cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@piefed.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No Man's Sky 10th anniversary Cosmos update is here, and that means orbital bases, space station ownership - and yes, you can finally fly to the sun⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There is no direction to go, it’s a sandbox, and discovery and exploration is pretty much the whole meat of the game. If you don’t like that, this is probably not the game for you. There are random events, there are questlines that eventually happen which you can optionally pursue, some of which get pretty in-your-face in case you’re worried you might miss them. Crafting and base-building is simplistic and mediocre. “Survival” is almost trivial on all but the very hardest difficulty settings, and even at the hardest difficulty and with willing suspension of disbelief it’s not really a fulfilling part of the game. There are a variety of other meta-systems tacked on too like language-learning, ship customization, fleet management and missions, settlements, universe-hopping, etc but these are just addons, they’re not the core of the game.

  If you want a more “guided” experience you could try watching for some of the time-limited/seasonal expeditions they do as live-service events. Some of them are easier to follow than others, but they all sort of have a theme and usually give you a good workout in a variety of the game’s different systems.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨wiki workers united!⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Great! I wish there were more tech unionization efforts like this in Canada, not that I imagine any such efforts would be able to make any progress at my regressive, toxic, American-owned, boomer-run employer within my lifetime. But maybe I’d be able to eventually find a new job at a union shop somewhere. I’m not holding my breath. Is there anything a senior-level peon like me can do to support these kind of things without trying to convince me there is any realistic hope of my current evil empire workplace ever unionizing?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Overturn Citizens United (and launch billionaires into space)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They can try, but how can such “wealth” exist without mutual consent? Their entire concept of ownership is predicated on money. We have all bent the knee and pledged allegiance to the concept of “money” but what happens when people no longer choose to remain loyal to it? How do they plan to keep those channels restricted? How much do you have to pay your proxies to protect things on your behalf when money is no longer something that is driving value in people’s lives anymore? How long can you keep money working as a motivating factor when the systems built on it start breaking down?

  They have built their lives and plans on the same lies that we have. Those lies are only real because we have all willingly suspended our disbelief and chosen to believe them because it suits us to do so. If it no longer suits us, we no longer need to continue believing, and no matter how hard the small number of billionaires and larger numbers of millionaires insist on believing, it won’t matter. Once enough people stop believing in the lies, it’ll become crystal clear that the wealth was just an illusion all along.

  I expect violence, from both sides, the only question is how long it will last and how severe it will be and what things will look like when it ends. I truly hope for something better, and I believe that with wisdom something much better is possible, but I’m not naive enough to expect it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Overturn Citizens United (and launch billionaires into space)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Because most Americans don’t know anything about Bernie, or maybe at most they know of a few extreme quotes Fox News or CNN have spit out from him. Educated well-informed voters are a tiny, tiny subset of actual voters.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Overturn Citizens United (and launch billionaires into space)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I recommend we allow billionaires to launch themselves into space, on their own dime. Occupy Mars! For the billionaires! So much free real estate waiting to be claimed!

  Then the real trick is: once they’ve self-exiled, don’t let them come back. And they will try to come back, trust me. They truly have no idea how much Mars sucks, they are NOT the brilliant clever people they have convinced both themselves and everyone else they are. Let them play their games, then laugh when they discover the consequences.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rich people don't understand us at all.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The best household robots are the ones that don’t move at all. Appliances. Like a dishwasher, FFS.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Housing prices⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That would be interesting, but I’m not sure how useful it would be given that “inflation” itself is a heavily massaged and manipulated metric. It’s one of the many layers of the illusion that the powers that be craft to separate us from the physical reality of why so many more of us have to work harder for the same or less. It only reflects actual reality to the extent it is politically necessary to so it can maintain some semblance of legitimacy. It may be better than nothing for adjusting such charts but it’s also misleading in its own way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Dangers of Socialism they warned us about...⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Extremism is also the problem, because it allows economic systems to be taken to extremes, which become unbalanced and that then unbalances other systems, like the political systems, which when given the right push by a particular aspiring authoritarian can easily end up landing on authoritarianism.

  The middle ground is usually the safest place to be. Socialism and capitalism are economic tools, they both have their place, for certain purpose. Extremists would tell you one is strictly, absolutely, and universally better than the other and imply that thus we should only ever use one system for everything (usually without strictly, absolutely, or universally defining what “better” actually means, because it’s usually a pretty self-serving form of “better"). That is an extremist position that many capitalists take, and most of western society spent the last oh, hundred years or so believing to various degrees.

  Socialized medicine is perfectly sensible, for example, and that’s a hill I’m perfectly willing to die on (but because I have access to socialized medicine I probably won’t have to die, and I won’t be bankrupted either, hooray :P)

  Socialism is not perfect, but neither is capitalism, neither is democracy, neither is pretty much anything. Perfection is a myth. There is no perfect tool, not in a workshop and not in a civilization. Some are more powerful than others. Some are more dangerous. Often the most powerful ones are the most dangerous. That doesn’t mean they are bad, but it does mean we must respect them and use them with care and attention, and only when appropriate. We don’t have perfect tools, and we probably never will but we can have a large and growing collection of tools we can use to manage our lives, our society, and our civilization. The more tools we know how to use safely the better. Only using one tool for everything is a stupid way of doing things, and it can be dangerous in its own way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I survive the US immigration?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That is my conclusion also.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do older files tend to have file extensions in all caps?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  A commodore 64 should’ve been enough for anybody.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I survive the US immigration?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Not all visits are the same, and that’s not really a good comparison. There’s a huge difference between visiting as a tourist temporarily for the world cup (a high profile event with extensive news coverage where any refusal is going to attract attention and be very internationally newsworthy) and the relatively routine process of actually immigrating for long-term work (dirty immigrants taking our jobs! /s) which is exactly what they are fighting against, whether any of us agree with that or not.

  The latter is much, much riskier in today’s political climate. It shouldn’t be. But it is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I survive the US immigration?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  They already know a lot about you that you might not imagine they do. Does that extend to whether you have social media accounts? Maybe, maybe not. If you declare your social media you’re taking your chances with what’s on there. If you lie about it, they may know you have one but not what it is, so you might get caught in that lie instead. It’s really hard to generalize what to say when you have imperfect information about what they already know, and they rely on that. What they “know” about you doesn’t have to reflect reality either, and there’s really nothing you can do if they “know” or simply believe you have a social media account and you actually legitimately don’t. Their beliefs trump reality. This is no longer a world where truth matters and you cannot rely on it to protect you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would it be possible to retool old transistors/electronics by filling in the increasingly larger gaps created by Moore's Law?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  As a conventionally understood process, no, and there is no practical way of even considering what you’re suggesting as a hypothetical. Maybe I and everyone else who knows anything about this topic are wrong though. If you can figure out a way, prepare to be very, very popular, because it would legitimately be a game-changer.

  The only thing I can vaguely think of fitting what you seem to be asking about is the process of combining hundreds or thousands of old pieces of hardware to run tasks in parallel. For example, think of turning a whole room into a cluster of Commodore 64s. If you had 1000 C64s, you could in theory run things 1000x as fast as a single Commodore 64. That’s an interesting idea, in theory.

  As far as catching up to Moore’s law, it’s going to be a struggle: This is almost never energy-efficient and almost never practical in the extreme, but it can technically be accomplished. Running tasks in parallel like this across different hardware is also extremely limiting though, as the isolated tasks have no way of communicating with or sharing information with each other at anything even close to the speed of actually processing the information. This is fundamentally different from a single-threaded task running at high speed on a single, combined processor, and requires careful design in either chunking the data into 1000 totally independent pieces or pipelining it into 1000 equally-computationally-intensive steps to be performed or some combination of the two, things which can really only be done effectively in certain problem spaces. This is why multi-threaded tasks typically end up not scaling up linearly in speed as you throw more cores at them. Many problems are not effectively parallelizable and cannot be cleanly broken into chunks without losing the context they need and cannot be split into so many discrete steps while maintaining the predictable timing window needed to schedule those tasks into a pipeline that isn’t constantly waiting on a handful of “slow” steps. It’s a huge challenge and not a realistically solvable one.

  If you just want homemade processors that can technically accomplish the same things as modern processors, sure, that’s technically possible but it’s going to be really, really slow and impractical. If you want homemade processors that can do a very limited set of things at something resembling Moore’s law speeds, you might be able to pull that off for certain very specialized tasks but again not in a super practical way and likely not in an energy efficient way either. What you almost certainly can’t do is both of those things at once. You can’t have the full capabilities of a modern processor in a homemade processor that is also as fast as a modern processor. That would just be a modern processor. And those are unbelievably advanced devices, they are basically the pinnacle of humanity’s collective technological achievement. I don’t think anything else can really compare to them, and you absolutely are not making them in your garage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This is exactly how an AI would respond, complete with fancy-quotes, em-dashes, a three-bullet-point list, and empty justifications throughout. Any AI would probably be able to provide more technical detail if we wanted to get into that, but I think a real human would be able to respond with a recipe for peach cobbler, and you’re a real human, right? What is your favorite recipe like?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you keep your shit organized?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Zack Freedman is a big 3d printing influencer who got the system off the ground and has kind of become synonymous with it, most of the gridfinity community discussion still happens on his discord I believe. He wears a custom teleprompter eyepiece thing, calls himself and his community cyborgs, and is neurotically hilarious about puns and alliteration. He’s quite a character.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you keep your shit organized?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nice to see a fellow cyborg!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨🤔 Interesting⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s exactly right, and it’s clearly why they intentionally decided to let the businesses have guns and gave them all the other rights in the constitution, knowing they would someday be declared to be actual “people” by a series of what must be the stupidest and most destructive legal precedents ever set in the history of humanity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨🤔 Interesting⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel very educated from having all read this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's a word for "I actively endorse it for others even though I dislike it”?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The word I would use is “recognize”, implying you recognize its value even though it doesn’t meet your own needs. I recognize gnome as a decent desktop environment but someone will have to pry KDE out of my cold dead hands before I’ll use it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG when available, but what should I choose between PS5 physical and Steam when not?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is the way. I buy games primarily to support game developers, not because I don’t know how to pirate. GoG is generally preferred when possible, but I buy games on Steam primarily because of convenience and the other services they provide, not because I blindly trust those games will always be accessible, and I think for the services they provide they do deserve their cut, so I’m supporting them as well. I do also happen to trust them, and I believe those games will be available to me for the foreseeable future and if I didn’t, my buying strategy would shift quite promptly, but I’m not blindly trusting that, it’s a calculated risk.

  I absolutely do know how to pirate games. This is not my first rodeo. But it’s mildly inconvenient, especially for updates and sometimes multiplayer, and I trust that process even less than I trust Steam. If Steam were to take my games away that I’ve already paid for (and supported) you’d better believe most of them are going into the download queue. Some I might choose to support again on a different platform, some have certainly earned it. But I know what I’m doing, and I’m doing it with intention. I decide who deserves my money and who doesn’t, and so far, Steam has earned what they get from me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How is an SSH key useful ?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s both far more convenient and far more secure. There’s basically no downside.

  Passwords are an obsolete technology that we keep widely using because they’re familiar and comfortable and then we try to bandaid-fix their issues with MFA which almost everyone finds intensely aggravating (and rightly so). Passwords are an awful choice from a security point of view.

  SSH was well ahead of the curve on allowing and adopting passkeys, but you will notice an upcoming push towards passkeys for everything, because the rest of the tech oligarchy has finally discovered that, like with MFA, they can use it as a way to capture your entire online identity within your phone which they own and control (even though you paid for it) and then use this as a lever to maintain their control of you, your phone, and your online identities. Enjoy your age verification journey!

  SSH keys are not locked to your phone and don’t have any big-tech strings attached, they are free and open and can be stored on any device, including ones you actually own and control, as it should be. SSH keys are the real deal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gog Promotional E-Mail Containing Nazi Symbols Goes Out to Subscribers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  As much as I would like to not let Nazis hijack certain things, the simple fact is they did, they have, and they continue to. If Nazi-ism were gone and a distant memory, which perhaps even a decade ago I might’ve believed we were nearly at, then we can start working on reclaiming what they have polluted and bringing back its true, full history.

  But that has all changed, the masks are coming off and we are starting to see how far these white supremacists have metastasized and how much power they are beginning to take control of with their fascism. Now is not the time to begin trying to reclaim these symbols, precisely when they are actively using them as dogwhistles and trial balloons, actively spreading their vile ideology and starting to signal to and coordinate with each other to make their ever-so-predictable moves against humanity once again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you stay on vpn 24/7 or turn it on whenever you need it?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I trust my ISP more than I trust a VPN. I only need a VPN when I need to appear like I’m in another country. That said, I’m very careful about who my ISP is, I have a choice in who my ISP is, and I pay more for that privilege, and I understand a lot of people don’t have that luxury.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you managed to create batteries that can last for a century, will charging be redundant?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That also kind of proves OP’s point though. 3G was shut down, making an iPhone 3 pretty much useless at this point. You can use these things a lot longer than they want or expect you to, sure, but 20 years is a stretch, and 100 years is untenable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, it’s possible. I use postfix virtual domains to direct entire subdomains to my personal mailbox, which I then host with dovecot-imap. For spam reasons I cannot in practice recommend redirecting an entire domain like <anything>@blahblahblah.com but subdomains like <anything>@addresses.blahblahblah.com or something like that works fine (and can be very secure, since if you’re using it for account signups it makes it very difficult to predict what email you’ve used for a given account making it difficult for someone attempting to reset your password or attempt to find re-used passwords across different accounts for example).

  I will agree with everyone else that starting a new mail server, especially in this day and age, is a challenging and complicated task with many obscure and tedious steps and constant maintenance and vigilance and little room for error. I have been doing this for over 20 years, and even I have been blacklisted countless times for small mistakes and configuration errors, and while an increasing number of blacklists are automatic and will eventually remove you once the problem is fixed, getting off certain blacklists is difficult and in the case of some of them, effectively impossible without paying money or coordinating with your ISP (and often paying money to them instead to vouch for you, or to give you permission to even run an un-blocked email server in the first place).

  Running a mail server requires a massive investment in trust and reputation, that presents a significant and possibly insurmountable barrier to entry for a novice, and it is absolutely jumping into the very deepest possible end of shark infested waters. I won’t say it’s impossible, but you’re going to have a very difficult time if you expect to be able to use it even for full-time personal use.

  I will say that receiving is usually easier than sending, so if you just want to receive emails on your own server and store them there, and then send using an “official” address (not on your server) that might work better. But it’s still super complicated, and having a setup like that can make it even more complicated, so this is still really not something I’d recommend if you’re new at self hosting and networking and stuff.

  There are lots of cool things you can do so easily with self-hosting, this is absolutely one of the hardest, and while it is rewarding and valuable in its own way, I would say it’s far from the most rewarding or valuable thing, and considering the difficulty, it’s almost certainly not the first thing you should be attempting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Death threats are never acceptable, but public shaming is an extremely important pillar defining the morals of society, and we are not wrong to use it whenever necessary.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Embracer Intends to 'Activate' Deus Ex, Saints Row, TimeSplitters, and Red Faction⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I hate it when that happens. Damn people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nobody understands the point of hybrid cars⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Science has already solved all these problems, they’ve been shouting about it for years, in some cases decades. the problem is we stopped listening to science and looking to science for answers, and instead started listening to companies who want to sell us things and looking to them for answers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨(Technology Connections) Nobody understands the point of hybrid cars [55:50]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They could even install catenaries incrementally only on the hardest and most common braking areas (which are often near population centers with infrastructure that could easily absorb the electrical spike) so it’s not like the total network needs to be electrified for this option to work. But nobody wants to spend any money and no government is ever going to force them to, so we’d apparently rather be completely reactionary and wait until economics eventually makes it make sense to them, because thinking and planning ahead for things beyond the current financial quarter is too difficult for us these days.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Internet has no benches: on building free public infrastructure for enjoyment⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The internet we remember never went anywhere, not really. We just all got sucked in by these conmen and sellouts who started “new and exciting” websites like Google and Facebook and Youtube then trapped people there and turned them into free infinite money generators with an ever-growing audience of captive eyeballs they could sell ads to.

  The same old internet is still there and it’s still free to join and contribute to: the indie web, the cozy web, the smol web, whatever you want to call it. We just forgot how to find it and join it and traverse it, and the ways of finding it are no longer common knowledge. Google and Bing are the only search engines that still exist, and they don’t want to show it to us. Social media is the only place we really have to share things with each other, and until we had Fediverse options they didn’t really want to let us see each other’s work and creations either, making it a cultural faux pas in many contexts and even going so far as to imply that it’s “spam” like Reddit’s infamous no-self-promotion rule. “How dare you try to create something you want us to show to anyone for free without being a company paying for ad space?” was the vibe I always got from that.

  It really won’t take much to get the old internet back. It’s not far away. It’s all drifting around out there in the ether, the content creators are still creating their content and they probably always will be, we just need to start putting the pieces back together again and figure out what sort of glue we need to put them all back together into a platform we can all stand on together once again.