AnAmericanPotato

@AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are there still sites out there for some "beer money"? Where you get points or whatever to watch video's, sign up for things, complete surveys etc..?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Google Play Rewards sends you surveys and gives you like 10-20¢ per survey. Each one takes like 5 seconds to complete. I haven’t used it in a long time, but years ago most of the surveys were about shopping habits based on my location history, like “did you go to < store> in the past week? Did you pay with your credit card?” Or random things like “have you shopped for auto parts in the past week? Yes/no/prefer not to answer.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I am someone who works out daily and sweats a lot. Just doing laundry doesn't seem to adequately clean the underarms of my shirts. What are some ways to clean these areas of my clothing better?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  A little white vinegar works well too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨For those who are super against to AI/LLM today. What was the catalyst how did you reach to this point? If you have the power to change our current situation what would you do.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Two main catalysts:

  1. Seeing how dumb 99% of products are.

  2. Seeing how dumb 99% of users are.

  Call my naive, but I truly did not see it coming. I didn’t expect cognitive surrender. I didn’t expect the whole world to start continvoucly morging. I didn’t expect lawyers to submit fake case citations, again and again and again.

  I didn’t expect society as a whole to just shrug their shoulders and decide that accuracy doesn’t matter.

  I also didn’t expect how much or how rapidly the bubble would inflate. GPU prices were already crazy, but now RAM and even SSD prices have roughly doubled in the past year, with no end in sight, with all production toward data centers. This is a disaster. We’re seeing higher prices for downgraded machines, like Microsoft’s 8GB Surface.

  Seeing as we’re all on Lemmy, I hope that I will not need to belabor the point that centralization is bad. The shift toward data centers and away from personal devices is a shift toward centralization. It’s a shift toward greater censorship and away from freedom.

  It’s not coincidence that this is happening at the same time as fascism is rising all around the world, that online ID laws are passing all over the world, that privacy-protecting technology like VPNs and end-to-end encryption are under greater and greater attack, and that knowledge repositories like The Internet Archive and Wikipedia are under attack. The shift is toward governmental control of the Internet, of access to knowledge in general.

  Now the US government gets the final say on who will have access to ChatGPT 5.6. Surprise, surprise.

  I’m not anti-AI or anti-LLM per se. I am anti-corruption and anti-bullshit. I am pro-consumer, pro-privacy, pro-individuality. In practice, that means I am anti-AI. Or more generally (but less strongly), I am anti-cloud.

  As for what I would do: well the real solutions are the same as the solutions to most of modern society’s problems. We need extensive economic reform. But barring that, we need to do whatever we can to shift the balance back toward personal, private computation. We don’t need more datacenters. We don’t need trillion-parameter models at all. The only thing they are good at is basic stuff you don’t need them for (unless you’re an idiot), and generating well-masked bullshit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do doctors not seem to give a fuck about pain? Is this just an American doctor thing, or is it universal?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My experience, also in the US, has been the opposite: I get prescribed addictive painkillers “just in case”.

  Last time I had surgery, they told me to take ibuprofen for pain, and they also gave me a prescription for vicodin if the pain was too great. I live in an area with a significant opioid abuse problem, and they’re handing it out like candy. They didn’t tell me “call back if it’s severe” or anything like that, they just gave me the prescription. I stuck with the ibuprofen, and realistically I could have done without even that.

  I suspect your experience is largely due to sexism. I’ve heard so many stories like this, where doctors don’t even think of taking women seriously.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are we so afraid of cockroaches?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As others have said: they’re nasty. There are a myriad of health risks associated with roaches in your home. They definitely do us harm, albeit not as directly or obviously as, say, ticks or mosquitoes.

  I consider my fear of roaches to be entirely rational. They directly carry diseases, and they produce allergens. They exacerbate or even cause Asthma. Also, it’s never good to have decaying corpses of any type inside your walls, which is where they will end up if you have an infestation.

  They will eat anything. They will go anywhere. They will thrive anywhere. I’ve seen wallpaper come right off the wall because roaches ate all the goddamn glue. You cannot get rid of them without a whole lot of poison (if even), which is itself a health risk. If I see a roach, I go to DEFCON 2. (DEFCON 1 is reserved for bedbugs.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are we so afraid of cockroaches?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s bad enough, but it can get so much worse. That can lead to an emergency room visit and permanent ear damage. It’s so fucking nasty that I won’t go into details, but a quick web search will tell you more if you have a strong stomach.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do I think music sounds better on my old MP3 player?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  320kbps mp3 is actually very good.

  Most steaming services will use much worse than 320kbps mp3. Some of the premium plans have options to do lossless but even then, it won’t be much better unless they’re encoding it from a higher-quality master.

  Also, most phones have okay-at-best DACs. Devices designed specifically for music (like mp3 players), even very old ones, could realistically have better DACs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If Company A tells your ISP we'll call Company B, that you are downloading DMCA stuff and your Company B lets you know this. Doesn't Company A need at least a warrant for entering?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t see anyone entering your home in this scenario.

  If you broadcast your IP address in a torrent swarm, that’s now public information. Your ISP can match that IP and timestamp to a customer. None of this information resides in your home and there’s no wiretapping or anything like that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would the US (if not the entire world) be better if that kid didn't break in to Harambe's enclosure over in the Cincinnati Zoo back in 2016?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you ever conflate a people with a country, you’ve made a big, dangerous logical fallacy.

  I live here because I was born here. That says nothing about my moral character.

  I’ve done what I can as a citizen. It has not been enough. I’m not going to stop.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Then revise it until you can read it without hating it.

  And, uh, don’t get too caught up on that part.

  Lots of artists never stop hating their own work. Art and neurosis — name a more iconic duo. At some point you just need to move on and let it be what it is. Perfectionism is a powerful thing, but it must be tamed.

  This is especially true when you’re starting out, before you’ve developed an intuition for which paths are worth following. It’s easy to get stuck in a loop trying to “fix” something that’s never going to be what you want it to be. “Quality over quantity” is the more common refrain, but for a beginner it should be the opposite, because what you need more than anything at that point is just practice. Related: austinkleon.com/…/quantity-leads-to-quality-the-o…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there an "Avoid Amazon" community for people who want to support smaller online retailers?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think they’re owned by Amazon, but the shipping email gave me an “Amazon Logistics US tracking number”. I guess that means Amazon handles warehousing and shipping? I don’t know what the practical difference is between buying on their own site (which used Shop.com for payment processing, fwiw) vs buying on Amazon.

  There are classes of products that are basically impossible to find locally now. Or if you can find the products, they’re outrageously expensive. One example is computer cables. 20 years ago I could walk into any dollar store and get all kinds of cables and adapters for $1-5. Now the only things I see locally are, like, $30 HDMI cables. I’m not paying $30 for a cable, especially not when that money would be going to another huge corp like Best Buy or Target. I’m willing to pay a bit more to shop local but there are limits, and there are so few truly local places left.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there an "Avoid Amazon" community for people who want to support smaller online retailers?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If that fails I do a web search and buy from another platform

  This is something where I think we could benefit from the wisdom of a community.

  Naively searching the web will generally yield >90% results centered around Amazon. Even if you exclude all Amazon domains, you need to sift through all the listicles and “review” sites that are really just Amazon ads with Amazon affiliate links inside.

  Same deal if you want to use deal aggregators like slickdeals. The overwhelming majority of posts there are from Amazon, or subsidiaries like Woot.

  Heck, recently I bought something direct from a brand’s own web site, only learning that they shipped through Amazon when I got the Amazon tracking number. I’m honestly not sure if I could have known that before completing my order.

  It is getting ever harder to avoid giving Jeff Bezos more money.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What if programmers rewrote the English language?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  And logical punctuation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do stunt people fall down stairs without hurting themselves?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  One of the things I love about all the old Jackie Chan movies is that they always include stunt outtakes in the credits. You can see how some things go wrong. Bloody nose here, broken foot there. Even the best of the best get hurt. I don’t think you’ll find a professional stuntperson who’s never broken a bone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do people have an issue with people in their mid-20s dating much older people?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  k

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨does the quality of downloaded youtube video increase after being downloaded?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  yt-dlp requests a specific format and downloads that in its entirety. When you use the YouTube web site, it dynamically adjusts based on your internet connection. If there’s lag, then it’ll drop you to a lower bitrate. So that’s one possible explanation.

  There’s a little gear button on the YouTube page that lets you manually select the quality you want. If you specifically select e.g. 1080p then it won’t drop you down, it’ll just lag if your internet is too slow. I’m not 100% sure if that also applies to audio.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If by “modern” you mean anything developed in the last 10,000 years, then no. We know humans lived to roughly the same maximum ages back then as today.

  If you extend that to 100,000 years, then…maybe? It’s hard to say but it’s plausible at least.

  The fossil record is not so detailed. It’s hard to estimate the age of fossils, and it’s hard to draw far-reaching conclusions from the limited number of well-preserved fossils that have been discovered. Most research doesn’t say anything more than “adult” or “child”.

  There are some techniques used to estimate more precise ages, and the estimates of the age at the time of death for fossils from the Upper Paleolithic period (12k-50k years ago) or older is rather young.

  The Smithsonian Institution has this to say about “Nandy”, a Neanderthal fossil from around 40,000 years ago:

  scientists estimate he lived until 35–45 years of age. He would have been considered old to another Neandertal, and he would probably not have been able to survive without the care of his social group.

  It’s similar for early Homo Sapiens fossils. At the Dolní Věstonice site, there was a ceremonially buried woman who’s estimated to be in her 40s, from about 30,000 years ago. She is thought to be one of the elders.

  I’m not aware of any others that are generally believed to have been much older than that. That doesn’t mean that humans couldn’t or didn’t survive for longer, but it was surely more rare. That doesn’t really support wild claims of what’s “hardcoded” or what a “natural” lifespan is. There were certainly more things that could kill you 50,000 years ago than there are today, and most of them have nothing to do with DNA and have little bearing on the maximum lifespan.

  The article is written very strangely, to the point where I honestly don’t know what they’re trying to say. They keep referring to the “natural” lifespan but never explain what exactly they mean by that, then they slide right into talking about “maximum” lifespan.

  If you ignore every time they say “maximum” and assume by “natural” they mean “general life expectancy of an adult human”, then it seems fair enough. But statements like “Neanderthals and Denisovans…had a maximum lifespan of 37.8 years” are utter bullshit. I honestly think they were trying to say something completely different, but then decided “maximum” sounded cooler. Probably because of the X.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is this picture idea immature?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Dating website: probably way too soon to share, just looks cringe

  You might be right in this case, but I also want to point out that most dating profile fucking suck, and it’s not because they are too “cringe” or immature; it’s because they are all the same generic pictures. Wedding, gym, hiking, dead-fish, bar, dog.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is this picture idea immature?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  This is the kind of thing I call a “loser filter”. It stops the kind of people you don’t want to deal with from entering your life in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does tea taste different when I drink it outside?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Likely this. Temperature and humidity also affect your sense of taste and smell, plus they can affect a hot drink’s evaporation rate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Short attention span⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  After working for many years in a “fast pace environment” I can’t help but notice that I have increasing difficulties to do simple tasks.

  How many years are we talking?

  A lot of what you describe sounds like you’re starting to have “senior moments”. If you’re past 50, that’s pretty normal. Which is not to say it’s good. “Normal” does not mean good. It just means common. I don’t think you should look for anything exotic if the mundane explanation fits your observations.

  Low-tech suggestion: Keep a notepad in your pocket. Make to-do lists. Cross items off it when you’re done. Maybe put the time in when you cross it off.

  • Put water on stove
  • Turn off stove
  • Make tea
  • Drink tea
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why hasn't video quality improved much over the past ten years?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep. On a Blu-ray disk, you have 25-100GB of space to work with. The Blu-ray standard allows up to 40mbps for 1080p video (not counting audio). Way more for 4K.

  Netflix recommends a 5mbps internet connection for 1080p, and 15mbps for 4K. Reportedly they cut down their 4K streams to 8mbps last year, though I haven’t confirmed. That’s a fraction of what Blu-ray uses for 1080p, never mind 4K.

  I have some 4K/UHD Blu-rays, and for comparison they’re about 80mbps for video.

  They use similar codecs, too, so the bitrates are fairly comparable. UHD Blu-rays use H.265, which is still a good video codec. Some streaming sites use AV1 (at least on some supported devices) now, which is a bit more efficient, but nowhere near enough to close that kind of gap in bitrate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the minimum number of words needed to communicate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I affect a British accent

  Lower-effort life hack: wear a Canadian maple leaf prominently. Put a patch on your bags, get a baseball cap, wear a t-shirt. Project “Canadian” any way you can.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Lots of recent (meaning past 20 years or so) research shows that our gut bacteria play quite a large role in our mental functions, too.

  The concept of “the self” as a single, indivisible, unchanging thing is simply not compatible with observed reality. To be alive is to be in a constant state of flux.

  Is there such a thing as an eternal soul? Uh, maybe…but if there is, it’s not going to be responsible for the things we typically associate with individual living people. It’s not going to have your sense of humor, or your memories, or your opinions, or your math skills. We enough about all of those things to confidently say they are not eternal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is anyone else getting a bit of schadenfreude from the news each day?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  If someone was uninformed and misinformed enough to think voting for Trump was even remotely in their own self-interest in the first place, then there is almost no disaster Trump can cause that will not be instantly reframed as “just imagine how much worse it would be under Dems!”

  Dying of COVID? Well at least you’re not dying from forced vaccination!

  Layoffs due to tariffs? LOL what’s a tariff?

  Can’t get benefits you need to survive? Well clearly the Welfare Queens left him no choice! It’s their fault!

  It’s no coincidence that Trump in particular and Republicans in general relentlessly attack education and free information. They’ve already brainwashed enough of the population to win elections, and they want to make sure the general population has no way out of that hole. This is why they’re attacking Wikipedia and Internet Archive. This is why Project 2025’s first order of business is to eliminate the Department of Education. This is why Musk bought fucking Twitter in the first place, most likely. This is why they’re now trying to repeal Section 230 (with the help of some Judas Dems), so they can bully any web site into taking down any information they don’t like.

  The information apocalypse is upon us.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is thinly-veiled political whinging really a question just because you used a question mark?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  www.dictionary.com/browse/whinge

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨people who drink, how long do your hangovers last?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  About half a day. If it’s really bad, a full day.

  But I don’t usually let it get that bad. Hydrating and eating properly before, during, and after a night of drinking will do wonders. Ideally, you should be hydrating all through the evening, not just chugging a liter or two at the end.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does Gmail have more spam now?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve noticed an uptick as well. This isn’t the first time it’s happened over the years, though. Spam is a cat-and-mouse game. Every now and then spammers learn how to break through, and it takes some time for Google to adapt.

  I’ve been surprised by the latest wave, because it’s so obviously spam. Mostly phishing attempts full of misspellings and even numbers in place of letters, like F1del1ty instead of Fidelity. Should be pretty easy to filter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there anything my girlfriend and I have to consider when traveling to America based on our skin differences?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Racism in America is real. Anyone telling you otherwise is probably just living a charmed life and incapable of accepting that their personal experience is not universal.

  I don’t have the time or energy to prove this exhaustively, but here’s a starting point: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_while_black

  And here are a few choice quotes.

  In 2019, as reported by NBC, the Stanford Open Policing Project found that “police stopped and searched black and Latino drivers on the basis of less evidence than used in stopping white drivers, who are searched less often but are more likely to be found with illegal items.”

  Please refer to the citations on that page for more details. Lots of studies in various states showing the same thing. The fact that the mere existence of racial profiling in America is still debated, when it has been consistently proven again and again for decades, is itself a clear indicator of a different kind of racism.

  Here’s a little story that stuck in my memory, about how a white woman finally came to realize that racial harassment by police was a real thing. It’s kind of hilarious, in a dark, face-palmy kind of way. franklywrite.com/…/a-white-woman-racism-and-a-poo…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there anything my girlfriend and I have to consider when traveling to America based on our skin differences?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s explicitly forbidden for anyone to discriminate against you based on your race or ethnicity

  Ironically, it’s very common to be asked for this information specifically because of anti-discrimination laws, so they can demonstrate statistically fair practices. I always see a box for this on medical forms, new-hire paperwork, etc. I believe the law requires it to be optional and only used for regulatory reports. So that’s probably what OP heard about.