Thank you so much for this! It reminded me to revisit my library’s general resources and look specifically for which archive collections they had available. I’m 1 state over, so I figured there was a good chance we would have Newspapers.com Library Edition access here.

The main/default collection my library sent me to was no help, but they had a Newspapers.com Library Edition portal listed further down. Final-fucking-ly got it. I really, really appreciate the help.

I’m sure it’s a fine service, if you want to use it regularly, but I just wanted 1 tiny thing. If they had a $1 for an obit or a page deal, sure. Instead, there’s this whole microcosm of bullshit where some are archived, others available, some omitted from public collections, some on different 3rd party sites, etc.

The family paid for an obit. It wasn’t in the 1800s. The paper has been digitized. I should be able to go to the paper with the name, exact date, and city and find it. They literally say it doesn’t exist. Not that it’s on our archive site or our partner site, just nothing.

I would have thrown a couple bucks to any of the sites for access, but no, I need to sign up for a subscription, give them all my details, get spam calls for the next 100 years, just no. Super frustrating.

True. They created their own problem by trying to up each other’s lumens claims over and over to the point where decent flashlights are claimed to have 5.6 million lumens and included 25000mAh 18650s.

Most of the $5+ flashlights are probably fine for most people’s needs. I have several and they’ve been fine for me. Different models, similar modes, similar brightness, and all fine for walking the dog or if the power goes out. Now, if I were relying on them for survival, I might think twice. All have held up fine, including the 12 year old one from dealextreme (pre-alibaba). But, since I don’t know if people are asking for recommendations where spec accuracy matters, I’m hesitant to recommend them to random people on the internet.

(I had to check, just for fun, and there are 18650 batteries listed as 19900mAh. Pretty impressive, since Panasonic is capped out at 3500-3600.)

Yeah, it really caught me off guard the first time I used the site. It was during one of those special celebration discount days where they had the audacity to mark items as literally $0.01 when basically nothing was that price.

For 3D printer filament, which is usually bought in 1kg/2.2lb spools, most places list a 2m sample or a 250g spool to game the search. And my other favorite is the whack-a-mole shipping setup where on variation might be free shipping, but choose a different color and the shipping jumps to $300+.

With Amazon, I’m seeing a ton more overpriced items discounted to still higher priced than their competition. If you look at their deals pages, you can find things like portable monitors for $70 (down from $150), but checking that category shows the same monitor (same specs under a different name) for $60.

Here’s as close as I can find right now, since all the lightning deals are ending for the day. There’s a USB laptop docking station that’s “discounted” from $139 to $70. There isn’t an exact match (there usually is), but similar products go for ~$60-$70 (2 HDMI, 4+ USB3 ports, 100W PD, ethernet). What’s funnier is that the specific company’s Amazon site has at least 4 identical docks at slightly different prices.

I just tried it again on desktop and it worked, but the reason was that I downloaded an extension a while ago and forgot about it. When I disabled the extension, it stopped working.

There used to be a way to enable installing any extension on mobile FFx Dev, but I’m not sure if that still works. The desktop extension just changes the user agent string, so that might be another route to enabling it.

I use the ChatGPT feature from desktop Firefox with no problems. Maybe it specifically denies Chrome, in which case I bet you could change the user agent string and get it to work.

I use AliExpress for electrical parts (except anything with memory), 3D printer parts, and small crap I don’t mind waiting for, but never anything I would be angry about if it never arrived. Also, nothing I consume or wear or need for safety, and I’m wary of anything that’s supposed to be plugged into the wall for long periods of time unattended.

I wouldn’t say I’ve been surprised, but my expectations are low. It’s all cheap stuff, but as long as you’re not needing the stuff you buy, it’s fine. Dollar store quality with the scent of plastic and cigarettes.

That being said, beware of scams. The one that seems acceptable to them is to list one cheap part for the listing, along with variations of the full device. That way it looks like the lowest price in search results, but when you click it, the selected variation is the cheap part. Like, you’ll search for “pliers set” and see a listing for $1, compared to others around $15. When you select it, the product page will have a carrying case for $1 and the various pliers for twice as much as the competition. What’s better is that the case will be selected automatically, not the thing in the picture you clicked on or the picture you see first in the product pages’ gallery.

There are also scam stores that pop up with super low prices compared to others on the site can disappear overnight and the cancellation/refund process is a super pain. Contact customer service once and just submit a claim with your CC company. Their refund process will try to keep telling you to wait for another week, and that includes the reps you get on chat. If you’re suspicious and still order, always follow the shipping info. They will estimate a reasonable delivery date, you’ll get a shipping notification, but it will sit in limbo. The shipping folks are separate from the scammers, so if you see the package actually move towards a shipping center, you’re in the clear. If it says they received shipping information for over a week, you got screwed.

Ignore flash drives/SSDs, batteries, and assume any flashlights are 1/100th the brightness claimed (literally). Oh, and watch shipping costs. Something with free shipping can be 10x the price of the product if you add a second one to your cart.

I totally agree on the first point, and might have a response in this thread stating much the same.

On the federation/syncing, I think it might need a more unique approach. Communities already have the problem of multiple posts linking the same article across several instances and communities, which don’t sync comments. Making sure the complete wiki for a given community is resilient to instances defederating, shutting down, or vandalizing should be top priority, IMO. I don’t know what the solution is, but I think we should be open to it looking different from the basic Lemmy sync setup.

For example, the wiki/extracted posts don’t really need to sync as quickly as thread comments. Also, there should be some form of versioning in case of a credentials bug, hack, or intentional mass deletion or vandalism. We could aggregate points of conflict between instances/communities in a topic’s main thread/stream/article and assign some for of weighting alongside the choice to continue reading from a particular wiki, which are return to the original thread/stream/article.

So, in the Biden-lizard example, the primary Biden entry that’s synced everywhere could have a “Controversy” section with generally agreed on, real issues (like age, which is true for almost all US politicians) and fringe disagreements. Each fringe entry in the list would link to the page synced between instances that subscribe to those beliefs, but that page would not be a part of the larger synced Biden pages’ contents. That keeps the lizard lovers’ content off the larger, community-focused instances.

I guess I’m worried about conspiracy theories pulling users of the ‘realistic’ path, while increasing load on dissenting instances. I don’t think Biden’s a lizardman, so I shouldn’t have to host the 12 hour long documentary on it. (We all know he’s a reincarnated demon-angel hybrid. Oh, so now you don’t agree? Fine, I’ll host my 36 part finger puppet reenactment of the situation myself!)

Anyhow, I’m kinda babbling. These are just some general ideas off the cuff I wanted to get out there. I’m not a mod or an admin, so I’m hoping to get the conversation restarted among those with the ability to enact some of these changes. Reddit is still a knowledgebase of useful past discussions, and while new content is great, the more we can pull into the fediverse, the better.

Yup, but this is to prevent me from getting lazy and putting off creating the post until “later”. (Where later = never) It also reduced things like tag typos and incomplete entries.

There are lots of details to be ironed out if we go the wiki way, which is why I think the tagged route would be the best start. Start getting the data and develop the larger structure over time. Once we need the data to populate the wikis/dbs/whatever, any mod can filter the posts pretty easily.

Other problems I see happening - conflicts between mods on entries, keep or throw out entries when an instance defederates (the c/politics folks might not want the entries on Biden being a lizardman from Nova Scotia, but c/iliketohitmyheadwithbricks does), bad blood if some mods want tighter control over wiki content, syncing when federating impact if larger media elements added, multiple wikis covering multiple topics while there are multiple instances covering multiple topics (multiplicative duplication due to the multiple hierarchies of equal importance), and I’m sure plenty more.

It would seem strange to users not keeping up with all the Lemmy/kbin meta to see a post that asks and then answers it’s own question.

I’m more concerned about folks wanting to filter out these posts more than worried about confusion, though.

Yeah. Sounds like a good idea for a browser add on.

It places a button by the post’s title.
Click that and it asks you to click the relevant replies.
It prompts for any additional tags (autotags RDX and subreddit name)
When you’re done it fills in the title, body, tags of a new Lemmy thread and sends the archive request to whatever service they set.

I’m thinking more in terms of syncing and storage. It all depends on how it’s implemented. Does each community have a wiki that’s synced with individual users’ wikis? A separate wiki per instance? How to handle edit conflicts, etc.

You’re right that just making a wiki isn’t too tough, but in the case of decentralized, editable, moderated content, it’s probably different enough to warrant an approach significantly different from a traditional, single site/many edit centralized version.

(We could always temporarily have a centralized wiki and roadmap out the transition later, too.)

Haha, thanks. I started to entertain myself and the length got a wee bit out of hand.
With the rate of signups they’ve had, I’m kinda doubting they even care about the rest of the fediverse groups. We’re just bugs on their windshield.
But, I hope I’m wrong, too.

That’s a blast from the past!

I’m generally a Windows user, but on the verge of doing a trial run of Fedora Silverblue (just need to find the time). It sounds like a great solution to my… complicated… history with Linux.

I’ve installed Linux dozens of times going back to the 90s (LinuxPPC anyone? Yellow Dog?), and I keep going back to Windows because I tweak everything until it breaks. Then I have no idea how I got to that point, but no time to troubleshoot. Easily being able to get back to a stable system that isn’t a fresh install sounds great.