultural subsidies ending, healthcare subsidies ending that disproportionately benefit poorer, rural areas, illegal immigrant agricultural workers that farms rely on becoming unavailable, counter-tariffs that tend to target agricultural output from rural areas, etc.


  • I’m sorry, you are correct. The syntax and interface mirrors docker, and one can run ollama in Docker, so I’d thought that it was a thin wrapper around Docker, but I just went to check, and you are right — it’s not running in Docker by default. Sorry, folks! Guess now I’ve got one more thing to look into getting inside a container myself.


  • tal@lemmy.todaytoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldI've just created c/Ollama!
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    13 days ago

    While I don’t think that llama.cpp is specifically a special risk, I think that running generative AI software in a container is probably a good idea. It’s a rapidly-moving field with a lot of people contributing a lot of code that very quickly gets run on a lot of systems by a lot of people. There’s been malware that’s shown up in extensions for (for example) ComfyUI. And the software really doesn’t need to poke around at outside data.

    Also, because the software has to touch the GPU, it needs a certain amount of outside access. Containerizing that takes some extra effort.

    https://old.reddit.com/r/comfyui/comments/1hjnf8s/psa_please_secure_your_comfyui_instance/

    ComfyUI users has been hit time and time again with malware from custom nodes or their dependencies. If you’re just using the vanilla nodes, or nodes you’ve personally developed yourself or vet yourself every update, then you’re fine. But you’re probably using custom nodes. They’re the great thing about ComfyUI, but also its great security weakness.

    Half a year ago the LLMVISION node was found to contain an info stealer. Just this month the ultralytics library, used in custom nodes like the Impact nodes, was compromised, and a cryptominer was shipped to thousands of users.

    Granted, the developers have been doing their best to try to help all involved by spreading awareness of the malware and by setting up an automated scanner to inform users if they’ve been affected, but what’s better than knowing how to get rid of the malware is not getting the malware at all. ’

    Why Containerization is a solution

    So what can you do to secure ComfyUI, which has a main selling point of being able to use nodes with arbitrary code in them? I propose a band-aid solution that, I think, isn’t horribly difficult to implement that significantly reduces your attack surface for malicious nodes or their dependencies: containerization.

    Ollama means sticking llama.cpp in a Docker container, and that is, I think, a positive thing.

    If there were a close analog to ollama, like some software package that could take a given LLM model and run in podman or Docker or something, I think that that’d be great. But I think that putting the software in a container is probably a good move relative to running it uncontainerized.


  • tal@lemmy.todaytoProgramming@programming.devPNG is back!
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    13 days ago

    PNG has terrible compression

    It’s fine if you’re using it for what it’s intended for, which is images with flat color or an ordered dither.

    It’s not great for compressing photographs, but then, that wasn’t what it was aimed at.

    Similarly, JPEG isn’t great at storing flat-color lossless images, which is PNG’s forte.

    Different tools for different jobs.


  • tal@lemmy.todaytoProgramming@programming.devPNG is back!
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    At least at one point, GIF89a (animated GIF) support was universal among browsers, whereas animated PNG support was patchy. Could have changed.

    I’ve also seen “GIF” files served up online that are actually, internally, animated PNG files, so some may actually be animated PNGs. No idea why people do that.


  • tal@lemmy.todaytoProgramming@programming.devPNG is back!
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    12 days ago

    On the “better compression” front, I’d also add that I doubt that either PNG or WebP represent the pinnacle of image compression. IIRC from some years back, the best known general-purpose lossless compressors are neural-net based, and not fast.

    kagis

    https://fahaihi.github.io/NNLCB/

    These guys apparently ran a number of tests. They had a neural-net-based compressor named “NNCP” get their best compression ratio, beating out the also-neural-net-based PAC, which was the compressor I think I recall.

    The compression time for either was far longer than for traditional non-neural-net compressors like LZMA, with NNCP taking about 12 times as long as PAC and PAC taking about 127 times as long as LZMA.


  • tal@lemmy.todaytoProgramming@programming.devPNG is back!
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    12 days ago

    What’s next?

    I know you all immediately wondered, better compression?. We’re already working on that. And parallel encoding/decoding, too! Just like this update, we want to make sure we do it right.

    We expect the next PNG update (Fourth Edition) to be short. It will improve HDR & Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) interoperability. While we work on that, we’ll be researching compression updates for PNG Fifth Edition.

    One thing I’d like to see from image formats and libraries is better support for very high resolution images. Like, images where you’re zooming into and out of a very large, high-resolution image and probably only looking at a small part of the image at any given point.

    I was playing around with some high resolution images a bit back, and I was quite surprised to find how poor the situation is. Try viewing a very high resolution PNG in your favorite image-viewing program, and it’ll probably choke.

    • At least on Linux, it looks like the standard native image viewers don’t do a great job here, and as best I can tell, the norm is to use web-based viewers. These deal with poor image format support support for high resolutions by generating versions of the image at multiple pre-scaled levels and then slicing the image into tiles, saving each tile as a separate image, so that a web browser just pulls down a handful of appropriate tiles from a web server. Viewers and library APIs need to be able to work with the image without having to decode the whole image.

      gliv used to do very smooth GPU-accelerated panning and zooming — I’d like to be able to do the same for very high-resolution images, decoding and loading visible data into video memory as required.

    • The only image format I could find that seemed to do reasonably well was pyramidal TIFF.

    I would guess that better parallel encoding and decoding support is likely associated with solving this, since limiting the portion of the image that one needs to decode is probably necessary both for parallel decoding and for efficient high-resolution processing.