I've seen a lot of sentiment around Lemmy that AI is "useless". I think this tends to stem from the fact that AI has not delivered on, well, anything the capitalists that push it have promised it would. That is to say, it has failed to meaningfully replace workers with a less expensive solution - AI that actually attempts to replace people's jobs are incredibly expensive (and environmentally irresponsible) and they simply lie and say it's not. It's subsidized by that sweet sweet VC capital so they can keep the lie up. And I say attempt because AI is truly horrible at actually replacing people. It's going to make mistakes and while everybody's been trying real hard to make it less wrong, it's just never gonna be "smart" enough to not have a human reviewing its' behavior. Then you've got AI being shoehorned into every little thing that really, REALLY doesn't need it. I'd say that AI is useless.

But AIs have been very useful to me. For one thing, they're much better at googling than I am. They save me time by summarizing articles to just give me the broad strokes, and I can decide whether I want to go into the details from there. They're also good idea generators - I've used them in creative writing just to explore things like "how might this story go?" or "what are interesting ways to describe this?". I never really use what comes out of them verbatim - whether image or text - but it's a good way to explore and seeing things expressed in ways you never would've thought of (and also the juxtaposition of seeing it next to very obvious expressions) tends to push your mind into new directions.

Lastly, I don't know if it's just because there's an abundance of Japanese language learning content online, but GPT 4o has been incredibly useful in learning Japanese. I can ask it things like "how would a native speaker express X?" And it would give me some good answers that even my Japanese teacher agreed with. It can also give some incredibly accurate breakdowns of grammar. I've tried with less popular languages like Filipino and it just isn't the same, but as far as Japanese goes it's like having a tutor on standby 24/7. In fact, that's exactly how I've been using it - I have it grade my own translations and give feedback on what could've been said more naturally.

All this to say, AI when used as a tool, rather than a dystopic stand-in for a human, can be a very useful one. So, what are some use cases you guys have where AI actually is pretty useful?

I have an Ubuntu server with two network interfaces - an ethernet and a WiFi network let's call eth0 and wlan0. So far I've been able to set it up as a router by enabling packet forwarding and then doing some iptables trickery. These are my iptable commands:

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o eth0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o eth0 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

If I'm understanding correctly, the first command says "if you receive packets from a device, do NAT and then forward them with your IP", the second one says to forward packets from eth0 to eth0, and the last line says "if you get packets back, only accept them if a connection has already been previously established". This Ubuntu server is connected to a router which is connected to a modem that actually has internet access. I've set it up so that my router uses my Ubuntu server as the default gateway during DHCP requests. This works fine, I'm able to use devices to connect to the internet, and if I do a trace route, it first goes to the Ubuntu server, then to the router, then out into the great beyond.

Now, I've run:

iptables -D FORWARD -i eth0 -o eth0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o wlan0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i wlan0 -o eth0 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

Which, if I'm understanding correctly, should forward packets through to the WiFi interface instead, but it isn't working. I'm still able to access other devices on the network but not the open internet. I also tried doing iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o wlan0 -j MASQUERADE which as far as I can tell is unnecessary, but that didn't do anything. When I do trace route this time, it is able to get to the Ubuntu server but no further. I've also tried doing iptables -L -v but neither the wlan0 -> eth0 rule or the reverse have any packet count. I also tried doing iptables -A FORWARD -i lan0 -o wlan0 -j LOG --log-prefix "FORWARD: " to just log it first, but nothing shows up in /var/log/syslog even if I try to connect to the internet from a device.

I'm at a loss here so any help even debugging or if I'm going about this wrong would be greatly appreciated. My ultimate goal is to set up a failover so that if the LAN interface doesn't have a connection, it'll start sending packets through the WiFi interface which will be connected to a different internet connection.

I have a fairly old router that doesn’t support gigabit. I also have a network switch that does support gigabit. If I connect two devices directly to the switch, then connect the switch up to the router, will the connection between the two devices support gigabit? If I’m understanding correctly the router would just act as DHCP server and give the two devices a local IP address, but the actual connection between them wouldn’t go through the router at all.

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Test Post

I'm planning to migrate my email to a different provider, but they don't give much storage, so I was wondering what people would recommend for this kind of setup: basically I'd like to use the new provider as something like a relay. I'd want them to only store an email or two at a time and have some kind of self hosted solution that just grabs the emails from the provider and stores them after deleting them off the provider so it's never storing my entire email history, and also keeps my sent emails somewhere so that I have a copy of it. Ideally I'd wanna be able to set this up with a mail client like NextCloud's.

EDIT: Thanks for the info guys! Very excited to get this all set up

At the moment I have a bunch of self-hosting services hosted in the cloud. I plan to get rid of my cloud resources entirely and run stuff on some server hardware I acquired recently but my ISP doesn't give me a static IP and I'm behind a NAT or whatever it's called (the thing that makes multiple people's home connections be behind a single public IP) so I don't think I can even expose directly to the internet. So my plan is to have a very small and cheap server at a data center and proxy my actual server behind that.

My question is, is there a way that I can set things up so that the same domain can connect directly to the server when I'm at home, and to the proxy when I'm not? The difference would be what connection I'm connected to (my home WiFi vs 5G/others' WiFi). I'm thinking I could maybe run DNS on the server and configure my router to use that as a DNS server, but wouldn't my phone/laptop cache DNS entries? So it'd still try to connect to the local IP even when I'm out.

Hey guys, as I'm sure many of you are already aware there's a couple of bugs that are plaguing the home page. I've made a hotfix for these bugs:

1. New posts popping up and pushing all the other posts downwards - this is more prevalent on the larger lemmy instances, you'll just be scrolling and suddenly everything's pushed down because new posts are being added to the top of the page as they're being created
2. Default "All" not working - this is more something admins would be aware of but in the site settings you can set the default "Listing Type" to "All" instead of "Local", but if you do this the home page doesn't properly load "All", it'll show you the "Local" feed with "All" selected in the tabs. Seems this feature wasn't implemented correctly in time for 0.17.4

Since 0.18 is still a little while out, and I'm sure the devs are both really busy on it (they also said they won't be making another 0.17 release), I went ahead and made a hotfix for these. I have it up on jcgurango/lemmy-ui:0.17.4-hotfix so if you're using docker you can just upgrade to that image. I'm not really sure how ansible works, so I can't help with that.

Here's the repo I have these changes on for those who want to check or build it themselves: https://github.com/jcgurango/lemmy-ui - I've based it on the v0.17.4 tag on the upstream repo.

Hello, and welcome to halubilo.social! This is JC and Faye's little corner of the Fediverse. Here you'll find a curated list of the most popular communities from other Lemmy servers. Just make sure you switch from "Local" to "All" when you're browsing.

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a link aggregator, similar to Reddit. This is one of many Lemmy servers that are part of the Fediverse. With an account here, you can make posts in various communities hosted on other Lemmy servers, and doomscroll through All until you pass out.

What is the Fediverse?

The Fediverse is not really a single "thing," but a network of websites. These websites all come together to share content with each other. For example, if you browse "All" you'll see posts from communities on other websites like beehaw.org or lemmy.world. You can still post in communities and comment on them here, and your comments/votes/posts will all be copied over to the "main" website that these communities belong to. Those other websites also give us real time content updates, so generally speaking if somebody posts on there, it'll show up here immediately. This process is called federation, and these websites are called instances.

This website runs Lemmy, but it's not the only federated link aggregator. There's also kbin and some others. Also, link aggregators are not the only use case for federation, you may have heard of Mastodon which is a federated social networking platform.

But, Like, Why?

This might all seem like we're just throwing data at each other and duplicating it unnecessarily, and you know, maybe we are. But, these are, at least in my view, the benefits of federation.

Shared Load

You have to remember that federation is, technically, how huge sites like Facebook/Instagram/TikTok ensure reliability. When you open one of these websites, you aren't just connecting directly to some giant server that the company runs and is constantly upgrading. These websites have multiple locations around the world, and data is constantly copied between these locations. This is so that one server isn't the single point of failure that takes down the whole operation. Federation spreads out the load (in theory at least, at the time of this writing people have flocked to a few very large instances), and ensure that even if an instance goes down, its content isn't lost forever and can still be browsed.

Though we already have standard protocols, the technology is in its infancy, and will get better and more reliable. Remember, one of the most popular federated technologies is email, and it took decades for it to reach the level it's at now in terms of reliability and use. We're doing pretty good for technology that isn't even a decade old.

Decentralized Control

One guy named Steve can't just unilaterally decide the direction of Lemmy or the Fediverse. Consensus must be established before any changes are made across the board, and some instances may decide they just, like, don't want to, man. That isn't to say that there isn't a hierarchy of sorts, after all this instance does take basically all of its content from larger instances. But it does mean that every instance owner can just decide for their community what they want. How they want their communities to be moderated, what communities they do and don't want on their instance, what people they do and don't want on their instance. This is good for instance owners, but it's also good for users. If you don't like the way one instance is run, you can leave. It's not easy yet to move all your data over, but that's gonna change really soon.

Past the community management parts, there's also the fact that every instance owner can decide how they want their instance to function. Sure, at the moment, pretty much every Lemmy instance looks and acts basically the same. But I intend to change that, and I'm sure more niche communities will follow suit once we all get comfortable.