Ephera
@Ephera@lemmy.ml
- Comment on If we replace most plastic with a non plastic alternative and would that really be better? 41 minutes ago:
I think, it’s possible to find alternative materials which behave similar to plastic in certain use-cases.
But yeah, I can’t see a one-for-one replacement happening. It’s part of the appeal of plastic, that it does not degrade.
- Comment on There's been a massacre! 1 week ago:
Yeah, perhaps the most fitting example here is non-vegetarian diets: Feed plants to livestock. Livestock uses up some energy for its own existence. Then feed livestock to humans.
There is a slight difference in that livestock can ingest leaves, which we cannot, but in industrialized farms, they typically get fed produce anyways, to make them grow more quickly.
- Comment on SUNS OUT GUNS OUT 1 week ago:
Huh, that’s a wild statement considering he later went on to formulate his ontological “proof”, which attempts to prove God’s existence without relying on axioms (and in my not-so-humble opinion fails to do so, because it assumes “good” and “evil” to exist).
Sure enough, this statement here is about math and not a general statement, but you’d think he would’ve gotten a clue, that trying to prove anything without axioms is not a smart idea…
- Comment on SOCKS SOCKS SOCKS 1 week ago:
They could’ve also socked the tail…
- Comment on Besides money/capitalism, why are tech companies trying to push AI text generators over search engines? 2 weeks ago:
I think, it’s mainly just companies trying to get their foot into the market. If Microsoft can establish LLMs as alternative to search, then it’s Google that loses market share. And once they control a share of the market, then they figure out how to capitalize on that.
At the very least, they can use it to control what information is available to the public and how it’s framed. But they can also integrate things like the LLM generating an affiliate link when asked about a product, or just generally weaving ad placements into the generated answers.
- Comment on Ori studio in crisis: No Rest For The Wicked could be their final game 3 weeks ago:
I think, the problem is rather that they have no budget for marketing. If they become visible on Steam, that’s significantly more visibility than they can hope for from a few social media posts…
- Comment on NO TO AI 3 weeks ago:
That’s always kind of bothered me about the whole generative AI thingamabob. Why are we generating things and storing them, when the ability to generate more of it is right there?
I mean, I know in lots of cases the output is extremely flaky, so it’s not as easy to just generate the same thing again, but yeah, it still feels kind of backwards…
- Comment on Poisonous Frogs with Ants in their Pants 4 weeks ago:
Would’ve been funny, if a fish was somehow snacking ants on the regular. 🙃
- Comment on Poisonous Frogs with Ants in their Pants 4 weeks ago:
I mean, it’s gonna depend on the specific ant species. Some ants don’t sting at all. Some ants only have formic acid. Some ants’ venom tickles. Some ant venom can kill you.
But to quote Wikipedia for one of the latter, the Jack Jumper ant:
The retractable sting is located in their abdomen, attached to a single venom gland connected by the venom sac, which is where the venom is accumulated. Exocrine glands are known in jack jumpers, which produce the venom compounds later used to inject into their victims.
It then goes on to list all kinds of those compounds: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_jumper_ant#Venom
I don’t have much deeper knowledge than that, but at that point, it might as well be a mixture of some compounds that they ingest and some that they produce from simpler compounds. At the very least, they would need to ingest appropriate atoms/molecules in some form, like for example nitrogen, which is contained in relatively many of those compounds.
- Comment on Players Have Too Many Options to Spend $80 on a Video Game 4 weeks ago:
Jason Schreier is not a no-name. I would expect the guy to figure it out, if he thought about it for a moment. But yeah, the whole article seems a bit rushed…
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, and just because you know they’re lying, doesn’t mean you know what the truth is, much less so how to prove it to someone else.
- Comment on Why don't Oblivion and Morrowind turn the character model when you run in different directions? 4 weeks ago:
You always attack into the direction that the camera is facing, so if the character was facing away, that would look quite weird.
- Comment on TIL 5 weeks ago:
Well, it says it’s a verb, so it’d have to be the last one…
- Comment on Is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion still fun for a first-time player in 2025? 5 weeks ago:
Yeah, Bethesda loves to ruin their game worlds with weirdly repetitive additions. Morrowind constantly spawns assassins on you, Oblivion does the Oblivion gates, Skyrim has the dragons. In the latter two, I think, it’s best to just not start the main quest, which prevents the Oblivion gates and dragons from appearing, at least if you replay the game.
- Comment on floats away in disgust 1 month ago:
For me, it’s a matter of this joke being old. If someone had sat down and drawn it as a comic anyways, that would make it cool and the thought of it can be humorous in its own way. But since they didn’t, it’s ultimately just an old joke. It not having been made through manual labor does change my enjoyment of it.
(And much like the others, I don’t care that it looks well-drawn. I just care that someone decided, fuck it, I’m a silly goose, I’ll spend some time crafting something for no good reason.)
- Comment on What purpose do carbohydrates OTHER than sugars serve in the body? 1 month ago:
To perhaps lean more into why complex carbs are useful:
Your body can’t really not digest something you’ve eaten. Once it’s in your stomach, it will be broken down and gets put into your blood. With the simple carbs, you get a lot of blood sugar very quickly and your body then has to deal with that. It does so by producing insulin, which tells the rest of your body to take sugar out of the blood. It’s put into either a limited, temporary storage (glycogen) or, once that’s full, into more permanent storage (body fat).
Eating lots of sugar can also lead to your body producing too much insulin, which will cause too much sugar to be taken out of the blood, so you often have a high and then a crash/low after ingesting sugary foods.Ideally, you want blood sugar to always stay at a reasonable level, where it can supply your brain and muscles, but where your body does not have to start storing lots of it. And that’s where complex carbs are neat, because they don’t get broken down all at once, when they’re in your stomach/intestines, meaning their sugar enters your blood at a more sustainable rate. By eating them instead of sugar, you’re less likely to put on fat and less likely to have a crash.
- Comment on I'm bored and desperately search for a proper game 1 month ago:
Mindustry is basically Factorio with more focus on tower defense.
- Comment on Every. Single. Game. Ever. 1 month ago:
Also kind of breaks immersion when there’s tons of different enemies, but they never fight between themselves. Only when the player character shows up, they’re like, imma ruin this woman’s life.
- Comment on is this something only introverts struggle with? 1 month ago:
Opposite of neurospicy. 🙃
- Comment on is this something only introverts struggle with? 1 month ago:
Oh yeah, that for sure.
- Comment on is this something only introverts struggle with? 1 month ago:
I’ve heard before that it can be more difficult for folks on the autism spectrum, because we perceive more of the details in each voice, so it’s more likely to overwhelm us.
But it certainly doesn’t have to be. Neuroboring folks also don’t find it helpful when two speak at the same time.
- Comment on is this something only introverts struggle with? 1 month ago:
I mean, depends on the situation. Personally, I wouldn’t call it rude when someone kind of free-fire responds to a question they hear. Best course of action is to just chuckle at them responding synchronously and ask for only one of them to speak at a time.
- Comment on Bahhh 1 month ago:
- Comment on Is there a good way to import/export/migrate playlists between platforms? 1 month ago:
For those with traditional music files (MP3, OGG etc.), the file format for exporting playlists is called "M3U8”.
It is literally a text file where each line is a file path.
- Comment on How are the blatant anti-competitive practices of Apple just…allowed? How is this even possible? 1 month ago:
Yeah, but the law genuinely treats (near-)monopolies differently from their competitors. What’s legal for a small company does not have to be for a company which dominates the market.
The thing is, laws are supposed to bring the greatest benefit to a society. In most cases, fairness aids that goal. But that’s not the case for competition laws, which is why they’re relatively unintuitive.
- Comment on [DCSS] I did it! I touched the Orb... 1 month ago:
suddenly found myself in the Realm of Zot.
Yeah, when I got there the first
and onlytime, I was also surprised how little separates you from Zot once you’ve made it through the Dungeon and the rune branches. Far too many of my characters have died on the final stretch… - Comment on Can't Afford A Nintendo Switch 2? Buy A Switch 1, Nintendo Says - Insider Gaming 1 month ago:
I mean, if it’s still shit and it’s getting even worse, I don’t know why we wouldn’t continue to mourn that, or at least call it out.
- Comment on Can't Afford A Nintendo Switch 2? Buy A Switch 1, Nintendo Says - Insider Gaming 1 month ago:
Well, traditionally, console prices were subsidized by the more expensive game prices. They’d sell the console at a loss to then make that back per game. Them raising both the console price as well as game prices is what makes it awful.
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 1 month ago:
Yeah, I don’t have first-hand experience with Arch for that reason either. Well, and also because I do want a distro to set things up for me. You could set up the snapshotting (with BTRFS and Snapper) on theoretically any distro, but not having to figure out how and what settings are good, that’s why I go with openSUSE.
I might look into NixOS at some point. It obsoletes the need for OS snapshots, because the entire OS configuration is made in configuration files. But from what I hear, it helps to be a programmer (which I am) to really appreciate NixOS.And yeah, don’t know much about Bazzite either, but from what I’ve heard, it really has some design decisions that make it feel more like a games console. The atomic/transactional updates, for example. As I understand, updates and such are applied to a copy of your OS, which gets swapped in when you do the next reboot. This helps keep the system stable after applying updates, but implies that you can’t really just poke around manually in your root partition.
It can be helpful for users not looking to experiment, but yeah, can be a pain, if you do want to.As for a real-time kernel, the JACK FAQ says you don’t need it, but the distro might limit real-time scheduling anyways: jackaudio.org/faq/linux_rt_config.html
I’ve had JACK running on my system about a year ago, although I didn’t really have a need for low latency, so I can’t say, if it actually worked correctly.
Perhaps also worth pointing out that “Pipewire” is becoming a thing, which tries to make interfacing with JACK and PulseAudio much easier. I believe, I also used Pipewire back then. But yeah, folks who’ve dealt with JACK a lot more than I have, seem to be really excited about it, so it’s presumably doing a great job. - Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 1 month ago:
Yeah, I always hesitate to recommend distros. 😅
There’s tons out there and they all exist, because some smart person decided to put in lots of work, as the existing ones didn’t match what they wanted.If we exclude Ubuntu/Debian-based, that narrows it down somewhat. The other major distros are:
- Fedora: Rather much tied to the corporate side (Red Hat / IBM), tends to be rather up-to-date. Kind of has a focus on GNOME, but other “Spins” are available.
- Arch: Community-driven, pretty much a DIY distro, so the initial setup is somewhat challenging. It’s really up-to-date, so much that it’s referred to as “bleeding edge” (rather than cutting edge), meaning you might get faulty updates from time to time. It’s also often loved by minimalists, because they can decide for each component, if they want to install it.
- Well, and perhaps the most niche of these – which is what I’m on – openSUSE: Has the best integration of KDE (not by a huge margin, but still). I like it in particular, because of its snapshotting system. It automatically starts snapshotting your OS (not the user files) once per hour or whenever you make changes to the installed packages. If something breaks, you can boot into a previous snapshot from the bootloader and roll things back.
It’s the most “maximalist” mainstream distro, in that it preinstalls relatively much software. Personally, I think the other distros are a bit silly with their minimalist tendencies, but yeah, I’m biased. And well, downsides of openSUSE are that it is somewhat niche. You’ll find a helpful, tight-knit community, but it’s less likely that guides mention how to do things on openSUSE. Similarly, you’re less likely to find pre-packaged software for openSUSE. May have to compile from source more often, although SoS has a good amount of software, too.
As for whether a different distro is too much experimenting, if you do jump into it, you’ll understand why I talked about the desktop environment instead. 🙃
The DE makes a much bigger difference. Some people conflate distro and DE, because certain distros will have certain default DEs.
But if you used the same DE on two distros, honestly the main difference you’d notice is a different package manager. Where Ubuntu Studio and Mint useapt, openSUSE useszypper, Fedora usesdnfand Arch usespacman. They handle somewhat differently, but largely do the same things (i.e. install/update/remove packages).
Obviously, there are more differences to the distros, like how quickly they update and some of the default configuration, like the snapshotting I raved about, but ultimately it’s still a Linux system with much of the same software running on both…