AnyOldName3

@AnyOldName3@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My friend got this when she tried to view a Reddit post about a dental issue that got marked as NSFW⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  With how the law is written, if you think anyone might ever make a mistake (likely), think the government might ever bother going through the hassle of enforcing it (probably less likely if you’re not running a big website), and don’t have loads of spare money to pay huge fines with or to pay an age verification service with (likely), then blocking the UK is the only way to be compliant. It doesn’t require a technicality. The law just doesn’t have any leeway for honest minor mistakes or small hobbyist websites.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My friend got this when she tried to view a Reddit post about a dental issue that got marked as NSFW⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Some instances use the image proxy and others don’t. It seems that mine doesn’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My friend got this when she tried to view a Reddit post about a dental issue that got marked as NSFW⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Fun fact: I can’t see the screenshot as I’m in the UK and your instance has taken the maximally paranoid literal meaning of the OSA and blocked access just in case anything’s accidentally not flagged as NSFW.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It Turns Out, Steam’s Adult Content Ban Has Been Plotted For A Year And Is Spearheaded By One Of Project 2025’s Leading Voices⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Those photos are of Shah-era Iran, when the West was propping up (including providing weapons, training and funding to) an unpopular authoritarian that had been installed by the UK and US when the previous democratically-elected government dared to attempt to nationalise the oil industry, which was owned by BP. Under the Shah, traditional Islamic dress was outlawed, which is why everyone’s in 1970s clothes. If you disagreed with the Shah, the secret police would take you away and kill you.

  Eventually, a coalition of leftists and religious leaders overthrew the Shah. The religious faction then assassinated all the prominent leftists and switched the secular authoritarian dictatorship for a theocratic authoritarian dictatorship. Under the Ayatollah, traditional Islamic dress was mandatory, which is why women in contemporary photos from Iran always have some kind of headscarf unless it’s in a news report about a protest that someone got executed for. If you disagree with the Ayatollah, the Revolutionary Guard will take you away and kill you.

  So Iran’s had laws forcing women to wear only the clothes approved by a dictator both with and without help from the West.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨when ur higher than sagan⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Willow bark contains salicin. Things made from willow bark have been used for a very long time as herbal remedies. In the early 1800s, people figured out how to isolate it and also break it down and oxidise it to make salicylic acid. They tried using what they’d extracted as medicine as they knew it had an effect on the body, and that was the height of the bar back then. It generally did much more harm than good, but eventually some things were discovered that it genuinely helped treat. In the late 1800s, people had figured out that if you tried subjecting known bioactive compounds to chemical reactions, sometimes you ended up with a new bioactive compound - that was how diamorphine (heroin) was first synthesised from morphine, for example. Someone tried an esterification reaction with salicylic acid, and got acetylsalicylic acid, and eventually Bayer managed to purify and manufacture it at scale and start selling it as Aspirin once they’d fed it to people and determined it worked as a painkiller.

  It’s a pretty standard 1800s try extracting compounds from herbal remedies, then kill some people with them, then apply basic chemical reactions to create novel compounds, then get lucky and produce a real medicine story. It doesn’t happen anymore because we’ve run out of things to try and you can’t just create new compounds and feed them to people and see what happens anymore - you’ve got to demonstrate that there’s a plausible mode of action against a specific condition before starting human trials.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨when ur higher than sagan⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Big pharma absolutely can patent drugs extracted from herbs. The reason you don’t see lots of them is that lots of them didn’t work very well and the ones that did were all isolated and turned into medicine decades ago, so the patents have expired, and they’re generally sold under medicine-sounding names rather than the names of the plant them came from. E.g. Aspirin was originally made from modified willow extract, and was discovered because willow was a known natural remedy and so was a good candidate for further investigation. Also, the requirement that a newly discovered drug needs to be proven to be effective to be licensed is a big hurdle lots of natural remedies don’t manage to clear.

  Even despite that, though, big pharma does sell natural remedies. The difference is that they don’t claim they’re medicine. If they only claim they’re a food supplement or something else that’s only medicine-adjacent, there’s no requirement to prove efficacy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Private water company increases CEO pay by nearly 100%. This is how Steve Reeds, UK water minister, reacts⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Godwin’s law isn’t claiming that it’s fallacious to compare things to Hitler or that the person who first mentions Hitler is wrong, it’s just observing that comparisons to Hitler eventually happen if an argument goes on long enough. It’s kind of obvious, too. Reductio ad absurdum is a valid form of argument, and as long as whoever you’re discussing something is isn’t ludicrously off the deep end, they’ll agree that Hitler is obviously bad, so if someone says something, and that thing when taken to its logical conclusion would imply (in the logically guarantees sense rather than subtly suggests sense) that Hitler wasn’t bad, it’s quick and easy to point that out as a demonstration that the thing must be wrong.

  In this specific case, though, it’s even simpler. Hitler and Thatcher are both obviously bad, and they were putting words in my mouth about Thatcher when objecting to a comment where I’d explicitly called her evil to suggest that I was claiming she wasn’t evil.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Private water company increases CEO pay by nearly 100%. This is how Steve Reeds, UK water minister, reacts⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  But her favourite story book said that if she destroyed all the industry then the invisible hand of the free market would liberate all the workers from drudgery and they’d all become doctors and live lives of luxury and never have to do any work.

  Thatcher was a die-hard believer in Ayn Rand’s economics, and a core part of that is that people are poor because you give them the opportunity to be, and then through several unexplained leaps of logic, that if you take away the option to be a bit poor, instead of making everyone even poorer like obviously happens in real life, somehow they’ll instantly gain qualifications in unrelated fields and become rich. It’s insane, and yet somehow a wildly popular worldview among the ‘intellectual’ right, despite being dismissed as moronic by anyone with two braincells to rub together and every serious academic.

  It’s roughly equivalent to claiming we should enslave short people and call them house elves and then as a result we’ll all get wands and certificates from Hogwarts that let us do magic (except the house elves, who wouldn’t need wands), but then instead of being placed into a secure hospital to protect the public, you get put in charge of one of the most influential countries in the world, and by an unrelated coincidence, the North Sea Oil Boom happens and makes that country more wealthy, so then decades later, magic being accepted as fact despite being purely from a fantasy novel full of plotholes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Private water company increases CEO pay by nearly 100%. This is how Steve Reeds, UK water minister, reacts⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Stating that Hitler thought he was helping Europe by slaughtering millions of Jews and other minorities doesn’t imply any degree of approval for anything he did or acceptance that if he’d been right, the end state he was aiming for was worth the atrocities committed trying to get there. Evil in the real world isn’t like a cartoon where the bad guy just enjoys being bad for its own sake. Pretending otherwise just makes it harder to recognise when people are doing evil things again just by being simultaneously incorrect and in charge.

  It seems like you’re under the impression that thinking you’re doing something good is virtuous, but I fundamentally disagree. I don’t think morality should be solely judged by outcomes, either, but rather whether you take reasonable measures to ensure that even if you’re wrong, you don’t make things worse. Everyone hears the phrase the road to hell is paved with good intentions as children, so should know that having good intentions has little to no bearing on whether they’re a good person unless they’re also making sure they’re not doing evil by recklessness or negligence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon thinks there is a bicurious double standard⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Some homophobes think touching their own genitals would be homosexual, so they don’t wash them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Private water company increases CEO pay by nearly 100%. This is how Steve Reeds, UK water minister, reacts⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It being obviously fucking stupid to anyone with the slightest grasp of reality doesn’t mean that Thatcher didn’t think it was true and wasn’t one of the people unwilling to think. She should have been sectioned for being deluded into thinking Atlas Shrugged was real life, but instead managed to get elected, and decades later, we’re still dealing with the consequences of putting the country in the hands of someone guided predominantly by their favourite storybook.

  There’s really clear evidence that there was an attempt to make normal people buy stocks in water companies in the fact that there was heavy television advertising in the run-up to privatisation encouraging people to buy stocks in water companies while they were still a fixed price. Post-Thatcher privatisation of UK infrastructure and public services, on the other hand, has always been done behind closed doors straight into the hands of hedge funds, venture capital, and individuals capable of buying the whole thing. The end result is always the service going to shit once there’s a profit motive conflicting with the service motive, but if you compare the percentage of these companies that are owned by pension funds and individuals who hold less than a few hundred pounds worth, it’s clear that the water companies have much more of their ultimate ownership in the hands of normal people than, for example Royal Mail. Obviously (to sane people), it’s way less than if the state owned the water companies, but it’s not nothing.

  Accusing a post of whitewashing Thatcher when its opening line explicitly states she was evil is a pretty big leap. Calling someone evil should be the opposite of whitewashing, and isn’t inconsistent with saying they thought they were helping. Plenty of evil people are deluded into thinking they’re doing something moral and that, because of that, the ends will justify their amoral means, or they don’t even notice their means are amoral.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Private water company increases CEO pay by nearly 100%. This is how Steve Reeds, UK water minister, reacts⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It was a Thatcher-era thing, and despite being evil and wrong about nearly everything, she at least thought what she was doing would help normal people. In the case of privatisation, it was accompanied by a big push to get normal people to buy shares in the newly formed companies. As a result, the water companies are mostly owned by pension funds and there’s a large chunk that’s normal people owning a tiny bit each. That’s then meant that any attempt to claw back illegally paid dividends (the companies have a legal duty to invest in keeping the water working and haven’t been doing so) would tank loads of people’s pensions, as would dissolving the companies or putting stronger restrictions on paying out dividends.

  The whole system’s all knotted together in a way that makes all the obvious solutions cause other big problems, and the government can’t afford to cause big problems when the polls have Reform so far ahead on account of them just claiming the obvious solutions will work flawlessly and not giving a shit about whether that’s true. Everything’s so on fire that it can’t be extinguished within a single electoral term, let alone rebuilt, so it’s become the priority to avoid upsetting anyone before the next election, lest the flamethrowers get voted in again only with napalm as fuel this time instead of petrol because the Tories have been eclipsed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anyone else from Europe feels the same while browsing the "All" feed?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That doesn’t stop Americans signing up with the instance and then dominating all discussion there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My new laptop chip has an 'AI' processor in it, and it's a complete waste of space⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A CUDA core is just a vector processor like every GPUs since the late 90s has been made of, but with a different name so it sounds special. It doesn’t just run CUDA, it runs everything else a GPU has traditionally been for, too, and that was stuff people were doing before CUDA was introduced. There are lots of tasks that require the same sequence of operations to be applied to groups of 32 numbers.

  An NPU is a much more specialised piece of hardware, and it’s only really neural network training and inference that it can help with. There aren’t many tasks that require one operation to be applied over and over to groups of hundreds of numbers. Most people aren’t finding that they’re spending lots of time waiting for neural network inference or draining their batteries doing neural network inference, so making it go faster and use less power isn’t a good use of their money compared to making their computer better at the things they do actually do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My earphones' cable has been oozing sticky goo for over a yer now⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s not entirely true anymore. Sound engineers did lots of experiments with microphones placed in the ears of plastic heads, and as a result, we know the modifications that need to be made to a sound to make it seem like it’s coming from so specific point when played through headphones. It works with both over-ear and in-ear ones and works well (despite what the other poster said) as pinna squiggles are accounted for and it turns out that humans don’t need their own personal pinna shape for it to work.

  You can find impressive demos by searching for binaural sound, both from microphones in a plastic head or with simulated HRTF.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨**!**⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Someone doesn’t understand the Windows design language. Anxiety would be a yellow warning triangle. That’s a red error circle, so something really has gone wrong and you’re right to be panicking about it, and better remember what it is before the consequences become too dire.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨be gay, do computers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The pun doesn’t even make sense unless the term was already in common use when Hopper wrote it. If you don’t already know what a computer bug is, the note sounds deranged.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Itch.io apologise for "frustration and confusion" after delisting thousands of NSFW projects⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  At the moment, they’re already at risk of being removed by the government, who can make them illegal, and simultaneously at risk of being removed by payment processors, who can prevent the stores from operating. It makes no difference to the government whether they’re also the payment processor. They could remove them anyway. Having two entities with unilateral power to remove something can’t be worse than just having one of them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Itch.io apologise for "frustration and confusion" after delisting thousands of NSFW projects⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  They can do a really shit job of administering payment processes in a transparent and democratic manner before they end up being worse than the status quo where it’s entirely untransparent and undemocratic. Also, governments already have the power to make things they don’t like illegal, so there’s no reason to expect they’d block payments for things they’ve left legal, whereas payment processors currently block plenty of legal things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Campaign asking EU to stop publishers "destroying" online games hit by anonymous transparency complaint⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  People taking bad-faith legal action will always be able to make up something to complain about. If you’re claiming something that you know is provably false, extra evidence proving it false isn’t an obstacle.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where do British elites get their news? Publishers, social media and AI⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s probably way less depressing than the equivalent list from eighteen months ago.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Since we're doing magic eyes now...⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Lots of people can really easily go cross-eyed and look at these with no practice whatsoever. Fewer people can do the parallel kind with no practice or with the amount of practice they’ve already done.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lead ammunition to be banned for hunting and shooting in England, Scotland and Wales⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A quick search says steel, tungsten and bismuth or composites including those metals are the typical replacements. Steel is cheap, and the other two are dense but more expensive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welcome to the Labour police state⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The thread’s about the law being akin to the law of a police state. A state is a police state if it enforces unjust laws that criminalise reasonable acts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just.....why?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I imagine getting a notification on their phone reminding them if they’ve not brushed their teeth by a set time might help forgetful people to remember to brush their teeth, and if it’s via Home Assistant, which is self-hosted, entirely local, and open-source, there’s no downside other than having to set it up in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thanks to the "you need to buy a new PC for running W11" bullshit, scammers are selling ewaste at full price to inexperienced people⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The $5 Windows keys have never been legitimate - either they’re just people selling keys they’ve generated with a keygen or bought with a stolen credit card, or it’s students reselling free keys they’ve got from Dreamspark or a sysadmin selling keys from their employer’s enterprise licence, which, in Microsoft’s eyes, are all piracy. An OEM copy of Windows 11 Pro is about €150 and can’t be transferred to a different motherboard, and a retail copy which can be transferred is about €300. A one-time purchase copy of Office is about €120 (it’s also available as a subscription). These machines either have at least €270 of software on them, or €0 worth of pirated software on them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thanks to the "you need to buy a new PC for running W11" bullshit, scammers are selling ewaste at full price to inexperienced people⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It can’t be legitimate because licences for the bundled software cost more than the machines are being sold for. Also, the hardware included isn’t officially Windows 11 compatible, so selling it with Windows 11 installed is misleading the customer into thinking they’re buying something much more recent than they really are. For a decent number of people buying these, they’re likely to own something just as new already, and could get a free upgrade to Windows 11 by doing the same configuration tweaks as the sellers did.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why, just why?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The tories cut funding from the department that decides whether asylum seekers have their claims granted or denied, so there’s a big backlog of people who can’t legally get a job to support themselves and can’t legally be deported, and feeding and housing them is expensive. The right wing press blames this not on the fact that they’re all in legal limbo until the backlog is dealt with, and not on the fact that decades of foreign policy mean that there are lots of people in danger unless they flee who have English as their only extra language, so would only be able to get a job after asylum was granted if they were in the UK, but instead on the myth that the government is required by things like the Human Rights Act to provide people a life of luxury if they come here and people are coming from safe places for a free multi-year holiday. Because humans are not rational, people believe the myth, and if the myth were true, it would obviously be a good idea to stop providing luxury hotel accommodation at great expense to the taxpayer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sadge⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t give JK Rowling ideas.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reminder that you do not own digital games⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Depending on the era of the game, you might well own a copy of a game on a disk, just like you own a copy of a book when you buy a book. Weaselling out of first-sale-doctrine stuff came a long time after people started buying video games. A century ago, publishers were trying exactly the same thing with books, and depending on the country, either legislation was introduced that made it explicitly illegal, or the courts determined that putting a licence agreement in a book just meant that the customer got a copy of a licence agreement with their book, not that they were bound by its terms.