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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Ugh…this one still frustrates me a lot. If I could wave a magic wand and have a different contributor do two things for the project, animated gifs would be one and a more consistent compact layout would be the other.

    Edit: Just want to add that when I was working on the gif problem, I got it working for posts…but you have to click through into the lightbox or to the complete image url…the thumbnail isn’t animated. So, I got partway there, but ran into technical limitations of the specific python library being used. Relevant issue.


  • As somebody that has done a lot of recent work on the UI for piefed, I have tried to make sure that it works even at quite small screen sizes. I actually just submitted a couple commits in the past couple hours to make the navbar across the top of communities/feeds/topics flow smoother across different screen sizes. The PWA is so far my preferred way to use piefed.







  • It’s been a while since I last used LaTeX since I am in industry now, but there is definitely a learning curve. If you are talking about undergrads, then it might be too steep a challenge for most to want to take on unless they plan on pursuing academia long-term. Like others have mentioned, LaTeX is a kind of standard that you see used a lot in academic circles. Some journals also like or support things that are created through tex and will have their own templates to use.

    Basically, LaTeX consists of writing in a markup language, like your screenshot, and then running that through a processor that interprets your .tex file and creates the formatted output (usually a pdf). Back in my day, TexnicCenter was the program of choice to write the actual .tex file, but some quick searching and it looks like VSCode with an appropriate extension is probably one of the best/easiest ways to do it now.

    The most annoying part of tex is references. I remember being utterly confused by BibTeX when I was trying to get it to work. I am way out of date on what best practices for today might be, but I hope they have improved that process somewhat.



  • I own a Prius (not a PHEV though, just a hybrid) and can corroborate that my mileage goes down significantly in the winter months. It is a combination of a couple factors in my experience.

    • Needing to run the engine more to heat things up for defrosting and heating the cabin.
    • Related to the above, I tend to idle a lot more in the winter while cleaning ice/snow off the car, letting it warm up, or clearing the driveway.
    • Switching to winter tires (Blizzaks) negatively impacts rolling resistance compared to the LRR tires (Ecopias) I use the rest of the year.

    I tend to average ~45 mpg in the summer and ~37 mpg in the winter over the past two years.


  • I have hosted a wordpress site on my unraid box before, but ended up moving it to a VPS instead. I ended up moving it primarily because a VPS is just going to have more uptime since I end up tinkering around with my homelab too often. So, any service that I expect other people to use, I often end up moving it to a VPS (mostly wikis for different things). The one exception to that is anything related to media delivery (plex, jellyfin, *arr stack), because I don’t want to make that as publicly accessible and it needs close integration with the storage array in unraid.


  • The fraud surrounding Alzheimer’s research continues… Not too long ago the fraud was related to amyloid (archive version). That article was even written by the same author and features many of the same investigators.

    I work in Pharma R&D (on the manufacturing side) and the company I work for has run trials for Alzheimer’s products based on research that has since been found to be fraudulent. As a published scientist myself, I would like to think that this level of manipulation and fabrication is the exception rather than the rule. However, I do think it is worth asking at this point what it is about Alzheimer’s research in particular that has led to this being so prevalent and, more importantly, so impactful. Basically, how did it go so far before anything was caught?

    I suspect at least part of the answer is due to the large influx of money into the field. Researchers were tripping over themselves to earn those grants and then, once they had them, produce results to keep them. I am not in academia, so I don’t have great insight into the NIH, NIA or their processes, but this should be a wake up call to put up a certain amount of guard rails.



  • There is a lot of collaboration between the different instance admins in this regard. The lemmy.world admins have a matrix room that is chock full of other instance admins where they share bots that they find to help do things like find similar posters and set up filters to block things like spammy urls. The nice thing about it all is that I am not an admin, but because it is a public room, anybody can sit in there and see the discussion in real time. Compare that to corporate social media like reddit or facebook where there is zero transparency.




  • Some good answers in here already. It boils down to a couple points for me:

    • Back when I started selfhosting, it was either nginx or apache, and I found nginx better and easier to set up
    • All the nginx knowledge I learned years ago still works just the same as it did back then, so why potentially mess things up by switching if it all still works
    • Basically every project has an example nginx config for reference, that can’t be said about other proxies
    • It is easier to find support online for edge cases that might pop up with nginx due to the ubiquity of its use and years of history


  • I didn’t have a VPS with them, but long ago I had a couple domains through them. One of them had an issue with the auto-renewal and I never got a notification of any kind, only finding out when they had taken ownership of the domain, advertising it for sale. Then they wanted some way, way higher amount of money for me to buy it back. So, I don’t have any domains with them any more.

    This was years and years ago though, so they might be better now.