GreenBeard

@GreenBeard@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How hopeless is getting a job with a CS degree?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you underestimate how long these people can stay irrational. And just how entirely by the balls they have the system trapped. They already think of themselves as gods. They’re a level of delusional that would have them in a straight jacket if they didn’t have so much goddamn money. They don’t see the people that work for them as even animals, they’re barely tools. The scale and the scope of solidarity that it would take to pop their fantasy bubble has never been achieved in human history. They have engineered a world that makes raising that kind of trust and unity a generational struggle as difficult as bringing down Soviet Russia was last century. I hope to live to see the day their empire crumbles, but I’m not holding my breath.

  It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better and the losses they’ll take from security breaches will be insignificant compared to the profit they extract from their monopolies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How hopeless is getting a job with a CS degree?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I wouldn’t hang a lifetime career on it. Unless you have a guaranteed job out of the gate, it’s a fool’s gamble.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How hopeless is getting a job with a CS degree?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Worth noting, this will happen to you a lot. Even the good small companies (almost especially the good small companies) are going to fold. A lot. I’ve been in the IT service industry for 25 years and easily 80%+ will fail within 5 years. Unless you’re in a particularly high demand market, the pay isn’t great (not terrible, but people have a very unrealistic expectation for how much your generalist IT guy makes), and you definitely don’t want to be an independent contractor because you WILL end up spending more time trying to collect payment than fixing computers (or the majority of your profit paying someone else to do it).

  It’s a lot less security than most trades in most regions, but you can still strike it lucky every once in a while. Just make sure you make hay while the sun shines, because it isn’t going to last, and dry patches are frequent in most markets.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How hopeless is getting a job with a CS degree?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  My suggestion? If you’re really clever, find a good trade shop that’s willing to work with you through an apprenticeship and stay as far as you can from CS for the foreseeable future. Don’t give up on learning how to code, but don’t sink a ton of money into certifications or degrees; stay a hobbyist and enthusiast, don’t make it a career. Some day those skills may be invaluable, but it’s absolutely not worth the money today. You want to be rich in 40 years? Be the only one left who knows how to fix machine generated spaghetti code. You want to eat tomorrow, learn to swing a hammer, bend conduit, or some other kind of skilled labour.

  Side note: Make sure whatever trade you’re going into, you have someone who is going to guarantee you a spot to get your apprenticeship BEFORE you go to school. If you go straight into school, you will likely spend a lot of money on a trade you never get your journeyman ticket in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How hopeless is getting a job with a CS degree?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  No there won’t. Not for a generation at least. The AI momentum will take decades to unravel before anyone even thinks about going back and fixing all the broken code.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come president try for goals into the future, when its a big if? Like carbon emissions and such. Why not do comprehensive plans that can be done in 4 years instead the far off future?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  To put it as simple as possible, even if everyone was on board with the objective, which they won’t be, if you have 5 people try to agree on a course of action, you’re going to hear 6 different opinions. Once upon a time you could rely on a certain level of mutual trust to get to a mutually agreeable solution, but no one can trust anyone these days. You can’t trust companies, you can’t trust the state. You can’t trust the church, and you definitely can’t trust God(s), can’t trust family, can’t trust people who are different from you, can’t trust people who are the same as you… And to be honest I see no good reason any of us should. We all claim we have the same values but no one acts like it. We have 50,000 years of reasons you should never trust anyone.

  But that means if you want to get something done, you need to build agreement from square one every time. If people don’t agree to it, you’re just going to end up with roadblocks, opposition, and sabotage. People need to be on board, and I mean fully committed or whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish is never getting done, even if it could potentially help people. You don’t build support in a day, you’re not going to be able to have a face to face conversation with everyone, and we all know you can’t believe anything in an ad, in the news or on the internet.

  So the simplest things take decades to get moving. Because getting people to do anything for someone they can’t trust is nearly impossible.Trust is the rarest commodity on earth, no relationship, from family, to friends, to nations can operate without it, and humanity is almost tapped out of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨At this stage in technological advancement can humans at the point where we can create a new element on the periodic table?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Several, most are highly radioactive and prone to rapid decay. Technically they occur naturally but don’t last long enough to be “found in nature.” If you’re looking for vibranium, you can stop looking, it won’t happen, but yes we have created new elements.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would you rather be reincarnated into a world of magic or reborn as yourself (with your current knowledge fully intact)?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  2 questions:

  1. Why do you believe magic is incomprehensible and supernatural? The earliest conception of magic is just a part of nature like everything else. We don’t fully understand it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t comprehensible.
  2. What is the explanation for quantum mechanics? I’m not suggesting that there isn’t one, I’m asking if you understand the underlying principles that make the observations of quantum mechanics work.

  No one asked you to believe in angels or demons or devas or yokai or anything else that is objectively not real. The fact that’s how some people define “magic” does not mean that’s the only definition. Some people have defined marriage as a holy sacrament exclusive to their mythological beliefs. That doesn’t mean that’s the only definition, and I find it odd that you would dismiss the very many viewpoints that do not have such an Abrahamic bias.

  We do not have all the answers to every question nor are we ever likely to, if for no other reason than the maximum information density of our brains is finite and a mind vast enough to know everything would necessarily exceed the limits of our finite universe.

  Now, far from finding imagination foolish, I think it’s one of our most important skills, but let’s be clear, most of the fantasy magic systems we fantasize about would be objectively terrible because in almost every case, the consequences of such a world would not be how we imagine it, particularly since every magic system we imagine is almost universally internally inconsistent. That by no means suggests we should stop imagining, I merely stated I’d rather live in a world that has consistent rules than one that is arbitrary and capricious.

  Perhaps you might learn to practice some humility and ask a question or two before you go throwing around terms like “ghoulish.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would you rather be reincarnated into a world of magic or reborn as yourself (with your current knowledge fully intact)?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And what makes you think we haven’t got those still in store? The island of our knowledge and the vast coastline of our discovery is still insignificant compared to the vast sea of our ignorance and the oceans of possibility we have yet to travel.

  Whimsy is in short supply, but it’s not because the world lacks magic. It’s more because of choices made by people who chose to be dead inside, and shaped the world in their image. I’m not asking you to stop demanding more whimsy, far from it. This old grey bearded man is asking you to form a party, accept a quest and perhaps one day lead the charge of an army in pursuit of returning the whimsy to the world.

  Do you accept, traveller?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would you rather be reincarnated into a world of magic or reborn as yourself (with your current knowledge fully intact)?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I really don’t understand what magic you think we don’t have? Chances are you typed this question on a slate of crystal and wire that allows you to see and hear across the planet in nearly real time. There are people who, with the right tools can summon fire at their fingertips, unleash arcs of lightning, draw water from thin air, and make rocks that talk. We are surrounded by forces that both well mapped (at least locally) and are completely incomprehensible to the best of us. While we have not mastered the veil between life and death, we have certainly learned to draw it back.

  You are, I fear demonstrating the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt. You’re confusing the comprehensibility of the world with mundanity. We are living in a world full of “magic”… It just doesn’t look like the magic you read about in old fairy tales, and importantly, it’s not shared equally to everyone.

  I’ll take reincarnation with my mind intact.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How no-techy/"common" people know if a Open Source code is secure?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  How do you know that proprietary code is secure? Open source at least has a collective self interest in finding and patching flaws. There is no such natural mechanisms in software development by giant corporate conglomerates.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do non-English speakers learn to code in English, or in their native language?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s probably fair, but I would also worry that anything coded in Finnish would be trying to find a way to kill me for not respecting its personal space.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If everyone in power is racist, a pedophile, and just all-around hates poor people, happiness, and everything that's good, then how do we keep winning?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You ever hear the saying that if you gave an infinite number of monkeys and infinite number of typewriters at least one of them would likely produce the stage play of Hamlet by pure chance from slamming the keys? That’s not exactly how this works but it’s close. The reality is co-operative power always exceeds what any individual can do, but co-operative power requires co-ordination. Usually these systems start out with well meaning people coordinating groups of people to build a house, raise a barn, build a wall, found a city, organize a farming district, found a nation, start a multinational corporation. Unfortunately the guy co-coordinating the team, tends to get a little full of himself over time, starts taking bigger shares for himself than is truly justifiable, and then their kids do the same thing and the system starts to decay.

  Public, private, capitalist, socialist, doesn’t matter what the goal or structure of the organization looks like, it always rots from the top. And then it falls apart, we rinse the blood off, and repeat with a slightly different version. This is not new, Plato had a very good description of it in 375 BCE (approximately). And every new attempt we try to build it a little bit better to prevent someone (or their great, great grandson) from eventually deciding they’re a demigod and entitled to do whatever horrendous idea pops into their head. We even built systems that kick you out of the top seat every once in a while to see if people still trust you to be in charge. Unfortunately we forgot corporate governance is also governance, creating a wealth class which became modern aristocracy, and yada yada here we are. Turns out our current system is also vulnerable to corruption. So are all the rest we’ve tried too though, and we have at least 10,000 years of attempts at it. It’s a hard problem.

  We get better, we still fail, we try again, repeat infinitely. How do we do good things like abolishing slavery, age of consent and minimum wage? We got better. Why are there still evil, greedy, pedos in charge? Well, they didn’t start that way, but they did end up a blood sucking fiend, sometimes after generations of rot, sometimes in one lifetime. You can’t really turn a vampire back to human though, so we do what we have to do. We’ll hopefully find a better solution on the next go around, trying to figure out how to work together to achieve a good life for everyone without the people facilitating the project turning into monsters.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What effect did COVID have on the minds of the ultra-wealthy?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It spooked them. Think of them like stunted teenagers who think they’ll live forever and have no concept of consequences. Suddenly being faced with the potential consequences of their largess, and the potential for coordinated, distributed, non-hierarchical response, as well as the recognition of their own mortality sent them into a state of existential panic. Their retrenchment and consolidation in response to this panic has only accelerated the damage they’re doing. They fully expect a mad-max style social collapse, and want to be sitting on a little slice of Eden when it happens.

  The fact that we could avoid all of the necessity for recreating the most horrific dystopias mankind has ever envisioned by them simply… not being so damn greedy seems to have missed them entirely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is the world more volatile now or is it just the abundance of news?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Have you considered the possibility it’s both? Yes the world is becoming less stable and less safe, but also, the immediacy of information has also made it all seem much more urgent and close? We don’t live in a closed test environment. Two variables can be moving simultaneously.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do americans living in Red States really despise american living in Blue States?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You make a good point. I remember when I was about to start school, my parents moved us to a rural area because they felt it was safer for raising children. The house we moved into was two doors down from a meth lab on one side and a pedo on the other. That was in the '80s.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do americans living in Red States really despise american living in Blue States?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Many do. Many people living in blue states despise their neighbours too. I’ve always found it odd that people who hate half or more of their countrymen call themselves “Patriots.” It’s bad enough that they rationalize hate, but to somehow twist that into a caricature of love, it’s just very contradictory.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's your excuse for the current state of affairs?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No, I’ve been “Green Beard” since 2005, but I heard it was a great game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's your excuse for the current state of affairs?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, well in that case, Alexa play “I’m Only Human.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's your excuse for the current state of affairs?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Why would I need excuses? I’ve been trying to stop this for 20 years. Political movements, organizing, writing and sharing useful information. I don’t need excuses. If you want an explanation, I can give you my perspective, but I don’t regret not doing more. I did as much as I could and paid dearly for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How bad were the asylums that Reagan closed in his tenure? Were they really that bad? Did no one take a look at the staff and bed side manner? Or was it really like Born On The Fourth of July?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They were legitimately that bad for the most part. Some were better than others of course, but the best of them were closer to a bad nursing home. The worst were legitimate atrocities. You didn’t put someone there to get better. Those who did were the rarest of exceptions, and were people whose problems had more to do with unhealthy environments. You put people in an asylum to keep them contained.

  It’s important to remember, psychology is a relatively young discipline. Historically the best mental counseling was folk wisdom and religion. People had all kinds of ideas, often grounded more in superstition than any kind of demonstrable, repeatable evidence (a problem which unfortunately persists in the field, though it’s getting better). Asylums were more like dubious research labs than medical facilities and the mentally ill were closer to lab rats. Caged lab rats.

  The field still has a long way to go, there’s still a lot we don’t know that’s out there to learn, but the methods and techniques are a lot better than they used to be. A lot better.

  There’s a lot of reasons not to like Regan, but he did get some things right. That was one of them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just got arrested for a supposed DWI even though I blew a 0.0000000. Don't cops need to read your Miranda rights to you? I asked for a blood or hair follicle test and I was denied. WTH is happening?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Just wait until they start screaming “Stop Resisting” for no reason. That’s when you’re either going to end up in a hospital or a grave. Get a lawyer and good luck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where do I go for unbiased news in the world without it having an ulterior motive or kissing ass to the establishment of said country?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  All news is biased. Every time someone writes something down, it has a perspective to it that provides a selective view of the truth. There’s no such thing as purely objective. The closest you can get is to aggregate multiple sources on any news worth your time. I find Ground News useful for this because it makes it convenient to look at multiple sources sorted by bias and then draw your own conclusion. Rather than trusting people not to make a straw-man out of opposing views it helps to hear what people actually think in their own words. You might even learn something, although I know no one really enjoys finding out their opponent actually has a point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do we see Oil as always being here for humans? Isn't drilling like taking water out of a swimming pool? Sooner or later your going to run out of water.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, this has been discussed extensively, since coal was the fuel of the day. Non-renewable fuel is by definition finite. It’s one of many issues with fossil fuels.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How old is the "world's oldest profession"?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess technically it’s slightly more than half, but the real limiting factor in the market is that regardless of species, most female primates won’t buy sexual favours. That’s not to say there isn’t a market for male “prostitutes”, just that their target demographic is a bit… niche, as is the demographic of those who would be willing to offer those services.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How old is the "world's oldest profession"?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, it sort of is, in that only half the population can do it. What he’s referring to though is an experiment where they tried teaching chimps the concept of “money” by giving them tokens they could exchange for food.

  The very first thing that they started doing was exchanging food tokens for… mating activities.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's becoming widely accepted that it's not safe to put pictures of your children on social media... (cont. in post)⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes. Like sexual predators they’re more common than people like to admit and I’ve had the displeasure of knowing a few. Also like sexual predators, living like they’re ubiquitous instead of taking out the trash is not the best way to deal with them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's becoming widely accepted that it's not safe to put pictures of your children on social media... (cont. in post)⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll grant it’s an automation issue. Age verification is always identity verification when it’s automated. It doesn’t matter how much you try to scrub the data. If it has to be done algorithmically, there’s no possible circumstance where an unaccountable third party should have that data.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's becoming widely accepted that it's not safe to put pictures of your children on social media... (cont. in post)⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A government that’s that untrustworthy, doesn’t deserve to exist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's becoming widely accepted that it's not safe to put pictures of your children on social media... (cont. in post)⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  At what cost? How many have lost hope and worse because the only thing they found in the noise of the internet was hate? Or worse, someone profiteering or exploiting their isolation?

  At what ratio do we acknowledge that the “cure” is at least as bad as the disease. Could we even get reliable numbers on that given it’s all on private platforms that have every reason to lie? Facebook is responsible for igniting at least one genocide. How many more before it’s too many?