It’s not wrong to want to reward someone for providing an above-baseline service, which is what we (usually) can at most do here. Among other things, they are literally asking for someone to hold their hand. That’s instruction-level commitment, not just “passerby internet comment”-level commitment, and I see it as fair to both request the service for a price and provide the service for a price.

Any Mbin in the plans, or is it too similar to lemmy?

However, even what I would consider reputable tutorials such as ones you find on HowToForge, sometimes don’t quite turn out as expected

Yes, because that’s a natural process. Most tutorial s written by users cover the experience the user had in their own use case. They don’t / can’t cover the same ground or have access to the same levels of examination that the devs can have.

So, if you’re going to say don’t trust AI, then you have to also be skeptical of all tuts. I mean, that’s where the AI scrapers got the info in the first place.

Oh please. Stop licking corporate AI boot and drinking the kool-aid. There’s at least two orders of magnitude of truthfulness and trustability between “a discrete set of tutorials written to cover described use cases” and “a random mix and blend hodgepodge coke snort prisoner soup ectoplasm of all the above, fine-tuned to invent answers that produce gratification and brand dependence”. You saying that these two things are as trustable as each other suggests you have quite a misanthropic edge to your personality and/or are going through a stage of cult-of-personality (or cult-of-brand).

I trust the humans who write the tutorials that have em-dashes. I don’t trust an AI that just slurped and pirated the work of those humans to try and snake-oil me with a bunch of grammar mistakes adorned with em-dashes.

There’s IRC, XMPP, and nu-messaging with enshittification.

The manuals are written by experts for experts and in most cases entirely useless for complete beginners who likely won’t be able to even find the right manual page (or even the right manual to begin with).

Asking for help online just gets you a “lol, RTFM, noob!”

This is a thing that honestly still makes me seethe sometimes, because as much as the manuals are there and people should be told to read the manual before anything else, there is a vast difference between a user’s manual and a technical manual. People who answer basic questions by telling the user to RTFManpage instead of leading them to the bropage or the tl;drpage or a simple use case tutorial (or even better, providing the example themselves) ironically builds bad cred for a movement for well-documented software.

The User’s Manual for a car covers, at best, how to turn the ignition on, how to drive, how to brake in difficult conditions and how to change the tires. Maybe it covers where exactly the friggin’ cupholder is. A Technical Manual for a car is for when there’s a real exceptional emergency that’s not simply covered by user service. The computer does not work and someone (not you, but the technician!) needs to know how to pin the RS232 connectors for the emergency interface of the onboard chip. The refrigeration liquid tube has broken off and you need to know what model or measurements the replacement needs to be and what heat can it withstand before it starts melting and likely obstructing the valve. You need to know if (or for how long) the car’s engine can withstand frontal semiautomatic fire and up to what reverse speed can the vehicle perform a safe J-turn maneuver in case you face an ambush.

~95% of manpages I’ve ever seen are Technical Manuals. ~70% of “help” for non-browser systems, as well.

What beginners need to be directed at before anything else is the User’s Manual.

And if that one is not available, go get writing it.

</rant>

All that said, none of that excuses turning to AI. AI is explicitly and specifically for when you don’t want things to work, or for when you are specifically looking for someone to bullshit you. They are for evading responsibility, not for finding solutions.

Are you really comparing LLM output to be on the same level of… hallucination-ness, than a Gamefaqs tutorial for a SNES game from the late 90s?

I know tiktok has deep-fried and rotten the brains of entire generations but this is just ridiculous.

Nah. But if what you want is to prevent rather than palliate or delay (AIs will get throug Anubis, in fact from what I read some of them already do), then pretty much your only option is real-person authentication, so that if stuff does get leaked, you have a discrete list of people who to hold accountable.

0.- Take it out of the public.

If MySQL is more robust than SQLite of all things, something is going seriously wrong.

Then again, it’s 2025. I no longer bet on what to expect from reality. Next someone points me to a mail indicating linux kernel will move its bookkeeping to MongoDB.

Doesn’t Forgejo support SQLite as a backend?

Not really conductive as long as most funds are siphoned by the C-suite ranks. Get rid of the C-fat first, maybe even turn Mozilla into a co-op, then have the People fund it.

PaaP! Platform-as-a-platform!

Each of them.

You could use XMPP but they don’t have any nice clients

[citation needed]

There’s at least three good clients for Desktop (multiplatform) and two for Android.

Plus, XMPP is the best thing to run service-wise. Relatively cheap, runs on a potato, not a nu-protocol that requires a server cluster and friggin’ npm.

It’s a crapload more work to support XMPP/Matrix/whatever messaging on any platform than just using a robust, reliable, resilient, widely supported good old SMTP

For the minimal of sending out a message to their accounts, they are just as easy as each other. Heck, there are simple packages to send XMPP messages from the CLI.

Any particular reason why you can’t do something like host a Send instance instead? Better to treat “filesystem behind the network” and “files to share” as two different things: one is imanent, the other is punctual and sporadic.

Only mostly when I want to. Which tends to be on Mondays and Saturdays.

I’m running Sid on servers, so automatic updates are actually a risk. Used to be Debian Stable, but maaan the docker and podman improvements… make me drool.

Google flags F-Droid updates…

Why would people have Google security going on if they have set up F-Droid as their appstore? Doesn’t that defeat the entire purpose?

There’s a wide gap of stuff one can do between IRC and “chat with voice channels”. For example, having a better protocol with better formatting options, a moderation API, better account management, other forms of multimedia (page embeds, images).

This week I was setting up an IRC server for a group of friends, but might switch it to XMPP. I also have a v good friend who is hosting a XMPP server that sees very little use and has some good lots of legacy stuff going on, I’ll try to ping them to see if it’s worth to spin something completely new.