cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  When you join the largest “catch all” instance, then you browse “all”, then you get the good with the bad. large means large, all means all. the point of the Fediverse is that you can create your own feed, starting from scratch if you wish, but nobody ever said that would be trivially easy. Federation gives you the ability to see literally everything, if that’s what you choose, but you have to choose whether you want “everything” to be the default or “nothing” to be the default. If you want showing everything to be the default, you can join the hugest mega instance available (lemmy.world) that’s what you did.

  If you’d rather opt-in to new communities instead of having to opt-out, start small. Go join a very small or heavily moderated or both instance, or start your own using a whitelist that only federates with communities you know are okay.

  Also consider that you don’t have to click on shit you don’t want to see. You’re choosing to go to “all”, you’re choosing to click, to engage, to be angry. Nothing you say or shout or scream or rant about is going to stop this stuff from being out there in the world. I understand you don’t want to see it, neither do I. That’s why I have joined a smaller instance that has already rather strict rules and relatively strong moderation, and I have further tailored my communities based on that, and when that fails and I occasionally see something I don’t want to see, I downvote it or hide it or report it and move on with my life, because that happens, shitty things exist, I accept that is part of the reality I exist in and I don’t have to like everything I see and if I can’t do anything useful about it I’m not going to lose my mind about it.

  I’m not trying to tell you you’re using lemmy wrong but… you’re using it wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Heroes of the Seven Islands is a hand-drawn fantasy rpg with anthropomorphic characters DEMO is OUT on Steam - I would be glad to have your feedback!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  You had me at “Might and Magic”.

  Actually, you had me at the art style when I saw it was actually pretty convincingly hand-drawn, not just some filters slapped on to make it look that way. I hope it is not AI or I’ll start having to question my damn lying eyes again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Moonbase Alpha: That time NASA made a meme video game⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is a DRM-Free Ebook always better than a physical book?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Digital media deteriorates too, it can be corrupted subtly or obviously and it can fail catastrophically. Backups and archival especially over the very long term are not simple or straightforward, it’s easy to make mistakes and for accidents to happen and a broken link in the chain can lead to the failure of the whole chain.

  “Defense in depth” is a good principle to rely on here. Digitization of physical media media makes sense and the risks are on the whole probably easier to avoid since keeping multitudes of digital copies is logisticially trivial compared to making physical copies. But that doesn’t mean it’s without risks, and may fail against risks that a physical copy wouldn’t. Both is better than either one, and either one is better than none.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you have to agree with everyone you give your money to? What sort of economy would that be?

  Probably a pretty nice one, actually.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah that would be bad. I think we can agree that if there’s one thing that’s even more important than the ideology of an author, it’s definitely capitalism, which is conveniently not an ideology at all, just one of the fundamental laws of the universe. That’s why it’s important to not pirate things for ideological reasons.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a screening number. It’s not supposed to be “trustworthy” because it doesn’t mean anything other than as an arbitrary point for grouping individuals into categories that can be used to estimate risks and make generalized decisions.

  As a thought experiment, consider another commonly used screening number, that breast cancer screening should become routine at age 40. Does that mean breast cancer doesn’t happen to women below age 40? Of course not. Does it mean breast cancer will always happen eventually above age 40? Also of course not. What does it mean? Basically nothing. There is nothing magic or medically significant about being 40 years old specifically. It’s just that we decide that’s a good approximation of the time when the benefits start to outweigh the costs for most people.

  For an individual it’s a pointless number that is completely erased by a massive number of individual risk factors and situational factors. You are an individual. It does not apply to you.

  For large populations, it’s a decent generalization. For people working with large populations, it can be a very useful measurement. But it’s not really supported to be anything more than that, and it’s not particularly useful to apply to you individually. We do of course frequently apply it individually, including many doctors (usually following the direction of insurance companies who DO care about large populations and DON’T care about you as an individual), but that’s not really particularly justifiable, that’s just a reflection of how our health care system works (or doesn’t).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is it okay for shit to go down the drain but not food?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Your link isn’t too helpful for what you’re describing.

  All household wastewater (including kitchen) ultimately goes into the sanitary sewer in most places, if it comes out of a house it’s all called “sanitary”. The alternative to sanitary sewer is storm drain, which is intended ONLY for surface rainwater and usually never have any household hookups, except potentially from rain gutters on the roof or tile drainage below ground, but municipalities are often pretty strict about that as these systems are very important for managing stormwater and avoiding flash flooding.

  The third option, which I think is what you’re getting at, is called graywater, and indeed you could have sinks and even showers plumbed into graywater drains, but never toilets, and it’s often clean enough or can be filtered so that it can be re-used for flushing toilets, irrigating lawns and gardens or other forms of non-potable re-use that won’t be bothered by things like soaps and lotions and bacteria and other things that might get rinsed off. This is common for RVs and boats and other situations where fresh water might be scarce, but very much less typical for household plumbing in most places in my experience, and there is rarely any municipal system hookup for it and the graywater is usually intended to be used on-site within the household plumbing system itself, but it can help divert or reduce wastewater into the sanitary sewer and can help reduce the use of clean potable water, so it is a good thing in general.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is it okay for shit to go down the drain but not food?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d also point out that the toilet pipe is significantly larger than than the kitchen pipe, and uses a multi-gallon, siphon-powered flush to help move it along. Your kitchen sink has none of these plumbing advantages. If you wanted to have a 3 inch kitchen drain and some kind of powered flush apparatus you might have a better time with food waste, but it’s still probably not a good idea for the reasons other people have mentioned. A normal kitchen sink drain configuration, even with the assistance of a disposal, is still quite ill-equipped to handle that kind and quantity of waste.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are there any initiatives aimed at training generative AI using 100% public domain works and works authorized by the creator?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I was just making some snide commentary for fun. It was a little bit at your expense I admit. I appreciate you for not taking it personally! This is why we can sometimes have nice things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are there any initiatives aimed at training generative AI using 100% public domain works and works authorized by the creator?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Ultimately we want as smart LLMs as we can,

  We do? I want LLMs to die in a fire (which they will likely cause by vastly and rapidly increasing global warming, so the problem at least solves itself)

  We are not the same.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not even about lack of trust in the future, it’s about what we picture that future to be. I think it’s more about not wanting to continue this unsustainable pyramid scheme based on the myth of infinite growth. Things that grow infinitely kill their hosts, become plagues, destroy ecosystems, and then eventually die out because they have nothing left to live with.

  To me, it’s about deciding whether we are going to spread out into the solar system and maybe eventually the galaxy if we manage to survive that long, chasing that unsustainable goal of endless growth like a plague of locusts, consuming everything in our path and leaving behind only destruction and death and waste, until we can find nothing more to consume or until we starve ourselves to death before we can find enough. The other option depends on whether we can see the potential of thoughtful progress, embrace sustainability and think about controlling our growth and maintaining our population at a comfortable level, allowing us to find a more harmonious and intelligent way forward. The question is not whether we can continue to grow unsustainably – we have the ability to continue growing for the foreseeable future and certainly can pursue that if that’s what we decide we want, the question is whether we should, and the answer I think most people would come up with if they actually think about it is that we shouldn’t.

  I don’t think most people necessarily think of it in those terms, I think a lot of people just look at things like the cost of living and at their own general happiness and comfort and value they get out of living, and that subtly but consistently influences whether people decide whether to have 0, 1, or 2 kids and stop there, or whether to have 3, 4, 5, or more, with people who are in poorer overall situations tending to have more, not less. This is why developed countries tend to have lower birth rates, typically below even replacement rate. One benefit of the globalization that has been done and the resulting massive wealth transfer to less developed countries is that it is lowering their birth rates and slowing global population growth. That is clearly visible through data. Demographics are a deceptively complicated thing, and are not always intuitive, but we do have a pretty good handle on it despite what it may seem like, and the world population is currently projected to stop growing around what is probably a reasonably sustainable level (about 10 to 11 billion).

  The problem is that our attitudes towards sustainability and equality tend to get thrown out the window every time another major technological change or social upheaval happens, and then all bets are off again as we figure out how to fit that back into the new picture of existence and expectations and growth and progress. Some medical breakthrough causing significant human life extensions or essentially immortality could throw the entire population situation completely off base in mere decades and that will rapidly become a serious maybe catastrophic challenge. If you think the housing crisis is bad now, imagine how bad it would be if every homeowner lived for eternity and babies still keep getting born and growing up and then imagine you try to fix it by telling people they have to stop having babies or that they can’t live as long as they want to.

  A lot of the population growth we saw in the last century or two, from mere hundreds of millions into the many billions, came about almost entirely due to human life extensions and reduction of infant mortality. And of course that’s a good thing, and we are right to strive for it, but it strains our economic foundation more than anyone realizes. Even small changes to these data points, resulting in people living a little longer on average, can have massive and continuous impacts on population growth until they reach a new equilibrium, which may be far higher than you expect and adds up to enormous amounts of additional resources needed.

  Technology has given us all so much more resources than any generation in history, the problem is there are also a lot more people to share it with, so in some very real ways it is in fact less per person. Some of that is intentional, some of it isn’t. The math of demographics and population growth are absolutely relentless and sometimes pretty unforgiving. We have to be really, really smart about it if we want to get ahead of it. And it’s risky business dealing with very sensitive subjects.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s the point of the comment. It’s pointing out why the analogy doesn’t work. A stray feral cat, with few exceptions, MUST hunt to survive. A homeless person can use a food bank or scavenge or beg. They are not in the same situation and cannot be directly compared in potential fighting effectiveness.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Pop_OS! kind of bad?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I like Pika but it’s mostly personal preference in my case, I’ve got a completely unsupportable and probably counterproductive addiction to apt. I agree with your assessment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  At least duckduckgo and Kagi search allow you to turn off AI. It’s a big part of why I’m using them almost exclusively now. I don’t want every web search I do destroying the planet to show me some unnecessary, untrustworthy and often irrelevant and unwanted AI garbage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨List of Fan (OpenSource) Ports/Remakes of Games⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  A few more honorable mentions that are not exact re-implementations with compatibility with the original datafiles, but more spiritual followups:

  Total Annihilation - TA Spring > Spring Engine > Recoil Engine > Beyond All Reason github.com/beyond-all-reason (I think there are mods that make it “Basically TA”)

  EV Nova - Endless Sky endless-sky.github.io

  Goldeneye 64 (multiplayer only) - Goldeneye Source forums.geshl2.com/index.php?topic=7823.0

  Warlords II - LordsAWar! libregamewiki.org/LordsAWar!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨List of Fan (OpenSource) Ports/Remakes of Games⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  XCOM 1 (UFO Defense) and XCOM 2: Terror From The Deep - OpenXCOM openxcom.org

  Master of Orion 1 - 1oom github.com/1oom-fork/1oom

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm a console gamer so, Why the hate on the Epic Games Store?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Tim Sweeney is an obnoxious hypocritical dickhead who has only gotten worse and stupider and more hostile over the years, he is constantly spouting anti-consumer and anti-common-sense nonsense while acting like he’s saving gamers and nurturing his egotistical martyr complex. He has gotten so bad that he has contradicted his own past self so many times that for awhile there was a literal subreddit “TimCriticizesTim” devoted to it. Also EGS itself is garbage resource-guzzling software that almost nobody actually wants on their computer, most of the people who do use it do it either because they’re forced to so they can play games exclusively available on it, or because Epic bribes them to by giving them free games constantly. It is nasty software that collects way more data than it needs to, spying on your files and possibly other stuff too, and they also lied about it (and as far as I know still do).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨(i feel really stupid asking, but what the hell!) could i be of french descent?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You’d be better off doing actual genealogy, which involves research, reaching out to family members, combing through dusty family heirlooms, following up on leads and stories, gaining access to historical documents and records, and more and more and more research. It’s not so much a conclusion you’ll come to as a process of discovery you’ll go through and a story you’ll piece together, potentially over a lifetime. If you’re lucky the pieces will be very solid and well supported, but more likely they’ll be hazy and questionable and quite possibly completely false. It will lead you in directions you never would’ve suspected. DNA can sometimes play a part in that process, but it’s no substitute for it. Especially it can help connect you with distant or not-so-distant relatives who may be able to fill in huge pieces of the family puzzle, or may be no help at all, but maybe it will not be about the answers you get as much as the friends you meet along the way. Trite but true.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did they already take the porn?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  sh.itjust.works is in Canada, FYI.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did they already take the porn?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  USA is going full Handmaid’s Tale to outlaw pornography by defining “obscenity” in the broadest possible terms and OP is conflating that with a sudden apparent disappearance of significant amounts of NSFW content on Lemmy wondering if instances potentially hosted in the USA are trying to get ahead of it by removing/defederating such content, which is honestly probably plausible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lies, Damned Lies, and LLMs: AI is a Con⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ironically I do believe AI would make a great CEO/business person. What’s horrifying about that is no matter how dystopian our situation now is, a planet run by corporations run by incompetent but brutally efficient AI CEOs seems certain to become even more dystopian.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is coal and fossil fuels still used?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re trying to move something with the inertia of an entire planet’s economy, which represents an incredible, almost incomprehensible amount of effort. Inertia becomes an incredibly powerful force that inherently maintains the status quo when you’re talking about huge systems with vast complexity. Yes, there are real challenges (which can be overcome) and yes there is real opposition from entrenched interests who stand to profit (or lose) significantly. But most people underestimate the amount that sheer inertia plays not just in this situation, but in all sorts of different situations, especially when you’re talking about global issues or societal progress. Human minds and values cannot be changed with the snap of a finger. Individuals perhaps can, but as a civilization it often takes decades, or even centuries when the change is massive enough, even when technology itself moves much faster than that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Politics is life. The days of being able to hide from politics were ended by Donald Trump. You may be able to ignore politics again someday far in the future, but right now, politics is very interested in you and any attempts to ignore it will be at your own peril, because politics does not like being ignored.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Players Have Too Many Options to Spend $80 on a Video Game⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Basic human psychology has been weaponized against us, and they’ve been getting better at it faster than we’re getting better at resisting it, for decades.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is this specific kind of sheet called?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think what you’re describing is a “duvet cover”. A “duvet” is a two part comforter with a bulky padded insert and a thin washable outer shell. There are a variety of types of duvet covers available in all kinds of different materials and many of them would essentially match your description of “two sheets sewn together” but they can also be significantly thicker and heavier weight materials, they still would be thin and won’t have the padding of a comforter though as that would be what the insert is normally for. The giveaway would be that there’s usually a zipper or button flap somewhere to insert the comforter insert into, and there are usually buttons or ties on the inside as well to keep the insert from bunching up.

  You could just get one of those and skip the insert. I often sleep with just a duvet cover during the summer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some good examples of "Where the fuck do you go" kind of games?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m gonna have to go super old school on this, because I think gradually games have gotten gradually better about this as the art form advanced. The absolute worst for this that I know of for this has to be “Below The Root” which, despite this point of criticism was a mind-blowingly advanced game for its time, arguably the first real open world CRPG. I have no idea how anyone could’ve legitimately completed the game without either using a guide or playing it over and over for years to learn every possible route of progress. I think the confusing nature of the world was in fact simply because nothing of that scale had ever really been attempted before and there was absolutely no precedent for how to adequately guide players through it.

  The world was, for its time, truly immense and sprawling with a multiple screen interiors for most buildings, a full cave system hidden underground, ladders and secret platforms aplenty. You could converse and trade with various NPCs in houses and wandering around on many of the screens. And when I say “screens” you have to keep in mind I’m talking about something this size. That is not a lot of context to work with for navigation.

  It’s also full of secrets and hidden things, and like many games of the time you will need to find and use pretty much all of them, in pretty much a specific order, to actually complete the game. I can’t even describe how insane the sequence of events you need to do to actually complete the game is, this guy uses a guide and save states but I think it illustrates the general lack of clear guidance in almost all cases. Combine that with the fact that you “die” easily, your inventory is extremely limited capacity, and did I mention you’re on a time limit? Because the “goal” of the game is to rescue a guy and if you take too long, he dies and you can’t win anymore!

  Many naive players (myself included) weren’t even convinced it HAD an ending and just kind of played it endlessly like it was some early version of The Sims.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some good examples of "Where the fuck do you go" kind of games?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You certainly can say it, but I’m going to have to mostly disagree it’s a good example though because I felt Half-Life was very linear. What it did do a good job at was creating a convincing illusion of non-linearity, which I can certainly see some people getting lost in occasionally, but probably briefly (unless you have particularly poor navigation abilities which some people definitely do). It can be especially bad once you get to Xen, which felt deliberately confusing and not really the greatest section of the game for a lot of reasons.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cities Skylines 2, Kerbal Space 2, Planet Coaster 2, Frostpunk 2... What Went Wrong?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s exactly right. They also had managers/publishers telling them to do shit like make the rockets even wobblier than KSP1 because it made for funny viral videos that would get more PR.

  Nobody who actually played the game wanted wobblier rockets than KSP1. Nobody really wanted wobbly rockets at all. Sometimes a bug can actually be a feature, but in this case, it really was just a bug. The people in charge didn’t ever care about the people who actually played the game, they just wanted sales, and they made decisions accordingly. That’s why it looks nice, but plays like shit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bubble Trouble - An AI bubble threatens Silicon Valley, and all of us.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I doubt that. Why wouldn’t you be able to learn on your own? AIs lie constantly and have a knack for creating very plausible, believable lies that appear well researched and sometimes even internally consistent. But that’s not learning, that’s fiction. How do you verify anything you’re learning is correct?

  If you can’t verify it, all your learning is an illusion built on a foundation of quicksand and you’re doomed to sink into it under the weight of all that false information.

  If you can verify it, you have the same skills you need to learn it in the first place. If you still find AI chatbots convenient to use or prompt you in the right direction despite that extra work, there’s nothing wrong with that. You’re still exercising your own agency and skills, but I still don’t believe you’re learning in a way you can’t on your own and to me, that feels like adding extra steps.