Aceticon

@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Saviour⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  “All hail me: I have saved you from myself”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hulu quizzing about the ads played⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  For over a decade I’ve been watching TV Series and Movies from a Media Box connected via Ethernet to my home NAS (which is generally an old notebook or even my router - once I got myself a decent router - with some external hardisks), which is actually a pretty simple network to set up using Ethernet Over Powerlinr adaptors (which were already good enough for it back when they only did 20 Mb/second and now that they’re 1000Mb/s will handle even the huge resolution lightly compressed stuff that one can now find as booty out there).

  The setup has been recently upgraded to a Mini-PC with Lubuntu and Kodi, which is in my living room (right next to my Internet router to which it is connect with Gigabit Ethernet) and is also my home NAS and Bittorrent server over always on VPN, with a wireless remote for using in my living room to control Kodi (so it works the same as a TV Box for watching media) whilst the background stuff I control from my main PC remotely using a mix of web interfaces and ssh plus command line.

  I had never had this good an environment for TV entertainment and I’m not even using any of the *arr suite or Usenet to source content so a lot of it is really just doing the same stuff as a decade ago but with better hardware and a more modern UI for media playing and (most importing) away faster Internet connection.

  Anyways, the point I’m making is that nowadays one can actually upgrade a little bit from your setup (which, by the way, is superior to what I had before my Mini-PC upgrade) cheaply and even get themselves very close to the same experience as the corporate stuff (media box with remote and a nice UI to play stuff from a media library) whilst maintaining maximum control and getting no shit from enshittification.

  PS: I couldn’t recommend more getting a wireless remote if you want to just be able to sit down on your sofa and have a no hassle media box experienced (even whilst behind sits a far more complex home infrastructure that what people who outsource that side of things to the likes of Hulu have). It real helps with having a shit-free under your total control entertainment experience without sacrificing the part of that experience that comes from having a modern interface for media selection.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, they look similar because they’re both people very emotionally and tribalistically (as there’s quite an element of feeling part of a group in it) wedded to an ideological bundle of pre-baked ideas they took in as “undeniable truths” and do not in any way challenge with rationality and skepticism.

  Both have the same way of thinking and relating to politics but tankies have adopted one ideological bundle of pre-baked ideas and modern day “conservatives” (I use quotes because they really don’t do conservation of much) adopted a different ideological bundle of pre-baked ideas.

  Mind you, they’re just extreme cases of people whose relationship with politics runs along the very same behavioural lines as sports club fans. For example, here in Lemmy you often spot Democrat Party fans, which you can spot by their “the figures of the party can do no wrong” posture and similar, in contrast with, say, people who might have voted for the party for tactical or strategical reasons but don’t just take every word of their propaganda as undeniable truth.

  I live in a country with a lot more political parties than the US and am even a member of a party here, as you see that kind of people in with every single party and in my experience mindless unquestioning fans are majority of party members.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anyway to erase the permanent marker so I can reuse this?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Sometimes ethanol (i.e. rubbing alcohol) works.

  If not, try acetone, same thing used to remove nail polish.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Now give me a treat⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Cats will just attack because they feel like it, no need to scare them with sudden movements.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vibes based cooking⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s funny that smelling the spices and the food as I cook it to see if they’ll go well together is my main method of figuring out which spices to use.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Par for the course⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  If you can’t even follow the Mathematics of error margins when using one easy to measure characteristic as a stand-in for another harder to measure characteristic which is positively correlated with the former but not by a factor of 1 and whose correlation factor actually changes by the very action you’re justifying, and, even more more sad, have to resort to calling it “pseudo-explanation”, there is no point in engaging with you using logic because that’s not the level you’re operating at.

  Enjoy your quasi-religious relation to your ideological beliefs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Par for the course⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Some people genuinely have huge assumptions about the intellectual capability of women and their suitability for certain occupations - the “women are very emotional” used as excuse for not giving them certain responsibilities such as management positions is far too common, especially in countries were the main brand of sexism is the so-called “Benevolent Sexism” (called that not because it’s actually good but because it’s disguised as being for the protection of women) such as Britain.

  Similarly there are prejudices about people with sexual orientations other than heterosexuality in the workplace, usually of the “they’ll make other people uncomfortable” kind.

  Sadly, still today, far to many people genuinely think along such lines and some aren’t even aware that they’re doing it because their whole lives they’ve lived around people who do it so for them that’s the “normal” way of thinking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Par for the course⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m afraid that fighting oppression and restoring the past oppressed to a level playing field involves finding if actual individuals did indeed suffer from oppression and compensating them for it in some way, a far more difficult task than taking the Fascist’s shortcut of presuming that everybody from a specific race, gender or sexual orientation are equally worthy or unworthy.

  What my experience in The Netherlands taught me is that preserving the idea that you can presume things about people (including that they’re “victims” or “discriminated against”) - a.k.a. Prejudice - is a dead-end strategy for fighting discrimination because:

  • It’s anchored on the very same architecture of presuming things about people based on race, gender or sexual orientation - in other words, Prejudice - as Fascist ideologies are.
  • Because it is literally Mathematically impossible for such a process to be improved to a point where there is full fairness of treatment for all: that process uses a person’s race/gender/sexual-orientation as an indirect metric to determine something else altogether - if a person has actually suffered due to discrimination - so it has an error rate in the form of people who do belong to a supposedly discriminated against race, gender or sexual orientation but never suffered from discrimination. When such people are helped without deserving it, an injustice is committed, and the more the error rate, the more injustice is being done by helping people who do not deserve that help. The Mathematical impossibility happens because the more that process succeeds at its stated objective of reducing discrimination, the more people of a supposedly discriminated against race, gender or sexual orientation never suffered from discrimination (or in other words, the more the error rate of assuming that race, gender or sexual orientation implies being a victim of discrimination) hence the more injustice that process is committing - the closer the process gets to success the more injustice it is committing, only it’s a against people from different races, genders or sexual-orientations.

  You can’t Prejudice your way into stopping Prejudiced treatment, not Ideologically and not even Mathematically.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Par for the course⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I suggest you read the system described by the poster from feddit.nl just below, which just removes the kind of professionally irrelevant information (including gender, race and so on) from being in the candidate selection process.

  Such systems are meant to removed descrimination (even subconscious one) rather than discriminating in the opposite direction. “Discriminating but the other way around” just preservs a mindset that people should be seen differently depending on gender or sexual orientation and, as I’ve observed first hand, yields environments which are even more sexist.

  Having lived in both Britain (which apes a lot of things from the US) and The Netherlands, I can tell you that the latter country is way much more naturally equalitarian (gender-wise and even more so when it comes to sexual orientation) than the former.

  The knee-jerk “this must be sexism” reaction to criticism of the “let’s keep treating people differently depending on the genetics they were born with” of the “anti-descrimination” systems in the Anglo-Saxon countries, in my view partly explains why in the decade and a half since I’ve left The Netherlands I’ve seen no improvement towards the much more natural gender and sexual-orientation equality of The Netherlands in either Britain or the US, quite the contrary.

  I’m sorry but compared with what I’ve seen working in other countries the system you defend is deeply flawed and preserves the very architecture of judging people on their gender, sexual-orientation or race rather than actual personal knowledge and track record that the Fascists have.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Par for the course⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Having lived and worked in both The Netherlands and Britain, I’ve seen actual American-style quotas systems in Britain that explicitly priviledged a specific gender (rather than what you describe, which is a system mean to remove any and all discrimination), and the result was pretty bad, both because the worst professionals around were from that gender and clearly only got the job due to quotas and at the same time competent professionals that happen to have that gender were not taken as seriously and were kinda second class citizens.

  In fact, that specific place which is the only one I ever worked with and American style quota system was the most sexist place I ever worked in, in my entire career (which spans over 2 decades) - people would not say sexist things, all the while they would definitelly have different competence expectations and even levels of how seriously they took people as professionals depending on people’s gender.

  Interestingly, IT in The Netherlands was way less sexist in a natural way than almost all places I worked in Britain, with almost always more well balanced gender-wise teams and were - at least that I noticed - nobody assuming anything in professional terms based on people’s gender or sexual orientation.

  Frankly one of the things I really missed after I move to Britain from The Netherlands was exactly the “that’s about as relevant as eye color” when it came to people’s gender or sexual orientation in the work place that the Dutch generally show (at least in my area).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Par for the course⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s two different ways to read the previous poster’s point:

  • That any kind of quotas system (no mater whose “born with certain genetic traits” group it favours) is generally bad and causes more problem that it solves. From what I’ve observed in my one and only time working in a place with such quotas, that’s what I saw, with both very incompetent people from the favored group who clearly only got the job due to quotas and at the same time with competent members of that group having trouble being taken seriously because they were assumed to be incompetent and having only got the position due to having the genetics that made them be a member of said favored group, so in general I would agree that priviledging anybody due to the genetics they were born with is wrong (not to be confused with systems that try and make sure nobody is discriminated against due to the genetics they were born with, systems I totally agree with: basically I disagree with people being given better treatment due their genetics).
  • That women and non-straight men are a problem in that profession. If that’s the take, I not only totally disagree with it but find it apalling and unnacceptable. Again, experience tells me that in IT women and non-straight men are neither less nor more competent than straight men: from what I’ve observed gender and sexual orientation are, as expected, entirelly irrelevant when it comes to professional competent in that domain. You need to have no clue whatsoever about that domain or being an abnormal simpleton to thing gender or sexual orientation is what makes somebody a good professional in any of the various areas of the Industry.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can enough solar pannels decrease the global temps?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Which is why if the objective was just to cool down the Earth (and ignoring that solar panels replace other sources of electricity that warm up the Earth more) just painting the ground white would be more reflective than solar panels as the white paint increases the amount of sunlight that gets reflected back to space whilst solar panels not only capture some of it as electricity (that will ultimately end up transformed into heat somewhere) but they also absorb some transforming it directly into heat (i.e. they warm up a bit).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I love my smart TV (From Mastodon) - Repost⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I have a cheap N100 mini-PC with Lubuntu on it with Kodi alongside a wireless remote as my TV box, and use my TV as a dumb screen.

  Mind you, you can do it even more easily with LibreELEC instead of Lubuntu and more cheaply with one of its supported cheap SBCs plus a box instead of a mini PC.

  That said, even the simplest solution is beyond the ability of most people to set up, and once you go up to the next level of easiness to setup - a dedicated Android TV Box - you’re hit with enshittification (at the very least preconfigured apps like Netflix with matching buttons in your remote) even if you avoid big brands.

  Things are really bad nowadays unless you’re a well informed tech expert with the patience to dive into those things when you’re home.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There is a fee to close my HSA account⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, right - I misunderstood that point you were making.

  So, as it turns out, we’ve been in agreement all along.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Learning a new language is easy!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  “Wie” in Dutch means “who” whilst in German it means “how”.

  Having learned Dutch first, I can tell you that when I was first learning German the expression “Wie geht’s” tended to give me a serious mental hiccup when I was trying to talk to German people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There is a fee to close my HSA account⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Not living in the US, I’m not up to date with US salaries.

  That said, even for administrative personnel paid $25/h, $25 will pay 1h of somebody’s work which is way beyond what is needed to close a retail customer account in any modern administrative system were should a common operation should take less than a minute to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There is a fee to close my HSA account⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It deceives people whose idea of how things work in large companies hasn’t changed since the days when it was the manager of your bank branch who decided if you you should get a loan or not.

  Nowadays, for certain in middle and large size companies, all the administrative main business pathways are heavilly if not totally automated and it’s customer support that ends up eating the most manpower (which is why there has been so much of a push for automated phone and chat support systems, of late using AI).

  Those $25 bucks for “account closure” pays at most for a few minutes of somebody’s seeking the account from user information, cross checking that the user information matches and then clicking a button that says “Close accout” and then “Ok” on the confirmation box and the remaining 99% or so left after paying for that cost are pure profit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There is a fee to close my HSA account⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As somebody who works in design software systems, including for large companies, lets just say that the amount of human time that goes into a customer account closure is negligible because such main business operations as openning and closing customer accounts are the ones that get automated the soonest and the furthest.

  The stuff that uses “lots” (in relative terms) of manpower is supporting customers with really exception unusual problems involving third parties and even then spending 2.5 h man/hours (assuming the administrative person get paid $10/per hour) is pretty uncommon.

  You’ve been lied to, repeatadly, for at least 3 decades.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Time to make your decesion⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In my personal experience, “the really old colleague” is often a real throw of the dice between stubborn-as-fuck-never-matured-know-it-all and very-interesting-seen-it-all-genuinelly-mature-colleague - so basically opposite ends of the scale.

  If you’re early career, having one of the latter kind of older colleagues is probably one of the best things it can happen to you, especially if you’re a bright kid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Time to make your decesion⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The subtle just under the surface love-hate passive-aggressive interplay between Dayzie and Brice (if you’re lucky, culminating in some kind of beyond-their-control office affair between them) would make that pair the most interesting in the long run, IMHO.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mildly McInfuriating⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Perceived value”

  Without that element, there would be no explanation for Marketingbeyond Brand Awareness working.

  Even then, it doesn’t explain a lot of how Marketing does its work (namelly the stuff they took from Psychology and use to do stuff like create associations between brand and feelings on people’s subconscious).

  And don’t get me started on other techniques that prey of human cognitive weaknesses (for example, FOMO would not work with the fabled homo economicus)

  Anyways, a ton of present day enshittification (and that includes this kind of price inflation) relies on people having a well entrenched positive perception of a brand after years of having a relationship with it (i.e. chosing it as customers) and there being quite a lot of momentum behind it. It also relies a lot on using a “slow boiling” effect to keep people from spotting the full picture of the changes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GRINDSET MINDSET⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The complexity is not in the “writing words”, it’s in knowing which words to write.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I believe him on a factual level, but not on an emotional level.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The best possible proof that Belgium is not just a place set up by The Netherlands and France as a network of gas stations to travel between those countries is that the roads in Belgium are visibly worse than in The Netherlands or France (really: you can tell exactly were the border is when driving into and out of Belgium by the change in the condition of the road).

  The problem for the Belgium friend is that he’s not keen on admitting that if Belgium wasn’t a real nation but rather a Franco-Dutch partnership, it would be better run.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I knew it. Vaccines got him.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In a wall near were I live somebody in the time of peak Covid vaccination tagged a slogan (in a language other than English) that roughly went like “50% or the prickled will die” - so prickled here meaning those who got the Covid vaccine - which might sound like a smart anti-vaxxer slogan until one thinks about how it implies that 50% of those who get the vaccine will never die, or in other words that the Covid vaccine actually gives eternal life to half the takers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should you bother with... mini PCs?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I use a pretty basic one (with an N100 microprocessor and no dedicated graphics) as a TV box + home server combo and its excellent for that.

  It’s totally unsuitable for gaming.

  Mind you, there are configurations with dedicated graphics but they’re about 4x the price of the one I got (which cost me about €120)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a theoretical limit to profit?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  But people do stop believing money has value, or more specifically, their trust in the value of money can go down - you all over the History in plenty of places that people’s trust in the value of money can break down.

  As somebody pointed out, if one person has all the money and nobody else has money, money has no value, so it’s logical to expect that between were we are now and that imaginary extreme point there will be a balance in the distribution of wealth were most people do lose trust in the value of money and the “wealth” anchored on merelly that value stops being deemed wealth.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a theoretical limit to profit?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And further on point 2, the limit would determined by all that people can produce as well as, on the minus side, the costs of keeping those people alive and producing.

  As it so happens, people will produce more under better conditions, so spending the least amount possible keeping those people alive doesn’t yield maximum profit - there is a sweet spot somewhere in the curve were the people’s productivity minus the costs of keeping them productive is at a peak - i.e. profit is maximum.

  Capitalism really is just a way of the elites trying to get society to that sweet spot of that curve - people are more productive than in overtly autocratic systems (or even further, outright slavery) were less is spent on people, they get less education and they have less freedom to (from the point of view of the elites) waste their time doing what they want rather than produce, but because people live a bit better, are a bit less unhappy and have something to lose, they produce more for the elites and there is less risk of rebelions so the whole adds up to more wealth for the elites.

  As you might have noticed by now, optimizing for the sweet spot of “productivity minus costs with the riff-raff” isn’t the same as optimizing for the greatest good for the greatest number (the basic principle of the Left) since most people by a huge margin are the “riff-raff”, not the elites.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We dumb⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If one thinks a lot, likes to learn and, maybe more important, thinks about knowledge and learning things, that person will probably get there.

  A certain educational background probably helps but is neither required nor sufficient, IMHO.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We dumb⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s a general thing with highly capable persons in expert and highly intellectual domains that eventually you kinda figure out what Socrates actually meant with “All I know is that I know nothing”