cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@piefed.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How long does it take for pregnancy to become noticeable?⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  There is really no general answer to this that applies in all cases. It depends on a lot of factors, including what body shape and size you have normally, and what kind of clothes you’re willing to/normally wear, and who you’re hoping to hide it from, and how far you’re willing/able to go to try to hide it. There are always ways to hide it if you’re willing to go to extremes, in Victorian times people would just head off to some remote country estate and allow no visitors until the baby was born and they were ready to “return to society”. Of course that kind of pattern of unusual behavior can also reinforce any suspicions, so it’s always going to depend on who exactly you’re trying to hide it from and how much they already know about you or how much they might suspect that you’re pregnant.

  A casual stranger on the street who has no context about who you are or what you looked like before your pregnancy and only encounters you a single time might have a much tougher time ever confidently identifying you as “pregnant” beyond a reasonable doubt unless it’s really obvious and it’s not always going to be obvious for everyone with every body type even in the late stages of pregnancy, it may not even occur to them. On the other extreme, if you’re living with and trying to hide it from your mom, or your partner, or even a close friend, and they’re vigilant for the possibility that you might be pregnant and are paying careful attention? Good luck, they’re going to figure it out sooner or later and probably a lot sooner than anyone else because they have so much familiarity with you as a person, and even your habits and behaviors, and they might even start noticing some changes intuitively even if they aren’t visibly obvious, including changes that you might not even have noticed yourself. And that just snowballs into more careful attention and analysis until they figure out what is probably going on with you. Sometimes they might even know or suspect it before you do. It happens.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ATproto: The Enshittification Killswitch That Enables Resonant Computing⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t really care what protocol is used, the best one will eventually win and whatever it ends up being will be mostly transparent to the user, just like (and I may be dating myself here) IMAP eventually became the standard way to interact with email and POP just got essentially forgotten despite starting out as the universal and most popular choice. Even SMTP is technically just one extremely popular way to reliably transfer email, but even in that case there used to be others like UUCP and you could make an argument that other significant protocols are involved in a modern email stack now too. UUCP made sense at the time, but eventually was recognized to be a stupid and non-scalable design and the superior protocol won out. Great. Email is still email.

  What I care about is having my data and account on a server that I can choose and trust or potentially even control. With Bluesky, that is currently quite hard and impractical, although gradually getting slightly easier. With the Fediverse it is foundational, and if I cared enough about it, I’d already be able to be running my own without issue, because that’s what the Fediverse is explicitly about. Again, I don’t care what protocol I’m or what protocol it’s using, I do care what network I’m on, and what features it has, and what goals it has, and what priorities it has, and on that basis I would rather be part of the Fediverse, whether it’s using ActivityPub or ATProto or something else.

  Bluesky is for the centralized people to go and centralize their hearts out. Maybe ATProto won’t be permanently afflicted by their tolerance for centralizing things, time will tell, but it’s the network and the organizations and the development directions I’m interested in, not the protocol itself. May the best protocol win.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do video game skeletons put themselves back together?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The same reason ghosts and vampires often similarly reappear soon after being banished or defeated. All are undead, protected or animated by powerful magics, and you generally can’t just “kill” something that’s already supposed to be dead. Death no longer has meaning to it, its mere existence proves that it is beyond what we would normally consider death. At least not without exploiting some kind of specific weakness, using some elaborate ritual or calling ghostbusters.

  Zombies are sometimes considered undead too, and originally they pretty much were, but more recently they’ve mostly been modernized and adopted into a more pseudo-science existence where they’re simply dead-ish, but with bodies still animated by some kind of infection in the nervous system and brain that allows basic biological activity to continue. The biological activity, then, can still be stopped using most or all of our conventional methods of stopping unwanted biological activity.

  True undead are much more difficult to permanently end, and a skeleton is very clearly not using any traditional biological activity to exist, so whatever does allow it to exist isn’t likely to be stopped by our traditional methods of ending life.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If WWIII broke out tomorrow do you honestly believe america would win?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You might be underestimating just how many nukes there are. As a species, maybe we could survive a full-scale nuclear war, if they all go off under ideal conditions to minimize fallout and radiation spread, and it doesn’t range far enough or last long enough for the radiation to shorten lifespans or sterilize us into a population bottleneck, and the climate effects don’t make the planet uninhabitable so quickly that even with what remaining functional technology our increasingly limited population and damaged infrastructure can continue to cobble together, we simply can’t adapt fast enough (like most of the other life on the planet). These kind of play against each other a bit though, the safest places from radiation are likely to be remote, minor islands and places like Australia, but they have some of the least resilient infrastructure and are also going to be hit very hard by rapidly changing climate conditions.

  It’s not going to be a good situation and I don’t think we can really accurately predict whether human life will survive it, there are way too many variables. We are tough and resilient, but nukes will put the entire planet, nevermind human civilization as we know it, into a really really tough place which there may genuinely be no coming back from.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there anything like a Beholder monster before 1975?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah it’s pretty clearly Medusa/Gorgon-inspired. Obviously, it has its own unique twist, as it should, and probably includes aspects from some other references as well (Scylla, Cyclops, and the Hydra from classical mythology, and various Lovecraftian and Science-fiction tentacle/blob monsters that were common throughout the 60s and 70s) but the basic imagery and functionality is too similar to a gorgon to ignore that there’s likely some connection, whether conscious and intentional or not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are there any art programs designed specifically for mouse users?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Krita is always free and open source, supported by donations and the community. It’s not a trial and it’s not time-limited.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Has Canada's government done anything concrete to reduce dependence on the US since Trump took office? Maybe even since the first term?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Voting for fascism is never the right choice. Even in a two-party system, everyone still has the option to not vote for either Kang or Kodos. “Throw your vote away” is always a valid electoral choice, and perhaps in some cases, the only morally defensible one. We even happen to have a still marginally viable third party, and even if all your vote is doing is keeping that third choice barely alive on the margins, that has its own form of validity too.

  Strategic voting is the opposite of strategic. It’s a short-term, single-election tactic that will result in a strategic collapse in the long term. You do not ever have to vote for one party to prevent the other party from getting in. That is not your responsibility, and if you do that, it’s not going to ever get better. You are sacrificing the future for the present, and the present is fleeting but the future is forever. We have to think longer term, or we will have absolutely no recourse when both of the top choices end up being unconscionable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Winnie the Pooh considered "racist" now or are .ml folks using it as an excuse to defend Xi Jin Ping?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you annoy .ml users, then I like you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If president abductions are something that can apparently just happen how come Putin or Kim Jong Un aren't in some foreign prison right now?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  But I’m le tired…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wendy's Firefox order kiosk borked⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  with a few scattered locations elsewhere around the world.

  There’s like 30 of them just in my single non-US city, so I’m going to suggest it’s probably more than a few scattered locations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should I get the Measles and/or Mpox vaccines if I had them as a child?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know what it’s like in the USA especially in its current dysfunctional state, but in Canada we’ve got public health agencies that support and track vaccination status and recently even pharmacies are getting into the situation. It seems like the US has similar organizations. If you don’t have a doctor, you may be able to find other options for checking your vaccination status through them, and they can probably guide you on whether you need any boosters or updates.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you think Google execs keep a secret un-enshittified version of their search engine and LLM?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No, porn is for poor people. These people can (and do) easily afford the live action version.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is with these videos where it's just someone reaction to shit someone else is doing? ⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree it is generally pretty stupid and difficult to watch, however there are a few situations where it makes some sort of sense.

  1. It is sometimes used as a way to get around certain copyright issues (probably not legally, but it sometimes confounds the horribly stupid copyright bots that major platforms use with lazy impunity)
  2. Sometimes the person “reacting” is themselves entertaining to watch. These reaction videos are generally for pre-existing fans of *that person*, not for fans of the *video being watched*.
  3. Sometimes the person reacting is adding genuine value, for example they might be a legitimate expert (or at least a self-believed one) on the topic the video is discussing. This is in some sense sort of a video review, or a fact-check.
  4. It is pure algorithm-bait, not really intended for any actual human to deliberately enjoy, but it tricks the algorithm into showing it to people who are too low-effort to look up the real video and just watch it because it’s in their “feed”.

  Usually it’s some combination of the above.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you were dropped into a pool of people's spit and prevented from getting out, would you melt to death?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, the good news is, this is a great place for dumb questions, should you ever have any. Welcome!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sooo... This is happening on Imgur⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It is always okay to punch Nazis. You don’t need a reason. (serious answer though: I have no idea what kicked it off, my comment still stands though, it’s always okay to punch Nazis.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WTF Just Happened? | The Corrupt Memory Industry & Micron [GN]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Here’s the actual TL:DW (it’s not that long, and I did watch it)

  Steve describes what’s happened (Micron shuts down Crucial their consumer-facing “store brand"), mocks their stupid press release, and discusses the nuances involved, will they still be selling to all the rebadged memory resellers who use Micron as a supplier? Unclear, their reps and defenders say yes, their PR and the context implies not really, unless those resellers want to get into a bidding war with AI datacenters that they’re not going to win. Steve not-so-subtly implies that this seems awfully sort of kind of like more price fixing from a small group of oligopolist companies who have in fact been convicted in the past of price fixing, while explictly stating that he is, of course, for legal reasons, definitely NOT implying that in any way shape or form. Some much deserved ranting about how shitty and frustrating this situation is is mixed in throughout and he goes over details about exactly how much prices have risen already, pointing out all the different devices that require some form of high speed memory that are going to be affected by this. Some further discussion suggests the possibility this might just be a shot across the bow to let the other memory companies who are totally not colluding with Micron and never would consider doing that to let them know it’s absolutely time to not collude about anything like that because of course they’re all paying very close attention right now. So we’ll have to see what else develops, but basically he’s letting everyone know he’s on it, and he’s paying very close attention too.

  I might’ve read between the lines a bit in a few places, I have some of my own strong feelings about what’s going on here, so I apologise if I inadvertently mixed in any of my own interpretation by accident.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WTF Just Happened? | The Corrupt Memory Industry & Micron [GN]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There are still some factors providing weight on the other end of that lever. Valve is doing good things with Steam Deck and the popularity of it is keeping developers supporting lower spec hardware. Remote play codecs (both Steam’s own and Moonlight/Sunshine) reduce the need to have more than one capable gaming computer as you can just stream from the one you do have to any others. Raspberry Pi is a great way to access non-gaming computing cheaply. Arduino, even though the company itself is kind of doing some shit, still has an ecosystem big enough to survive even if the company itself completely sabotages it. And of course the used/surplus PC market is thriving, even more than ever before with Windows 11 forcing millions of PCs into early retirement for no good reason. They’re still perfectly capable machines that will run Linux without an issue and you get them cheap as a song or even free if you play your cards right.

  I’m not saying any of this to dispute anything you’re saying, I’m just pointing out these resources we still have so that we can take advantage of them while we still can and protect our continued access to them. It’s clear the claws are coming out to start locking down consumer computing, but people need to know there is a resistance to it and there are ways to resist. And we should.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If the US was partitioned, what new states would you want to appear?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Move the USC capitol to Milwaukee or Minneapolis/St. Paul. Both nice and central. Despite seeming landlocked, both have ocean access, Milwaukee through the Great Lakes and Minneapolis through the Mississippi. Plenty of industrial capacity and open land in the area if they need to expand. Midwestern culture is pretty resilient and underappreciated frankly. Minnesotans are basically honorary defacto Canadians already. Milwaukee featured prominently in Wayne’s World, starring Canadian Mike Myers (who started the recent Canadian “Elbows Up” movement) so we’ve already got that significant cultural connection there too. They’d be good choices I think.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who shops at small businesses?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Too late I already starved to death long ago. I am just a ghost in the machine, still screaming at the injustice of the world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨True⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s how it should be. That demonstrates why the working class must maintain control of the means of production. Contrary to popular belief, that’s not actually communism, rather it is the difference between feudalism and freedom.

  When the feudal lords own the thing(s) you use to make your living, you’re not really free and disempowerment and disenfranchisement becomes endemic and cumulative. Plantation slaves and tenant farmers had an awful lot in common, they were not free, did not have any form of mobility, physical, social or otherwise. The lord owned the land and pretty close to everything in it. They controlled the job, controlled the housing, controlled the costs, controlled the compensation and ultimately controlled the tenants lives. There is some difference in the degree of control, but mostly only in degree.

  Tenant employees are not much different today, except that it’s all been dressed up to look more free. Most of it’s an illusion though, and that shows when you start actually trying to exercise any freedom. If you don’t own any of the things that are earning your paychecks, you’ll be a slave to the people who do. That’s not something capitalism requires or even expects. A free labor market is part of the free market that capitalism requires to function effectively. Entrepreneurship is one of the pillars of capitalism and growth but it cannot exist if people or even small organizations cannot afford to own anything productive enough to be competitive or successful.

  Like it or hate it, capitalism itself is not quite the problem. What we’re doing now is not functioning effectively because it’s not actually capitalism anymore, it’s feudalism. Whatever you want to call it, late-stage-capitalism, neo-liberalism, techno-feudalism, neo-feudalism, what is happening today is not what capitalism used to mean, and it’s not just because we just didn’t “properly understand” capitalism until now, and it’s not because this was actually an inevitable outcome.

  Capitalism is just a tool, it’s one tool in a toolbox that we can use, it was never supposed to be the only tool, but even if it was the only tool, what we’re using it for now is not what it was supposed to be used for. What we understand about capitalism’s intended function is not matching what we see happening in the world because it’s been changed, it’s been corrupted. Important pieces of the framework that we used to call capitalism have been lost. On purpose. It has been stripped down from a tool to a weapon.

  Capitalism is not the problem, we can get rid of it if we want, but it won’t solve the problem. The lords claiming ownership of everything are the problem, and even if we did throw it all away to switch to communism or something else, they would still be there, they would put themselves in the same places of power, and they would cause exactly the same problem, just like they did in communist Russia, maybe even some of the names and faces of the lords changed, but the problem certainly didn’t! Corruption and greed and exploitation and rent-seeking don’t care what economic system you’re using, they will find ways to corrupt, hoard, exploit and seek rent from the less fortunate, because that’s what the humans desiring those things want. And they will use any system at all to get it. The system is only at fault in that it was not protected from this kind of abuse. Any system will have to be or it will end up the same way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who shops at small businesses?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Perhaps I was laying it on a little thick for you, but sometimes you’ve really got to sledgehammer the point home, to ensure the people in the back can hear. My point has been made, nobody is obligated to take it personally, you are welcome to ignore it or do with it whatever you please. That said, if your instinct is to take it as a personal attack directed at you, maybe the point actually is directed at you after all. I tend to trust people’s own judgements on this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who shops at small businesses?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Only buying things that are the lowest price has many consequences and not all of them are beneficial to you. Sometimes it’s just that the thing you are buying for the lowest price is crappy and poor quality. But now we are coming to realize that one of those consequences might be the destruction of the world. Figure out how to price that consequence into your economic model, and choose accordingly.

  Apparently not destroying the world is more valuable to some people than others. Personally, I would pay at least 1000% more to not destroy the world, because not destroying the world is really important to me. Maybe it’s not as important to other people, I don’t know. The wonderful thing about the world we are destroying is that everyone gets to make their own decisions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It turns out Saudi Arabia will own 93.4 percent of EA if the buyout goes through, which is effectively all of it⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That is some very black or white, us or them, red team vs blue team thinking. It’s very interesting that you immediately jump to that conclusion when I am not even from the US at all. The answer to your question is absolutely not, and the fact that it’s a “world economy” doesn’t and shouldn’t mean any people are obligated to do business with and accept the controlling interest of literal monsters fueled by oil and oil money. Ethics must also be allowed to control the economy, not just money. The world’s financial systems have consequences beyond just the economy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It turns out Saudi Arabia will own 93.4 percent of EA if the buyout goes through, which is effectively all of it⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s definitely not new, but it’s time to start thinking about how strange it is, and start pulling these assholes off their money-merry-go-round.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Starbound Fans: New Dedicated Server Open to Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  PVP? Strictly yes, strictly no, or opt-in?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do people with epilepsy triggered by flashing lights, drive past trees that are backlit by the sun?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t have epilepsy, but I do get migraines, and what you described is a perfect trigger for me.

  Best way to avoid it is don’t drive when the sun is low in the sky or on roads lined with very tall trees. If for some reason I was trapped in such a situation, which is not really likely since it’s very predictable if it’s something you’re interested in avoiding, I would probably slow down, find somewhere to pull over, and just wait it out. But yeah, it is bad. I don’t do it if I can at all help it, because I avoid getting into that situation like the plague.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What game is a guilty pleasure of yours?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Beta Starbound was the shit. Release was just shit, with no “the”. They took a great game of endless discovery and procedural generation with a gameplay loop that just worked out of beta and filled it with completely predictable set pieces and juvenile hard-coded nonsense. They literally added a poop emoji monster FFS.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If Microsoft ended Windows 10 support, why is it still getting updates like every other day?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You think you can turn them off. Temporarily. They mysteriously turn back on. For no obvious reason. I have literally never in my life been successful at actually permanently disabling Windows Updates. And god knows I have tried. The setting re-enables itself. The disabled service re-enables itself. Some installer quietly turns them back on. You change some unrelated setting and suddenly, there’s Windows Update again! There’s no escape.

  Windows: “Oh, I know you already told me you didn’t want important updates, but I just assumed you still wanted critical updates? Okay, okay, I get it, you don’t want critical updates either, I hear you…” <3 weeks later> “I’ve been trying to warn you about this for the last 2 weeks but you’ve had your notifications turned off, but now I really have to because Microsoft told me this next update is SOOO important that I really need to install it just this once, okay! But really, you should have at least critical updates too. I mean, installing this update requires them anyway, and all the important updates too, so I’ll just turn those back on for you to make this whole process easier next time Microsoft has a super-critical-urgent-mega-feature-emergency-update for you, sorry for all this inconvenience!” <reboots in the middle of your work>

  Linux is the only solution that has worked.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Subnautica 2 Publisher Asked ChatGPT For Help Dumping Founders⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The best thing that could happen is to have the Subnautica founders either settle with them to take back the IP (and ideally at least the payout they are owed), or utterly wipe the floor with them in court, and then use the damages awarded to create the true successor to Subnautica that it was always going to be without the interference, meddling and sabotage from Krafton.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Subnautica 2 and inZOI publisher Krafton launches voluntary resignation program for employees as it transforms into an “AI first company”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  FWIW, between what’s going on with EA/Sims 4 and Inzoi, most of the life-sim community seems to be pinning their hopes on Paralives now, which does look like it’s going to be a banger, but relying on a single successor to the genre is a lot of pressure and the community is putting a lot of weight on their shoulders which is not a great or healthy situation to put them in. Especially for a genre that requires so much work to meet the community’s expectations.

  Oh well, at least if it all goes to shit, we’ll always have Sims 3 and all its mods and expansions. Still the best life-sim out there in my opinion, as long as you can withstand the instability, bugs and crashes.

  Some bearded and cutlass-wielding fellow needs to create a definitive hacked community edition of that game, ideally with all the mods and fixes already implemented and ready to roll, all the awful EA store and social media shit mercilessly excised. Or even better, some project just needs to reimplement the whole engine from scratch, OpenTTD style.