cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@piefed.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How would you actually tax the ultra wealthy?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The reason nationalizing things doesn’t work is because it makes billionaires mad, and billionaires use their money to get revenge, sabotage the shit out of the process and convince you it’s a failure with propaganda you don’t understand and get you to elect a government that undoes the nationalization or dismantles it or sabotages it further until it dies.

  The general public can be reliably played like a fiddle to go directly against their own best interests, at full speed. Case in point: Trump. Also Reagan. Also all politics ever, really. “I love the poorly educated” is quite possibly the only true thing Trump has ever said.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My friend is 31 and is constantly breaking out in acne. She also gets very irritated/argumentative before her period. Is this normal for her age?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Get her to talk to a doctor, don’t diagnose her and don’t ask internet strangers to diagnose her. This is what doctors exist for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What Phone do you guys use?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m a scrub using stock Android also. Well, technically stock Samsung, whatever flavor of Android they call that nowadays. In my defense, saying that I “use” my phone at all is generous. I avoid the digital ball-and-chain like the plague, only touch it when I have to (like when some foolish family member calls me). None of my important data, passwords, or accounts will ever touch it unless they give me literally no other choice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's going on with the Systemd age verification stuff?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  A bunch of US states are passing laws saying operating systems must implement “age verification” or the companies that make the Linux distros will be liable for infringement. This, naturally, makes many of the companies involved (many of which are backed and funded by large, powerful tech companies) that make Linux distros really eager to implement age verification. Meanwhile, the users and maintainers of Linux itself, the systems that make up Linux, and even the maintainers and contributors to many Linux distros, who are real human people and not faceless corporations that think following unjustified laws is justified, think this is fucking garbage, and are telling the corpo scum to go fuck themselves with rusty knives. This is entirely appropriate and reasonable in this case.

  Hope that helps explain what’s going on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Subnautica 2's early access release date was "self-servingly" leaked by Krafton, "further damaging the game", claim lawyers for reinstated Unknown Worlds CEO⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This sort of thing used to bother me a lot, now I appreciate the sign that a real live human actually touched this at some point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So what's your take on Pokopia?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Cobbleverse Minecraft is where it’s at. There’s also All The Mons, which is “Cobblemon” AND “All The Mods” which is pretty much peak modded Minecraft as far as I’m concerned. I don’t see how anything could be better than this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Flappy Bird a good game?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not a bad game in the same way pong is not a bad game and checkers is not a bad game. They are simple, shallow games. That’s fine. Most people prefer deeper and more complex games most of the time, but sometimes, some people might feel like playing a simple game like flappy bird. That’s fine. There is nothing specifically wrong with it. It is playable. It’s not broken. It’s a perfectly fine game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jensen Huang says gamers are 'completely wrong' about DLSS 5 — Nvidia CEO responds to DLSS 5 backlash⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Calling it now: Jensen Huang’s mind has been emptied and replaced with AI chips. That’s why he just spouts AI generated nonsense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stardock announce an expansion into indie game publishing⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m very conflicted about Stardock. Brad Wardell has some very… uncomfortable and problematic issues around things he’s done and said and his games have often failed in one way or another. On the other hand, he does seem to genuinely have empathy for his customers in a way that most businessmen generally don’t, especially nowadays. I mean, I got this email too and over the years I’ve been given several gifts of free games and expansions other things and just given a general feeling of accountability and generosity from this company that are just… unheard of. I don’t want to give them a pass for the things they’ve done wrong but… like damn, their apologies are pretty convincing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  its a corp it cant just make claims and not follow on them

  oh, my sweet summer child… the winter is coming, and you will quickly find out exactly what corporations can “not” do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The AI bubble bursting might be one of the best things for open source models⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s what they think and hope is going to happen. I’m hoping (and optimistic) consumers can stay furious and resourceful longer than they can stay solvent. Once the bigger bubbles start popping, that will almost certainly become true.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Never understood this. If something foreign enters you your white blood cells go after it like a dog in heat, Would this not mean that our cells are smart enough to discern bad from good?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It has lots of false positives and false negatives. It is actually a very simplistic system, if it was “smart enough” we wouldn’t have diseases. In fact, a good number of diseases, especially chronic ones that millions or billions of people suffer from throughout their lives, are actually the immune system’s fault. It is not a “smart” system. It is clever. Sometimes. Until it’s not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord will restrict your account next month unless you scan ID or face⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s fine, and I hate Discord’s general situation too, and I can’t wait for a properly federated self-hostable open source alternative to take off. But it just seems a bit knee-jerk or straw that broke the camel’s back to throw Discord under the bus specifically for this. To be clear, you don’t actually need to provide ID, you can either continue using a limited account (it’s barely limited at all in any serious way unless you’re using Discord for NSFW stuff) or you can attempt to validate your face with a camera instead, which supposedly happens completely on-device. Either one is a totally reasonable alternative.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord will restrict your account next month unless you scan ID or face⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s fine if that’s your personal response. This still feels like a misdirected and ultimately useless response though.

  This is a government-created problem. Are we expecting widespread boycotts of Discord to change the government’s mind? Of course not.

  If it’s extremely bad for users, then users need to change their government. Yeah, yeah, I know the excuses for not doing that, they don’t listen, we are all powerless, it is the way it is, yadda yadda. It’s a lie. We are powerful, they want us feeling powerless so we can’t challenge them. Fuck that, challenge them. Government exists to represent us, it can exist in perpetuity only with our active and ongoing consent and participation. If people in totalitarian countries can overthrow their governments, so can we, we don’t have to do it overnight, we don’t have to do it over this one single isolated issue, but we can at least start working against them, eroding the structures that support them. Fuck governments like these, figure out ways to twist their arm, make things more difficult for them, and eventually, if we keep at it, we’ll get what we want. We hold the power here, not them. We decide what kind of society we want to live in. We need to stop abdicating our responsibilities as citizens and actively fight against this shit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The developers of PEAK, explaining how they decided on pricing for their game. ⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m Canadian, so I instinctively just round 5 bucks up to 8 bucks instead (adding exchange and tax)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I worked some prison and jails. They always put this big heavy green thing on you if your on suicide or solitary watch. My question is if Epstein was on watch then how did he suicide?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It was shallow because he was bleeding out at the time from all the gunshot wounds, give him a break, he did his best.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How long does it take for pregnancy to become noticeable?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But I’m le tired…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wendy's Firefox order kiosk borked⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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? ⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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