barsoap
@barsoap@lemm.ee
- Comment on [deleted] 11 hours ago:
Still 14 unless the over 21yold exploits an underdeveloped sense of sexual self-determination. Only prosecuted on demand, cases are very rare, and usually brought on by parents and then thrown out by the court after talking to the younger party.
17 is still young enough to fall under sugar daddying protections, “in exchange for money or money-valued things”, those apply until 18. That would presuppose a transactional relationship, though.
- Comment on The fact that this is a real image is infuriating 12 hours ago:
Ensure that states carrying out the death penalty have a “sufficient supply” of lethal injection drugs.
Some context: The EU has been sanctioning the US over this for decades now, first we stopped selling drugs they use to murder people to prisons, then we completely stopped exports, it has gotten so far as to stop exports of precursor chemicals. And it’s not like our pharma companies would mind they’re actively on the ball regarding this, they don’t want to be associated with it either.
If you want to be barbarians at least have the decency to not paralyse people while they die in abject agony but use a guillotine. Heck, firing squad or hanging are more humane than that injection stuff: Literally torturing people to death while making sure they can’t flail and scream.
- Comment on 'The Brutalist' criticised for its use of AI 1 day ago:
Apparently, the line between art and garbage is how it’s made.
Yeah no that’s the difference between craft and craft. Confusion about that is ripe both within the pro- and anti-AI crowd, on the one hand you have people who get dazzled by the results of their “big boobiez plz” prompting, not able to judge the resulting image even if they tried to, on the other side you have people taking on “big boobiez plz” commissions not realising that their derivative style, by-the-numbers composition, everything, is slop. Hand-made slop is still slop.
You can value craft for its own sake and that’s fine and proper but please don’t confuse it with art or I shall be referencing urinals on pedestals.
- Comment on Mexico’s deadly Coca-Cola addiction 2 days ago:
Not interested enough in the topic to actually watch the video but from the first seconds and description: Sucrose is made up of 50% fructose and 50% glucose. You can split it apart, producing inverted sugar, with nothing but water and heat, you can help that along a lot by adding acid, of which there’s a decent amount in coke. Any bottle of coke, even if made with 100% straight sucrose, will contain detectable levels of separate fructose and glucose before it hits the shelves.
The issue with HFCS btw is the “high fructose” part, fructose goes straight to the liver and gets turned into fatty tissue: At equal sweetness, HFCS is metabolically more dangerous, especially if you never dig into your fat reserves, than sucrose. inverted sugar is equally as good or bad as sucrose. It’d get split apart in your stomach with acid, in your mouth with enzymes, you name it.
- Comment on idea for a controller that sounds good on paper and I wanna share 2 weeks ago:
The 2600 used a MOS 6507, which is a cut-down 6502, which had ~3500 logic transistors (not counting the ones necessary because NMOS), running at a max of 3MHz. Add very primitive graphics and 8k RAM.
Can’t be arsed to slog through suitable processors but ARM cores back then could kill that thing dead. 2002 is six years after the Palm Pilot while Moore’s law was still in full effect. The 2600 is from 1977, two decades more ancient.
There should even be more than enough cycles left over to generate the video signal in software.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to gaming@beehaw.org | 8 comments
- Comment on Generative A.I. a Parasitic Cancer 2 weeks ago:
Just for the sake of argument, let me turn this around half-ways: Just as guns don’t kill people, people do, so AI does not produce slop, people do. Generative AI has its uses, where it becomes problematic is when people who can’t even judge a medium use it to produce something in that medium. It’s perfectly possible to get good stuff out of Stable Diffusion, but you have to know a thing or five about visual media or it’ll dazzle you. Applies the same for all genAI I’ve ever looked at.
Likewise, humans are perfectly capable of producing horrendous slop without aid of these tools – just look at the romance novel isle or what Hollywood was up to last year. What’s different nowadays is that it has become very easy to generate that slop, there has been an explosion of slop. If I were to imagine a silver lining it would be that people are probably going to get bored of it and non-slop, AI or non-AI, will see an increase in prestige and value. Just as the invention of photography saved painters from doing portraits.
Bonus:
Summarise the fable of the robot and the antipsychotic
“The Fable of the Robot and the Antipsychotic” is a story that explores themes of mental health, technology, and the human condition. In this fable, a robot represents modern technology and its capabilities, while the antipsychotic symbolizes medication and support for mental health issues.
The robot, designed to optimize efficiency and productivity, struggles to understand the complexities of emotions and human experiences. It encounters an individual who is grappling with mental health challenges and is hesitant to seek help. The robot, despite its advanced programming, cannot provide the emotional support the individual needs.
Through the interaction, the fable highlights the importance of empathy, understanding, and the role of medication in managing mental health. The robot eventually learns that while it can assist in many areas, the human experience requires compassion and connection, which technology alone cannot provide.
In the end, the story conveys that while robots and technology can enhance our lives, they should complement, rather than replace, the human touch in addressing emotional and mental well-being.
- Comment on Does Lemm.ee Have a TOS? 2 weeks ago:
AFAIU (IANAL, much less an Estonian one) what’s usually considered ToS aren’t really necessary because you’re not entering a contract with lemm.ee that would bind anyone to anything – e.g. you’re not paying usage fees so there doesn’t need to be a stated policy on sitebans because if you went to court over a ban the court would ask “which services did you buy that they did not provide?”, then throw the case out.
That said this is the EU so there’s a privacy policy linked in the footer. It’s a GDPR requirement.
- Comment on Women Directed Just 16% of 2024's Top 250 Grossing Movies 2 weeks ago:
Is there a particular narrative floating around “women can’t do movies”? In the present, I mean? There have been plenty of “women can’t be soldiers” narratives in Uhura’s time, also (in the US) “black women can if anything only be maids in movies”, of course that opens a door.
To me, “women can’t do movies” makes about as much sense as “women can’t write books”. Ask even a paleoconservative and I doubt either would make sense to them. There has to be a narrative that needs to be broken for a narrative-breaking role model to have an effect, especially as “you can do anything, girl” is also a narrative.
Also, rant: Why is it that female role models got a downgrade. I’m talking about the original Mulan “be smart about things and play to your strengths and you can achieve the barely imaginable” vs. remake Mulan “you have literal magic powers that’s why you’re better than everyone at everything” type of thing.
…just looked at who wrote/directed either and let me just say that according to this limited sample, it is infinitely better to have men write and direct inspirational movies for girls than let women do it. Just for the record I don’t doubt that women can make good movies, those just clearly can’t, and I hated the remake before I just looked up who made it.
What’s more important: That the movie inspires a billion young girls or that the behind the scenes inspires the 10k who bother to watch it?
- Comment on Women Directed Just 16% of 2024's Top 250 Grossing Movies 2 weeks ago:
they might not make the mental leap to “I want to be a director, and I think it’s possible”.
You have an awfully low opinion of women’s agency.
Regarding STEM: Countries with higher gender equality have lower rates of women in STEM. One factor there is that STEM pays well so in less equal societies getting into it gets you independence and security that is not necessary in more equal ones.
Regarding CS in particular, it was found that the type of examples in intro courses has a lot of influence, e.g. you can explain Dijkstra’s algorithm by talking about finding the shortest path a message might take between two people who know each other only via chains of acquaintances, or by having a robot find a path through a maze. Once people are into the field it doesn’t matter any more as they recognise examples as that, mere examples of a more general thing, but the intro classes should address preferences of different populations equally and we don’t have to get into why those preferences exist that’s irrelevant. Just do it.
- Comment on Sparrows Can't Sing (1963) 2 weeks ago:
In Trek they generally need genetic manipulation to get cross-species offspring, to the point that that not being the case for Bajorans and Cardassians opens quite a couple of interesting questions. Vulcans and Romulans are probably also compatible don’t look at me do I look like a nerd with a canon encyclopedia.
The Progenitors were introduced to explain why just about everyone is bipedal and two-eyed, but the seed dropped 4.5bn years ago, every species went through plenty of evolution of its own. Yes, birds have four limbs and two eyes just like us but we aren’t genetically compatible.
- Comment on why women's pockets are useless | Answer in Progress 4 weeks ago:
Protip, in general: Buy workwear. No, not high-viz stuff, look at trousers for plumbers, for carpenters, cooks, catering, etc, you’ll find good quality at good prices instead of good quality at insane prices (fashion) or shoddy quality at insane (but the other direction) prices (fast fashion). They will have a cut that first and foremost focuses on comfort and function (i.e. you can squat in them), only then go for looking somewhat stylish. Which, yes, works. Colour choice will be limited, but black will be among them so stop complaining.
- Comment on Justice should be equal 4 weeks ago:
Valta also sounds like a Germanic loan just a second… yep. Same root as German “Gewalt”, violence, “walten”, to rule, preside, also English wield.
What’s it with Finnish. One third borrowed from Estonian, another third from the Swedes, the rest from the Sami.
- Comment on Call me SKEPT1KAL 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on Call me SKEPT1KAL 4 weeks ago:
Another one was GPS: They had prepared two sets of maths for the satellites, Newtonian and relativistic. They started operating them with the Newtonian model, and the satellites went out of sync, nothing really worked. Then they flipped the switch to relativistic, and everything worked flawlessly.
Even before that they took an atomic clock, put it on a plane, and flew it around the earth to later compare to one that stayed on earth. They differed by the expected fraction of a fraction of a millisecond.
Neither of those two could be done right when Einstein proposed relativity, but experiments like that could already be envisioned, “move a sufficiently precise clock sufficiently fast and compare it to a stationary one” is kind of a no-brainer. That’s not the case with string theory, noone has any idea how to test any of it.
OTOH, physics shouldn’t feel bad about that stuff. E.g. number theory is notorious for results which are considered useless even by the people formulating them, only for an application to appear a century or two later.
- Comment on The Two Genders 5 weeks ago:
Yeah, artists skew left but you won’t find a more bigoted libertarian than a young polish programmer. Most of them are also pretty spoiled too because of the degressive tax system that favours them so much.
The temporarily embarrassed millionaires don’t tend to be the ones going into gamedev: Our wages suck and being an indie is about as likely to make you rich as playing the lottery. I’d mostly limit that kind of behaviour to FAANG folks as well as people who should have studied business economics instead (or actually did) and probably can’t code for shit anyway, in short: Techbros. They’re about as toxic as your average corporate lawyer.
Assholes existing is a general feature of contemporary society, don’t pin it on people understanding “there are 10 kind of people” jokes.
- Comment on The Two Genders 5 weeks ago:
About 50% of developers are 25-35. We skew young due to more and more people becoming programmers, that is, for the same reason that cobblers skew old, but not first vote kind of young.
And your source doesn’t even make an attempt to correlate voting behaviour to profession, much less specialised field (programmer vs gamedev), not to mention that not every gamedev is a programmer, all in all not enough data to slander a whole profession. Do better.
The reason gamedevs skews progressive, btw, is because artists do.
But OTOH yes you’re right in Poland’s case it’s not imported culture war BS it’s Catholicism.
- Comment on The Two Genders 5 weeks ago:
Super Hexagon!
- Comment on How Would You Rank Quentin Tarantino's Films? 1 month ago:
Craft, pure craft, is what makes a Tarantino movie. Especially strong when it comes to dialogue and framing it.
Tarantino is about as special as Villeneuve is special – but not in the same way. They both have their specialities where they’re extraordinary, and in other aspects they’re only rock solid.
Not liking/enjoying a movie is fine, but it doesn’t really say anything about how good the movie is, it just might not have been for you. Maybe watch a scene analysis and even if the movie still doesn’t do it for you, you can appreciate the skill with which it’s done.
- Comment on TikTok set to be banned in the US after losing appeal 1 month ago:
There’s some equivocation going on there: On the one hand we have a theoretical model, due to Adam Smith, that says if you have perfectly rational actors acting without restraint on perfect information then you get very very nice results and that’s called the free market. Then you have peddlers of institutionalised market failure saying that any regulation that would make people’s choices more rational, or give them more information, is making the market unfree.
In short: While classical liberals and specifically ordoliberals are saying “there shall and must be regulation, so that the real-world market comes closer to approximating Smith’s free market”, neoliberals say “there shall be no regulation because Adam Smith doesn’t like monopolies but we do so let’s poison the conversation by calling inherently unfree markets free”.
- Comment on Smug Viruses 1 month ago:
I’m not contradicting anything, I didn’t even use the word “life”. I’m simply taking the perspective of the genome, and fighting against the notion that viruses would act as mechanistically as prions.
- Comment on Smug Viruses 1 month ago:
It’s a hostile instruction manual which learns, adapting itself to its surroundings, constantly re-writing and re-inventing how it interacts with the world. Which is more than can be said about most politicians. Forget about physical anatomy, for a second, and consider the species as an organism.
- Comment on Smug Viruses 1 month ago:
Of course it adjusts to its environment – it even uses it to replicate. Viruses are that branch of the genome which is being minimalist about its seed pods, other branches need all kinds of superfluous stuff like eyes and limbs and brains and whatnot. Complete waste of resources, having pods which can maintain independent homeostasis, what good does that for the homeostasis of the genome? Eh?
- Comment on Starbucks wants a Bachelor's degree for a barista 1 month ago:
Many of which won’t be recognised, at least not without further qualification. And no you can’t become an English teacher with a US degree in literature: You need to study second language acquisition pedagogics, ideally for that specific language pair. Nobody cares about your interpretation of To kill a Mockingbird.
- Comment on #StopKillingGames Update: Initiative reaches seven country requirement 1 month ago:
All minimums taken together only sum up to 497025. The million signatures is the actual hurdle, any campaign that is not horribly lopsided should easily get the seven countries.
The idea is that if your initiative is excessively national it has no business being a EU initiative.
- Comment on ugh i wish 1 month ago:
Well yes that’s another reason but trust me when I say that you’re not the only European country with standards for milk and eggs. There’s nothing to brag about, also, do you even raw pork.
- Comment on ugh i wish 1 month ago:
You know that exact kind of thing is why you’re known as arrogant swots all over Europe, don’t you? Do you google whether Denmark has safe tap water before going on ølviking?
- Comment on ugh i wish 1 month ago:
UHT does, 140C for 2-5 seconds. Shelf-stable without refrigeration for up to nine months unless you open it.
Frankly speaking the difference between milk from cows with good diet vs. from cows fed protein slop is greater than between the modes of processing.
Still have PTSD from my mother feeding me raw milk – unlike in the US it’s legal here, also heavily regulated so it wasn’t a health risk microbiology-wise but boy am I sensitive to even slight off-tastes in milk because yes you’re going to interrupt the cooling chain and no that fridge doesn’t have 8C. Unless you’re a cheesemaker or such and it’s necessary for the process, stay away from raw.
And, no, it doesn’t have health benefits. Maybe if your kid doesn’t play outside in the mud and the milk is the only source of germs they’re exposed to, then it may help them to not develop autoimmune disorders. Be sane, choose mud over milk.
- Comment on The world is ending but here's a side quest - will RPGs ever solve their urgency problem? 1 month ago:
Because the world isn’t “ending”.
- Comment on Young people were becoming more anxious long before social media, and we should not be fixated on simplistic explanations that reduce the issue to technical variables, researcher says 1 month ago:
Now I might be an old disillusioned fart but nope, social media hasn’t changed a thing… for me. The anxiety, depression, and anger was already there, full force, in the 80s and 90s. I mean come on listen to Punk and Grunge. Coincides pretty well with the rise of Neoliberalism and New Labour, wait why did I use the same term twice. It’s at the tail wave of boomers having had their revolution and subsequently declaring the end of history.
What differs though is that (yeah I’m going to do it) the young’uns who never experienced life without the internet, worse, without a smartphone or tablet, don’t even go to fucking concerts any more where they could touch some grass and get laid. Also media competency falls off drastically again I think somewhere in the middle of gen Z.
