Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

people: its like im sick all the time now. i would give anything to make it stop

me: you could wear a mask

people: no not like that

Hiya fedi, I need your knowledge! The family wants to digitise a big collection of old photographs, negatives and photo slides. I know there’s services we can send the material to that do this for a living, but grandpa is afraid to hand them off for fear of them getting damaged, lost etc. So I need to figure out how to do this “in house” as best I can.

I’ve figured out there’s specific photo scanners, instead of a flat bed scanner, that should be able to handle the negatives and the slides.

But what I don’t know is about good software to scan and archive them properly, what things to watch out for when doing this and what kind of software exists that could help restore and enhance the digital copies.

It doesn’t matter if this is a slow going process, there’s no deadline here.

If you have any recommendations for hardware equipment, software or documentation and protocols to read I’d be very grateful. I would prefer to do this using open source software but if there’s proprietary software that makes a meaningful difference I’m happy to consider it.

(I know how to search the web myself, so I’m looking for advice from folks with practical experience, not just a Google search hit or whatever an LLM misgenerated.)

Boost would be appreciated since unfortunately I’m short on folks with this type of knowledge in my own social circles.

In Europe, flying is cheaper than taking the train.

It's an embarrassment, and a major problem: we have to stop flying for silly short distances. Realise that the overheads of flying (reaching the airport, awaiting 2 hours, the flight, the unloading, reaching the destination) largely cancel out any time gains of flying. And the carbon costs are utterly untenable. Not to speak of the modern, dire conditions of the whole flying "experience".

Another embarrassment is that train connections can't be guaranteed when across countries or companies. They aren't even coordinated. As if those who commission and set the schedules didn't travel by train themselves, at least not internationally. In considering how tiny most European countries are, it's frankly bizarre.

There are so many destinations one could travel by train to, yet in practice, it's not sensible. A disgrace.

The upside is that it can be fixed.

#trains #EuroRail

@albertcardona So true! And on top of that, it's often super hard to figure out where/how to buy the relevant tickets. You don't want to know how much time I spent on that. I actually wrote a blog with tips about this: https://mariekevanvugt.blogspot.com/2023/08/how-to-travel-by-train-in-europe.html

I would ask that folks please read the entire thread (the last post in the thread is here https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/112401426707865447 just in case it gets cut off) before considering replying here with comments or questions about the situation :)

StackExchange Inc's deal with OpenAI is extremely frustrating, and users are being left without much recourse.

the story is already hitting the tech press, but much of it is missing important details and context about how StackExchange sites are run, not to mention the history of organised protest against SEI's pro-LLM stance.

I wrote a bunch about it here, in case anyone is interested in learning more about the situation and its impact:

https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/112401284014892261

"that's not the kind of thing a decent human being says" is a fire response in general.

Gotta remember that for when some right-wing shithead tries to argue that people don't deserve rights again.

Not sure who needs to read this, but I guess many of you who follow me either don't care, or know.

Anyways, I wrote some words about Flakes, and channels, and channels, and channels, and related things.

https://samuel.dionne-riel.com/blog/2024/05/07/its-not-flakes-vs-channels.html

okay, wait: one last thing i want to say, in somewhat good faith to these people

If you genuinely believe that bringing #AI to #StackOverflow is going to be a net benefit, understand this:

You’re cheering on your own demise. If this AI will actually be as good as some of y’all think it is, you, a person now reliant on this tool, will be the first one to get fired

Out of all of the things, that should atleast be one of your concerns

Some of the racists on here are so unsubtle about it lol. Like, you think we don't notice when you ask for feedback to a political question and ignore all the Black and brown folks who respond, graciously thank the white ones, and delete?

.......we have eyes and brains to work them, you know! You're not fooling anyone 😂

I applaud Apple for their new iPad ad: "We are a huge corporate machine that will crush anything you love in order to make a buck" is refreshingly honest.

In software architecture you have to recognize when you're adding a rocket stage.

In rockets and aeroplanes it's a simple truth that weight adds more weight. To carry more you need bigger engines, a bigger fuel thank, more fuel. More weight becomes even more weight.

For rockets to make it out of the atmosphere they use multiple stages. Each stage carries the rocket to a certain height, once the fuel is used up the stage is ejected so the next stage can push forward a lighter rocket. So adding a stage will get you further, but at the cost of much more machinery, engineers, and complexity. You now have a much heavier rocket to launch.

Switching to kubernetes, kafka, microservices, a single page app, ... is adding a rocket stage. Maybe it's what you need to get where you want to go, but be clear about the extra weight, operational cost, engineering overheard, mental overhead.