Aceticon

@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨34% of the US population doesn't vote. Why do polticalitcians cling to the idea that these voters can't be reached?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  From my own impression as a member of a small political party in my own country who joined not out of tribalism but simply because they seemed to mostly want the same things as I do, party members live in a bubble of people who are heavilly into politics and understand the importance of politics, whilst the leadership specifically in addition to this are also mostly surrounded by generally unquestioningly hero worship from the common party members plus they tend to have quite limited life experience outside the party as they’ve joined it as young adults (maybe when they were at university and involved in student movements) and it and its internal environment have always been a large part of their lives.

  Those people usually see the supporters of their political adversaries in the same way as fans of a sports club see fans of other clubs, and don’t really “get” the point of view of people who don’t vote at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just Beware⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  “Beware of shape-shifting murderous alien” would’ve required a bigger board, so it’s cheaper to put it like this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that in the database space MS-SQL was never the best option at any level or at least not for long.

  Oracle could be said to still be the best amongst databases for high performance and very large datasets, but in my experience in the smaller and mid-sized databases space things like Postegres and even No-SQL databases surprassed MS-SQL already back in the late 90s, early 00s.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The Apache Web Server

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I hope she found herself⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  “Curious how the name of the person we’re calling for is the same as my name”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I hope she found herself⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  When it comes to finding oneself, the journey matters more than the destination…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You cannot learn without failing.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know.

  The whole thing sounds like it will lead into fights amongst true book clubs because the members of each will think theirs is the true book, not the other ones, and the fights might even be worse between the true book clubs that were originally the same. I all sounds kinda dangerous.

  Plus, how would I know if the book of your true book club is in fact the one and only true book if there are other true book clubs which like you book also claim to have the one and only true book and its a different book?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you use your blinker in a car?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  First thing: the blinkers are for your own safety, but they’re also for other people’s safety and to help improve the flow of traffic (for example, if somebody waiting at a T-junction to go into your lane sees in a timely fashion that you’re going to exit at the junction, they’ll know earlier they can come in rather than have to wait to see what you actually do and this kind of thing times many such situations adds up to better traffic flow).

  Second thing: it’s a lot easier and cognitively simpler to just do it without thinking rather considering the situation to see if you should do it or not and a good mental trigger point to train that as an instinctive movement on is “if I’m going to turn out of my lane, I’ll turn the blinker on for the side I’m turning to” - so, turning of that road -> blinker on that side; changing lane -> blinker on the side I’m moving to; going to stop and park on a side of the road -> blinker on that side.

  Personally I just use the blinkers for all such situations and don’t even have to think about it, and as for my first point, that just informs how early I do it (I’ve trained myself to do it quite a bit before I turn). This does mean that at times I’ll use the blinkers when there is nobody else around to actually use that information, simply because I’m not actually thinking about “should I do it or should I not?” I’m just unthinkingly executing a trained impulse. Never had any problems with excessive wear and tear of blinker lights and since I don’t need to think about it I can focus on more important things, so as I see it even end at the cost of at times using the blinkers for nobody to see whether is really no point, I’m still better of having trained myself to do it like this.

  That said blinker usage amongst drivers massively depends on the country and the general driving culture there. For example were I come from, Portugal, most people only use the blinkers in situations were they stand to gain from it themselves (for example when exiting a road to the left, crossing a lane, were others might give you way, out of good manners if they know your intentions), then of the rest most will use it for the safety of other cars but almost none will do it for the safety of pedestrians, whilst in The Netherlands (were I picked up my current habits on this) they’re generally pretty thorough on using blinkers in all situations they should quite independently of seeing or not people who might use that information (possibly because of all the bicycles around, as they’re often hard to spot using the mirrors when in certain positions relative to a car which are exactly the positions were knowing that the car wants to turn is important for the safety of the cyclist)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You cannot learn without failing.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you guys have a new true book per week or is it more of a true book a month club?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You cannot learn without failing.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  God works in mysterious ways…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You cannot learn without failing.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Elves, trolls, orcs, dwarves, ents and hobbits are real! It says so on the holy book: The Lord Of The Rings.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You cannot learn without failing.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Could it be the phenomenon we also see in areas such as Engineering were as people get more senior most transit into more managerial positions, where the mindset is a lot more about managing appearances and stakeholders, and saying the right things at the right time to the right people rather than the far more “it is as it is” mindset of those on the technical side?

  I actually started by going into Science at Uni but ended up switching to Engineering (not many jobs for Experimentalist Physicists in my homeland) so never actually saw the actual Science career track from the inside through the eyes of somebody with enough professional experience to see the more subtle things about it, so I am genuinely curious if the Science career too has the phenomenon in Engineering of Senior people tending to be more Administrator/Manager and less Technical hence with more tendency to manage the subjective perception of reality of others to achieve personal and career goals and less of a desire for things to be as clear and as objective as possible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Remember when she fucked up the economy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Also lets not forget how the changes in press-ownership legislation during her time set the way for the growth of the Far-Right which has already delivered Brexit and will quite likely keep on regularly delivering problems to the UK.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Remember when she fucked up the economy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sure there were also wonderful moments later on when people had a chance to pissed on her grave.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨America is fucked⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m in Portugal, and it’s definitely not.

  I mean, people are clearly more selfish behind a wheel than they are in person (a lot of Portuguese “good manners” is really just social shame, which isn’t there when people feel anonymous, so many become a lot less polite when inside a car), but everybody just moves over when an ambulance comes and for example you’re more likely to be given way to turn off the road across the other lane, than not.

  You do see some asshole shit (for example, cars trying to scare pedestrians into waiting for the car to pass before entering a zebra crossing), but generally it’s a minority (which the notable exception of people not using direction indicators to help others, only themselves, which is a majority) rather than the majority.

  In my experience Spain is pretty similar.

  From own experience in Latin America it wasn’t much worse, though it was only in Peru and I wasn’t long in Lima to get a good feeling for their big-city driving.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨America is fucked⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  At about 10 seconds on the video you can actually see a guy getting out of the way of the ambulance to let it through, though he was not doing it preemptively.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨America is fucked⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As a non-native English speaker, ages ago I moved to The Netherlands (were they also use “ja” for “yes”) and once I learned Dutch and got used to speak it as much or more than English, I noticed a definite tendency on my English for my “yes” to come out quite “ja”-like (sorta like an “yeah” with a pretty much silent “e”), though granted not as strong as that guy.

  Maybe this is some kind of broader linguistic tendency (non-native English speakers used to a “yes” in a different language that’s pretty close to one of the English words for “yes” - in this case “yeah” - just doing the lazy thing of using the other language word or a softened version of it because English-speakers get it) rather than a German-specific thing.

  I would be curious to hear from Dutch people and people from Scandinavia (if I’m not mistaken most if not all those languages use a “ja” for “yes”) if they tend to do that or not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  How to give it a go:

  • Get a 256GB SSD and install it on your computer alongside the existing drives.
  • Install a gaming-oriented Linux distro such as Pop!OS, Bazzite, SteamOS or similar, on that drive (don’t let it touch any other drive - those things generally have an install mode were you just tell it “install in this drive” which will ignore all other drives)
  • Unless your machine is 10 years old or older, during boot you can press a key (generally F8) and the BIOS will pop-up a boot menu that lets you choose which OS you want start booting (do it again at a later date if you want to change it back). If your machine is old you might actually have to go into the BIOS and change the boot EFI (or if even older, boot drive) there.
  • Use launchers such as Steam and a Lutris since they come with per-game install scripts that make sure Proton/Wine is properly configured, so that for most game you don’t have to do any tweaking at all for them to run - it’s just install and launch.
  • If it all works fine and you’re satisfied with it, get a bigger SSD and install it alongside the rest. Make one big partition in it and mount you home directory there (at this point you will have to go down to the CLI to copy over your home directory). You’ll need this drive because of all the space you’ll be using for games (both Steam and Lutris will put them under your home directory) especially modern ones.

  As long as you give a dedicated drive to Linux and (if on an old machine before EFI) do not let it install a boot sector anywhere else but that drive, the risk exposure is limited to having spent 20 or 30 bucks on a 256GB SSD and then it turns out Linux is still not good enough for you.

  When NOT to do it:

  • If you don’t know what a BIOS is or that you can press a key to get into it.
  • If you don’t know how to install a new drive on your machine (or even what kind of drive format it takes) and don’t have somebody who can do it for you.
  • If you don’t actually have the free slot for the new drive (for example, notebooks generally only have 2 slots, sometimes only 1).
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I thought the same, especially since I had tried Linux one my main several times since the 90s (yeah, at one point I used Slackware).

  Then I did the transition, and installed Pop!OS since I’m a gamer plus I have a NVidia graphics card and didn’t want to go through the whole hassle related to that (Pop!OS has a version which already comes with those drivers).

  Mind you, I did got a separate SSD for Linux (and meanwhile added a new one, which is where my games directory is mounted).

  So, this time around, what did I find out in about 8 months of use:

  • Once, I did had to boot into CLI mode and have apt do some failed upgrades, which included doing some kind of rebuild thing (you get instructions of what command to run when apt fails). This was due to a upgrade of the apt itself, I believe. All the other times it just boots to graphics mode (I’m using X rather than Wayland) or if it fails to start it (happened only a handful of time) you just reboot it.
  • In general even though I’ve done things like add and change hardware components, I have done little tweaking via CLI and some of it I did it because I’m just more comfortable with it or wanted so obscure options (for example, I wanted to mount the drive shared with Windows with a specific user and group, so I had to edit fstab). Except for the more obscure stuff there are UI tools for all management tasks and one doesn’t have to actually do much management and things almost always just work (for example, I changed graphics card - whilst staying with NVidia - and it just booted and worked, no tweaks necessary)
  • As for games, I use Steam for Steam Games and Lutris for all other game versions including GOG. Both have install scripts specific for each game, that configure Wine appropriately, so you seldom have to do anything but install, launch and play. That said in average I have had to tweak maybe 1 in 10 games. Further, about 1 in 20 I couldn’t get them to work. If you do install pirated games, then there is no install script and you do have to do yourself the whole process of figuring out which DLLs are missing and configure them in Wine using Winetricks (curiously, I ended up having to install a pirated game because the Steam version did not at all work, and the pirated version works fine). Note, however, that since I don’t do multiplayer games anymore, I haven’t had problems with kernel-level anti-cheat not working with Linux.
  • Interestingly, for gaming you have safety possibilities in Linux which you don’t in Windows: all my games launched via Lutris are wrapped in a firejail sandbox with a number of enhanced security restrictions and networking limited to only localhost, so there is no “phone home” for the games running via that launcher (Steam, on the other hand, is a different situation).

  I still have the old Windows install in that machine, but I haven’t booted into it for many months now.

  Compared to the old days (even as recently as a decade ago), nowadays there is way less need for tweaking in Linux in general and for gaming, even Windows games generally just install and run as long as you use some kind launcher which has game-specific install scripts (such as Steam and Lutries), but if you go out of the mainstream (obscure old games, pirated stuff) then you have to learn all about tweaking Wine to run the games.

  If you have a desktop and the space to install the hardware, just get a 256GB SSD (which are pretty cheap) and install a gaming-oriented Linux distro (such as Pop!OS or Bazzite) there, separate from Windows and you can dual boot them using your BIOS as boot manager: since the advent of EFI, booting doesn’t go through a boot sector shared by multiple OSs so if each gets their own drive then they don’t even see each other and only the BIOS is aware of the multiple bootable OSs and you can get it to pop up a menu on boot (generally by pressing F8) to change which one you want to boot.

  For the 20 or 30 bucks it’s worth the try and if you’re comfortable with it you can later do as I did and add another bigger one just for the directory with you games (or your home directory, though granted to migrate your home like this you do have to use the CLI ;))

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Today's Survey. One point for everything that you have NEVER DONE⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The country were I was living when I rented videos didn’t have Blockbuster, so 1.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Virgin Physicists⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For starters resistance changes with temperature.

  Also even in a multi-turn potentiometer, getting a precision of 1 in 10^9 would require an equal level of precision in the angle you rotate that potentiometer to (for example, a 0.1 degree error in a 10 turn potentiometer - which I believe is more turns than anything that actually can be bought - translates into a 1 in 36,000 error in resistance, so about 3000 larger than 10^9) even if you had a perfect material whose resistance doesn’t change with temperature.

  The joke here isn’t even specifically about resistances and electronics, it’s that the real world has all sorts of limitations that when you’re doing things whole in the mathematical world you don’t have to account for, and that’s a hard realisation for Physicists (having gone to study Physics at uni and then half way in my degree changing to Electronics Engineering I can tell you that’s one of the shocks I had to deal with in the transition).

  (In a way, it’s really a joke about Theoretical Physicists)

  See also the “assuming this chicken is a spherical ovoid” kind of joke.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Calm your tits⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  We had a saying in my country which goes roughly like this: “It’s not the dog that barks which bites”

  I’d say it applies here, and I ain’t talking about the corgies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump supporter Rick Fuze was arrested in CA for using a stun gun on peaceful protesters outside a Tesla dealership. The woman kicking this guy’s ass is a retired professor with 16,000 citations.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Worry not: soon the American authorities will treat the former pretty much the same as the latter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Enshittification⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Easy to measure (support manpower costs) vs hard to measure (business lost due to bad support).

  Good engineering (and old fashioned business practices) would try to better measure the hard to measure stuff (for example using surveys).

  Modern MBA business practices just uses the asy to measure stuff as guidelines and doesn’t even try to measure the rest, possibly because “if we don’t officially know it the I can’t be blamed for it”.

  Mind you, maybe they’re right since most consumers get shafted and still keep on coming back for more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Enshittification⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Just thinking out loud, I’m wondering if there’s not a mix of two innovations - the big innovation such as whole new software or hardware to do something that wasn’t possible to do before or at least not in that way and small innovation, i.e. incremental improvements.

  In Tech, companies usually start with one big innovation (consumer OS for Microsoft, web search with automated crawling for Google, universal discussion forum for Facebook and so on) and after that mostly do smaller innovations on it. Whilst they often have a couple more big innovations in them (for example Android OS for Google and Office for Microsoftw) they seem to eventually run out of such innovations or maybe just become too much “play it safe” when it comes to them so don’t really do the break-through big innovations anymore.

  All this to say that I suspect corporatisation destroys the environment in a company for big innovation - it’s a lot easier to keep on milking the existing cow that to try and come up with something completely different and the very mindset of the company changes from “try crazy ideas” of the small, poor and desperate startup to the relying on steady and safe income streams that more appeals to the bean counters that take over those companies when they get big enough.

  Under a sales model, you need a steady stream of small innovation on the core product to keep the steady and safe income stream going - people need to be convinced to buy the latest and greatest version of the product so it general need to offer something more than the last one, and although marketting can be used to convince people to buy a new version which has little more than the last one (look at iPhones of late), as the product matures there is less and less small innovation on it that’s actually usefull to there is less and appeal for consumers to get the latest version and that income stream falls.

  Both subscription models and paid-by-advertising upend that need even small innovation - a company doesn’t need to regularly make a new and improved version of their original big innovation, they just need to keep on getting the steady stream of revenue from their existing product. I would say that this appeals even more to bean counters that the small innovation cycle since it’s even more predictable, hence you see big companies shifting to it even in things which make no sense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fucking hell⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My experience living in The Netherlands (which has a similar system) as a non-native whose mothertongue is from the Romance branch is that you eventually get used to it. I think that’s because as your language skills improve you just stop interpreting the parts of the number individually and handle hearing and speaking those “nastier” blocks of two digits as if the whole block is a language expression.

  Even better the apparently flip-flopping between one way of ordering digits and another one in longer numbers (for example: “two thousand and two and ninety”) actually makes the strategy of “everything between 0 and 99 is processed as an expression” viable, whilst I’m not so sure that would be possible if instead of 100 numerical language expressions we had 1000 or more.

  (If you’re not a Franch native speaker and you learn the language you might notice something similar when at some point your mind switches from interpreting “quatre-vingt” as “four twenty” to just taking it in whole block as an expression that translates to eighty)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welp.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If you go up to my original post, it was in response to somebody talking about German politics in the context of the Israeli Genocide.

  As one of only a handful of nations who kept on “unwaveringly supporting” Israel with weapons even as the Genocide became more and more extreme and obvious beyond deniability, Germany definitely needs to be heavily criticized for that support and the underlying view of other human beings that is required for people to say - as Sholz did - “We unwaveringly support the Jewish Nation” (note the ethnicity very explicitly) as justification to keep sending weapons to Israel even after they had already murdered over 40,000 civilians including a list of babies 1 year old or less which was 17 pages long.

  This isn’t the “police taking less seriously reports of being assaulted from victims of certain ethnicities than from other ethnicities” level of Racism far too common in many countries, this is the “we’ll keep on sending weapons to people who have murdered thousands of babies because we support the race of the murderers” level of Racism - the level of evil of unfairly treating a minority is a whole different scale of the level of evil of sending weapons to baby mass murderers because you support their race.

  Absolutely, the likes of the US and UK, for example, are just as appallingly and disgustingly Racist.

  However I myself did not expect this from Germany, both because I had a much much better opinion of Germans (I even lived there for 3 months) and because having in the past done horrible things exactly because of extreme Racism (aka Nazism and the Holocaust) and spent the time since remembering it and claiming “Never again”, it turned out that the “Never again” of most German politicians was the race-limited version “Never again shall we Germans do this to Jews” rather than the Humanist version of “Never again shall this happen”.

  It’s hard for me to convey just how profoundly disappointing I am with Germany in addition to how disgusted I am with it and other nations who kept supporting baby mass murderers with weapons to kill more babies overtly because they support the race of the murderers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welp.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, the good old sociopath-style argument that because there is Racism everywhere then people shouldn’t complain about the level of Racism in some places approaching that of the Nazis.

  It’s the Racist variant of the good old “we’re better than North Korea” argument to defend Capitalist excesses.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welp.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, man, yes.

  I’ve spent more of my career doing server-side stuff than other areas and it’s like night and day when it comes to IT security between server-side dev and gamedev, probably because server-side is networked and generally is done for much more important targets (valuable data and even actual financial assets of big companies, rather than an individual’s game state or machine) so there is way more expectation that the best external attackers will be hammering at anything a server-side component exposes via a network interface trying to hack it.

  Mind you, I still bitched and moaned at the lack of IT Security awareness of some of my colleagues when I was doing server side stuff :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welp.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Having over a 25 year career done development in all kinds of areas including gamedev, there is quite a big difference in way of thinking and doing stuff between anything with user interaction and server-side stuff, and gamedev specifically also differs a lot from the rest of areas of user-facing software because it’s very performance oriented, way closer to the bare metal than the rest (in smartphone apps you’re working on top of libraries on top of libraries on top of libraries, in gamedev you make GPU shaders in a variant of C which very tightly tied to the specifics of how that hardware works), and each game is pretty much a unique user interface in programming terms (i.e. there much less reusability, especially of assets, than in say web or smartapp development).