GenderNeutralBro

@GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do they turn Federation into a dystopia?⁩ ⁨⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Some drumhead court-martial, lifelong prison sentence, violently separating a mother from her child and some goons beating up a prisoner

  The key point here is that it is portrayed as horrible. Ake resigned in protest and only came back for the opportunity to make amends. The scene is there to show how far the Federation has fallen, in order to set up the task of rebuilding it.

  Starfleet Academy has a justification for how shitty the world is, and IMHO it’s approaching it correctly. There was a galactic disaster that almost completely destroyed the federation, so SFA is literally post-apocalyptic. But it’s using that setting to tell a hopeful and positive story.

  The core message of the show is that you can rebuild a just society even after it’s gone so far down the shitter. You can choose to do better, to be better. This is culturally relevant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A History of DHTML and Web Applications - The History of the Web⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think anyone called those “web apps” though. I sure didn’t.

  As I recall, the phrase didn’t enter common usage until the advent of AJAX, which allowed for dynamically loading data without loading or re-loading a whole page. Early webmail sites simply loaded a new page every time you clicked a link. They didn’t even need JavaScript.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | 1x01 "Kids These Days" & 1x02 "Beta Test"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I am curious if they are going to reveal anything about Gideon S. Turner. I can’t entirely tell if Caleb is making stuff up and Tarima is playing along or if Gideon S. Turner has a very strange history.

  I was confused by this. It came hot on the heels of a truly excessive number of historical name-drops and references, so I was like “Turner? Was he on…Enterprise? DS9? Did they mean Tucker? What’d I miss?”

  It was a funny bit but it didn’t really land for me because of that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you prefer fluffy UI over Liquid Glass?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. I’ve been using Macs since System 6 and while I’ve often disagreed with Apple’s direction, this is the first one that feels downright incompetent, in much the same way as Microsoft’s Vista and Windows 8 designs were.

  There’s no consistency between how things look and how they behave. There is useless clutter everywhere. Legibility of text is an afterthought. It’s like they forgot the distinction between graphic design and UI design.

  But it looks pretty at a glance, so…great…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there desire for Capt. Una spin-off?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, I would like to see more of Queen Jurati and her Borg Cooperative. It was a cool idea that, like all the cool ideas in Picard, was poorly developed and overshadowed by nonsense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Monster of 2025: Endless subscriptions⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If Civilization II taught me one thing, it’s that ongoing payments are an absolute scam… Unless you’re planning to declare war anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft has a problem: nobody wants to buy or use its shoddy AI products — as Google's AI growth begins to outpace Copilot products⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I meant for AI stuff specifically. Their main products are…well I wouldn’t say “good” but they successfully choked out all competition in the 90s so…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft has a problem: nobody wants to buy or use its shoddy AI products — as Google's AI growth begins to outpace Copilot products⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Microsoft has nothing worth using. Microsoft hasn’t made anything that’s even worth talking about. Anyone with an OpenAI key and an afternoon to kill could make something every bit as good as what Microsoft has done. They put the absolute bare minimum of effort into everything they’ve done with AI.

  The only advantage they have is customer lock-in. Historically, that’s usually enough for them. I hope it’s not this time.

  Eventually Microsoft will probably buy a company with people who know what the fuck they’re doing. I think that’s their only way forward because it looks like the brain drain has finally caught up with them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it's costing the economy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Jesus Christ what a dumb take. But at least they didn’t say that millennials are killing the cell phone industry. I guess that doesn’t make for good clickbait anymore.

  Reminds me if the parable of the broken window, in which French economist Frédéric Bastiat explains the painfully-obvious truth breaking windows is generally a bad thing, even though it drums up business for the glass maker.

  But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, “Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.”

  It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The actual paper presents the findings differently. To quote:

  Our results clearly indicate that the resolution limit of the eye is higher than broadly assumed in the industry

  They go on to use the iPhone 15 (461ppi) as an example, saying that at 35cm (1.15 feet) it has an effective “pixels per degree” of 65, compared to “individual values as high as 120 ppd” in their human perception measurements. You’d need the equivalent of an iPhone 15 at 850ppi to hit that, which would be a tiny bit over 2160p/UHD.

  Honestly, that seems reasonable to me. It matches my intuition and experience that for smartphones, 8K would be overkill, and 4K is a marginal but noticeable upgrade from 1440p.

  If you’re sitting the average 2.5 meters away from a 44-inch set, a simple Quad HD (QHD) display already packs more detail than your eye can possibly distinguish

  Three paragraphs in and they’ve moved the goalposts from HD (1080p) to 1440p. :/ Anyway, I agree that 2.5 meters is generally too far from a 44" 4K TV. At that distance you should think about stepping up a size or two. Especially if you’re a gamer. You don’t want to deal with tiny UI text.

  It’s also worth noting that for film, contrast is typically not that high, so the difference between resolutions will be less noticeable — if you are comparing videos with similar bitrates. If we’re talking about Netflix or YouTube or whatever, they compress the hell out of their streams, so you will definitely notice the difference if only by virtue of the different bitrates. You’d be much harder-pressed to spot the difference between a 1080p Bluray and a 4K Bluray, because 1080p Blurays already use a sufficiently high bitrate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Retina e-paper promises screens 'visually indistinguishable from reality'⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The only thing I would use such a thing for is installing an ad blocker for the real world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI couldn't create an image of a woman like me - until now⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Representation…in AI image generation?

  The idea that this is something anyone should want is hard to wrap my head around.

  If I could opt out of being deepfake-able, I would.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A data center fire in South Korea sees 858 TB of government files and 'eight years’ worth of work' stored in the cloud go up in smoke⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you can’t afford backups, you can’t afford storage. Anyone competent would factor that in from the early planning stages of a PB-scale storage system.

  Going into production without backups? For YEARS? It’s so mind-bogglingly incompetent that I wonder if the whole thing was a long-term conspiracy to destroy evidence or something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Star Trek Discovery that bad?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I very much enjoyed the start but steadily lost interest.

  There’s some good stuff in Discovery all the way through, don’t get me wrong. But they kind of flipped the script in a way I did not appreciate.

  Most of classic Trek showed us a future with a largely functional society, mostly full of good people who were ready and willing to deal with occasional corruption.

  Lots of newer Trek, and especially Discovery, showed us a future where society is largely dysfunctional and corruption is the norm. Almost everyone in the series who isn’t a main character (plus a couple who are) is a piece of shit. Even the “good guys” frequently encourage or at least tolerate clearly evil behavior as long as it serves their ends. But it’s okay because…friendship I guess?!?

  Their heart is in the right place but the writing is generally bad. I think this generation of writers is incapable of imagining a better world, which, sure, is understandable, given how thoroughly corrupt our current society is. But it’s deeply depressing. It lacks soul.

  SNW is better in this regard. But you’ll probably want to watch season 1 of Discovery first since there’s some crossover.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If AI Was Really Used to Censor ‘Together’ in China, It Represents a Potentially Terrifying Future⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I’d rather come at it from the opposite direction. “Everyone censors, so this exactly the kind of shit your government is going to try to force on you in the future.” Everyone should care about this, if only out of self-interest.

  China’s writing the playbook. Other countries will follow it sooner than you might think. This is everybody’s problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I Was Scammed Out of $130,000 — And Google Helped It Happen⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I was about to say this.

  If they can’t give me a callback number that is publicly listed on their web site, then they’re most likely a scammer.

  With Google, however, this is a scarier proposition than with most companies. If someone from my phone company, or my bank, or my insurance company called me, I could very easily call the actual company and talk to a human to confirm. I have no idea how I could ever talk to a human at Google. I’m not sure they even have a public phone line.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Proton Mail Suspended Journalist Accounts at Request of Cybersecurity Agency⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Unfortunately, you still need a level of trust with Proton. Even aside from trusting that they will not bend to pressure to terminate your service, you’re also trusting them with your network of contacts, because metadata (including the sender, recipient, and subject line) are not end-to-end encrypted in Proton.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anonymity is dead and we’re all content now⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Just wear disposable faces.

  You humans wear the same face your entire life and then get upset when people recognize it?! Get over yourself! Aside from the obvious privacy issue, let’s be real: it’s also gross.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Browser Company, maker of Arc and Dia, is being acquired⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That can’t be good. But I guess it was inevitable. It never seemed like Arc had a sustainable business model.

  It was obvious from the get-go that their ChatGPT integration was a money pit that would eventually need to be monetized, and…I just don’t see end users paying money for it. They’ve been giving it away for free hoping to get people hooked, I guess, but I know what the ChatGPT API costs and it’s never going to be viable. If they built a local-only backend then maybe. I mean, at least then they wouldn’t have costs that scale with usage.

  For Atlassian, though? Maybe. Their enterprise customers are already paying out the nose. Usage-based pricing is a much easier sell. And they’re entrenched deeply enough to enshittify successfully.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doubting Your Favorite Web Search Engine⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Why? It’s Japanese and your browser should display it as マリウス. But I don’t know what that means.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does AI need to be perfect to replace jobs?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that’s true for a subset of code. But for others, the hardest parts happen in the brain, not in the files. Writing readable code is very very important, especially when you are working with larger teams. Lots of people cut corners here and elsewhere in coding, though. Including, like, every startup I’ve ever seen.

  There’s a lot of gruntwork in coding, and LLMs are very good at the gruntwork. But coding is also an art and a science and they’re not good at that at high levels (same with visual art and “real” science; think of the code equivalent of seven deformed fingers).

  I don’t mean to hand-wave the problems away. I know that people are going to push the limits far beyond reason, and I know it’s going to lead to monumental fuckups. I know that because it’s been true for my entire career.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does AI need to be perfect to replace jobs?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If I’m verifying anyway, why am I using the LLM?

  Validating output should be much easier than generating it yourself. P≠NP.

  This is especially true in contexts where the LLM provides citations. If the AI is good, then all you need to do is check the citations. (Most AI tools are shit, though; avoid any that can’t provide good, accurate citations when applicable.)

  Consider that all scientific papers go through peer review, and any decent-sized org will have regular code reviews as well.

  From the perspective of a senior software engineer, validating code that could very well be ruinously bad is nothing new. Validation and testing is retired whether it was written by an LLM or some dude who agent two weeks at a coding “boot camp”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jonathan Frakes Surprised ‘Strange New Worlds’ Star Trek Spoof Was Controversial; Talks Directing ‘Academy’ And More⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think it’s fair to call all those “not serious” just because they had some cheesy aspects, especially when in some cases it was just in the B plot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jonathan Frakes Surprised ‘Strange New Worlds’ Star Trek Spoof Was Controversial; Talks Directing ‘Academy’ And More⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, not yet. It was announced, I think for season 4.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AOL announces September shutdown for dial-up Internet after 34 years⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  XMPP is still around! Despite Google’s best efforts to kill it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 3x04 "A Space Adventure Hour"⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Also they put a spotlight on the huge energy costs of running an AI

  Plus it’s fully in keeping with canon. They mentioned several times in TNG and beyond that holodecks needed isolated power. (And obviously we know the original Enterprise didn’t have a holodeck in a few years’ time.) It’s a nice way for them to have their cake and eat too.

  I hope they have another holodeck episode at some point, maybe on a space station.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google’s healthcare AI made up a body part — what happens when doctors don’t notice?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The “free market” solution is for malpractice suits to be so ruinously expensive that insurance companies will apply sufficient pressure to medical practices to actually do their fucking jobs.

  Same in the legal field, plus we should see a wave of disbarments already.

  I’m not holding my breath. AI is shaping up to be history’s greatest accountability sink and I’ve yet to see any meaningful pushback.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I tried Servo, the undercover web browser engine made with Rust⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  All major browser engines are FOSS.

  Chrome and Edge are proprietary wrappers around Chromium (BSD license). Firefox and derivatives are FOSS (Mozilla Public License). Safari is built around WebKit (LGPL/BSD).

  The problem, however, is governance. These projects are all too big for anyone to realistically fork and maintain independently. So in practice, they are under control of Google, Mozilla, and Apple — all of which have questionable priorities (especially Google).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 3x01 "Hegemony, Part II" & 3x02 "Wedding Bell Blues"⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not really looking forward to another season of Gorn PTSD. We just did that with La’an. We don’t need to rehash it. It’s boring.

  Time will tell if they justify it.

  I did love the costumes in this episode, although I also felt like they were a little too present-day. But if they’re playing Wham I guess that’s what they were going for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Annotations for *Star Trek: Strange New Worlds* 3x02: “Wedding Bell Blues”:⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pike also commented on the wedding planner being Andorian. Spock didn’t seem to react to that statement, so I guess he also saw the Trelane as Andorian at that point.