Aceticon
@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Today's Survey. One point for everything that you have NEVER DONE 1 day ago:
The country were I was living when I rented videos didn’t have Blockbuster, so 1.
- Comment on Virgin Physicists 3 days 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 days 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. 1 week ago:
Worry not: soon the American authorities will treat the former pretty much the same as the latter.
- Comment on Enshittification 1 week 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 1 week 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 2 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. 2 weeks 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. 2 weeks 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. 2 weeks 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. 2 weeks 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).
- Comment on Welp. 2 weeks ago:
The reaction to Brexit in the rest of the EU - where almost from one month to the next people’s support for the idea of leaving the EU crashed to less than half as much - gives me hope that what Trump is doing in America is actually crushing the chances of his ideology in the rest of the World.
This seems to already be happenning in Canada (we will know for sure once the result of their upcoming elections is out).
In summary, I think there is good reason to hope that the result in the rest of the World of the Fascist Far-Right taking over a high-profile country will be either the crushing of the Far-Right or it very explicitly distancing itself from the kind of ideology espoused by Trump - in other words, that America, just like Britan with Brexit, is really and unwittingly taking one for the rest of us.
- Comment on Welp. 2 weeks ago:
I would say that the politically widespread “unwavering support” for a nation very overtly because of their dominant ethnicity, including whilst they’re commiting a Genocide along ethnic lines themselves (the kind of thing one would naivelly expect Germans to be especially disgusted at), proved beyond any doubt that Racism in Germany is alive, well all across the political spectrum, from the supposed “left” of the Greens all the way to the far-right.
AfD really is just the same mindset with the extra step of “If it’s good to unwaveringly support them no matter what they do, then it’s also good for us”
Sadly whilst the symbols were forbidden, the way of thinking about other human beings (of seeing people as members of ethnicities and judging and treating them differently depending on ethnicity) that was the foundation for Nazism never actually died in Germany, they just changed who the ubermenschen and untermenschen are and don’t actually say those words out loud.
- Comment on We exist to pay rent, wage slave, and to generate new wage slaves for exploitation. 3 weeks ago:
A shitty take … that works!
- Comment on And I even lost the one that I had 3 weeks ago:
This is also something I (luckily, I like to think) realized many years ago on my first trip abroad by myself (well, I went and met with a cousin of mine who is the same age as me) when I was 19 - when you’re focused on collecting pictures of everything (as he did to a level I jokingly refere to as “photographic diarrhea”), you’re not just living the moment.
Mind you, looking at any of the handful of pictures I made back then does bring me back to the memory of the whole thing (though the wierd details such as how the top floor of the WTC back then - pre 9/11 - was basically a large food court of fast food brands aren’t in the photos), but then again me thinking about it right now does the same.
- Comment on Thinkpad for the win 3 weeks ago:
In electronics there are actually milspec versions on microchips different from the normal space (they have a wider range of operating temperatures plus I also believe higher resistence to electromagnetic radiation and mechanical vibration, similar to microchips “for automobile use”), but I suspect that when it comes to actual consumer electronics devices the words “military grade” are not a protected tag (as in, electronic devices said to be “military grade” are not forced by regulation to have certain characteristics) so those words are generally marketing bullshit.
- Comment on Thinkpad for the win 3 weeks ago:
Also now you have to buy a special cloth from Apple to clean the gold logo on the Apple MacBook Cleaning Cloth Pro without scratching it.
(It’s cleaning cloths all the way down!)
- Comment on Having a baby? Use this one weird trick! 3 weeks ago:
I think at least some countries in Europe had a similar system as the US but moved to Restricted Birthright in the 80s because of freeloading - i.e. well off people with no connection to a country just flying over and having their kids there to give them citizenship in that country.
With Restricted Birthright the parents have to have been living in that country for a few years - so de facto being members of that society - to earn that right.
Personally I think it’s fair that those comitted to participating in a Society all deserve the same rights (including local nationality for their children) independently of themselves having or not the local nationality, whilst those who are not comitted to participating in that Society do not, and “being resident in that country for more than X years” seems to me a pretty neutral and reasonably fair way to determine “comitted to participating in that country’s Society”.
- Comment on Having a baby? Use this one weird trick! 3 weeks ago:
That’s what everybody will be saying in the Northern Hemisphere every time there is a break in the nuclear winter cloud cover, only with more feeling of joy (so, more exclamation marks!!!).
- Comment on Having a baby? Use this one weird trick! 3 weeks ago:
I think that the Restricted Birthright citizenship which is most common in Europe tries to navigate somewhere between those two extremes - in it basically if you’re a Resident in that country for more than X years (from what I’ve seen usually X years is 2 years) then your children born there get citizenship.
It filters out freeloading - well-off people who have no personal investment in a country and its future and never contributed to it in any way, just flying over and having their kids there to give them citizenship - whilst still extending the same rights as locals have to those who, whilst not having the local nationality, are participating members of that society.
I think the fairest way is to give equal treatment (including giving the local nationality to their children and making it available to they themselves after a few years living there) to those who are participating members of a society but not to those who are not members of that society, and that would also mean that the fairest treatment would be that the children of local nationals who have long ago left (and the children themselves never in fact lived there) do not get that nationality automatically for merely their parents having it.
Ultimately I think nationality should be earned by living as part of a Society and when they’re born children, having not have had a chance to “earn” it, would inherited that from the or parents.
That said some level of obtaining nationality based on the nationality of one’s parents makes sense to cover the time gaps of people who moved abroad and had children there before they could qualify for the nationality of the country they were born with, since otherwise those children would be stateless.
As for the decision mechanism being “years legally living in a country” it’s just the simplest and most equal for all (passing no judgment for things like what people do for a living) way of judging “participating in that Society” whilst only excluding people who were neither invited in nor taken in because they’ve truly need help (i.e. it’s only for legal immigrants and refugees).
- Comment on Tried to order a part before the tariffs 4 weeks ago:
Good luck getting the Trumpettes to understand that…
- Comment on Tried to order a part before the tariffs 4 weeks ago:
It’s a tax increase which can be (and is being) mis-portrayed as something that the seller pays, when in fact it’s the buyer that pays it.
In practice what Trump did was institute the equivalent of an additional 25% sales tax for all Americans when they buy goods manufactured in Canada or Mexico, but because this tax is usually payed by companies (which do most of the importing) and most people aren’t at all familiar with how Import/Export works, he seems to be getting away with portraying it as a tax on Canada and Mexico.
(The concern of those countries is not that they pay more - which they don’t - it’s that a selective “sales tax” that only applies to products they export to the US makes their products less competitive on price when sold in the US, hence they will sell less which is bad for their companies)
I’ve seen some theories around that the purpose of this significant increase in tax is to pay for the tax cuts for the wealthy that the Republicans are passing.
- Comment on Tried to order a part before the tariffs 4 weeks ago:
I’ve seen a similar thing happen overtime for Aliexpress shipping to Europe - it used to take 2 months to were I am (Portugal), now it takes a bit over a week.
I think they set-up some kind of consolidated shipping operation so that the sellers on their site can ship things via Aliexpress’ own system, which is way faster (and invariably involves air-shipping via The Netherlands) and often is listed as Free Shipping.
I’ve bought once or twice from sellers there that don’t use it and those packages still take 2 months to get here.
I mention this because it makes sense that Aliexpress has set up a similar system for the US given that it’s a market which is almost as big as the EU.
- Comment on Tried to order a part before the tariffs 4 weeks ago:
This is probably why the EU itself recently changed the rules and VAT (the EU’s version of Sales Tax) is payable on all purchases from outside the EU, no matter how small the value, but import tax remains only payable on purchases above €150.
They also set up a system so that non-EU retail sellers can collect VAT directly on payment - just like EU ones do - so for example a buyer from the EU buying stuff via AliExpress will have the VAT added to the price during checkout.
- Comment on Google’s Sergey Brin Says Engineers Should Work 60-Hour Weeks in Office to Build AI That Could Replace Them 4 weeks ago:
Funny because I’ve worked on and off in Tech Startups since the 90s and what I’ve seen is the very opposite of your statement: post year 2000 Crash Tech has become more the Even Wilder Wild West Of Finance (i.e. no-rules hyperspeculative) and that has been reflected on how most of the Founders and Investors are people with backgrounds in area heavy towards Sales practices (i.e. Finance, Marketing, actual Sales people and, more in general Grifters) and very few have backgrounds in actually making things.
The Techie with an Engineering background coming up with a new Technology or twist on Technology and making a successful company out of it that was common in Tech boom of the 90s has been replaced by money-men and those whose main skillset is to find and keep investors (so, those good in spinning a good tale, not making something that actually works).
- Comment on Was big bird called little bird when he was young? 5 weeks ago:
- Brings "5x ceramic plate"
- Receives “Sword Of Total Pwnage” which has been a family heirloom for centuries.
- Comment on GOG's billboard in Times Square, NYC 5 weeks ago:
As a side note, if you use Lutris it has install scripts for pretty much all GoG games, which will take care of adding the necessary libraries via winetricks and you can use them for game installation even when not using Lutris’ support for direct dowload from GoG and instead installing from a local copy of the GoG offline installer for that game.
- Comment on This letter from "Friends of Zion" my grandmother received today 5 weeks ago:
Those specific propaganda elements are widespread in the West and widelly repeated in the mass media even outside the US, so it’s useful to deconstruct all that for others when I am in a position to do so since that deconstruction of it will also alter their perception of other instances they saw which at the time they did not really spotted for what it really is.
Hopefully the pointing out the mechanisms used here to construct a highly biased image will even make the readers deconstructions of it such as mine be more resilient to other instances of the same techniques being used.
Further, how can we be sure that this poster is a propagandist sock-puppet and not just a normal person who got deceived by the modern (that relies on framing, qualifying and implying) style of propaganda and hence repeated it?
I think that all in all, it’s better to have these things and then just deconstructing them for all to see, than silencing them. Also on principle I’m very wary of Censorship.
- Comment on This letter from "Friends of Zion" my grandmother received today 5 weeks ago:
I went to all the trouble of pointing out the obvious hypocrisy and propaganda not for “these people” but for everybody else.
- Comment on This letter from "Friends of Zion" my grandmother received today 5 weeks ago:
That shit starts by straight out quoting Zionist propaganda.
First the double standard:
Either they’re both Terrorist organisations for “attacking and murdering civilians” or one is a Resistance Movement and the other a Nation State. Claiming that the murdering of civilians to terrify the rest into complying with one’s political and economical goals is only Terrorism if some do it but not if others do it is absolutely taking a side and doing it quite extremely since “Terrorist” is a heavily loaded word.
Second:
The ever repeated Zionist propaganda that being against Israel is being against Jews hence it’s antisemitism. Is Hamas anti-semite (I.e. against Jews for being Jews) or is it against an occupier oppressor nation that takes their land and murders their children and is controlled by a subset of Jews? So far all indications are that it’s mainly the latter.
Also the double standard raises its face once again here as the Israelis aren’t being said to be anti-Islamic, which is funny give that even the Israeli press is extremely racist nowadays - curious that the alleged Racism of one side just had to be mentioned but not of the other side.
Third point:
That Israel responded as if there had been nothing else before. This is pure Zionist framing of this stage of a long ongoing conflict between a colonialist occupier and the native resistance. Israel started this shit, way back when the Zionist colonialists started stealing the land of Palestinians and expelling them or murdering the (the first peak of it being the Nakba).
If Israel was given the exact same treatment as Hamas in that text, it would have been described as “the Terrorist anti-Islamic colonialist invader”
Now, I’d like to think you’re just naively repeating the Zionist framing and propaganda that they so carefully spread in the West, in which case you might want to actually think about what you read before repeating it, as you’re parroting outright propaganda.