evranch
@evranch@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Steam Now Warns Consumers That They're Buying a License, Not a Game During a Purchase 2 months ago:
Somewhat ironically, both of those things would actually require a license as opposed to ownership
- Comment on Ok boomer 2 months ago:
In other words, race to the bottom is race to the bottom.
Those jobs were not cruel and demeaning as you seem to imply. In fact plenty of industries still operate that way (auto parts etc.) and they served a valuable purpose, to give work experience to that underpaid teenager.
In fact if you go to a butcher shop, fishmonger, farm market etc. you will have your food handed to you by a human as well. And most people highly rate both the service and quality at such shops, with the employees usually being paid significantly more than at supermarkets, and having proper work hours and job security.
So yes, I suppose Piggly Wiggly made food margins a little thinner. But considering I get better meat prices at my butcher than at a supermarket, who do you think benefited from that move the most? Most likely the same ones benefiting from the move towards a fully automated store like Amazon tested.
- Comment on dream job 2 months ago:
scienceengineeringSiege engineering to be precise
- Comment on I didn't think I'd be doing this at my age. 2 months ago:
The one I loved was a pancake machine at a hotel breakfast buffet. You pressed the pancake button and batter was dispensed onto a slowly rolling large heated cylinder. When your pancake made it to the edge of the cylinder, it peeled off and flipped onto another counter-rotating cylinder. Then it was peeled off and slid down a chute onto a plate. Perfectly round, perfectly cooked.
I ate a few more pancakes than I should have just to see it work. Then against the protests of my wife I lifted the hinged side panel to see how the batter was loaded and dispensed (it was squeezed out of a bag by a screw jack)
The girl at the buffet asked if I was a process engineer (yup) and assured me that I was far from the first to peek under the hood 😅
- Comment on 🐛🪲🐞 2 months ago:
I wouldn’t even say “before relatively recently” as it depends where you are. Up until my daughter was like 5 or so she was just fully naked or in a swim diaper at the beach and like you say nobody considered that to be “nudity”.
But we’re in rural Canada where we don’t have the pedo paranoia that seems to have taken over America, and we just let our kids run free like we did.
Though it’s growing in the cities and small towns now, not long ago in a nearby town there was a Facebook panic over a man in a white van driving slowly around town. Unsurprisingly he turned out to be a plumber looking for the right address.
- Comment on I hope you don't have any plans this evening. 2 months ago:
If he follows through he’ll be in on round 2 of the rapture I guess
- Comment on [deleted] 3 months ago:
That’s practically all my cats eat! I only put cat food out in the winter or if they start to look slim. All summer they eat mice and sparrows and get fat. (Note that sparrows are a terrible invasive pest and removing them has a positive impact on the local ecosystem)
They are barn cats though and that’s their job so it’s a little different from the pet cat situation.
- Comment on Can anyone suggest some good co-op games for two people? 3 months ago:
I play a lot of couch coop with my kid but adults would enjoy all these too. Most can be found under $20 on Steam and a lot are fairly lightweight games but have good coop mechanics and can be a lot of fun to sit down for an hour or two with.
- Overcooked 1 + 2 (but 2 really is better) you will love or hate it depending on your personalities, nothing in between. We loved it
- Ship of Fools
- Enter the Gungeon
- Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime
- Moving Out
On Switch
- Cadence of Hyrule
- Don’t starve together (only split screen on console not PC… Wtf)
- Pikmin
- Comment on Celery 5 months ago:
Been using one of these apps to try to identify the many wild plants in my native pastures. Mostly just out of curiosity and conservation. Likewise it helped identify some trees and shrubs the previous owner planted around the yard.
They are far from perfect but are a good starting point as you get lots of pictures to compare to your mystery tree, you finish the job yourself.
- Comment on I don't have AC but my apartment lease covers unlimited water usage and the water is very cold. How can I best use this to cool my home? 5 months ago:
Gut an AC from the dump. Replace the condenser with a tube in tube heat exchanger, using your cold water as a heat sink. Brazed plate HX if you’re feeling rich. Replace the cap tube with a TXV for better load tracking. Recharge with R290.
T Sure this is even further beyond your skill level but is the best possible way to use a source of cold to chill your apartment. You can locate it anywhere convenient, not just by the window. You could likely get a COP over 5 and be discharging the water in a fairly modest stream at around 30-40C.
- Comment on To all you outside of the US... 5 months ago:
No I’m serious, I’m here in SK and we’re trying to push Moe and his cronies out for the NDP this fall, and our biggest problem is the federal NDP damaging the brand by backing Trudeau. All we say all day is “The SK NDP is not affiliated with the federal party, we stand for working Canadians, vote Moe out”
If you think $500 for low income and seniors is anything other than a bone thrown to pacify the poor then Singh has pulled the wool over your eyes.
The requirement for “no access to insurance” absolutely torpedoes the entire thing. Private insurers need to fall, universal coverage is the only way. Dental is the Canadian equivalent to the entire USA health insurance racket.
Congrats on living in the one green riding, which does give you some power over your single seat party… Which ultimately holds no power at all in our broken system.
I’m sorry to say I voted Trudeau on the promise of electoral reform, which he then told us we didn’t want. I’m in a safe blue riding which means my vote is pointless, so I’m going full protest vote next time for the PPC 🤣 Max is laughable, especially his obsession with dairy supply management, but enough votes for “burn it down” will hopefully send a message.
- Comment on To all you outside of the US... 5 months ago:
Trudeau over Biden?
Trudeau is importing the world’s problems in the name of propping up the real estate investor class (of which he is a member) and pumping up fake GDP numbers. GDP per capita is plummeting in Canada with excess immigration.
Singh is in his pocket, a waste of a vote. I was an NDP voter all my life, I’m done.
Polliviere is an absolute idiot who will ride a wave of hatred for Trudeau into office.
Voters in Canada have no power and no representation as all votes are whipped. Your MP is a seat filler. We have no ballot initiatives or direct democracy options that America has, and reform will never come.
Biden listens to people who know what they’re doing and stands out of the way… Passed legislation supporting workers and unions, energy infrastructure etc. meaning he’s both more left than Singh and more business-friendly than PP
- Comment on To all you outside of the US... 5 months ago:
America needs some perspective. You complain that your only choices are a doddering fool or a toxic narcissist who wants to actively destroy the nation.
Here in Canada we look at our options and think “America is so much better, I wish we had an option to vote for a doddering fool. All we have are narcissists”
No joke I wish we had a leader as good as Biden. The bar is so low that the devil is doing the limbo with it down in Hell.
- Comment on Employees Who Stay In Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less 6 months ago:
Correct, but often the actions of CEOs are performative and don’t actually support the goal of bringing money in. They like to put on a show of being ruthless, and often behave more psychopathic than an “optimal” business AI would.
For example, it’s been proven that employee retention is one of the #1 ways to boost productivity. Costco is one of the few companies with a CEO which truly believes in this and despite paying higher wages than any other grocer they are one of the top performers in my investment portfolio.
Remote work? Totally profitable and AI would maximize it instead of forcing workers back to the office to “put them in their place”
4-day week? Also proven to be a net gain as workers are rested and motivated.
A “cold and calculating” AI would be far more likely to make reforms that benefit both the company and the employees, as it isn’t motivated by power structures or the need to look ruthless. Cutting pay is a losing move as it loses talent more than it saves money, and deep learning algorithms would realize this easily.
Also the “person who owns the AI” would actually be the shareholders, who are often ordinary investors. Rather than funneling money to bloated C-suites, the money would be more likely to circulate in the economy through dividends.
- Comment on Employees Who Stay In Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less 6 months ago:
Hard to see how it could perform any worse, and the wage savings could be allocated to the people actually doing the work.
Yeah sure… The savings would go to buybacks or dividends, of course.
And that’s still a better use of funds than wasting them on an overcompensated CEO.
- Comment on Which is which? 6 months ago:
Except male bees have no stingers, and almost all bees are female… So I guess that would leave us fellas as being the birds?
Birds are cool I guess
- Comment on the ologies don't like to talk about theo 7 months ago:
This would make a good explanation for the bizarre biblical angels, especially having parts of their “body” that aren’t connected to each other. They only appear disconnected in the 3D projection we see, and are actually parts of a 4D organism.
- Comment on shrimp is bugs 7 months ago:
I draw the line at “overpopulated” when our resource consumption is unsustainable to the point where we are becoming the sole consumer of the planet.
It’s commonly stated that we would need 2 planets the same size to sustain our current population in a way that doesn’t result in eventual collapse.
We’ve cleared vast land areas and scoured the sea of fish in our quest for calories. Eating bugs will not be the solution that makes us sustainable.
It’s been proven our population increases every time we increase our carrying capacity, such as through the invention of nitrogen fertilizer, mechanized agriculture etc. And there has never been a time that there were not people starving somewhere.
If we carry on this path we will be eating bugs and people will still be starving while ecosystems continue to collapse. It sounds like there is no net gain, IMO.
- Comment on shrimp is bugs 7 months ago:
Valid point. When I grew up fishing for shrimp as a kid I was quite terrified of them until I was taught how to eat them.
I can assume they taste bad, because otherwise we would all be eating them already. Humans eat just about everything on the planet if it’s tasty, even if it’s really weird.
Personally I don’t see the need for it when we have plenty of plant sources of protein like pulses, and we can raise ruminants on otherwise useless land (like my hilly, rocky farm).
It seems to me just an excuse to continue overpopulating the planet. Sure, we could develop new protein sources to feed 10 billion - but if we had kept our population to the 4 billion it was in the 1970s we could all be eating thick beef steaks and salmon without worrying about straining the carrying capacity of the planet.
Maybe we should focus on getting our population down to a sustainable level before we worry about new and exotic foods.
- Comment on shrimp is bugs 7 months ago:
I still think that, environmentally consciously, we should all switch to a mostly plant based diet and explore meat alternatives without fear.
I don’t have an issue with this statement, in fact I have friends who grow beans and lentils and I cook and eat dry beans every day in addition to my lamb. Plant proteins are healthy and delicious, and they easily stand alongside other standard dishes on our plates. Everyone I know eats a lot of beans.
My issue with the bugs is the same as I have with soy protein. Soy protein has been snuck into all manner of processed foods to boost protein numbers while replacing the higher quality proteins that you would expect in those foods (i.e. many cheap chicken breasts are injected with a solution of salt water and soy protein to plump them up and make you think you got more “chicken”)
I feel like using insects this way just is another step in adulterating our food supply, separating those like you and me who know what we are eating from the “commoners” who will not.
I have no problem with explicitly eating bugs outright if you choose to, I just don’t want to have them snuck into my hamburger at a restaurant.
Interestingly my ex-wife was from Taiwan and had never eaten insects except as a novelty - so it must be a different part of Asia where it’s common. Taiwan tends to like fish, pork and chicken as well as tofu and black beans.
- Comment on shrimp is bugs 7 months ago:
That’s the problem, it isn’t delicious. That’s why they keep coming up with schemes to use them as a protein additive, like “cricket flour”.
I raise lamb free range on pasture, no inputs other than grass, and that’s what I’ll be eating for the foreseeable future. Let me tell you, that’s delicious.
I would encourage anyone else concerned about factory farming to find a small producer, most of us will gladly even give you a tour and let you see our herds, we love to show off healthy animals on green grass. And we’re often cheaper than the supermarket these days, no greedy middlemen to mark it up.
- Comment on shrimp is bugs 7 months ago:
The difference is that shrimp are delicious? Last time you got a bug in your mouth what was your instinctive response?
The great reset is bogus but there’s definitely a “conspiracy” to get us to eat bugs… A boring, capitalist conspiracy. Just the next step in the race to the bottom, another cheap and low quality food that the unwashed masses can afford to keep them alive and trudging off to work.
I will eat bugs when I see the billionaires have them on their plates.
- Comment on [deleted] 7 months ago:
I bet I know what sort of socks you wear
- Comment on So sweet 8 months ago:
Only if I’m truly in the middle of something that’s time or focus critical. Otherwise I’m always glad to hear from my friends.
I have a FWB who I text with 99% of the time but awhile ago she texts “Can I call you? I really need someone to talk to.” Of course! It was a joy to talk to her, she lives in the city, I’m out on the farm. Told her she should call more often.
Like the other comment I despise voicemails though. If I don’t pick up, text me. That’s even my voicemail message now… And still people leave voicemails 🤬
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 8 months ago:
I think you’re misreading the point I’m trying to make. I’m not arguing that LLM is AGI or that it can understand anything.
I’m just questioning what the true use case of AGI would be that can’t be achieved by existing expert systems, real humans, or a combination of both.
Sure Deepseek or Copilot won’t answer your legal questions. But neither will a real programmer. Nor will a lawyer be any good at writing code.
However when the appropriate LLMs with the appropriate augmentations can be used to write code or legal contracts under human supervision, isn’t that good enough? Do we really need to develop a true human level intelligence when we already have 8 billion of those looking for something to do?
AGI is a fun theoretical concept, but I really don’t see the practical need for a “next step” past the point of expanding and refining our current deep learning models, or how it would improve our world.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 8 months ago:
And it still can’t understand; its still just sleight of hand.
Yes, thus “passable imitation of understanding”.
The average consumer doesn’t understand tensors, weights and backprop. They haven’t even heard of such things. They ask it a question, like it was a sentient AGI. It gives them an answer.
Passable imitation.
You don’t need a data center except for training, either. There’s no exponential term as the models are executed sequentially. You can even flush the huge LLM off your GPU when you don’t actively need it.
I’ve already run basically this entire stack locally and integrated it with my home automation system, on a system with a 12GB Radeon and 32GB RAM. Just to see how well it would work and to impress my friends.
You yell out “$wakeword, it’s cold in here. Turn up the furnace” and it can bicker with you in near-realtime about energy costs before turning it up the requested amount.
- Comment on Life? What do you mean? This ain't life, it's surviving 8 months ago:
Nibbler: “What is one life, compared to the entire universe?”
Fry: “But it was my life!”
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 8 months ago:
We may not even “need” AGI. The future of machine learning and robotics may well involve multiple wildly varying models working together.
LLMs are already very good at what they do (generating and parsing text and making a passable imitation of understanding it).
We already use them with other models, for example Whisper is a model that recognizes speech. You feed the output to an LLM to interpret it, use the LLM’s JSON output with a traditional parser to feed a motion control system, then back to an LLM to output text to feed to one of the many TTS models so it can “tell you what it’s going to do”.
Put it in a humanoid shell or a Spot dog and you have a helpful robot that looks a lot like AGI to the user. Nobody needs to know that it’s just 4 different machine learning algorithms in a trenchcoat.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 8 months ago:
Most claim they can code, but if they were coders they would be coding
I dislike techbros as much as you, but this isn’t really a valid statement.
I can code, but I can’t sell a crypto scam to millions of rubes.
If I could, why would I waste my time writing code?
Many techbros are likely “good enough” coders who have better marketing skills and used their tech knowledge to leverage into business instead.
- Comment on What will happen to large companies once poor people have no more money to use? 8 months ago:
All the tradesmen in here to bootfuck this guy with our steel toes