This is really just a driver which sends a bunch of bytes via I2C to a microcontroller.

I2C is a very standard way of communicating with digital integrated circuits at low speed so this is not specific to the microcontroller used on Synology NAS devices (which is actually a pretty old and simple one) much less specific to drive leds.

So whilst technically this specific Linux Driver ends up controlling LEDs on a very specific device, the technique used in it is way more generic than that, and can be used to control just about any functionality sitting behind a digital integrated circuit that exposes an interface to control it via I2C, be it one that hardcodes it or one which, like this one, is a microcontroller which itself implements it in code.

All this to say that this is a bit bigger than just “LED driver”.

I’m not disagreeing, rather I’m expanding on your point.

Yeah, LLMs kinda-sorta-almost work for nearly anything but their failures are have a uniform distribution in terms of seriousness - LLMs are equally likely to give an answer than will kill people if acted upon as they are to make a minor mistake in an answer.

Statistical text generators don’t have logical consistency checks or contextual awareness, unlike people, and that makes LLM unsuitable for just about any application were there are error modes which could be costly or dangerous, even whilst barely trained people could work there because some things are obviously dangerous or wrong for even the dumbest of humans so they won’t just do them, plus humans tend to put much more effort and attention into not doing the worst kinds of mistakes than they do the lighter kind.

Of course, one has to actually be capable of logically analyzing things to figure this core inherent weakness in how LLMs works when it comes to use them in most domains - as it’s not directly visible and instead is about process - and that’s not something talkie, talkie grifters are good at since they’re used to dealing with people who can be pushed around and subtly manipulated, unlike Mathematics and Logic.

Just to add that Neural Networks have already been used for ages.

For example, early automated mail sorting systems in the 90s used them to recognized postal codes.

For literally decades, slowly and steadilly they’ve been finding more niches were they add value and then somebody comes up with NN styles of model for natural language text generators and “good enough to deceive non-expert” image generation - so with interfaces which are accessible to MBAs - and suddenly all the Venture Capitalist and Oversized Tech Company CEO types latch on to the thing and pump up what seems to be the biggest Tech bubble ever.

I expect that after the bubble bursts and the massive pain of unwinding the gigantic resource misallocation due to it is over, NNs will be back on track at slowly and steadily finding more niches were they add value.

Yeah, that’s much better.

Personally I detest not understanding what’s going on when following a guide to do something, so I really dislike recipe style.

That said, I mentioned recipes because recipes meant to be blindly followed are the style of guide which has the lowest possible “required expertise level” of all.

I supposed a playbook properly done (i.e. a dumbed down set by step “do this” guide but with side annotations which are clearly optional reading, explaining what’s going on for those who have the higher expertise levels needed to understand them) can have as low a “required expertise level” as just a plain recipe whilst being a much nicer option because people who know a bit more can get more from it that they could from just a dumbed down recipe.

That said, it has to be structured so that it’s really clear that those “explanation bits” are optional reading for the curious which have the knowhow to understand them, otherwise it risks scaring less skilled people who would actually be able to successfully do the taks by blindly following the step-by-step recipe part of it.

For “all documentation” to “cater to all levels” it would have to explain to people “how do you use a keyboard” and everything from there upwards, because there are people at that level hence it’s part of “all levels”.

I mean the your own example of good documentation starts with an intro of “goals” saying:

“Visual Studio (VS) does not (currently) provide a blank .NET Multi-platform Application User Interface (MAUI) template which is in C# only. In this post we shall cover how to modify your new MAUI solution to get rid of the XAML, as well as cover how to do in C# code the things which are currently done in XAML (such as binding). We shall also briefly touch on some of the advantages of doing this.”

For 99% of people almost all that is about as understandable as Greek (expect for Greek people, for whom it’s about as understandable as Chinese).

I mean, how many people out there in the whole World (non-IT people as illustrated in the actual article linked by the OP) do you think know what the hell is “Visual Studio”, “.Net”, “Multi-platform Application User Interface”, “template”, “C#”, “XAML”, “binding” (in this context).

I mean, if IT knowledge was a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 the greatest, you’re basically thinking it’s “catering to all levels” when an explanation for something that is level 8 knowledge (advanced programming) has a baseline required level of 7 (programming). I mean, throw this at somebody that “knows how to use Excel” which is maybe level 4 and they’ll be totally lost, much less somebody who only knows how to check their e-mail using a browser without even properly understanding the concept of "browser (like my father) which is maybe level 2 (he can actually use a mouse and keyboard, otherwise I would’ve said level 1).

I think you’re so way beyond the average person in your expertise in this domain that you don’t even begin to suspect just how little of our domain the average person knows compared to an mere programmer.

The more advanced the level of knowledge on something the more foundation knowledge somebody has to have to even begin to understand things at that level.

It would be pretty insane to in a tutorial for something at a higher level of expertise, include all the foundational knowledge to get to that level of expertise so that an absolute beginner can understand what’s going on.

Imagine if you were trying to explain something Mathematical that required using Integrals and you started by “There this symbol, ‘1’ which represents a single item, and if you bring another single item, this is calling addition - for which we use the symbol ‘+’ and the count of entities when you have one single entity and ‘added’ another single entity is represented by the symbol ‘2’. There is also the concept of equality, which means two matematical things represent the same and for which the symbol we use is ‘=’ - writting this with Mathematical symbols, ‘1 + 1 = 2’” and built the explanation up from there all the way to Integrals before you could even start to explain what you wanted to explain in the first place.

That said, people can put it in “recipe” format - a set of steps to be blindly followed without understanding - but even there you have some minimal foundational knowlegde required - consider a cooking recipe: have you ever seen any that explains how does one weight ingredients or what is “boiling” or “baking”?

So even IT “recipes” especially designed so that those with a much lower level of expertise than the one required to actually understand what’s going on have some foundational knowledge required to actually execute the steps of the recipe.

Last but not least I get the impression that most people who go to the trouble of writting about how to do something prefere to do explanations rather than recipes, because there’s some enjoyment in teaching about something to others, which you get when you explain it but seldom from merely providing a list of steps for others to blindly follow without understanding.

So, if one wants to do something way above the level of expertise one has, look for “recipe” style things rather than explanations - the foundational expertise required to execute recipes is way lower than the one required to undertand explanations - and expect that there are fewer recipes out there than explanations. Further, if you don’t understand what’s in a recipe then your expertise is below even the base level of that recipe (for example, if somebody writes “enter so and so in the command prompt” and you have no fucking clue what a “command prompt” is, you don’t meet the base requirements to even blindly follow the recipe), so either seek recipes with an even lower base level or try and learn those base elements.

Further, don’t even try and understand the recipe if your expertise level is well below what you’re trying to achieve: sorry but you’re not going to get IT’s “Integrals” stuff if your expertise is at the level of understanding “multiplication”.

The Paradox Of Tolerance is about how we should not tolerate the intolerant, not about what sacrificing ourselves to inconvenience the intolerant, must less sacrifice others to inconvenience the intolerant.

It’s really only about the Tolerant tolerating the Intolerance leads to an increase of Intolerance, and doesn’t really cover how far and justified is to make onself or others lose something to inconvenience the Intolerant, or in other word, the devil in the details part of any solution.

That said, your idea has merit and it has parallels to what some of the right does - for example, how the right creates spaces which they pass as leftwing to attract leftwing people and then when enough of a critical mass arises they use it to spread rightwing-distortions of leftwing ideas or even just outright rightwing ideas: look at Twitter or, even better, Reddit or even what the DNC has done to the Democrat Party in the US.

The discussion there is not anymore “how much is right to sacrifice the rest to inconvenience the NAZIs”, but instead is “how moral and ethical it is to create fake NAZI spaces to fuck with the NAZIS” - so it doesn’t involve sacrificing the rest at all - and personally I think it’s pretty damn ethical and moral to fuck with the NAZIs like that (after all, they want to do far worse to other people than merelly honeypot them into an online space that just gets closed after a while, so it’s not even close to how harshly they deserve to be treated)

How easy or hard it is to pull that off, especially repeatedly, is a different matter, as the Technical bit of setting up such instances is easy, the hard part is to attract the NAZIs to the honeypots, which is a Marketing problem.

Deterring them from the Fediverse (as in not letting the use the protocol) is a near zero impact for them outcome, possibly technically impossible (it’s an open protocol and the software is open source) and possibly with a lot of negative impact for everybody else (it risks undermining the main point of the Fediverse - Freedom).

Much more important is deterring them from spreading their hate to other people (in general) and as it so happens, when it comes to the people in the Fediverse, them segregating themselves in their own server actually helps with that: other servers can simple defederate, taking away their audience, hence they’re not actually spreading their hate to others in the Fediverse.

With them not being self-segregated it’s a lot harder because it they’ll do what they are doing right now: join servers all over the place, post comments all over the place, so in response they get banned if they go too far (and then just open a new account) and others tend to try and nullify their poison by downvoting them or pointing out the with logic the stupidity and/or inconsistence of their position, all of which is a lot more fallible than just defederating the NAZI instance.

More generally, there is no perfect way to “deter them from the fediverse” (just try to actually analyse the problem space and you will soon find that there’s no foolproof method), and hence the discussion has to be about how far should we go and what the delivers the best results, which brings us around to the point I was making: having the NAZIs in their own instance does more to stop them spreading their poison the Fediverse audience than somehow blocking that and keeping on trying to stamp them down individually when they’re mixed with the general fediverse population.

I understand the feeling.

I also look at it Logically and that yields a more subtle take.

My point is that thinking that ANYTHING is acceptable to contain the NAZIs (even when it hurts the rest) is forgetting that the whole point of stopping the NAZIs is to protected everybody else and their freedoms.

I’ll give you a parallel example: start by “Everybody should be thrown in Jail to make sure all criminals are in Jail”. Whilst it would work, this is obviously senseless. Once that’s accepted the discussion becomes “how far should we go to make sure criminals go to Jail” and onwards to “how many innocents wrongly in Jail is acceptable” and “how many criminals who evade Jail is acceptable”.

All that is what lead to things like a Justice System with Presumption of Innocence, different sentences for different Crimes and an Appeals System.

When it comes to stopping NAZIs the same reasoning applies - “ANYTHING is acceptable” is obviously senseless (killing all human beings would certainly stop the NAZIs, but I expect we both agree that it’s a bit too much) so the discussion is then moved to “how far are we willing to sacrifice the rest in order to stop the NAZIs”, which is the area of thinking anchoring my original point - if the NAZIs are contained (by their own choice, even), then maybe it’s not worth it to sacrifice the freedom of the rest by mangling the Fediverse if all that would deliver as a result is the near-zero impact outcome of barring the NAZIs from their own separate space in the Fediverse whilst they can still gather elsewhere.

In my view by wanting that you asked originally, a far greater number of people than the number of NAZIs would sacrifice a lot for something that will make the NAZIs lose very little - or in other words your idea amounts to “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”.

I don’t think that “lets’ fuck up what’s important for almost everybody in order to barelly inconvenience the NAZIs” is a wise position, even if I understand the impulse to “just fuck those sons of a bitch no matter what”.

They would have one either way - I mean, just look at Twitter, Reddit, FOX News. Even when there weren’t such NAZI spaces bought and paid for by billionaires, NAZIs had their own websites, mailing lists and whatever.

Weakenning the freedom inherent to the Fediverse’s implementation just because the NAZIs might use it to create their own space is just indirectly constraining yourself because of the NAZIs, which IMHO is the opposite of what we should be doing.

Would you defend changing HTTP(S) and HTML to somehow stop NAZIs using it because as they are now they can be used by NAZIs to spread their message? How about e-mail? How about pen and paper?

You can’t just throw the baby with the bathwater “because NAZIs”.

If you really want to stop NAZI messaging altogether you can’t do it by Technical means, you have to do it by Social and Political means - Laws Censoring NAZI messaging - and even there, look at Germany that does it and all they seem to have achieved is that the NAZI symbology is hidden whilst a large part of the NAZI way of things is widespread in society (hence the AfD success) and some elements of it are even shared by the majority (hence Germany’s very overtly race-justified unconditional support of a nation commiting a Genocide). De facto Germany’s banning of NAZIsm hasn’t stopped the kind of Fascism like in the US right now or the AfD there, were they use the NAZI propaganda techniques and share many ideological elements with the NAZIs but just don’t use NAZI symbols.

Them making their own space actually lets us much more easily reduce our exposure to them - without their space we get them everywhere and each of us have to ban such users individuals to avoid their poison, whilst if they’re congregated in a server we can just ban that server and/or its forums.

In terms of the NAZI bar metaphor, this is more like the NAZIS setting up their own bar and congregating there rather than trying to take over other bars - everybody else can very easilly avoid even looking at the NAZI bar, much less going there and listening to them spreading their ideology - yeah, by default the sound of their activities does leak to the street, but in Lemmy we’re the ones who can chose to close the door, not them.

Compare that with, for example, how the Zionists captured news@lemmy.world and even up to a level the server itself, by seeking moderation and admin positions there: subverting an existing large traffic forum and the biggest Lemmy instance is way much more pernicious than what the other kind of NAZI are doing by setting up their own - easily avoided - corner.

Suiciding the mid and long-term economic prospects of the US for the sake of populism (it’s literally already cheaper to go renewable than use fossil fuels, even the cheapest which is gas, plus the main side effects of widespread use of a technology is all those companies that pop up in that tech domain so blocking approval of renewable projects in the US, means American companies in that domain will be less likely to succeed that those in other countries).

And this happens right alongside with betting like crazy in a technological direction - the most bubbly and with less specific uses parts of AI, such as LLMs - which is so far is deeply net negative in economic terms - it costs way more in energy than it delivers in increased efficiency - and whose rate of improvement has already fallen massivelly so is unlikely to become a net positive across the Economy - though there will certainly be specific net positive areas, just not massivelly so - were curiously, the Chinese with their models that consume much less power, have already done more to make it net positive than American companies.

China’s work to take over as the world’s superpower has never been this easy.

Kinda reminds me this Game one plays in Theatre which is to Play The Status (you’re given a number between 1 and 10, with 1 having the lowest social status and 10 the highest, and you try and act as such a person).

Alongside the whole chin-down to chin-up thing, people tend to do more fast and confident moving the higher the status, but the reality is that whilst indeed up the scale in professional environment the higher the status the more busy and rushed they seem, the trully highest status people (the 10s) don’t at all rush: as I put it back then (this was the UK) “the Queen doesn’t rush because for everybody the right time for the Queen to be somewhere is when she’s there, even it it’s not actually so, hence she doesn’t need to rush”.

There was also some cartoon making the rounds many years ago about how people on a company looked depending on their social status, were you started with the unkept shabbily dressed homeless person that lived outside the vuilding, and as you went up the professional scale people got progressively more well dressed and into suits and such, and then all of a sudden a big switch, as the company owner at the top dressed as shabbily as the homeless person.

It’s also possible that it’s to do with habit.

Having lived for many years in various countries, I noticed how after about one year living somewhere my body had adjusted to the local temperature average and my idea of “too hot” or “too cold” had changed, as reflected in my choice of clothing when I went back to a different country were the average temperature is different (like going back to Lisbon in Winter and being comfortable wearing just a t-shirt whilst everybody else had coats on and though it was “cold”),

The average temperature in, for example, Amsterdam, is around 5C lower than Lisbon, so it makes sense that one’s perception of “too hot” and “too cold” is at a lower temperatures for those living in the former than those living in the latter.

From my own experience living there, temperatures in the mid 30Cs in The Netherlands is a lot harder than 40C in Portugal and Spain, because The Netherlands is more humid.

There really is no greater pleasure and no greater value adding activity for a Senior Dev than to wade through masses of code produced by pretty much understanding-free copy & paste from stackoverflow by an automated version of the most junior and clueless coder imaginable.

Dust is going to be a problem (well, maybe not that much electrically, but it maks it a pita to keep clean) after some months, especially for the Raspberry Pi.

Consider getting (or, even better, 3D printing) an enclosure for it at least (maybe the HDDs will be fine as they are since the fan keeps the air moving and dust probably can’t actually settle down on it).

External 2.5" HDDs connected via USB for longer term bulk storage and using it as a NAS, a smaller internal NVME SSD for the OS and a larger one (but SATA, so slower) for the directory were torrents go to.

The different drive performances fit my usage pattern just fine whilst optimizing price per GB.

External 3.5" would be cheaper for bulk storage but the 2.5" are a leftover from when I was more constrained in terms of physical space.

Well, the N100 does have a lot more breathing space in terms of computing power, so it’s maybe a better bet for something you want to use for a decade or more, and that remote control I linked to above does work fine, except for the power button (which will power your Linux off but won’t power it back on).

I actually tried an Android TV Box (which is really just and SBC in the same range of processing power as the Pi) for this before going for the Mini PC and it was simply not as smooth operating.

That Mini-PC has enough computing power room (plus the right processing extensions) that I can be torrenting over OpenVPN on a 1Gb/s connection whilst watching a video from a local file and it’s not at all noticeable on the video playback.