AnAmericanPotato

@AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would you do if you got message that says "do not look outside"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Telling people not to do something with no compelling explanation will surely increase the odds of people doing that thing. Honestly, the better strategy would be to say nothing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does the microwave button have a "popcorn" button when every microwave popcorn brand says "DO NOT USE THE POPCORN BUTTON"?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well TIL.

  I’ve been lied to all my life!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does the microwave button have a "popcorn" button when every microwave popcorn brand says "DO NOT USE THE POPCORN BUTTON"?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My microwave has a bunch of different modes. Most of them are a bit more complex than “run at X power for Y seconds”. Like, the “defrost” or “potato” settings (yes there is a “potato” setting) will cycle the power on and off in bursts, which gives you more even defrosting and less explosive potatoes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is behind the current Lemmy meme about 4 being a private key?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. The burden is high, though, and it’s outside even most tech-savvy admins’ scope of knowledge.

  I mean, I could not tell you off the top of my head how many certificate stores exist on my system and what uses each of them. Is curl safe? Is dnf safe? apt-get? zypper? pip? npm? homebrew? flatpak? Do any of my umpteen Flatpak apps have vulnerable library versions baked in? Do Electron apps bundle their own certificate stores? What about <random bullshit> that has its own built-in autoupdater (less of a problem on Linux than Mac or Windows, but still)?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is behind the current Lemmy meme about 4 being a private key?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  arstechnica.com/…/the-internet-goes-on-high-alert…

  It’s hard to properly describe how big a fuckup this is. All I will say is that all the coverage I’ve seen is underselling the potential for harm. There’s nothing you can do except update your shit, pray that everyone in the upstream supply chain of every service you use has updated their shit, and take comfort in the fact that there are no proven wild exploits out there (yet).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why do reverse thrusters work on an airplane, but a fan on a sailboat doesn't work?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They tested the fan on a sailboat on MythBusters, and were shocked that it actually worked. mythresults.com/blow-your-own-sail

  It didn’t work well, but it did work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech hobbyists, How are you avoiding the crazy prices for computers and newer tech?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been lucky with my upgrade/build timings. Built my first PC right before the crypto madness, and did my last major upgrade right before the AI madness.

  I’m going to run my current system until it crumbles to dust. With any luck, the market will have settled a bit by then.

  As for projects, I have lots of old “useless” tech that I can work with. Like old laptops, phones, Raspberry Pis, even mobos and other spare PC parts. Building small is more interesting to me than building big.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I’m watching something on tv and a dude strangled another dude with rattle snake. Is that possible? What’s the tensile strength of a snake?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You can strangle somebody with your arm.

  But can you strangle someone with a dead arm? It sounds very different than using a live arm. Without any muscle activation I think you’d be putting a lot more stress on weak points in the snake’s body and it might just tear apart. But I have no first-hand experience strangling people with live or dead arms (or snakes), so I’m just playing armchair murderer here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Character.AI promised me⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  No idea!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Character.AI promised me⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  First I’ve heard “yumeship”. www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=yumeship

  A yumeshipper - or a Yume - is someone that cherishes and loves a fictional character so deeply, they see themselves with that character.

  “Yume” means “dream” in Japanese.

  “F/O” apparently means “Fictional Other”.

  I’m not sure if they understand the difference between real people, fictional characters, and chatbots.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My 1TB hard drive took a crap reformatted it, lost all my info, and it works now. How do I use a cloud or drive online to backup my stuff so I am not relying just on physical and can dl anywhere?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’ll have to pay for that much cloud storage. How much depends on your specific needs.

  Backblaze offers “unlimited” PC backup for $9/month: www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal

  If you want more control, you can save some money by using a tool that can work with a wide variety of cloud storage providers, and then pick a cheaper provider, instead of using an all-in-one service like Backblaze.

  Borg Backup is a free tool that can work with lots of storage providers. This is a great option for more technical users, and there are also some GUI tools that make it easier to use like Vorta (Mac and Linux; I’m not personally familiar with any GUIs for Windows). Borg handles data de-duplication, compression, and encryption. It’s great for local backups as well as cloud backups. I’m not sure what the cheapest option here, but Hetzner supports Borg Backup in their storage boxes, which go for €3.20/month for 1TB. This

  rclone is similar, though it’s more of a sync tool than a backup tool. Depending on your setup, this distinction could be purely academic. It handles encryption, incremental syncing, and a lot of other advanced uses. Like Borg, you can choose from almost any cloud storage provider or use local drives.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are expressions like "women artists" or "women writers" used?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s kind of the opposite. You’re talking about using “female” as a noun instead of an adjective. And for sure, don’t do that to refer to humans! But it’s perfectly normal and correct as an adjective.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Others have provided good advice. I’ll only add that you might also think about celiac / gluten sensitivity. There’s a wide range of possible symptoms there. You could just try cutting out gluten for a week or two and see if the situation improves, because it’s not always easy to diagnose.

  But yes, do talk to a doctor, and be prepared to push back and advocate for yourself if they brush you off.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are so many new programming languages being developed?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of the time, a new language is created to make one particularly difficult thing easy.

  For Go, that one thing was concurrency. You CAN do concurrency in C or Python or whatever, but it’s not really built into the language.

  For Rust, that one thing was memory safety. C leaves it all up to you, so it’s very easy to make mistakes that lead to memory leaks, crashes, or security vulnerabilities.

  If you program in any language for a significant amount of time, you’re bound to find a few things that you do a million times that you wish were easier to do right and harder to do wrong. Some people see those problems and say “I can make something better”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In this day in age is it still hard for a person to "come out the closest" ? Or do we need the boomer generation to go away until it is so acceptable it becomes laughable for both parties?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on where you live, and what kind of social circles you’re in.

  In some places, you might get a shrug.

  In other places, you might get murdered.

  Or anything in between.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you maintain a phone number in different countries on the long-run ?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Only for US numbers, I think.

• ⁨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..?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨months⁩ 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]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And logical punctuation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do stunt people fall down stairs without hurting themselves?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨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.