my_hat_stinks
@my_hat_stinks@programming.dev
- Comment on ‘Americans just work harder’ than Europeans, says CEO of Norway’s $1.6 trillion oil fund, because they have a higher ‘general level of ambition’ 3 weeks ago:
Nonsense article. They claim Americans “work harder” because they have longer hours, no regulation, and no legal requirement for time off. In other words, they’re closer to slaves.
- Comment on Ackchuallly 1 month ago:
There definitely are rules to language, which are determined by how the language is actually used. The issue with prescriptivists is that they invent their own rules which often go against how the language is used, i.e. the rules are nonsense.
Take the “less vs fewer” argument. Everyone happily uses ‘less’ in pretty much the same way for nearly a millennium, then some prescriptivist asswipe comes along and says they don’t like it so now there’s a rule. Prescriptivists spend the next couple of centuries yelling about their new rule and creaming themselves over how they’re now ‘better’ at the language than other people while everyone else just doesn’t give a fuck and continue to speak normally.
In the end language is just a tool to communicate ideas. If you clearly understood someone but whine because they ignored your made up rules you’re the asshole.
- Comment on Video game actors' union calls for strike against 'League of Legends' 1 month ago:
But at some point, it’ll either generate original content on its own, or rely on content already created by other AI.
What you’re describing there is called model collapse and it’s not a good thing. A generative AI ouroboros accumulates error until its output is useless.
- Comment on Tesco loses UK legal battle over plans to ‘fire and rehire’ staff on lower pay 2 months ago:
I think you’ve misunderstood. They’re arguing against the capitalist approach in which there was an attempt to fire and rehire employees to cheat employees and save the company money. The system which prevented the company from doing so was government intervention to protect workers, which is not a capitalist approach.
- Comment on Scammers PANIC After I Hack Their Live CCTV Cameras! 2 months ago:
it’s pretty shady to be looking for legal safe harbor for scammers who rob people all over the world every day.
This is an argument that happened entirely within your own head, not in this thread. I think I made it clear right from the start I’m against scammers and approve of (ethical) actions taken against them, but I’m also against people who dox, invade privacy, engage in vigilantism, and gain unauthorised access to other’s computer systems (particularly when it’s for profit and ego). These are not mutually exclusive, there is no disconnect there. I even gave an example of more appropriate actions to take against scammers, notably actions that are actually effective.
Criticism against “justice” porn is not remotely the same thing as condoning scammers. You’re arguing in bad faith and you know it.
- Comment on Scammers PANIC After I Hack Their Live CCTV Cameras! 2 months ago:
This is very untrue and you definitely shouldn’t be giving out legal advice on topics you’re not knowledgeable on, but exactly which part is a crime and how criminal it is will depend on your local laws. Some such computer misuse laws are intentionally written very broadly with generic wording precisely so that edge cases such as unintentionally granting an unauthorised party access to a system does not clear them of wrongdoing when they do so.
As for how to tell which laws are relevant and whether you’ve breached them? Well, I’m sure the answer will shock you.
- Comment on Scammers PANIC After I Hack Their Live CCTV Cameras! 2 months ago:
Accessing a system you’re not authorised to access, regardless of how that access was obtained, is generally not legal. The way to sort that out is, you guessed it, a trial.
- Comment on Scammers PANIC After I Hack Their Live CCTV Cameras! 2 months ago:
That argument doesn’t work, all you’re doing is pointing out the issues with vigilantism. He’s also committing a crime, are the scammers now in the right too since they’re targeting a suspected criminal?
- Comment on Scammers PANIC After I Hack Their Live CCTV Cameras! 2 months ago:
I suggest you read the next few words in that sentence which you conveniently left out of your quote, might help clear up any confusion.
- Comment on Scammers PANIC After I Hack Their Live CCTV Cameras! 2 months ago:
I’ll definitely be downvoted for this too but I completely agree. There’s a fine line between entertainment at scammers’ expense and vigilantism for views. Publicly spreading the faces of people you’re accusing of a crime without any sort of trial is definitely the latter and has little direct impact on shutting down these operations. This video screams ego trip.
I used to watch Kitboga and they were much more ethical (at least when I watched). They’d lean heavily into the entertainment side, waste a lot of the scammers’ time which they then couldn’t spend on actual victims, and report/shutdown accounts as they came up which actually does directly impact their operation. Your scam call center still works if one of your workers gets their face posted online, it doesn’t if you have no bank account.
- Comment on Why does the USA have so few legal protections for ordinary people, and how can we change that? 2 months ago:
There are currently 120 comments, of which I can see one person suggested “violent protest” and one person suggested “blood”. Most of the comments which give any suggestions say unionisation, protest, and reform. If you see those as inherently violent that says a lot more about you than it does the other commenters.
- Comment on Why does the USA have so few legal protections for ordinary people, and how can we change that? 2 months ago:
There’s a lot of replies here about why US citizens are in the situation they are but not how to fix it, which was the question you asked. You have two political parties in a first past the post system with largely similar corporate focussed policies, people primarily vote against a party rather than for one that represents them. If you really want to change things you’ll need to overhaul your voting system to break up your two party system and encourage competition from parties that actually represent what people want.
Unfortunately there is no safe and easy way to do this; it means the two parties in power giving up that power which they will not do willingly. You’ll need large scale consistent and actually disruptive protests, ie not just meeting up for a day then returning to life as nornal, but the US has a history of responding to protests the same way they do everything; with violence.
So more practically, you can contact your representative at the appropriate level of government and hope they don’t completely ignore you this time.
- Comment on Why are people downvoting the MediaBiasFactChecker not? 3 months ago:
It’s possible to factually accurate with heavy bias, but since that would require selective reporting to enforce a single worldview I wouldn’t consider that “highly trustworthy”.
Consider the following hypothetical headlines:
“Teen Killed by Islamic Group During Shooting”
“Terrorist Shooting at Mosque, 20 Dead”Both are technically factually accurate ways to describe a hypothetical scenario where a teen shoots up a place of worship before being stopped by one of the victims, but they both paint very different pictures. Would you consider both sources “highly trustworthy”?
- Comment on How come neither burps nor hiccups are usually painful, but a combination of both is? 3 months ago:
Sounds like snake oil. Their website says you need to sip water through their straw for 3 seconds two/three times, then repeat those 3 sips up to 2 more times so that puts the effectiveness at somewhere around that of pretty much any other free home remedy. The way those instructions are written seems like it’s meant to intentionally obfuscate that fact too, it’s incredibly unnatural to say “do this thing two to three times, up to three times”.
- Comment on UK ban on puberty blockers upheld by High Court 3 months ago:
What a shitshow. The studies all show that puberty blockers have positive or neutral effect on trans people’s health, the “insufficient evidence” they’re claiming here is literally just that the people running the studies didn’t refuse to treat one group as a control.
If you want to claim you’re “evidence-led” maybe you should follow the evidence. If the best studies support puberty blockers banning puberty blockers is not “evidence-led”. If you believe the evidence isn’t strong enough you’re welcome to run your own study too, but good luck getting past any ethics committee with a proposal of “let’s force gender dysphoria on kids as a control”.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 months ago:
Bit of a misleading title, I’ve not watched the video but based on the video description and article they cite (also written by them, I think?) it should read “95% of Deaths from Extremism [in the past decade] in the U.S. are [Committed by] Far-Right”. The title as it is now suggests 95% of people killed were far-right, not that 95% of people killed were killed by far right.
Personally I’d swap “are” for “were” too. Present tense is a bit of an odd choice since it’s data from the past, for obvious reasons.
- Comment on Petition to pass paid leave nationwide delivered to all members of congress 4 months ago:
Not really, where I am full-time employees are legally entitled to a minimum 28 paid days off per year (including public holidays at employer’s discretion) and that’s still low compared to some of the better European countries. My understanding is that the US does not require any paid time off and this petition is to fix that.
3-6 months maternity leave at 66% pay isn’t necessarily great either, here we have 52 weeks maternity leave starting at 90% pay for 6 weeks then the lower of 90% pay or a fixed weekly amount for another 33 weeks. Returning to work in the first 6 months entitles you to the same job, in the second 6 months an equivalent job (equal pay, location, etc). There’s also 1-2 weeks paternity leave for other involved adults (eg father or partner) and the option to share up to 50 weeks of the maternity leave entitlement with them. And those are just legal minimums, for instance my work offers much better paternity leave than just a couple of weeks.
- Comment on Amazon's so helpful 4 months ago:
This means that the decimal representation of pi ends with the digit 9, followed by an infinite sequence of other digits.
I guess? There is a 9 followed by infinitely many other digits. Not sure I’d call that the end of pi, though.
- Comment on Humans didn't invent agriculture 4 months ago:
Utter nonsense. Your argument is that because you can imagine a god and spread the idea they are real. The logical conclusion there is that anything you can imagine is equally real. Bigfoot really is wandering around a forest, spaghetti absolutely does grow in trees, and the moon landing was definitely on a sound stage (but they also really landed on the moon because I can picture that too).
- Comment on How Dating Apps Are Squeezing More Money Out of Less People 4 months ago:
According to this list it was used figuratively by Jane Austen, who I believe died more than 200 years ago. That page also claims the earliest known use is 1769, so it’s probably less than 300 years in writing? It’s moot either way, if you’re going for an etymological argument you could go further and say literally should mean anything to do with letters or writing, from the original Latin literalis/litteralis “of or belonging to letters or writing”.
- Comment on How Dating Apps Are Squeezing More Money Out of Less People 4 months ago:
Hard disagree; it’s not a useful comment precisely because it’s prescriptivism. It’s suggesting people are incorrect because they’re using a commonly accepted meaning of a word, that’s just not how language works.
- Comment on How Dating Apps Are Squeezing More Money Out of Less People 4 months ago:
Language is defined by how it’s used, if it’s common for people to say “less” then that is correct. Trying to define the only “correct” usage counter to how people actually use the language is prescriptivism, which rarely changes how people actually speak. The only real use of prescriptivism is elitism.
You clearly understood what was said, you just wanted to announce you’re “better” at English.
- Comment on Somehow metal with zip zap moves rocks without touching and this isn't fiction? 5 months ago:
I’m not convinced. Most magic systems in fiction have rules, meaning they can be scientifically proven and studied. Magic is simply when something falls outside your understanding of how the world works. It’s all about your perspective.
There’s a part in the Lord of the Rings where Galadriel shows Sam and Frodo a scrying pool. To Galadriel it’s normal, simply the way the world is. To the hobbits it’s magic.
‘And you?’ she said, turning to Sam. ‘For this is what your folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy. But this, if you will, is the magic of Galadriel. Did you not say that you wished to see Elf-magic?’
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 6 months ago:
The problem with your argument is everyone’s only telling you exactly what your own link also says; the licence only applies if someone needs your permission anyway. If they don’t need permission the licence doesn’t matter. You don’t need to be a lawyer, you only need to be literate.
If the licensor’s permission is not necessary for any reason–for example, because of any applicable exception or limitation to copyright–then that use is not regulated by the license.
And all that’s still ignoring the fact you’re putting a higher bar to refute the claim than to make it in the first place which is nonsense; anything which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 6 months ago:
It’s ironic because you demand someone be a lawyer to refute an obviously incorrect claim made by a non-lawyer. If you consider me answer the question you asked directly of me “irony” then I suppose I can see how you might consider that comment ironic.
It’s definitely worth noting that you’ve attempted to shift the topic well away from the absurdity of using an open licence to do the opposite of what licences do and instead onto the topic of who is a lawyer and the definition of irony.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 6 months ago:
Ironic, considering you are undoubtedly not a lawyer and have evidently never even dealt with copyright issues.
CC licences are handy copyleft licences to allow others to use your work with minimal effort. Using them to restrict what others can do is a fundamental misunderstanding of how copyright works. If you want to restrict others’ use of your work copyright already handles that, a licence can only be more permissive than default copyright law. You can sign a contract with another party if you want to further restrict their use of their work, but you’ll generally also have to give them something in return for the contract to be valid (known as “consideration”). If you wish to do so you can include a copyright notice (eg “Copyright © 2024 onlinepersona. All rights reserved.”) but that hasn’t been a requirement for a long time.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 6 months ago:
Adding a CC link and falsely claiming it’s an anti-AI licence is misinformation and undoubtedly does add confusion.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 6 months ago:
Likely because it’s blatant misinformation and very spammy. Licences permit additional use, they do not restrict use beyond what copyright already does. I imagine there’d be fewer downvotes if they didn’t incorrectly claim licencing their content was somehow anti-AI. Still spammy and pointless, but at least not misinformation.
Imagine if someone ended every comment with “I DO NOT GRANT PERMISSION TO LAW ENFORCEMENT TO READ THIS COMMENT. ANY USE OF THIS COMMENT BY LAW ENFORCEMENT FOR ANY REASON IS ILLEGAL. THIS COMMENT CANNOT BE USED AS EVIDENCE AGAINST ANY NON-LAW ENFORCEMENT PERSONS IN RELATION TO ANY CRIME.”
A bit silly, no?
- Comment on Geography is neat 6 months ago:
Seems like a non-issue to me. You’ll go to whichever hospital is closest. If you’re resident in one of the countries you’ll be in EU/EEA and get the usual healthcare for residents of whichever country the hospital is in, if you’re non-EU it’ll depend on what travel insurance you have.
- Comment on The miracle of childbirth 6 months ago:
Nothing is cut off? The only thing missing is one bonus panel.