A year and a half ago, selling a video card on eBay was basically the same as paying someone to punch you in the face. It was as likely you'd get an INAD and eat the loss as anything else. So when I had one to sell, I sold it on FB Marketplace, and meeting in person for that much money didn't feel a lot less sketchy but at least it was in public and I could count the money.

Now, I want to replace a Nvidia card with an AMD one and that leaves me selling the Nvidia. It would be extremely convenient to sell it on eBay, but I'm looking for some perspective on whether the buyer protection scams have died down for video cards over there now that the shortage has passed, or if it's still basically a waste of time.

Earlier this week, I bought myself a new 2TB NVMe drive on sale, and had planned today to install it. Knowing that the computer, built in Dec 2021 had an issue with PCIe at the time that prevented 4x drives from running at 4x, but now had a BIOS update that fixed that (and introduced support for two additional CPU generations), I thought I should go ahead and flash the BIOS too.

Sparing unnecessary details, everything went fine. I unseated the 3060Ti to get at the M.2 ports, swapped out the old drive for the new one. Plugged in a spinner I had laying around while I was in there. Machine wouldn't boot - so I reinstalled GRUB (yes, I'm a Linux user) and that was fixed. The disk had everything copied over from the old one, so that was fine too, other than some power management spam in the journal that was fixed with a kernel param. Seems fine, right?

So I spin up Minecraft to have a quick session. Frame rates are like, 3-20 fps for about 2 full minutes, then they get up to 60fps (Vsync'd). But every few minutes, they keep dropping and creep back up. Sometimes they bounce up.

There are a dozen potential problems at least that could cause something like this. So I went back into the newly flashed BIOS knowing that all my settings were reset, and started poking around and fixing settings. This was good either way, but it didn't fix my sporadic fps dips. The game ALWAYS started at sub-10 fps, but it would get to 60 eventually. Sometimes in a handful of seconds, sometimes in minutes. One time, all the textures refused to load. Another time, the GPU fell off the bus.

This was not a problem at all prior to the work, so I started reviewing what I'd done so far. I'd added a disk with all copied data.. but there's a nvidia cache in there... cleared that. No dice. I looked at heat. No problem. Same drivers as before, but maybe I have to roll back drivers, or kernel, or BIOS. I dunno. Frustrated as fuck.

Could also be a power issue. Or a reseating the card issue. I hadn't added any devices with more power consumption and I have ~100W of buffer on a good PSU, so it really should be a problem, but I reseat the card and replug the power cables anyway.

The problem is worse.

So I spend another hour and a half poking around forums looking at every possible thing I could do on the software side to fix this, before I decide to reseat the card one more time. I mean, the first time changed SOMETHING, even if it was for the worse.

Popping out the card, I blew into the slot as I thought I saw a tiny speck of dust. I used canned air the first time but this was really an afterthought by this point...

The body of a tiny moth popped out of the slot.

I reseated the card, spun up Minecraft, and everything is fine. Perfect frame rates, just like before.

I'll never get the hours back that I spent troubleshooting this today. At least several other items were improved along the way, such as RAM timings. But in the event this story helps anyone in the future, it's worth the time it took to type it.

I know a lot of development is happening in the space and this answer will likely change.

One of the crucial parts of my snoosite "workflow" if you can call it that, was a widget front and center on my phone using redditisfun:

I wonder if there are any apps, current or in some stage of development, that feature a basic "Frontpage" widget like this?

I'm kicking around a few feature requests.

One of them I've already created in github as it seems appropriate to mainline Lemmy, but a couple of others I think are more appropriate to third party development. Since I'm more a product management / sysadmin type and not much of a coder, I'm putting these in the aether in case they drum up some interest in those considering features for bots or other tooling.

First is YouTube aggregation - it doesn't have to be limited to YT. I'm interested in the ability to automatically collect notifications from a list of channels (click that bell icon, baby) and generate a community post to link new videos.

Second is RSS aggregation. If a blog or magazine or news site has a feed, and if that feed should feature an entry matching keywords defined by a moderation team, generate a post to the community linking to that content.

If these capabilities exist already for Lemmy, even in a hackish way, please do let me know. Otherwise, these are things I am wishing for :)

A community for people who don't believe in gods.

!atheism@lemmy.world

I'm looking at communities on instances other than the one where I have my account (lemmy.world) so I can really spread my wings around in this space. When I look as an unauthenticated visitor at communities on, say lemmy.ml, the subscriber counts are considerably higher for local communities than how they are reported globally from lemmy.world. What accounts for this delta?

I might guess the sub counts from lemmy.world for non-local communities only account for subs "on loan" from the community you're checking from, but that might be too simple an explanation.

Whatever the explanation, it would be nice to see the sub counts both as they are accounted from the parent instance and as the number of subs coming from your own instance. I can make a feature request, but first I'd like to know how it works :)

Before I go on, I know we don't want to talk about the other site here. I'm not trying to do that in the context of bitching about anything. I've got what I think is a question that highlights a concern possibly worth considering AND seeking a potential solution that someone may or may not already be working on behind the scenes that perhaps needs to bubble up.

One of the major reasons I have been drawn to a particular aggregator community (and, to be fair, a handful of independent SIG forums such as Lemon64 as a particularly great example) is that posts in their communities hit immediately in search engines. Due to orders of magnitude larger userbases compared to the relatively young communities in the fediverse (for the time being), it naturally follows that there will be more engagement and responses at the more mature sites. This is particularly important in communities where people depend on the experience of people, where numbers matter, to get feedback on problems of an esoteric nature.

Currently, I am massively impressed by the growth in userbase of some core communities (selfishly, in particular those that appeal to my own interests and bias) on Lemmy. What keeps me refreshing pages of the other aggregator are the posts of interest in those communities that aren't being mirrored in their respective Lemmy communities. Until some of those key "announcements" or "seed posts" if you will, which generate engagement, begin to organically synthesize here, those communities can use some help.

I heard the term "bootstrapping communities" from a moderator here while browsing, and I think this is related to that kind of activity.

As we know, the predicate for much of this movement were API changes that will make it massively more difficult to leverage any existing solutions to effectively crosspost from one aggregator community to its sibling(s) on Lemmy. Duplication of current headlines from something like /r/fpgagaming to /c/fpgagaming or similar, for example, is important to anyone interested in that niche Special Interest Group (SIG) who may prefer to consume their content exclusively / primarily through Lemmy, and depends heavily at this time on the passion for BOTH fediverse engagement AND the SIG in question. Those aren't always easy to find in combination. Harder still in non-technically inclined SIGs.

What I am NOT suggesting, in case this post might unintentionally but strongly imply otherwise, are activities that presume to wholesale "lift and shift" content from one aggregator community or SIG site to a Lemmy community. There are obvious ethical problems with engagement and other kinds with automation at that level. What I'm wondering is the most honest approach to bootstrap existing SIG communities that may be looking for alternatives into those alternatives on the fediverse, without missing crucial content.

What I'm wondering is who (not if, I think it's safe to assume that more than one person is thinking about this problem) and what activities, if there is anything to be discussed in open air, are working on the challenge of aggregating the aggregator to populate relevant content to appropriate communities?

I'm not embarrassed to wonder about this, but please don't take the question as an invitation to flame. PMs are fine also.

To close this thought with a personal anecdote, although this is rather specific it's certainly by no means unique in the broader quality:

I'm reminded of how the owner of d3fmod and several key core developers for MiSTer still depend nearly exclusively on birdsite for product announcements and community updates. These are often posted first to the first party's own website or patreon, and replicated to the other aggregator near immediately by a 3rd party in the community. We can't expect or insist that anyone prefer fediverse engagement when there is presently a small fraction of the community to be engaged, and the best way to encourage that engagement is to demonstrate availability of the exact right content.

Until we have the levels engagement and moderation within our respective Lemmy communities, which may (or may not) develop organically over time, it's practically a liability to fail at ensuring the most important content to those interests are present in the fediverse at large. While it could be considered incumbent on mods to perform that function, it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to do that part-time without good software to assist, and that is what this post is about: software shims to enable effective bootstrapping for community moderators and their current state of work / availability.

I'm really glad to find that there's a decent sized community for this special interest group on the Fediverse! Bravo, glad to be here and counted among these numbers.

When I finish later this summer, I'll link up some pics (maybe on PixelFed!) but for now, I'm excitedly waiting for some new hardware. Having run a MiSTer for over a year now, it didn't get much use due to being poorly placed in my house and not getting enough attention. This summer, I've made it a priority project and now my kids are enjoying retro Kirby games just as much as the new ones!

Eagerly awaiting (shipment and) delivery of Ironclad+ round seven with accessories, and a wagonload of OEM controllers to use on SNAC. I feel then that my quest to squash lag will be more or less complete from an acquisition standpoint. But the fuller journey is never "over."

Long term, I either need to hire someone to adjust the yoke on my RGB modded 36" Trinitron or (better) teach me to do it safely. Alternatively I need to find another large set that I can mod and which doesn't have convergence issues. And eventually, I'm sure FPGA programmers will migrate to a new platform that will need to be explored. :)