ArchRecord

@ArchRecord@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Democrats Panic over President Trump’s Talk of Reforming U.S. Postal Service⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Trump has not established a specific plan

  Democrats panic over guy with no plan saying we should magically make a thing different.

  We want to have a post office that works well and doesn’t lose massive amounts of money

  Even though the controllable loss was reduced by over $400m in just 2024, and the only increased uncontrolled losses were from things like pensions, y’know, the thing that people need to retire after doing work that serves the whole country, I guess we can always make it profitable by jacking up the cost of every single package delivery! Cuts for the working class!

  And it will be a form of a merger, but it’ll remain the Postal Service, and I think it’ll operate a lot better than it has been over the years.

  Merger! Business words! We’ve fixed the system! If it remains the same Postal Service, but undergoes a merger, then that just implies the US government buying another entity to merge it into USPS. And if that’s not what he meant, then we get privatization with private shareholders demanding costs must rise to pay them profits on top of the existing cost to provide the service. Cost cutting!

  Following his remarks, Democrat members of the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to Trump urging him to abandon any plans to reform USPS (emphasis added)

  “Your reported efforts to dismantle the Postal Service as an independent agency would directly undermine the affordability and reliability of the U.S. postal system”

  “We urge you to abandon immediately any plans that would either privatize the Postal Service or undermine the independence of the Postal Service.”

  “Don’t reform this thing” is the same as “don’t dismantle, privatize, or undermine the independence of this agency” now? What a conflation.

  Seriously, this entire article is just “Trump says he wants to do things to take an existing system that already works and either privatize or cut funding for it” and Democrats going “don’t do that we all still need to get our mail at a reasonable rate”

  Don’t forget, private companies are under no obligation to provide service to any area deemed unprofitable, whereas the USPS is required to do so. And what areas are the most likely to be unprofitable for delivery companies? Rural areas. Which areas have the highest population of conservatives? Rural areas. If Trump manages to successfully implement his plan, don’t be surprised and come out with the whole “I didn’t think the leopards would eat my face” argument.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How is the Stock Market keeping it's value after *points to everything*?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A few reasons:

  1. Market prices are more often determined by speculation than actual intrinsic value. People will say that the market is “efficient” in the sense that everything is valued efficiently based on the value it’s worth, but take one look at meme stocks and you’ll see that prices can easily be influenced by large volumes of purchases instead of any actual intrinsic value in the corporation being invested in. A lot of money being funneled into index funds can lead to the price of stocks continually increasing without actual value of the underlying companies being taken into account as much as you would think.

  2. Fascism is supported by, and continues to support capitalism. Corporations benefit from capitalism, especially under a system where safeguards are removed and businesses can make larger profit margins as a result.

  3. A lot of the changes Trump is making hurt working people, but don’t hurt corporations. (and often even help corporations directly) For instance, he’s making union busting easier, knows that any tariffs can simply be passed on by the companies without shrinking their margins, (just costing you more), is cracking down on legal immigration to the point that illegal migrant workers are even easier to exploit with the threat of deportation, etc. A lot of the bad things Trump is doing will only affect us, not corporations or the capital owning class.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, whether or not someone believes they have gender dysphoria shouldn’t affect if they get therapy or not. I’d recommend it regardless, it helps a bunch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Forgive them, for they know not what they do⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Some landlords that are complete assholes ask, but I doubt you’ll actually see anybody actually do it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon Artificially Discounting Items $0.01 Below the Free Shipping Limit⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been here for over 15 years, I have other people who live with me but they never do anything weird when it comes to chargebacks/refunds. I still have no idea why retailers hate my address so much 😭

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon Artificially Discounting Items $0.01 Below the Free Shipping Limit⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d just never seen this specific flavor of bullshittery from them before. Encouraging sellers to keep prices below the shipping limit is one thing, but adding discounts artificially no matter what the actual seller prices their product at is a whole new level of making things worse for everyone involved.

  Sellers have a lower likelihood of a non-Prime member buying their item, users don’t get free shipping.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon Artificially Discounting Items $0.01 Below the Free Shipping Limit⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  As another user replied to you earlier, yeah, it’s substantially more expensive after shipping. Nearly 50% more, in fact, but in this specific instance I wasn’t actually planning on buying this specific bit set, the price and subsequent notice of the discount just caught my eye when it was in Amazon’s list of product recommendations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon Artificially Discounting Items $0.01 Below the Free Shipping Limit⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t ask me, I’ve been asking the same question myself 😅

  The only things that had originally come to mind were my accounts on those stores being new (but who makes an account there then just lets it sit for like a week), me using virtual cards to avoid using the same payment info across different sites (but many other people do that with no issues), using my non-gmail email (but other people also do that with no issues), ad & JS canvas blocking (but as needanke mentioned earlier, they don’t seem to have problems), or possibly just something with my address itself making its way onto some shared-around list of addresses not to ship to for some reason, but none of these explanations really seem to make sense.

  I’m genuinely just as stumped as you are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon Artificially Discounting Items $0.01 Below the Free Shipping Limit⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I know, I only took this specific screenshot because it happened to show up as a recommendation within Amazon’s interface and I noticed the price and discount seemed odd. I intend to try buying it (or at least, a similar set made by iFixit) on their own site when I end up actually needing it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon Artificially Discounting Items $0.01 Below the Free Shipping Limit⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I try to when I can, but I tend to have major difficulties doing so.

  I tried Ebay, they restricted my account and said the only way for me to get it un-restricted was to buy a product from a limited set of brand-new partner suppliers (e.g. Logitech, HP, etc) that were all over $100, and nothing I actually needed.

  I tried buying some chargers from Anker and they also restricted me and said they wouldn’t let me make a purchase because my email seemed suspicious (I don’t use Gmail), so I had to go back to Amazon and buy it there instead for practically the same price, even though it would have actually been cheaper on Anker’s own website since they had a discount code that would have worked for my order.

  I bought something on Target because I’d been given a Target gift card, Target cancelled my order 3 times and made me contact customer service to remove an invisible hold on my account.

  I frequently try checking third-party sites for the same products, and the prices are way higher (e.g. A product I plan on purchasing is $80 on the manufacturer’s site, and $58 on Amazon, with the price frequently dropping to $38) because Amazon literally mandates that the cheapest price must be on Amazon. Often times, these price differences are so drastic that I could end up paying double for the same product.

  I also tend to get Amazon gift cards from relatives even though they already know I dislike using Amazon when I don’t have to, so it’s often somewhat unavoidable.

  Don’t get me wrong, those are just the worst instances so far. I’ve bought quite a few items from elsewhere before without issues, it’s just that I tend to have the occasional issue that makes it practically impossible to buy elsewhere.

  Believe me, I do my best to not have to spend money on Amazon, but it’s either so drastically more expensive that it’s simply not reasonable to buy elsewhere, or for various reasons I mentioned before, I’m not even capable of placing an order in the first place.

• Amazon Artificially Discounting Items $0.01 Below the Free Shipping Limitlemm.ee ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨250⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a name for the smell or sensation experienced right before dawn?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure if this is entirely relevant, but depending on your local climate it could be related to the smell known as petrichor that you will often get when it rains/is about to rain on soil, which could be affected by the moisture in your local area that accumulated overnight then evaporating more quickly as the sun rises.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PEGI gives Balatro an 18+ rating for gambling imagery⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Gotta love how they saved the literal slot machine for a minute in to the video so it wouldn’t be too obvious.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Haha SO TRUE!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Haha so true!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s definitely true, I probably should have been a little more clear in my response, specifying that it can run at startup, but doesn’t always do so.

  I’ll edit my comment so nobody gets the wrong idea. Thanks for pointing that out!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To put it very simply, the ‘kernel’ has significant control over your OS as it essentially runs above everything else in terms of system privileges.

  It runs at startup, so this means if you install a game with kernel-level anticheat, the moment your system turns on, the game’s publisher has software running on your system that can restrict the installation of a particular driver, stop certain software from running, or, even insidiously spy on your system’s activity if they wished to. (and reverse-engineering the code to figure out if they are spying on you is a felony because of DRM-related laws)

  It basically means trusting every single game publisher with kernel-level anticheat in their games to have a full view into your system, and the ability to effectively control it, without any legal recourse or transparency, all to try (and usually fail) to stop cheating in games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Clever, clever⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Computers are a fundamental part of that process in modern times.

  If you were taking a test to assess how much weight you could lift, and you got a robot to lift 2,000 lbs for you, saying you should pass for lifting 2000 lbs would be stupid. The argument wouldn’t make sense. Why? Because the same exact logic applies. The test is to assess you, not the machine.

  Just because computers exist, can do things, and are available to you, doesn’t mean that anything to assess your capabilities can now just assess the best available technology instead of you.

  Like spell check? Or grammar check?

  Spell/Grammar check doesn’t generate large parts of a paper, it refines what you already wrote, by simply rephrasing or fixing typos. If I write a paragraph of text and run it through spell & grammar check, the most you’d get is a paper without spelling errors, and maybe a couple different phrases used to link some words together.

  If I asked an LLM to write a paragraph of text about a particular topic, even if I gave it some references of what I knew, I’d likely get a paper written entirely differently from my original mental picture of it, that might include more or less information than I’d intended, with different turns of phrase than I’d use, and no cohesion with whatever I might generate later in a different session with the LLM.

  These are not even remotely comparable.

  Assuming the point is how well someone conveys information, then wouldn’t many people better be better at conveying info by using machines as much as reasonable? Why should they be punished for this? Or forced to pretend that they’re not using machines their whole lives?

  This is an interesting question, but I think it mistakes a replacement for a tool on a fundamental level.

  I use LLMs from time to time to better explain a concept to myself, or to get ideas for how to rephrase some text I’m writing. But if I used the LLM all the time, for all my work, then me being there is sort of pointless.

  Because, the thing is, most LLMs aren’t used in a way that conveys info you already know. They primarily operate by simply regurgitating existing information (rather, associations between words) within their model weights. You don’t easily draw out any new insights, perspectives, or content, from something that doesn’t have the capability to do so.

  On top of that, let’s use a simple analogy. Let’s say I’m in charge of calculating the math required for a rocket launch. I designate all the work to an automated calculator, which does all the work for me. I don’t know math, since I’ve used a calculator for all math all my life, but the calculator should know.

  I am incapable of ever checking, proofreading, or even conceptualizing the output.

  If asked about the calculations, I can provide no answer. If they don’t work out, I have no clue why. And if I ever want to compute something more complicated than the calculator can, I can’t, because I don’t even know what the calculator does. I have to then learn everything it knows, before I can exceed its capabilities.

  We’ve always used technology to augment human capabilities, but replacing them often just means we can’t progress as easily in the long-term.

  Short-term, sure, these papers could be written and replaced by an LLM. Long-term, nobody knows how to write papers. If nobody knows how to properly convey information, where does an LLM get its training data on modern information? How do you properly explain to it what you want? How do you proofread the output?

  If you entirely replace human work with that of a machine, you also lose the ability to truly understand, check, and build upon the very thing that replaced you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Clever, clever⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Schools are not about education but about privilege, filtering, indoctrination, control, etc.

  Many people attending school, primarily higher education like college, are privileged because education costs money, and those with more money are often more privileged. That does not mean school itself is about privilege, it means people with privilege can afford to attend it more easily. Of course, grants, scholarships, and savings still exist, and help many people afford education.

  “Filtering” doesn’t exactly provide enough context to make sense in this argument.

  Indoctrination, if we go by the definition that defines it as teaching someone to accept a doctrine uncritically, is the opposite of what most educational institutions teach. If you understood how much effort goes into teaching critical thought as a skill to be used within and outside of education, you’d likely see how this doesn’t make much sense. Furthermore, the heavily diverse range of beliefs, people, and viewpoints on campuses often provides a more well-rounded, diverse understanding of the world, and of the people’s views within it, than a non-educational background can.

  “Control” is just another fearmongering word. What control, exactly? How is it being applied?

  Maybe if a “teacher” has to trick their students in order to enforce pointless manual labor, then it’s not worth doing.

  They’re not tricking students, they’re tricking LLMs that students are using to get out of doing the work required of them to get a degree. The entire point of a degree is to signify that you understand the skills and topics required for a particular field. If you don’t want to actually get the knowledge signified by the degree, then you can put “I use ChatGPT and it does just as good” on your resume, and see if employers value that the same.

  Maybe if homework can be done by statistics, then it’s not worth doing.

  All math homework can be done by a calculator. All the writing courses I did throughout elementary and middle school would have likely graded me higher if I’d used a modern LLM. All the history assignment’s questions could have been answered with access to Wikipedia.

  But if I’d done that, I wouldn’t know math, I would know no history, and I wouldn’t be able to properly write any long-form content.

  Even when technology exists that can replace functions the human brain can do, we don’t just sacrifice all attempts to use the knowledge ourselves because this machine can do it better, because without that, we would be limiting our future potential.

  This sounds fake. It seems like only the most careless students wouldn’t notice this “hidden” prompt or the quote from the dog.

  The prompt is likely colored the same as the page to make it visually invisible to the human eye upon first inspection.

  And I’m sorry to say, but often times, the students who are the most careless, unwilling to even check work, and simply incapable of doing work themselves, are usually the same ones who use ChatGPT, and don’t even proofread the output.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Seeking feedback: how should lemm.ee move forward with external images? (related to frequent broken images)⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is something I think would be the best solution. It seems like the best possible tradeoff between user privacy, and actual effectiveness.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨the problem of sex⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “Why sex?”

  10/10 starter question, no notes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sorry to be a bother...⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re welcome.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sorry to be a bother...⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The most asinine, self-centered thing I’ve seen today has got to be you assuming that the emotional state of your employees, which the goods and services you offer depend on for sales, is something that they should simply magically suppress for the sake of customers.

  Do you think this employee is going to check the mood of each customer?

  Buddy, if every customer going through the checkout line at the grocery store I work for had this pin on, it would make judging how much small talk people want loads easier, and would save me, and them, a huge mental headache. That said, if only I were to choose to wear that pin, I don’t think indicating to customers how up I am for small talk would make me an asshole.

  If you were my boss, and wanted to deliberately disregard my mental state because you felt it would make you a few more bucks, that would make you the asshole.

  Get your priorities straight.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon's system marked an item I returned a year ago as not received and charged me for this return, but the chat bot already knew they had received it.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Always demand a human support representative until it gives you the option to, then the actual human will usually manually process your refund if you complain about how the initial refund never happened.

  Bonus chance of success if you’re a Prime member and say you’re thinking about cancelling.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Whoever wrote this headline has never encountered a passenger train before in their lives⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The train also only runs between Erkner Station, and Tesla Sud, which is literally just the station right at the Tesla manufacturing facility in the area.

  “It’s also free to not just Tesla employees, but regular passengers as well.”

  That’s great and all, but are everyday people taking trains to go see the outside of a Tesla factory, then leaving again?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨America's Smartest Man Finds Something Interesting⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  TLDR; “weak people have to conform to social consensus otherwise they get hurt I guess?”

  I, on the other hand, am a big, strong, high T alpha male, that isn’t worried about what anyone thinks! I am a free thinker, and I know my opinions are correct because I instantly based this entire opinion on a subjective, anecdotal view of the world that I then extrapolated meaning out of, the best evidence! /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired fitness MMORPG where you progress by walking IRL. We're now accepting more people to the Closed Beta!⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not an expert on the process, but anyone making a custom repo should be able to store the F-Droid repo on GitHub.

  It looks like you wouldn’t need to make the app open-source either, as it should be capable of just accepting an apk file. (and possibly auto update from any GitHub releases page, not sure on that though)

  Again, not an expert, I haven’t made an F-Droid repo yet myself, so I may have understood something wrong, but it looks relatively straightforward according to their guide

  This wouldn’t make it available to users through the default preinstalled repo in F-Droid (which is heavily privacy-focused and limited in scale) but it would allow any user to just click a link or scan a QR code to add your repo to their F-Droid app.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired fitness MMORPG where you progress by walking IRL. We're now accepting more people to the Closed Beta!⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not an expert on what automation options they might offer, but I know Aurora Store will essentially just pass through anything you do on the Play Store since it’s just a frontend, and for F-Droid you can host a repo where you place any updated APK to automatically make it available to anyone linked to your repo.

  I know alternative payment options are probably a nightmare to properly set up and integrate, so it may not be worth the increased cut of revenue you’d get, but I’m really glad you’re considering it!

  I look forward to trying the game when it comes out :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired fitness MMORPG where you progress by walking IRL. We're now accepting more people to the Closed Beta!⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I love this and I haven’t even used it yet! 😅

  A few things:

  • I love the idea of paying one-time to play offline, but it’s not currently very possible to do in-app purchases on a ROM like GrapheneOS, which you mentioned in the post as being something users (myself included) have. Will there be a way to pay outside of the in-app purchase dialogue to get access? (i.e. donate through bmac, then link account to app temporarily to confirm) I’d definitely like more of my money to go to you, rather than a play store fee.

    Additionally, will there be a direct APK download at all, or will it only be available through the Play Store? (obviously privacy-preserving frontends like the Aurora Store exist, but it’s nice to have an APK download too 😊)

  • Thank you for making privacy the default setting, while still letting users share more if they want to. This is something I always love to see!

  I’d 100% sign up for the beta right now, but since my GrapheneOS phone doesn’t have the ability to use the Play Store beta features, I’ll hold off on that so I don’t take someone’s spot :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Words truly matter⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are people who think that “positive” or “negative” words have a magic-like effect on natural processes.

  From what I’ve seen, this was originally popularized in 2004 by Masaru Emoto’s book “The Hidden Messages in Water,” where part of his claims were that snowflakes would develop differently in containers labeled with negative or positive emotions. Image

  Naturally, this turned out to be a complete lie, but many people, such as those in the original post, still believe that words can somehow influence things like mold development on food.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Publishing Revenue⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I, too have seen the ability of Sci-Hub to give me free access to research papers.

  It’s terrifying how easy it is to get access to scientific literature for free! Wouldn’t recommend to anyone.