Like, I love thrash/death/heavy metal music, but I could mostly do without the vocals. Is there a genre of music (or specific bands) I should look for?

I'm a big fan of Arcturus, Children of Bodom, etc, but I prefer the instrumentals way more than the singing.

So, is there a specific genre for that?

Edit: Imagine Silent Night, Bodom Night but without lyrics. It's not that I dislike the vocals; would just appreciate the track more without them. It's like they're just in the way of what I want to hear.

Edit 2: Thanks, everyone. I have heard of Animals as Leaders but am not super familiar with them. Will definitely check them out as well as the other recommendations.

An acoustic performance of Usher's "Yeah" using a Boss RC-20 Loop Station.

Yeah, it's 90s country, but this song has always spoken to my ADHD.

I'm in a hurry to get things done Oh, I rush and rush until life's no fun All I really gotta do is live and die But I'm in a hurry and don't know why

Scientists are literally trying to reinvent the wheel

> South Korean researchers have developed a "morphing" wheel that can navigate stairs and obstacles up to 1.3 times its radius, potentially revolutionizing mobility devices and robotics.

> The wheel, created by the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM), features a chain-based outer hoop and sensor-controlled spoke wires that adjust stiffness based on terrain. Inspired by water droplet mechanics, it transitions between solid and fluid states when encountering impediments.

The FBI says a teen intended to cause as much harm as possible by 'swatting' multiple locations.

Alan W. Filion, 18, of Lancaster, California, entered the plea to four counts of making interstate threats to injure the person of another, the US Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida said in a news release. He faces up to five years in prison on each count. A sentencing date has not yet been set.

“For well over a year, Alan Filion targeted religious institutions, schools, government officials, and other innocent victims with hundreds of false threats of imminent mass shootings, bombings and other violent crimes. The US Attorney’s Office said Filion made more than 375 swatting and threat calls from August 2022 to January 2024.

Just a quick check-in / progress report on 1.4.21

This release is looking to be a "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all" type of release. Most of the changes are architectural, so if nothing appears to have changed, then that's what I'm going for.

Rewrote the Post Feeds

I'm in final testing phase of the post feed rewrite. That was a brute, and I spent a whole week's worth of evenings squashing bugs, but I now have a post feed component that's fully self-contained with regard to fetching, pagination (infinite scroll and manual), sorting, filtering, caching/snapshots, remembering where you left off, etc.

The old feed code was a hodgepodge of the original Photon code plus all the new stuff I bolted on. It worked, but it was ugly and was tightly coupled to the page it was integrated into. Since I'm going to have to do some heavy port work in the near future (more on that below), I figured it was high time to start some major refactoring and de-clutter.

The new feed component can be easily integrated anywhere, so that opens up some new feature avenues.

The new feed component has been integrated:

• On the frontpage main feed
• On community pages for the community feed
• In community profile modals - You can preview a community or check for latest posts without leaving your current spot
• In Moderation modals - It will show you the post/comment creator's submissions in the current community
• In user profile modals: You can click anyone's username and see their submissions right in the profile modal

For moderation purposes, those put a lot of helpful information right at your fingertips when accessing them from the moderation modal.

For user profile pages, I'm still working on the feed component there. I have a component that's used in the modals, and that's the likely candidate for the profile pages, but I may opt to adapt the post feed one to accept a user in addition to an optional community. The reason they're separate is that profile submissions are fetched differently and have to display comments as well as posts. So, before I make a final decision on which way to implement that, I need to finish testing the current feed write and make sure all of the bugs have been addressed (so far, so good).

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Snapshots Are Now gzip Compressed

Yes, I know IndexedDB will solve all of my storage woes. The problem is I'm not ready to integrate that yet (it's planned for the re-write/port; see more below).

When you're clicking from the feed into a post, Tess takes a snapshot of the current API data for that page and stores it to the browser's session storage. The problem I keep facing and dealing with is that per key, local and session storage maxes out at 5 MB. That seems like a lot, but with infinite scroll and every post containing a full copy of the community details (the sidebar info), and multiple posts from the same community having redundant copies of that, that 5 MB fills up fast.

To address this (until I'm ready to switch to IndexedDB), I've added gzip compression to the snapshot data. In testing, I'm seeing about an 80-85% reduction in size compared to the uncompressed JSON. Considering all the redundant information it's storing, that is to be expected.

Combined with the feed rewrite, the snapshots are also more useful. Before, they were just used as a way to get you back to the same spot in an infinite scrolling feed without having to fetch everything from the API up to that point. They....still do that. But, in addition, they now remember your feed position on the main feed as well as per-community.

This means if you scroll down through Community A, go home to check the main feed, pop into Community B, and then back to A, you will be returned to your previous position when going back into each.

Also, they will invalidate on browser refresh. I finally got that working reliably.

Snapshots are currently hardcoded to a maximum validity period of 15 minutes (or if you close the app/browser tab), but I am probably going to make that a config option. In practice, it means once you leave a position in the feed, you have 15 minutes to return to it before it expires and starts you back at the top.

Feedback / suggestions on that is welcome.

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Svelte 5 or React?

So Svelte 5 is finally out. Initial estimates are that it's going to take a lot of work to move from Svelte 4 to 5 (I absolutely will not let any script touch code I maintain, so it's going to be a 100% manual process here).

I'm also considering just porting the whole thing over to React. The only reason Tess is in Svelte is because I wanted to add media support to Photon, and Photon was in Svelte. That said, while I was new to it at the time, it has grown on me. But React is what we use at work and seems to be generally more long-term stable.

I'm still mulling this over and will probably be kicking the can down the road for a while. I'm also looking for contributors, so that may factor into the decision as well.

Trust moves slightly higher but remains lower than before the pandemic

> A majority of Americans say they have confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests. Confidence ratings have moved slightly higher in the last year, marking a shift away from the decline in trust seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

> A new Pew Research Center survey of 9,593 U.S. adults conducted Oct. 21-27, 2024, takes a close look at the public image of scientists, who serve as one potential source of information for Americans navigating complex policy debates and everyday decisions around things like their personal health and wellness.

> About three-quarters of Americans say they have either a great deal (26%) or a fair amount (51%) of confidence in scientists to act in the best interests of the public. This share is up slightly since last year. Still, levels of confidence in scientists remain lower than in April 2020 – at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, 87% expressed at least a fair amount of confidence in scientists, including 39% who said they had a great deal of confidence.

Key Findings

• 76% of Americans express a great deal or fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests.
• Majorities view research scientists as intelligent (89%) and focused on solving real-world problems (65%).
• Communication is seen as an area of relative weakness for scientists.
• Americans are split over scientists’ role in policymaking.

I've never fully understood how the 'popcorn' button on microwaves work (I've read different things that may or may not all be true depending on make/model), but my current one always runs for exactly 3 seconds too long and ever so slightly burns the popcorn.

It's not burned enough to throw it out, but it does give a noticeable "burnt popcorn" smell that kind of ruins my day.

So instead of pressing "popcorn" and doing something else, I have to stand there and watch it to hit 'cancel' in time.

Picard: Mr. LaForge, this is the worst transporter accident in Federation history.

Geordi: It could have been worse, Captain. They could have been horribly merged.

Picard: But at least there would still only be one of them.

The community banner and icon are both broken and seem to be hosted away from Lemmy World on fry.gs which I believe is/was the home instance for one of the original mods. That instance appears to be no longer functional.

Not sure how long they've been broken; I just noticed that when I flushed my cache recently they weren't working and then realized the banner and icon links the API returns no longer work.

"icon": "https://fry.gs/pictrs/image/c6832070-8625-4688-b9e5-5d519541e092.png", "banner": "https://fry.gs/pictrs/image/1a1e9226-87cb-4499-94a7-d43b1e520e50.png",

Update: I did find the banner. I don't have a copy of the banner, but I do have the icon in my instance's proxy/cache if you want to save it and re-apply it from Lemmy World.