quixotic120

@quixotic120@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to learn Japanese⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  no but there are plenty of of resources much more knowledgeable than I am

  Recommend genki if you’re good with a book

  If you just want to get started like today duolingo isn’t horrible but I would suggest going into setting as soon as possible and turning off romaji (the English pronunciation guide written over the hiragana). It will make it significantly harder initially but using romaji will stop you from learning the characters. You won’t read the hiragana, you’ll read the alphabet you already know.

  That said I did duolingo to brush up a bit and I really dislike that they don’t explain much when you make errors. Given it’s an app they have the ability to bring up so much information for errorless learning. I guess they want to make it “easy” and prevent information overload but it tends to be that they present you with a screen when a concept is introduced then that screen is gone forever. So then if you make the error you just have to kind of figure out the grammatical rules behind what you’re doing wrong

  In the beginning it’s not so bad but eventually you’ll get very confused, why does は (wa, kind of like “is”) sometimes go here and sometimes go there? Why is it sometimes は and sometimes が (ga)? Duolingo never really clearly explains particles, wa marks the topic and ga marks the subject. Duolingo just throws dozens of examples at you until you consistently get it correct without necessarily knowing why unless you dig through the app or research independently

  It bothers me because I am in mental health by trade and my research interests and background is in human behavior and more specifically learning and skill acquisition. This is an inefficient model for skill acquisition. Allowing the learner to make this many errors as part of your model slows learning, potentially significantly, and allows the learner to learn bad habits and mistakes. So as you’re doing it and mistranslating you may ingrain that

  それら** は**わたしのあかいコートですか (sore wa watashi no akai koto desu ka) are those my red coats?

  Should be

  それらわたしのあかいコート** は**ですか

  (sore watashi no akai koto wa desu ka) which is grammatically incorrect and makes you sound like a goddamn fool

  But when you’re learning concepts like doko/どこ and soko/そこ (where, there, basically) you learn that “wa” goes towards the end of your phrase like whatever wa doko desu ka similar to the incorrect example above

  Sore/それ and kore/これ are demonstrative (this and that, basically, though the above example again shows how contextually this falls apart and it becomes “those”) and are typically introduced shortly before doko/soko

  Fun times! Remember these are real basic examples and I am also real dumb

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to learn Japanese⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And yet feeding it Japanese it usually gives the worst outcomes even if you do this and deepL gives much better ones even if you don’t. I don’t know what magic deepL does to make that happen but when I scanlate manga deepL almost always gives the best result even when I do what you’re doing or feed ChatGPT the images directly

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to learn Japanese⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I never know what to tell people like you. DeepL is the best one at translating Japanese and it still is mixed

  Japanese is a contextual language. It is difficult for machines to translate because it is not a language where a word simply means this or that.

  Take a very short sentence:

  がくせいです - gakusei desu

  Gakusei is “student”

  A literal translation of this would be “am student” or “is student”

  But if I say this to you you will infer things based on context and です/desu takes on a different role. If I am clearly referring to myself then gakusei desu in this context becomes “I’m a student” (though to be fair I would probably have said it with a first person pronoun and particle like わたしはわ (watashi wa)

  But if I’m referring to another singular person in the room this would be inferred through context, eg “he’s a student.” But this is where it starts getting confusing, the copula (desu) doesn’t differentiate singular or plural, so context is also used to derive plural forms, eg “they are students”.

  This copula also applies to other situations outside of he/she like “it” eg コンビニです, konbini desu, konbini being “convenience store”, “its a convenience store”

  This is a very very basic idea of why. It gets more complex obviously once you move past these extremely basic examples but honestly someone more knowledgeable at Japanese should explain at that point, I’m self taught and mediocre (thus my use of 0 kanji, I’m pretty sure at a minimum there’s kanji for gakusei and watashi but I suuuuck at kanji. I at least know meat. 肉肉肉 although that’s mostly thanks to anime and the local Asian grocer lmao).

  I think AI can probably do it eventually but it will need to be able to do much better job of understanding what the source material is actually talking about and that’s the challenge to overcome. And that’s why it will probably never be able to really accurately translate a paragraph copy pasted into it

  As to the sanitation that’s a separate issue about corporate control of AI. If they don’t want their translation services to sound “vulgar” that’s their prerogative I suppose but it also means they sound less human and realistic because people are gross and ugly when they speak. Vernacular is ugly and lexicon adapts quickly in ways that people don’t always love. But to be clear I don’t mean it’s just about slurs and bad words, I mean it’s about slang in general. Words that are generally inoffensive but not considered proper. English equivalents would be what we consider zoomer speak, hella sus yeah bruh type shit (I’m not good at this part)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to learn Japanese⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh shit this is great, thanks

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to learn Japanese⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t even care about flirting with women I just want a free app where I can practice speaking my second language with actual people and not some sanitized AI that doesn’t understand context or slang

  But not discord, fuck discord

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Based Red Dead⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Anon wants to play as Micah

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Based Red Dead⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  These actually had distinction:

  Defectives was generally the term prior to like 1845, which is when Howe published “on the causes of idiocy”. That led to more classification

  Idiot was what we could call severe intellectual disability. Requiring 24 hour care but some muscular control, cognitive, and speech capabilities. Use was phased out in the late 19th century because it had become pejorative

  Fool was a subcategory of idiot with more significant impairment of reasoning and speech skills. This became pejorative and was phased out.

  Simpleton was moderate intellectual disability. Some degree of functioning, capacity for speech, motor and reasoning skills, but required assistance with tasks. This also become pejorative and was phased out (see a pattern). This was replaced with several terms, including feeble minded, imbecile, and moron, which were also in turn phased out.

  at one point in the 19th century there was a distinction when symptoms of dementia set in. If you got what we would now call early onset dementia, it was called “amentia”. By the early 20th century “ament” was kind of a catch all for “idiots, imbeciles, and feeble minded”

  There was also “cretin” which was originally supposed to be a kindness for all intellectually disabled people as it means “Christian” in French or something, but it also became pejorative

  Another super racist one was mongoloid/mongolism which was specifically for Down’s syndrome. This is because, no joke, John Down thought people with down syndrome looked like Mongolians. His reward for his racism was the condition bears his name forever, apparently. This was only changed because Mongolia had to petition the WHO to change it because it was offensive

  Imo instead of policing language we should maybe recognize that the intentionality behind the use of these terms is what the problem is.

  Saying the word “retarded” does not have to be inherently offensive. Describing something that is slowed or hindered as retarded is accurate. Using retarded as a pejorative term makes you a dick, sure. But if I go through all the effort to change “retarded” to “intellectually disabled” guess what happens? The same thing that has happened for the past 175+ years. The people who have used the terms in the pejorative sense will quickly adapt, making your efforts to police language pointless unless you intended to enrich their lexicon.

  If you consider actions that could actually be meaningful for the individual it would be something that would address the harm caused by pejorative use. That’s a challenging road to go down (imagine criminal penalties: middle schools would be ghost towns!). we want to feel like we do something though so we instead do this, which is pointless.

  That said if the disorder was named by an old racist based on his racism then by all means change it up but maybe don’t memorialize him when you do it. That doesn’t come up as much anymore, thankfully

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is in trouble⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This honestly makes so much more sense from an environmental standpoint. Why waste so much in terms of resources shipping hundreds of millions of pounds of sugar water every month so picky babies that refuse to drink water will pump more money into the coca cola empire so they can get type 2 diabetes as fast as possible. Instead just ship this little cup thing at 1/18th the weight and save so much gasoline, road wear and tear, etc.

  Who am I kidding, they’ll just put this into plastic bottled water that’s been shipped from 3 states over

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the odds of getting salmonella when eating raw poultry products?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is simply not true

  Modern meat is generally pretty safe and chicken tartare is definitely a thing. Is it something you should do if you are immunocompromised, a child, or elderly? Probably not. Is it something you should do if you are unsure of how the meat was handled? Probably not

  But if you buy quality chicken from a trusted butcher, freeze the surface, blanch it for a few seconds, you can pretty safely eat it raw assuming you’ve done a good job keeping your surfaces and hands clean. You could probably do it with grocery store chicken tbh but the risks are much greater because you have no clue if the $12/hr kid packing chicken breasts properly washed their hands (handling is overwhelmingly where foodborne illness is going to come from in this scenario)

  Is it going to be safe 100% of the time? No, of course not. But neither is eating medium rare steak, or eggs with runny yolks. But could you do this every day for a year with issue? Probably

  Raw chicken is kind of like scallops btw

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon gives a piracy history lesson⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Dependent on hardware that allows for such things. I think/hope you are right and that demand for such things will continue to enable their presence for at least some time but I fear the eventual end of things is hardware that is completely unable to be customized, repaired, or modified in any meaningful way. iphones for everyone.

  The tech moguls are cozying to trump hard and that’s not for nothing. They’re going to get something in return.

  I hope you’re right though

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How is the current AI bubble when compared to the .com bubble in the early 2000's?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The dot com bubble was this crazy time where for a brief period a generation didn’t know about this thing that the generation after them was increasingly and rapidly interested in.

  So like people use the whole “Wild West” metaphor and it’s really apt. Conglomeration was happening in the 90s with the rise of walmart, home depot, etc and it was becoming clear that opening a retail store was a dying business because the “big guys” were destroying towns. Like it was only a matter of time before a walmart came to your town and shuttered main street

  But the internet was different. All these established entrenched companies didn’t care about it, yet. So you could make bank with basic ideas. Like oh, clearchannel owns 70% (now like 95%) of the radio stations in the us. Trying to start anything in that space is foolish, plus there’s all these regulations. But internet radio? Boom, millionaire. Petco and petsmart are rising and putting pet stores out of business. But pets.com? Had prominent national advertising including a float in the macys thanksgiving day parade, a Super Bowl ad, and was listed in nasdaq. Boom, millionaires. Busted after 2 years and now redirects to petsmart tho

  Some of them stuck around. Like banking was obviously entrenched with old money but then a couple of rich kids were like what if we use daddies money to do internet banking? Then x.com and PayPal started and now we have elon musk and peter thiels reign of terror

  AI seems to have some similarities in that there’s the whole “what if we apply AI to x” thing and VC dummies throw cash at it but it’s not as broad so the bubbles not as big and frankly it’s not as definitively revolutionary. The internet was clearly a game changer. Like anyone with half a brain who used it saw the potential early on; it was a new modality for communication with an unprecedented speed and dearth of information. And after it had matured a few years people started to see how fast it was progressing, especially via stuff like games. We went from doom to quake to final fantasy 8 and everquest in the span of the 90s and anyone paying even a lick of attention saw the potential for things like facetime, netflix, youtube, etc eventually.

  But with AI it’s harder to picture. There’s the narrative that it will eventually do stuff and it can do impressive things but for the most part most people’s experience with it is that it’s like having a mediocre employee. Their work is okay but you have to constantly check it because they always make stupid mistakes. They tell you they’ll learn to stop doing that but it’s been several years now and they keep doing it. Just like teslas will self drive in 2018, chatgpt will reach agi any day now, maybe, or maybe it’s an illusion and it’s really just a bunch of if>then statements that are constantly trying to fix themselves but messing up others in the process.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Top 3 Apps in my Country (Venezuela) are all VPNs...⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Isn’t tiktok free? Why would you need a lite version. Is it for old phones that can’t run much?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨oopsie⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The reason it was the mantra back then was because there was always at least a few new people and people who were just kind of dull that simply didn’t get it and needed such a thing constantly repeated

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨rarted⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think your post is bad or wrong. If I’ve worded my post ambiguously in a way that makes you feel attacked that was not my intention and I apologize; I do see how this could be the case re-reading it. I stream of consciousness post mainly. I intended to clarify your experience, which is why I started with the drawing of the spectrum and then in the second paragraph drew the argument without any specific citing of anything you said (but again re-reading this I can see how the ambiguity could read as inflammatory)

  That said (and this is my opinion) I do not think your post should be changed; I generally do not think that any post should be changed so that the dialogue exchange can be preserved for others to see how things evolved. I believe there is a great deal of value in not just saying “this is the rule” but also exposing exchanges that clarify why “this is the rule” (though to be clear I don’t think this is a rule).

  But I also believe that one should have autonomy over their content and that being the case if you choose to delete or edit your post I would support you exercising your autonomy even if i ultimately did not support the actions of changing your content. This inherently conflicts with the internet though as even sites like lemmy get archived plus I know some content on lemmy is publicly logged with things like moderator actions though I don’t know the extent of this. That’s just the nature of the internet in 2025 though. So much for “the right to be forgotten”, sigh

  To clarify further on the reason it can be damaging is because it puts expectations on that population to be cheery and uplifting. Then when they are not they can be further ostracized for being “extra difficult” and “not one of the good ones”.

  There were interesting social dynamics in those group homes. There were certainly a number of people who unfortunately had an intellectual impairment that was so severe they did not really register the other people around them in the typical social ways one would think. They would mainly consider in an immediate context and only form relationships with people who put in serious effort to engage and deliver positive feedback/rewards, which were almost always staff and not peers.

  But then there were also plenty of people who had severe but not as drastic deficits. They would have much stronger social and communication skills but need much more assistance with things like safety awareness, activities of daily living, medical support, education and work supports, etc. this is where the aforementioned issues would come into play. Often the people who would be very personable and out in the community often would be trotted out for all kinds of things as a kind of marketing for the agency. They were a sign of the “great things” we did there.

  Many of the people we worked with had unpredictable behavior that could become extremely dangerous, exhibited behaviors that were socially unacceptable like playing with feces or purposefully vomiting, etc. They didn’t get to go out as much and they didn’t get to be “the face”. To be clear we made efforts to take everyone out into the community as often as possible but some got special treatment. A place like that often gets donations and then “the special group” gets to go to a Major League Baseball game because a benefactor gave up their private box. Then everyone’s jealous because once again they’re left behind while the “good ones” come home with free stuff and tales of free chicken fingers.

  In educational settings this came up too; I would consult and people would openly express disdain for special needs children who had high need because they weren’t like the other upbeat special needs kid that was easygoing. And this was crazy because it wasn’t just like a classmate bullying situation usually. Often that actually wasn’t happening anymore because the kid had scared the other kids. But now they’d be getting open disdain from educators and aides. Like I’d be observing in classrooms and the teacher would say something like “you see? I can’t handle this! No one can! This kid is impossible! He/she needs to be in a facility”. This isn’t like a “oh this happened one time, so crazy” thing, this kind of thing happened multiple times, multiple elementary schools. And frankly the teachers were partially right, basically every kid was inappropriate for public school and should have been placed out of school but that’s a different story about the snails pace of obtaining funding for alternative placements

  Essentially this is a (very long, sorry) way of saying that this class of people is essentially invisible to the population at large and perpetuating this stereotype that they are cheery and nice means that the ones who don’t fit it are either hidden away or met with disdain (or outright aggression) because it is seen as abnormal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨rarted⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh, it’s a spectrum like any other diagnosis (albeit deprecated). I’ve worked with intellectual and developmental disability for much of my career. I do more general outpatient now but the beginning of my career was almost solely ID/DD

  I would argue it’s just as harmful to paint ID individuals as the “happy friendly” caricatures to sanitize them. They are dynamic and multifaceted. They have good and bad days, they are sometimes nice and sometimes mean. Some more than others. As a result some are just kind of jerks, frankly. And to be honest this is kind of fucked up but from my time working in inpatient residential I can tell you that it’s not unlikely that the people you encountered in the gym were on the “good temperament” side, or having a good stretch in their lives. Generally the people who were having a rougher time didn’t go out into the community as much, especially to a place as potentially dangerous as a gym

  That said I truly don’t think Elon is intellectually disabled. I think he is possibly a sociopath who equates that to Asperger’s because he thinks it’s cool and mysterious since he’s emotionally stunted and stuck in his 14 year old edgelord phase for life, apparently. But I don’t know, never met the guy

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon buys a TV without researching⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  LG sucks in many ways. I have a cx as well. I rooted it and blocked updates and all lg services, which helps a lot

  If you update it though lg automatically opts you in to data sharing without your explicit consent, which is bullshit

  That said imo compared to all the other smart tv options webos is one of the best options. Especially if it’s rooted (though rooting it is becoming much more difficult these days). Then you can install adfree youtube with sponsorblock, permanently block updates, etc.

  Android tv is absolute garbage and loaded with more ads than anything. But at least android doesn’t break when you use adblocking; my old Roku tv doesn’t allow you to set custom dns servers and when you set an ad blocking dns server at a router level the TVs apps break. Android still works although googles ad game is so strong that even blocking all their ad networks still allows some ads somehow, even deleting caches. I’m pretty sure android tv just has ads installed in it

  Of course the best thing to do is never ever ever connect your smart tv to the internet at all and buy a secondary device to utilize for watching media. I recommend ugoos devices. I use the am6b+ but they have other/newer devices that may fit your use case better. Stripped down android with 0 ads but can still run all streaming apps/dolby vision licensed and you can flash them with Coreelec so they natively boot to kodi

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the endgame when the rich have all the money?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  For a while it will be that they only have almost all of the money; a small portion will have to go to the workers so that someone exists to run things like power plants and farms and mcdonalds and shit. But eventually robots will replace all that, or slavery

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I need a flicker free LED lightbulb running in the 3000 K range.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This is all besides the point. This is not a website. This is a product, that runs in your home, that was sold for years on the agreement that they would not be able to harvest this data (simply because I could run them without connecting to the internet). Now I still have that option of course, but I will eventually trade product updates to do so. It is a given, philips has said as much

  Also the data would likely include things like your wifi SSID and password (hopefully encrypted).

  It’s cool that you don’t care about your autonomy and privacy but the bottom line is companies like philips shouldn’t get to unilaterally get to make decisions that alter the tos over a decade later because people like you are apathetic. Some people have literal thousands invested into this ecosystem and many have hundreds, easily. Your apathy and people like you enables companies like philips to bully consumers and make consumer hostile decisions

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I need a flicker free LED lightbulb running in the 3000 K range.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Eu regulations won’t save you when someone hacks philips servers and all of the data they’ve stored on you is captured by malicious actors. And whoops, it turns out they stored a ton more than they needed to, your address, your lighting schedule, how many rooms are in your house, names of users with access to your home, etc. and whoops, turns out they did the bare minimum to secure their servers and hacking them was basically as simple as knowing how to hack things

  So terrible! What will the eu do! Be really mad at them and 8 years later sue them for 70 million dollars, which is 5% of their operating revenue. They will surely learn their lesson and definitely not continue doing the exact same thing without changing at all. But they’re really mad at them! And they can’t stop you from turning off the lights! Nice! Also they harvested all that data above and sold it to advertisers to make back the 70 million (and then some) so it didn’t even matter they got hacked, your info is easily available for like 24 cents

  They definitely don’t flicker though until they’ve had a significant amount of use. But there are a lot of comparable bulbs for much cheaper that don’t cost nearly as much. Not all of those are “smart” though, but you can combine them with a smart product that’s much more consumer friendly (like lutron caseta) and then you’re good to go. Or just get a z wave bulb if you want a bulb that can do things like change colors/temperatures. Fuck philips, fuck compulsory “cloud” services”, and fuck the regulatory bodies that have utterly failed us because they simply don’t understand tech beyond basic connectors (or they’re paid not to, I guess)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I need a flicker free LED lightbulb running in the 3000 K range.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It doesn’t matter if it’s free. Fuck that. Your iot shit should NOT be on “cloud” servers. I love having automated tech shit in my house, it’s great, but it’s 100% not worth having if it can’t run offline

  My one exception is if it needs an initial authentication online and then can run offline forever. Lutron caseta is an example I will endorse, the product works extremely well. Never have drop outs, unresponsive devices, etc. it does require an internet connection to activate a device initially but after that it can run on an isolated vlan with no internet access indefinitely (I have verified this)

  Philips, like so many other iot providers, will likely skimp on cybersecurity. Why should I trust them to potentially sync my address, my lighting schedules, information about the layout of my house, etc? Further they will absolutely harvest my data and sell it. If not initially then eventually. Fuck all of that. The best option for security is to air gap all my iot shit and not connect it to the internet at all. If the vendors don’t respect that then I don’t respect them. Either I’ll hack it to make it work, find a workaround, or sell it. Either way I’ll make sure I shit on them online every chance I get because I’m so goddamn tired of corporations stealing our autonomy as consumers

  Highly recommend home assistant btw. Only voice assistant you can actually run locally and only voice assistant you can actually have autonomy over. It’s frustrating that the choice is a more feature filled product like alexa, siri, or hue versus home assistant or a pure z wave bulb but the former always robs your autonomy. They either fill the space with ads whenever possible (alexa), don’t allow you to customize the assistant and control your data (siri and alexa), at any time will change the tos to revoke api access (chamberlain, mazda), force server sided bullshit (hue), etc

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I need a flicker free LED lightbulb running in the 3000 K range.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  All LEDs are flicker free on dc power and they all flicker on ac power so what you’re looking for is an led bulb with a good quality internal dc power supply. Unfortunately many, even those advertised as flicker free, don’t meet this requirement, because they’re built cheaply.

  This also depends to a degree on your eye sensitivity. My vision is poor but I can clearly see the difference between 30 and 60 fps whereas some of my friends and family don’t seem to notice such a thing. I don’t know if that’s similar but I’ve had experiences where I’m like “these lightbulbs are flickering” and other people are like “no they arent” and I then question if I’m potentially mentally ill or my eyes are possibly worsening even further (although thankfully sometimes other people notice too).

  To oversimplify it it has to do with the rectification of the power supply and constant vs switching current dc power supplies

  You can verify this by taking a high quality slow motion video of the bulb at least 240fps. I have some clips but they won’t upload.

  Basically a hue white ambiance doesn’t flicker. This meets your requirements as it is adjustable between 2200k to 6500k. However, these are expensive and frankly I wish I never bought them because philips changed the terms of service after sale. I bought into their “ecosystem” years ago and I only run smarthome stuff on my local network but they are pressuring users to move to “philips security” which will require your lighting to be connected to their servers 24/7. This is apparently going to be necessary in a future update. A workaround is the bulbs do work with z wave but that requires additional hardware/software, plus why support a company that pulls such bullshit

  A second video I have shows that as hue bulbs age they do begin to flicker though it is hard to see/perceive for some time. This is not a criticism of hue and more just something to be aware of with led lighting, the power supplies will begin to weaken and fail over time. Thankfully this takes quite some time, the bulb I have is approaching 8-9 years of life. But considering the price that’s not necessarily a great price per year (although keep in mind they’re regularly on sale). The flicker is mild

  A third video shows a cheaper no name bulb that was marketed as flicker free. My partner says they are not bothered by it so it’s in their office but I can’t stand it. The video shows a much more dramatic flicker.

  There is this website which verifies this for you, bulbs listed are either truly flicker free (category a) or imperceptible flicker (category b):

  flickeralliance.org/…/flicker-free-light-bulbs

  This post is brought to you by autism

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon discovers Japanese jazz⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t bought a record in a while but I used to buy a ton and buying used from Japan was always my favorite. It wasn’t like this if you bought from corporate stores obviously but almost every time I bought from just some dude on yahoo auctions or discogs or ebay or whatever I would have a similar experience. Handwritten note, candy, good luck charm from a shrine, etc. almost made up for the astronomical shipping

  One time my friend ordered a book from Russia and got similar treatment except they got tea. We made it and it was the most horrible tea we had ever tried in our lives. It came with a sweet letter though so the sentiment was nice

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  your son sounds badass, read some shoujo and meet tom nook while spinning brat

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon reaches enlightenment⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of therapy is just Buddhism repacked for modern audiences

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon visits America⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  American burgers are the king of all burgers, bottom line

  That said 2 things I absolutely agree with:

  A burger should be small enough to easily bite. It’s okay if you have to smoosh it down with your hands

  If you already have ketchup, mustard, mayo, bbq, etc then why do I need “burger sauce”? Your burger sauce is probably just some variation on mayo and ketchup anyway. Thanks for making my burger a sloppy piece of shit akin to eating ribs

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anons make the worst game ever⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  A currency system where the game has a normal currency that you can earn via tasks but that currency is artificially nerfed because there is an additional “premium” currency that is only available either in extremely paltry amounts that have to be saved over months of grinding or spending actual cash. Also there’s a ton of stuff that can only be purchased with large amounts of premium currency

  A subscription for basic services like multiplayer or a song catalog even though you just paid $70 for the game

  High paced action game that suddenly grinds to a halt for a forced stealth section that was clearly tacked on and poorly designed

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon gives a piracy history lesson⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The less likely to get a virus point is arguable but I get what you’re saying

  Really the thing is private trackers kind of put themselves out of the game. Like let’s look at a common path to get to some of the more well known coveted private trackers:

  Do an irc interview about the rules and culture of a site with a staff member. You will have to study, sit in irc for god knows how long for someone to be available, and pass. Alternatively, know someone already in who trusts you and will burn an invite

  Then you’re in. Now you have to upload music, which is much less commonly pirated bc music streaming isn’t fucking stupid and fragmented these days (though pricing keeps rising so maybe we’ll see a return). To get to the point where you can be invited to sites that would actually have movies and tv and games and shit you need 25 gigs uploaded and a 0.7 ratio minimum. Also the sites been around a while and the people on it are meticulous music collectors so finding something to upload is actually challenging, when you do you have to make sure you meet the strict guidelines, etc

  That’s a lot! Like learning to use a torrent client is easy. Asking a 2024 tech dummy to learn irc? Come on. At the same time the filter is needed, the people who truly want to be there are what make the communities so great, and the vetting process is what keeps feds out (for the most part they go for low hanging fruit sites like rarbg)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon gives a piracy history lesson⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  “Intel Boot Guard is an ME application introduced in Q2 2013 with ME firmware version 9.0 on 4th Generation Intel Core i3/i5/i7 (Haswell) CPUs. It allows a PC OEM to generate an asymmetric cryptographic keypair, install the public key in the CPU, and prevent the CPU from executing boot firmware that isn’t signed with their private key. This means that coreboot and libreboot are impossible to port to such PCs, without the OEM’s private signing key. Note that systems assembled from separately purchased mainboard and CPU parts are unaffected, since the vendor of the mainboard (on which the boot firmware is stored) can’t possibly affect the public key stored on the CPU.”

  From libreboot faq. There is precedent for this and it just hasn’t been heavily exercised, yet

  Unless you build the hardware you cannot prevent this from happening. It’s merely a question of how long until 99% of tech devices are basically iphones and you need a very restrictive “developers license” to buy the (likely extremely expensive) 1% that are not that puts legal repercussions on you if you do anything that they do not like

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon gives a piracy history lesson⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This is true but is only applicable as long as manufacturers still allow alternative OS to exist. It sounds crazy now but the idea of not being able to use an alternative is something that manufacturers are clearly toying with (see the x elite laptops with locked boot loaders, hp secureboot, etc).

  They’ve seen the control they can exert over users with mobile devices and they want that across the spectrum. Then it goes back to a point I made in another comment; Linux/foss users can and will still exist but they will be restricted to ancient hardware that prevents them from working on certain tasks. This already occurs: look at a true foss idealist that will only use hardware that can run coreboot/libreboot. You’re generally running hardware well over a decade old at this point. If you want to work on any computationally complex task (ml models, high poly 3d modeling, anything requiring a modern discrete gpu really), you’re out of luck unless you compromise your ideals

  The thing is Linux users and other power users think “if manufacturers lock the bootloader there will be a huge outcry and people won’t buy it”. And there is truth to that, there will be a lot of noise online. But most users won’t care and they’ll still buy the stuff. And apple/google/hp/lenovo/etc will push/pay their buddies at facebook/reddit/etc to downplay the discussion/outrage so it will blow over quick and become a normal thing. Then all it takes is a new dmca extension or modification and now overriding a manufacturer lock on a bootloader is an illegal modification

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon gives a piracy history lesson⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What are they going to do? Manufacture their own silicon? The ability to make a computing device of reasonable power is fairly prohibitive and as things move forward manufacturers seem intent on doing things that are more and more hostile to consumers. You say people won’t let themselves be pushed around and that sounds nice but people have consistently done exactly that to date.

  Our power as individuals is minimal here; we can vote politically and financially. These companies do amazing financially so voting with our wallets doesn’t work. Voting politically also hasn’t done in terms of enacting regulation aside from some small wins in a few states with right to repair (and big losses in many more states as well as federally). And given the fact that those wins are small and fragmented with only a very small handful of states having any policy (like less than 10) it’s likely that big tech will push back hard rather than simply comply. And we are heading into political times where regulations will likely continue to erode.

  So as things worsen the people who “know a bit more” can have the choice of using cutting edge hardware that is more locked down, or being a stallman type that uses relatively ancient hardware full of compromises because it is compatible with an ideology. That is just but it also means they will be constantly hampered and the problem will only be compounded as technology becomes more advanced, which is inherent and constantly occurring

  This is also not just a generational thing to be clear. People my age, younger, and older, who were into this stuff have become tech illiterate as time progressed because they’ve allowed themselves to move away from their computers and go to their phones which have become a reddit/youtube/tiktok/pintrest/amazon/twitter/instagram/etc box. The etc is whatever skinner box game they’re playing at the moment, because most of them who played actual games don’t even bother to play games anymore. They’re so caught up in the cycle of “engagement” that they don’t care about much else. they come home and doom scroll then complain about how they feel aimless and anxious all the time and never get stuff done

  You’re right that there exceptions, but they seem to be dwindling