hendrik

Hmmh. I think I didn't quite get it at first. But you explain yourself very well. I wish I had some valuable insight to offer, but I don't think I have. I mean most people are looking for something like intimacy and physical touch. It's hard to find the few people who don't want or need that... Technically you don't need a partner, marry and take the common path through life. But you're also looking for something...

I think it kind of boils down to the question, where to find such people. For someone like me, it's super hard to empathize. I get what you say, and you explain your feelings very well. But that's not at all how physical contact feels to me. I guess we have other people like you, I'd imagine some of the people with autism do, or trauma or other kinds of being neuro-divergent. But as this is a bit more rare, I'd say the chances of randomly walking past someone like that on the street are low. So it has to be somewhere on the internet, or some safe-space or group meeting of people who are in similar situations. You may have that in the city, like a regular's table, just to talk to people who can relate... But to my knowledge, that's not a thing in more rural areas. And it's a bit awkward to go there, at least for the fist time. So if you can't do that, it'd be more dedicated internet forums. Or sometimes people met alike people in MMORPGs or other online games, Discord servers... But I don't meet a lot of women there...

There also is another chance to meet more diverse people roughly at your age, if you go to university, or some other kind of higher education. I found there's a lot more niche people there, at least in some fields... But not everyone is able to attend university. And it's not fundamentally different, just slightly better odds. And you still face the same issues with going out, joining clubs...

Anyways, I wish you the best. I hope you can find a way to get there. Don't be too hard on youself, people regularly need way longer than 19 to find someone. And the internet is a vast and diverse place. But also often superficial, heavily biased (at least the common services) and oftentimes without much attention to detail.

Well, another thing people frequently say is, you got to love yourself, before someone can love you. I mean that's yet another phrase with limited truth in it... But I'd like to say, being in introvert (for example) isn't a bad thing per se. Sure, it comes with consequences. And it makes dating harder. But there are people looking for introverts. You're allowed to embrace that side of yours, it's a good trait from some people's perspective. Social skills come with experience in my opinion. You got to practice that. I'm also an introvert, and I learned talking to people, making small talk, talking about arbitrary stuff and leading a conversation, and judging what my conversational partner might find interesting (or boring).

Appearence isn't something you can change a lot. You can put in some effort to eat correctly, stay in shape, pick clothes that fit who you are or who you want to be... But there isn't really a way to change the symmetry if your face. So don't waste too much time thinking about that, since that's something you can't change. Focus on the things you can change.

And you say you have goals, projects, interests... These are also good things about you. I mean sure, reading, historic things etc might not be very cool or popular. But you know what you like, you have projects and goals... Ultimately that's good personality traits. And lots of people like that in a person, once they started to pay attention to who someone really is.

So... Dating isn't easy, you're not alone with that. And everybody has their own, individual struggles... I'd recommend thinking a bit about who you are, and who you want to be. And what positive traits you have. Start by embracing that about you. Maybe if you do, other people will pick up on that. And don't be disheartened if they don't. People are superficial, they don't look twice, etc...

And yeah, I've heard several times now that dating apps suck for everyone. And they're superficial. And if it's just a picture of someone that pops up and people have to make a split-second decision based on the picture... And you say you don't look that good by common standards... Maybe you don't stand a chance and you got to find some other strategy...

I mean I don't know anything about him, or you. So I don't know what to recommend. Usually, a good strategy is to talk to each other. Say what you were trying to achieve, what you thought would happen and how you felt. How you feel now. I mean the thing with mistakes is, we all make mistakes. And you can't turn back time... You can just try to own your mistakes. Make it clear to your boyfriend whether you learned something... Yeah, and when talking, you both need to listen to each other's feelings. Doesn't really work unless both sides open up.

No matter how you tackle the issue with your boyfriend, I think you should alao stop DMing strangers on the internet if they say they're going to send you money for something. They probably want something in return. And what you seem to be doing seems to end in sexting every time... So either this is what you want, or you need to change strategies. What are you looking for, with that, anyways?

I haven't checked, but ffmpeg is super versatile. It does a lot of stuff, even esoteric and niche things... Sometimes depends on what flags are set when compiling it, so the Linux distros don't always include everything ffmpeg is capable of.

Probably not entirely secure. We had things like this happening: https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/26/leaked-data-exposes-a-chinese-ai-censorship-machine/

But they're not stupid. They have scientists, IT experts... And I'd think twice before going head-to-head with the Chinese authorities.

8FE62A

Some people do it. For example we have this solar-powered website: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

You'd need an energy source like a solar panel, a battery and some computing device. Like a single board computer (Raspberry Pi) you can also run webservers on smartphones, or even a microcontroller. The server part works without an internet connection. But you obviously need some way to connect to it. A wifi (router) or a computer connected via an ethernet cable.

The tech isn't too complicated. Just install nginx if you have a raspberry pi, open a wifi and put your website on it. If you choose a phone, try Termux and a supported webserver. Both Linux and smartphones are designed to even work without an internet connection ;-)

Not really. I could use some good selfhosted search engine. I mean all the existing projects (which is just YaCy, to my knowledge) are a bit dated. Nowadays we only got metasearch engines and we're relying on Google, Bing etc.

But I don't need any chatbot enhancements. That's usually something I skip when using Google or Bing because it doesn't work well. The AI summaries tend to be wrong, and it's bad at looking up niche information, which is something I need a search engine to be able to find. The AI just cites the most common slop, or at best the Wikipedia article. But I don't really need any fancy software to get there... So for me, we don't need any AI augmentation.

And I think the old way of googling was fine. Just teach people to put in the words that are likely to be in the article they want to find. That'd be something like "Rust new features 2023" or "homelab backup blog". Sure you can strap on a chatbot and put in entire natural language questions. But I think that's completely unnecessary. We have brains and we're perfectly able to translate our questions into search queries with little effort... If somebody teches us what to type into the search bar, and why.

Yes. Plus the turing machine has an infinite memory tape to write and read. Something that is in scope of mathematics, but we don't have any infinite tapes in reality. That's why we call it a mathematical model and imaginary... and it's a useful model. But not a real machine. Whereas an abacus can actually be built. But an Abacus or a real-world "Turing machine" with a finite tape doesn't teach us a lot about the halting problem and the important theoretical concepts. It wouldn't be such a useful model without those imaginary definitions.

(And I don't really see how someone would confuse that. Knowing what models are, what we use them for, and what maths is, is kind of high-school level science education...)

It's a long article. But I'm not sure about the claims. Will we get more efficient computers that work like a brain? I'd say that's scifi. Will we get artificial general intelligence? Current LLMs don't look like they're able to fully achieve that. And how would AI continuously learn? That's an entirely unsolved problem at the scale of LLMs. And if we ask if computer science is science... Why compare it to engineering? I found it's much more aligned with maths at university level...

I'm not sure. I didn't read the entire essay. It sounds to me like it isn't really based on reality. But LLMs are certainly challenging our definition of intelligence.

Edit: And are the history lessons in the text correct? Why do they say a Turing machine is a imaginary concept (which is correct), then say ENIAC became the first one, but then maybe not? Did we invent the binary computation because of reliability issues with vacuum tubes? This is the first time I read that and I highly doubt it. The entire text just looks like a fever dream to me.

I have it role-play for my amusement, bounce ideas and regularly ask it to give me 5 ideas about something, if I'm not creative myself. I also use it for translation. Either copy-paste an entire text or help me phrase things.

I've also fooled around with image generation, music, tried to program a website, had it rephrase my emails... But all of that wasn't super useful to me. At lest not for my everyday tasks.

Other AI things I use (occasionally) are: Text-to-Speech, Speech-to-Text and text recognition.