What was the most ridiculous or funny boundary push you saw?

Trolling someone by attaching a camera to the ceiling right above their keyboard. I’ve been paranoid since I saw that stunt pulled… They got their point across about physical security though.

I’ve worked for a university before and it was very common for staff to remote into their systems from home – usually with SSH for CS types or Remote Desktop/Team Viewer/etc. for less computer-focused folks. (The former usually didn’t have much issue – the folks using the latter mechanisms got compromised a number of times… -.-) There was also a campus provided VPN that was required to access certain systems with instructions to students and staff on how to use it, but other systems just got public IP addresses.

If what you’re doing is related to your work and campus IT doesn’t object, you’re probably fine to do it. I’ve run various kinds of websites and web apps for colleagues to collaborate on research projects. Being able to do things like that is kind of the point of the internet.

Having seen a number of students, uh, push the limits and find the boundaries of acceptability the hard way though… I’d strongly advise you not to install cryptominers, run TOR exit nodes, or torrent TV shows/movies/etc. That kind of thing tends to get your systems in hot water with IT or other parts of the bureaucracy…

In principle, sure. I’m not aware of an existing out-of-the-box solution that’d do what you want, but it also wouldn’t surprise me terribly if someone’s cobbled something together to do this before.

If I wanted to make something like this personally (and couldn’t find an existing solution), I’d start by doing some research into PBX software like Asterisk, what derivatives and extensions people have made for that, etc. – being mindful that I’d likely be digging into a deep rabbit hole…

I’ve tried setting up projects that used hard links like that and there are some pros and cons to this. On the plus side, you can delete from one location and the file is still available in the other without having to manage a separate repository structure. On the down side, most software cannot copy the structure correctly to a different file system (even one that supports hard links), which can make backups and migrations annoying to deal with – generally you end up with multiple actual copies, ballooning disk space usage and sometimes causing weird issues if the two files linking to the same data (rather than just having copies of the same data) actually matters…

I’d recommend sticking with the “primary repository of real files” and “multiple views filled with symlinks” structure over hardlinks unless you’re really sure you know what you’re getting yourself into.

You can do this using links. e.g. ln -s TARGET LINK_NAME to make symbolic links on the command line, or (usually) by holding some key while dragging a file/folder between windows in your preferred GUI file manager.

I have something related set up with a small Python script to automatically create new files and update the links for tracking my weekly work notes (pseudo-timecard, basically).

You can run docker containers with multiple volumes. e.g. pass something like -v src1:dst1 -v src2:dst2 as arguments to docker run.

So – if I understood your question correctly – yes, you can do that.

Giant middle finger from me – and probably everyone else who uses NoScript – for trying to enshittify what’s left of the good parts of the web.

Seriously, FUCK THAT.

Two quick ideas on possible approaches:

1. Static page route. You can just write some Javascript to load the image from a file input in HTML, draw it resized to a canvas (based on an input slider or other input element), then save the canvas to an image. (There might even be simpler approaches if I wasn’t stupidly tired right now…) This can be done in a single file (HTML with embedded JS – and CSS if you want to style it a little) that you toss on any web server anywhere (e.g. Apache, nginx, whatever). Should work for JPEG, PNG, and probably WebP – maybe other regular image types too. Benefit: data never needs to leave your device.

2. Process on server route. Use Python with a simple web server library (I usually opt for tornado for stuff like this, but flask or cherrypy or similar would probably work). Set up a handler for e.g. an HTTP POST and either pass the image into a library like Pillow to resize it or shell out to ImageMagick as others have suggested. (If you want to do something clever with animated GIFs you could shell out to ffmpeg, but that’d be a fair bit trickier…) The image can be sent back as the response. Be careful about security if you take this route. Probably want some kind of login in front of it, and run it in a VM or some other secure environment – especially if you’re using AI to kludge it together…

Best of luck and let me know if you need any help. Will probably have some time this weekend if you can’t get it on your own. Happy hacking!

I would be happy with a FOSS desktop app I can install in linux too

On the command line, you can do this with ImageMagick (e.g. use the command convert once it’s installed).

With a (desktop) GUI, there’s a bunch of programs. GIMP is probably the most well known and has a ton of capabilities but is a bit complex. I use Kolourpaint as a quick-and-dirty “MS Paint”-like program for very simple tasks where I want a GUI.

If you want a simple web UI I’m sure there is one already, but I don’t know one specifically. It wouldn’t be too complicated to hack something up if all you need is a quick-and-dirty file input and percentage rescale or something like that. If you don’t get a better suggestion and don’t know how to make something like that yourself, let me know and I can write an example.

People have already covered most of the tools I typically use, but one I haven’t seen listed yet that is sometimes convenient is python3 -m http.server which runs a small web server that shares whatever is in the directory you launched it from. I’ve used that to download files onto my phone before when I didn’t have the right USB cables/adapters handy as well as for getting data out of VMs when I didn’t want to bother setting up something more complex.

I’m under the impression the reputation points are either the combined number of upvotes or that minus downvotes

IIRC from kbin – and assuming mbin didn’t change things – boosts counted for two points while upvotes (favorites) are one point and downvotes (reduces) are one point. Boosts are basically retweets, IIRC, and wouldn’t be coming from lemmy users – just from Mastodon, mbin, and other tools that support it.

Edit: To clarify, I mean downvotes reduce by one point.

I don’t know, but there’s a related thread here: https://slrpnk.net/post/18399280

No answers there (as of time of writing this comment), but someone did say they asked about it on IRC.

I’m not involved with running it – and given that this is likely to be a politics heavy community, I’m probably going to stay out of it for the most part. 🙃️ I just happened to see the announcement post that @3dmvr@lemm.ee made to !newcommunities@lemmy.world about a week ago and remembered it.

If you or @3dmvr@lemm.ee want to start a thread in !communitypromo@lemmy.ca feel free though!

!unlockthread@lemm.ee is probably what you’re thinking of.

The current solution is for bots on participating instances to automatically perform the search + subscribe song-and-dance routine. This is pretty surprising to some people[1], and it requires someone to set it up in addition to the instance itself, but it does work.

[1]: I tried to translate an explanation into Japanese for some folks experimenting with Mastodon/Lemmy interaction yesterday – they thought Lemmy had a ton of spam accounts following groups instantly…

Check your language settings. Usually that means you have the language that the comments are tagged with disabled. (Usually either English or Uncategorized is disabled)

As someone who watches gaming footage on PeerTube, I’ve mostly interacted with single creator instances – i.e. either the creator themselves is self-hosting it or it’s run by a fan as a non-YT backup of their Twitch/Owncast/whatever VODs. Those instances generally do not allow anyone else to upload.

Discoverability sucks but the way I’ve found them is by using SepiaSearch and looking for specific words from game titles. I imagine the way most other people find them is that they already know the content creator from Twitch and want to find an old VOD that isn’t archived on YT (e.g. because of YT’s bullshit copyright system) – but that’s just a guess.

It’s surprising that there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way in the UI to just see a list of creators/channels on a local instance. So, that’s the first thing I’d change to improve discoverability.

The way I currently find relevant content is by going to Sepia Search, putting in exact words that I think are likely to be in the title of at least one video on a channel that would likely also have a lot of other relevant content, and then going through that channel’s playlists. Those searches often lead me to single user instances with only one or two channels (e.g. a channel that has a backup of that user’s YouTube content and a channel with a backup of their Twitch or OwnCast or whatever streams). When it leads me to a generalist instance or one with a relevant subject/theme though, I’ve had little luck finding content from anyone else unless they’ve posted recently (compared to other users). Often the content that is most relevant to me is not what is newest but the archives from years ago. (New content is relevant though once I want to follow someone in particular, but it’s not what I want to see first.)

Another issue I’ve encountered is with the behavior of downloaded videos. I greatly appreciate that PeerTube provides a URL for direct download, and I prefer to watch videos in my own player downloaded in advance (so I can watch offline; pause and resume trivially after putting my computer to sleep; etc). H264 MP4 works fine for this, but the download seems to be some sort of chunked variant of it (for HLS?) which requires the player to read in the entire file to figure out the length or seek accurately. Having to wait a minute or two to be able to seek each time I open a large video file off my HDD is an irritating papercut. I suspect there’s likely a way to fix it by including an index in the file (or in a sidecar file) but I don’t know how to do it – short of re-encoding the entire video again which I’d rather not do since it both takes a long time and can result in quality loss. (EDIT ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec copy -acodec copy -movflags faststart output.mp4 repacks the video quickly.) This usually doesn’t affect newly added videos (where the download link includes the pattern /download/web-videos and a warning is shown that it’s still being transcoded) but does when that’s done (the URL includes /download/streaming-playlists/hls/videos instead); so, this is something that happens as a result of PeerTube’s reprocessing.

Downloads from the instances that I’ve found to be most relevant to me are also pretty unreliable (connection is slow and drops a lot), so I use wget with automatic retries (and it sometimes still needs manual retries…) rather than downloading through my browser which tends to fail and then often annoyingly start over completely if I request a retry… It would be really nice if I could check that I’ve downloaded the file correctly and completely with a sha256 hash or something.

I don’t know what other systems do, but text-to-speech on my computer reads it as “with a shirt that says (pause) emo skull (pause) the dialogue reads…”