fine_sandy_bottom
@fine_sandy_bottom@lemmy.federate.cc
- Comment on How do you officially pronounce a possessive like: " Travis' "? 2 weeks ago:
TIL I guess.
I’m concerned that using the correct form will make me look like an idiot though.
- Comment on Vivaldi polishes its browser, adds a dashboard • The Register 3 weeks ago:
I’m not going to watch a video about polishing a turd but I assume the turd remains a turd.
You’ll not I didn’t actually make the claim that its not possible.
- Comment on Vivaldi polishes its browser, adds a dashboard • The Register 3 weeks ago:
There’s a popular phrase “you can’t polish a turd”. The meaning in this case being that if you put a nice UI on chromium it’s still chromium.
- Comment on Vivaldi polishes its browser, adds a dashboard • The Register 3 weeks ago:
Hey check out this turd I polished.
- Comment on How come people who are against abortion are in favor of the death penalty? Kind of seems like a contradicition/ 4 weeks ago:
It doesn’t work as a deterrent though. In states that have the death penalty people still do bad things.
- Comment on Has "Self-Driving" devolved? 4 weeks ago:
Yeah. I tend to agree.
Being able to drive without killing someone is only one aspect of an autonomous vehicle, and security is one that I’m not confident about in the least.
I’ve noticed that my wife’s Level 2 car is just hopeless outside of the city. Sure that’s where most people live and it’s fine for most people.
Driving on country roads it spends more time having self-disabled it’s autonomous features than not, simply because it can’t see the road or what have you.
- Comment on Has "Self-Driving" devolved? 4 weeks ago:
You’re not wrong, but that’s not really what I meant although perhaps I didn’t explain it very well.
Another way to say the same thing, if you group together all the various components or aspects of “driving”, 95% of them might be solved relatively easily, but getting the last 5% right is extraordinarily difficult.
It’s deceiving because the first time you saw a Level 2 car in 2018 it’s natural to think that if they’ve made so much progress seemingly overnight, then surely in the next few years we will have Level 6 cars.
I do take your point that humans are also good drivers 95% of the time and mistakes only occur within 5% of situations. The issue there is the imperative that autonomous cars must be better than a human in all circumstances. If a human makes, on average, 5 serious mistakes every 500,000km, but an autonomous car makes 6, you’d probably not want to put your family in that autonomous car.
- Comment on Why do some men dis other men who sit to pee? (& follow-up questions) 4 weeks ago:
I just do whatever I feel like doing at the time.
I’ve never heard someone’s strong opinion about it. Do guys really diss guys for sitting down?
- Comment on Has "Self-Driving" devolved? 4 weeks ago:
The tech hasn’t regressed, it just hasn’t progressed while the marketing has.
Look up the automation levels: au.pcmag.com/…/is-your-car-autonomous-the-6-level…
My wife’s car is 6 years old, and is level 2. Nothing amazing now, but kinda cool in 2018.
Since then expectations have increased dramatically, and the problems you’re hearing about are cars expected to have the higher levels of automation but failing to achieve that.
It seems like this is one of those technical problems that gets exponentially more difficult to solve, the closer we get to solving it. What I mean is, suppose a human averages 100,000km per “incident”. It was easy to make a car do 90,000km per incident, less so to have it do 95,000km per incident, but we’re finding it very very difficult to get that last 5% performance.
- Comment on Has "Self-Driving" devolved? 4 weeks ago:
Obvious shill gonna shill obviously.
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to technology@beehaw.org | 51 comments
- Comment on Google turns to nuclear to power AI data centres 4 weeks ago:
Yeah I don’t know enough about the technologies involved to have an informed opinion but solutions involving nuclear always seem like this…
“Just let us keep doing what we’re doing while we invent a new technology that will solve all our problems.”
Obviously, the answer is… we absolutely should invent this new technology but while we’re doing that we can transition to renewables and avoid grifts that rely on absurd energy usage like crypto and AI.
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to technology@beehaw.org | 10 comments
- Comment on Do you actually care about your friend's new baby, vacation abroad or similar life events or are you just being nice? 4 weeks ago:
I think your angle is a bit reductive.
Conversations or interactions generally don’t go from 0 to how-dare-you-not-care-about-my-baby instantaneously.
For example, in a cafe, order coffee, I’ve never met the barista before, they’re not going to flop out baby photos and grill me about how much I don’t care about their kidlet. They might make casual conversation, how are you, great day, bit tired, newborn up all night, oh I have a newborn too, she’s been unwell, yeah ours had HFMD last week, oh that’s tough, is she better now, was the fever bad, and so on and so forth. What I’m saying is, it’s through the too and fro that you guage how interested someone is in the things that are important to you.
If my sister had a child then she would probably just expect me to care about her new baby because she’s family and we see each other every week and the new baby is going to be part of my life for the rest of my life.
Another thing that happens is… people just get excited about things and that’s ok too. I became a new father almost a year ago. To me, it’s the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me. Of course I understand that it’s not very amazing to anyone else, but for those first few weeks of course I was excited about it. It would be fine if I were to “overshare” with my barista, but it would also be fine if they were to tell me to keep my baby photos to myself.
- Comment on It really is tedious 4 weeks ago:
I used to think that but honestly now I avoid it where I can. Like between a wall and cornice a sash brush is fine. Removing switches like like fittings and switches is better than taping too.
- Comment on Bless 🙏🏻 4 weeks ago:
Someone will be asking in a moment to tell us that this is shitpost community, some people are too uptight, that its dark humour, and that we should just block the community if we don’t like it.
Only a child can find things like rape and suicide funny, because they lack the emotional depth to understand the ramifications of these concepts.
- Comment on Why don't we have cool vending machines in the US? 4 weeks ago:
I’m sure it’s possible but I suspect it’s simply not cost effective.
Removing grease requires hot water, harsh solvents, and scrubbing. If you’ve ever cleaned an oven or bbq or whatever I’m sure you’d agree that it would be very difficult to automate.
- Comment on Why don't we have cool vending machines in the US? 4 weeks ago:
I don’t understand the question.
You have a vending machine in a train station cooking greasy popcorn all day. Is there a machine that can clean that ?
Baked on greasy-buttery-ness is very difficult to clean.
- Comment on Why don't we have cool vending machines in the US? 4 weeks ago:
Is that really what’s happening in the picture OP posted? Like someone puts foil wrapped morsels of… food in there once a week and the machine just keeps a couple hot and ready to go?
Seems very unappealing.
That said here in Australia the food you get at gas stations / road houses is more or less the same, just that there’s a person to heat it up and hand it to you.
- Comment on Why don't we have cool vending machines in the US? 4 weeks ago:
Needs to be cleaned every day.
- Comment on You're not you when you're dooming. 5 weeks ago:
I think that’s pretty much what we have now.
The power & wealth imbalance is the same anyway.
The wealthiest man in the world is installing a God king. It’s a perversion of democracy.
- Comment on If Republicans have Project 2025. Why don't Democrats have their own guide book? 5 weeks ago:
This is the answer.
Writing a playbook is authoritarian.
- Comment on Why are peole hating on .world? 5 weeks ago:
God that fucking bot.
The bot itself is only mildly offensive, but the fieflord bot-love is just repugnant.
About a month ago news did a “feedback about the bot” thing, in which they declared undying love for the bot above all things and declared any input other than breathless support for the bot to be vote manipulated misinformation.
There were about 3 mods involved, all contradicting each other, and themselves, very condescending, and very sooky and sulky. “One of the mods almost resigned over this!” kind of stuff.
You had to start every comment with “look I know you guys are doing your best and investing all your free time as volunteers but…”
- Comment on The British government is transferring sovereignty of an island in the Indian Ocean to Mauritius next week, potentially impacting the existence of the .io domain. 5 weeks ago:
Yes. I think it would be hard to find anyone who thinks chagossians should not be consulted in determining what happens with their island.
The stark reality is that it’s probably just not possible, in any meaningful way.
I have first hand experience in this type of negotiation with community / minority group trying to navigate the best outcomes for them with their limited resources, although of course nothing so dramatic as deciding what to do with an island.
The first problem you encounter is that their is very limited governance within the group, or no governance, or extraordinarily poor governance which is acting against the best interests of the group. Straight off the bat you can end up mediating internal disputes which might be generational feuds. For chagossians, you might ask who gets consulted and are they reasonable representatives of the group.
The next problem you encounter is that the demands of the group may very likely be unreasonable and unachievable, and the group might become hostile if they are unmet. For example you might think possible outcomes in this circumstances are stay with UK, join Mauritius, or become a sovereign nation. What happens if the group demands a fourth option, a new island, in the mid latitudes, unpopulated, potential for local fishing industry, et cetera. You can’t really negotiate with a group that would make such a demand.
Another problem is that, well, the stark reality is that maybe the Chagossians don’t really have any meaningful options. What’s the point of negotiating if the only potential outcome is being subsumed by Mauritius and accepting whatever they will provide.
In addition, no matter how much you consult with them, there will always be someone that says they weren’t consulted and they’re bitter because they didn’t receive their new tropical island.
Finally, if things need to be resolved in a timely manner, then involving the Chagossians isn’t going to achieve that. The only option is to hand them over to Mauritius and let them manage all of these issues that have been simmering away since the dawn of time.
- Comment on The British government is transferring sovereignty of an island in the Indian Ocean to Mauritius next week, potentially impacting the existence of the .io domain. 5 weeks ago:
I don’t really know anything about Chagos, but is that really what the islanders want? A quick google suggests the islanders might find it difficult to agree.
Most micro island nations just aren’t viable as a sovereign nation in 2024. They need air travel, health services, telecommunications, building materials, food imports, education, et cetera. Sadly they just aren’t able to produce anything of any value with which to pay for all of those things.
In many cases they end up trading their sovereignty for political positions. It looks like there’s already a detention centre for sri lankans in Chagos. China will happily pay then millions a year for them not to recognise Taiwan as a sovereign state, which is kinda ironic.
Nauru is a fairly interesting island nation. They sold the rights to their phosphate (bird poo) 80 (?) some years ago, and after it was extracted they were left with a moon scape. Sadly they squandered the money with some comically bad investments, including a broadway production IIRC. Health outcomes are pretty terrible.
It looks like there’s already a military base in Chagos, so I guess that’s something they can trade on.
Another problem with sovereignty is migration rights. If you’re born somewhere like that you would absolutely want the opportunity to go to university in Australia or UK or similar.
- Comment on It appenes that my email has gotten on the hands of some scammers with a botnet or something. What do I do? 5 weeks ago:
No one cares about catching specific phishing campaigns.
- Comment on It appenes that my email has gotten on the hands of some scammers with a botnet or something. What do I do? 5 weeks ago:
I gave up on this years ago.
Figuring out how they got hold of your email won’t be very satisfying. It’s not possible, but if it were you would find it’s some obscure forum you signed up for 10 years ago to make the search function work, which hasn’t updated their forum software during that 10 years, and is now leaking email addresses.
Point is, the horse has already bolted and now your email address is on the lists that get sold on the dark net. There’s no going back.
My understanding with spam / phishing is that most email providers will identify and remove 95% of it. gmail will catch 99.9% just because of the volume of emails going through their servers. I personally would pry my eyes out with a fork before using gmail so I’m stuck receiving 5% of spam. It’s nothing really. Every day (or several days) I look at my inbox, action and archive as appropriate, and delete the rest. It literally takes less than 1 second because I would have to “delete the rest” anyway.
As others have mentioned, “catch-all” email addresses are one method to kind of mitigate or manage the problem, but ultimately I’ve found it to be a cool trick but ultimately inconvenient and maybe pointless.
- Comment on No longer dating 1 month ago:
Hah.
Firstly, I wasn’t complaining.
Secondly, I suspect I’ve touched a nerve. Are you the fieflord of some Alexandrian repository of enlightened content and discord? Do you find it fulfilling?
- Comment on No longer dating 1 month ago:
Because modding online communities is a huge waste of time for anyone who isn’t desperate for validation.
- Comment on No longer dating 1 month ago:
I’ve been thinking about this lately.
You’re right in that there’s no central “authority”, but lemmy has become very centralised with all the content on a few big instances in fiefdoms controlled by a few mods who seem to be weirdos with too much time on their hands.
I guess the benefit is, if an instance or a mod does something really egregious there’s the potential to just move to another instance.
I think we need another few iterations of exodus from other platforms because of whatever shitstorm for lemmy to develop its own vibrance.