cecilkorik
@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Why doesn't the Trump administration simply edit the Epstein files and release them? 1 day ago:
The problem with lies is you have to have a good memory. You need to make sure all the lies line up and don’t leave holes in your story that reveal the lie underneath because ironically the smaller the slip the more damning and harder to explain it can be. That applies to falsifying documents too. It’s actually more dangerous to try and create something fake because now you need fake evidence for all the fake stuff you’re putting in there, and you need to hide any evidence or corroboration that points to the stuff you’ve removed, and it all gets really complicated and really error-prone really fast. Liars survive by keeping things simple enough that it can’t be challenged, or in Trump’s case, by hiding all the small lies behind big obvious ones, like “there are no Epstein files” which everyone knows is a lie but the lie is so big it’s immovable while all the juicy details are buried underneath.
- Comment on How did websites like TinEye recognize cropped photos of the same image (and other likened pictures), without the low-entry easyness of LLM/AI Models these days? 1 day ago:
We didn’t call them AI because they weren’t (and aren’t) intelligent, but marketing companies eventually realized there were trillions of dollars to be made convincing people they were intelligent and created models explicitly designed to convince people of things like the idea that they are intelligent and can have genuine conversations like a real human and create real art like a real human and totally aren’t just empty-headedly mimicking thousands of years of human conversation and art, and immediately used them to convince people that the models themselves were intelligent (and many other things besides). Given that marketing and advertising literally exist to convince people of various things and have become exceedingly good at it, it’s really a brilliant business move and seems to be working great for them.
- Comment on How did websites like TinEye recognize cropped photos of the same image (and other likened pictures), without the low-entry easyness of LLM/AI Models these days? 1 day ago:
We didn’t call them AI because they weren’t (and aren’t) intelligent, but marketing companies eventually realized there were trillions of dollars to be made convincing people they were intelligent and created models explicitly designed to convince people of things like the idea that they are intelligent and can have genuine conversations like a real human and create real art like a real human and totally aren’t just empty-headedly mimicking thousands of years of human conversation and art, and immediately used them to convince people that the models themselves were intelligent (and many other things besides). Given that marketing and advertising literally exist to convince people of various things and have become exceedingly good at it, it’s really a brilliant business move and seems to be working great for them.
- Comment on People often say "Don't talk to the police", but what if a friend, neighbor, or a loved one gets kidnapped and you want to help the victim? 1 day ago:
That’s the fun part, you can’t. A lot depends on the details here. You’re looking for a one-size-fits-all answer to a very not-one-size situation.
In 99% of cases a major crime like a kidnapping that I know I didn’t have anything to do with should be reported immediately, and “speaking to the police” only ceases when I become aware they have decided to suspect my involvement. In the other 1% of cases, I have understood how bad it looks and I’m talking immediately to the best lawyer I can find and letting them do all the talking from the beginning.
- Comment on How come nobody does anything about North Korea? 2 days ago:
It’s not a lack of empathy as much as a kind of educated empathy. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. We historically have a notorious and awful track record of nation building, and I think a lot of people believe this boils down to the fact that it’s very difficult to impose a national identity on people from outside, even with direct, physical intervention. We have tried to get around this at times by only supporting what we believe are legitimate independence movements which clearly already possess a strong national identity. Unfortunately even those tend to devolve into ethnic cleansing campaigns and dictatorship as soon as we leave. And if we don’t leave, then we have to stay there forever and we have to keep interfering every time things threaten to go off the rails and then it becomes paternalistic colonialism.
Keep in mind too that a lot of people living under oppressive regimes are genuinely damaged people and there is nothing but time that can heal those wounds. They are traumatized, they are angry, they have lost loved ones, they have been subjected to horrors we can only imagine and clinically document, without feeling the fear and emotional scars those things inflicted on millions of people. If you suddenly give them back power again, even small amounts of power, it is in human nature for many to seek revenge for what they’ve gone through (and not always against the right people). They’ve learned how to operation within the context of a deeply flawed and dangerous regime, and as resilient as the human spirit is it still is difficult to teach new ways.
At some point, people have got to learn to stand on their own two feet and find a way to build an equal, fair and just nation for all of themselves, by all the people and for all the people. While we certainly can do a better job of supporting this, we can’t do it for them and our attempts to do so have typically ranged from highly questionable to disastrous and extremely counterproductive. We fought for our own freedom, and it is not out of selfishness that we tell them they must fight for their own too. It’s not that we enjoy the fighting, it’s that as awful as it is, it appears necessary to get that hostility out into the open and understood to be as awful as it is, for a successful outcome to be possible.
On the other hand, even that hasn’t helped in Israel/Palestine where it seems like we’ve tried almost everything and failed. The fact is, nobody has the answers. We don’t know the way to fix this. We are always trying, even when it doesn’t seem like it, but we have to be abundantly cautious that we’re not making it worse, because we often are.
- Comment on VC behind ‘996’ work culture debate says 5-day weeks won't build billion-dollar startups 1 week ago:
“As you can clearly see on this chart I made of the value I put on things, the value I put on my own work is the highest, and the rest of you are very low, and you should feel bad that I don’t value your work! What are you going to do about it? Work harder? Haha, that will just make my value go up even higher!”
- Comment on VC behind ‘996’ work culture debate says 5-day weeks won't build billion-dollar startups 1 week ago:
“I work this hard, everyone should work this hard!” – someone has no idea what hard work is.
- Comment on The signatures are still coming and it's already making an impact 1 week ago:
It will be hardly any work once a law passes, because they’ll make sure it is. Everyone knows where the proprietary code is. It doesn’t just get merged in “by accident” unless you are a really shit developer (and to be fair some are).
Besides, no one is saying they have to open source it. To be honest, the outcome from this petition that I would most like to see is simply a blanket indemnity to the community attempting to revive, continue and improve the software from that point forward. If the law says that it’s legal once a software is shut down, for the community to figure out a way to make it work again and make it their own, and puts no further responsibilities on the “rights holder” at all, I think that honestly solves the problem in 99% of cases. It would be nice if they gave the community a hand, released what they could, and tried not to be shit about it, (and I know some of them will be shit about it, but we’re pretty resourceful), as long as they’re not trying to sue every attempt into oblivion I think we’ll make a lot of progress on game preservation and make the gaming world a much better place.
- Comment on 32, f. Are there any dating sites that are actually free and don't suddenly force me to pay to actually use the site? 1 week ago:
From my understanding (and experience) dating apps/online dating in general is dead, fucked up beyond repair by capitalism, toxic incels, predators, scammers, crooks and most recently AI. No technology can possibly survive such an onslaught and most of them wouldn’t profit from doing so. They have a financial incentive to attract repeat customers.
In person meeting and dating should be the obvious alternative, but apparently nobody goes out socializing anymore since COVID and nobody can afford hobbies because of the economy and chronic social malaise and terminal online doomscrolling has broken people’s ability to form human connection anyway so I think civilization is probably just ending after these last few generations, frankly.
If there is a useful option I’d love to know what it is too.
- Comment on I am looking to broaden my youtube channels that I follow. What female channel are you following? 1 week ago:
In absolutely no particular order:
www.youtube.com/@VBirchwood - historical fashion/lifestyle
www.youtube.com/@EmmaThorneVideos - a self-described “silly little guy” (hint: not a guy) politely mocking religion and other stuff that deserves mockery
www.youtube.com/@darbinorvar - woodworking and maker stuff
www.youtube.com/@AtRachelGilmore - Canadian independent journalist
www.youtube.com/@AnnaRudolfChess - originally chess (she’s an international master and chess commentator) and video games but after a long mental health hiatus, lately more mental health discussions and variety
www.youtube.com/@LauraFarms - farming, obviously
www.youtube.com/@SpaceMog - astronomy, astrophysics, space
www.youtube.com/@karilawler - retro computers/video games and programming
www.youtube.com/@acottonsock - Playing The Sims with sometimes inappropriate commentary
www.youtube.com/@EngineeringwithRosie - engineering explainers with an emphasis on renewable energy
www.youtube.com/@BeckyStern - electronics maker stuff
www.youtube.com/@aprilclucks - incredibly deadpan sarcastic Australian life advice and mockery of everything and herself too usually - Comment on Why do so many homes in rural areas have a front yard full of junk? 1 week ago:
Just because they look rusty and old doesn’t mean they’re junk, but even if they are, there will be no urgency to dispose of them. Most people who aren’t minimalists don’t dispose of things except for aesthetic reasons, unless they’re out of room. Many rural people have a relatively narrow scope for aesthetics that doesn’t include what you might call the front yard, and being rural, it’s really hard to run out of room. Therefore, there is no urgency to dispose of stuff that has become “junk”, and when you do, you will probably do it all at once, as a project, once you start feeling like you’re running out of room, which takes quite awhile, so you’re very likely to see the development of the junk pile in its intermediate stages.
- Comment on Is there a term for something like Imposter Syndrome, but instead feeling like it’s other people conspiring to give you an illusory taste of success with intent to pull it away and screw you over? 1 week ago:
I think that’s just called capitalism.
For an actual answer, I’d turn to the idiom of dangling a carrot which evokes the idea of an animal chasing a carrot being held out in front of it on a stick by its own rider, unable to reach the carrot since it moves forward as they do, but chasing it forward anyway.
- Comment on So if we're just good with careening into fascism 2.0 what does the future look like? 1 week ago:
Yeah people thinking the Democratic Party is going to save them are delusional IMO. They are part of it and many of them have been working towards the same goal. They are a false opposition at best. Not all of them, some of them are legit, like Bernie, and look how he has been treated by the Dem establishment. Any real resistance is marginalized.
- Comment on Subnautica's Original Creators Have Been Removed From Unknown Worlds "Effective Immediately", As Krafton Makes Concerning Leadership Changes 1 week ago:
Oh good now maybe the Subnautica developers can go independent to make a spiritual successor that isn’t called Subnautica and isn’t garbage.
- Comment on In Canada, Nintendo is increasing the price of the original Nintendo Switch. 2 weeks ago:
Fuck Canada in particular, as usual. It’s starting to feel a bit personal.
- Comment on Steam Summer Sale 2025 has begun! 2 weeks ago:
KSP1 is the bees knees and the modding community is still going as strong as ever. Still worthwhile even at full price.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
We don’t absolutely know what the future holds for our own planet much less the universe, so it’s impossible to answer this with any conviction, but based on my current understanding or the general scientific consensus, and the fact that the universe is expanding and that expansion is accelerating, no, by placing them at the edge of the observable universe and the effects of relativity, their hypothetical signals will never reach Earth and almost certainly not the Earth that we know of that’s orbiting Sol and full of humans patiently observing the universe for signs of their lost ancestors.
But we don’t know with any certainty that the universe’s expansion or acceleration is going to continue indefinitely, we don’t even fully understand why it is happening. However, if the universe is infinite, and is going to last an infinite amount of time, well “infinity” is a very long time and you can’t rule out the fact that another wormhole could open and bring them (or their signals) home at some point now that you’ve proven such a wormhole can exist. So when you put all the things we do know and the things we don’t know together, I’d give them about 50/50 chances, with a margin of error of plus or minus 50%.
- Comment on [Stellar Blades] This game completely broke them 2 weeks ago:
Most game media/advertising/reviewing is garbage and cannot be trusted. I play games that look fun. I have a particular definition of fun specific to me alone. I’ll watch actual gameplay to decide if it looks fun to me. I might watch technical reviews and benchmarks that tell me if my hardware will be able to play it. IDGAF what culture war moralizing poop that some idiots want to headline it with and babble about to get views on their articles and channels.
I don’t think Stellar Blade looks like the kind of fun I personally enjoy so I’m going to pass, but I’m not going to judge or shame anyone who’s enjoying the fuck out of it because there’s nothing to shame. It’s a game. It’s made to be played and be fun for people to play. Have fun. Don’t worry about the drama storms. They’re pointless and devoid of meaning.
- Comment on Flock Removes States From National Lookup Tool After ICE and Abortion Searches Revealed [404 Media] 2 weeks ago:
The Party says 1984 has always been our guiding principle, just like we’ve always been at war with Eastasia. I certainly don’t remember a time when it wasn’t so.
- Comment on With all the animals that die in the sea, is it possible they get pickled in there? 2 weeks ago:
Ocean salinity varies slightly but averages around 3.5%. Brackish water would be less than 3% as long as it’s saltier than freshwater, which is limited to 0.05%. Brine, which OP is asking for, is water with 5% or greater salinity. The ocean doesn’t get that high but salt lakes definitely can, the Dead Sea is almost 35% salinity. Also why it’s called the “Dead” sea, FWIW. Maybe you could pickle stuff there.
- Comment on I'm trying to understand a financial question in a video. A lady is saying that she will Payback equity when she refinances, but I'm not sure how that helps her in the context to the video. 3 weeks ago:
From my understanding of this messed up situation:
She has half of the equity in the house, he has the other half, maybe not exactly half and half, this is common after a divorce and the actual proportions are irrelevant. In order for HER to acquire full equity in the house (the house she lives in and considers hers and that the divorce has apparently assigned to her), she must pay his half of the equity BACK to him when she refinances. Thus, she both “has” equity and “owes” equity. Both are true. She has her half (which is money on paper and represents her ownership of the house, not money you can spend), she owes the other half which is also equity, just not hers (which is real money she DOES need to spend, and will be refinanced into the form of a larger mortgage with higher payments). Once she refinances, he gets the lump sum representing his equity, and she gets a bigger mortgage. He could then use that lump sum to pay back the alimony with. But that’s all in the future, and the future is an uncertain place that doesn’t help anyone now and that nobody wants to wait for.
So she suggests that she’ll forgive his alimony if he forgives the equity she owes him, because that is probably a much bigger amount of money that she owes him and would then get to keep, compared to many many years of alimony that she might not even get if he’s not going to be around that long and isn’t working or goes bankrupt or whatever else might happen in the intervening years.
The key moment in the video as far as I’m concerned is when she mentions her husbands “new wife and kids”. I think that if you strip away all the reasonable-sounding explaining and arguments, that’s what this is really about, she wants to get as much as she can in cold hard cash right away, even if it means cashing out some of her ex-husbands 401k now, so that the other wife and kids don’t get their hands on it and then she doesn’t have to worry about them anymore.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
“remove any thing that they might be able to do” is a hilariously broad brush to apply to three letter agencies in this day and age that were doing things like this 50 years ago.
I’m not saying it’s realistic that OP is being targeted for such surveillance. But if they are, good fucking luck! Flashing your firmware ain’t going to do shit when they’ve just gone ahead and replaced the chips on your board with their own that act exactly like a normal chip but have extra code that doesn’t get flashed when they don’t want it to.
- Comment on Why do fancy cars look fancy and cheap cars don't? Can't you just slap a Lamborghini-style chassis onto a lawnmower engine if you want? 4 weeks ago:
You absolutely can slap a Lambo body on anything (provided it fits) and there is a literal cottage industry that exists around doing so. It’s not popular because, let’s be honest, it’s pretty silly, and everyone involved acknowledges its pretty much just for fun and entertainment. The status symbol of “owning a Lamborghini” goes away forever the second you start the engine.
There is a lot of psychology that goes into designing the appearance of cars. Like, an extreme amount. Car companies spend millions designing and refining body shapes and styles, and building brand images, and pushing commercials that seed these ideas into your head about their brand looking a certain way and that look therefore implying quality, they’re connecting all those dots in your head, one marketing campaign at a time, and it works because we’re honestly pretty gullible creatures at least when somebody wants to spend millions upon millions of dollars researching exactly how they can weasel their way into your brain.
And this might surprise you, but the same “looks incredible but the worst piece of shit ever” can certainly apply to luxury vehicles. Aside from notorious reliability and repairability issues, Lamborghinis don’t usually win any races either. They won’t win a drag race, they won’t win an oval track race, they won’t win a rally race. They’re fast, certainly, but they’re not the fastest and for what you pay for a Lamborghini you could build a much, MUCH better purpose-built race car. You could probably build 10 purpose-built race cars. Hell, people build race cars out of junkyard parts that can beat Lamborghinis. They’re not the end-all-be-all of cars, nor are any of the other luxury brands. They have some nice features but they also have a lot of dumb features and yes, a lot of cut corners too. They’re designed to be desirable and profitable, not to be the best.
So to answer your question, it absolutely IS the case for cars, in fact it’s probably even moreso the case than it is with computer parts. Unless you really need to roar down the highway towing a 10,000 pound trailer at 80 mph and still get up to that speed in 5 seconds flat, you really only need like probably 30-50 horsepower max for most of the daily driving that people do, but people’s driving habits and attitudes would have to change and they would hate the feel of gradual acceleration, so they would simply never buy such a car. I think we really underestimate how incredible even the cheapest “crappiest” cars are. We’re talking about machines cheap enough for almost everybody in our society to own, that can drive at high speeds, in perfectly dry, climate-controlled comfort, carrying many passengers and cargo, in almost any weather short of a tornado or flood, with excellent reliability for hundreds of thousands of miles, that provide constant lighting and electricity and entertainment, all while maintaining a high degree of safety for the occupants.
If you’d rather putter around on a riding lawnmower with a Lamborghini body kit on it, you absolutely can do that, but you have to understand that once you start comparing the limited features and abilities it provides you will quickly find what you’ve constructed is the real “piece of shit” in comparison. Just don’t forget your slow-moving vehicle sign!
- Comment on What's going on with moths and lamps in lemmy? 4 weeks ago:
That’s awesome thanks! (Community discovery is still something I struggle with on Lemmy)
- Comment on What's going on with moths and lamps in lemmy? 4 weeks ago:
Reddit had a community “OutOfTheLoop” for these type of questions. It was very helpful for people like me who do our best to ignore these nonsense viral image macros that get blown out of proportion. The problem on Lemmy is, judging by the comments here, I think almost everyone here avoids those things like the plague, so there’s few if anyone “InTheLoop” around to explain for us.
- Comment on Why are you here and not on Reddit? 5 weeks ago:
Welcome!
But I have to ask, why are you guys here and not on Reddirt?
Hilarious typo if it wasn’t intentional.
Where the population us much larger and its basically the same?
First thing you quickly realize here is that larger is not necessarily better. Small is beautiful, you can have actual thoughtful conversations with individuals here without the incessant dogpiling and low effort meme replies. I have even got smacked down (and rightly so) for accidentally bringing some of that with me at one point. It’s not needed or desirable here.
It appears a few instances dominate this landscape anyway?
When you actually look at the comments I usually find almost everyone is on a different instance, in fact when there are relatively small numbers of comments like the are on most posts, you often won’t even see the same instance in the comments twice unless it’s the same person. Yeah, some instances have “huge numbers” of people and communities (lemmy.world) but I think a lot of them are honestly just rarely used, abandoned, or otherwise non-participatory, and the communities can be used by anybody (which is exactly the point of federation). The people actually spending their time here are on a wide variety of instances, often even using different frontends or software. And that’s great. To me, the ecosystem feels healthy and diverse.
Its not like this is unchecked social media, they still moderate these places right?
The point is you can choose an instance whose moderations suit you. (Almost?) all instances moderate to some degree, complete unmoderation is how you end up infested with child porn and other horrible shit. But the directions they moderate in, and the specific things they moderate, can vary wildly depending on the preferences of the owners and the countries they operate in. They also federate with and defederate different instances, which is a large-scale form of moderation. Most instances defederate (and have been defederated by) hexbear and lemmygrad. But not all of them do. Some also defederate lemmy.ml. But not most. And of course those three still federate with each other, and with some other instances. The point isn’t to completely prevent isolated echo chambers, it’s to allow the instances themselves (and the users who join them) to choose how much echo they want to hear compared to how many challenging views they disagree with. Everyone should be able to find a balance that suits them. Most of the people complaining about the content on Lemmy have probably just chosen the wrong instance, frankly, because most people don’t understand how this works and the biases and moderation attitudes inherent in all these different instances is not always super obvious at first glance.
Reddit sucks now. I still check there regularly but I find both the content and the commenting less and less interesting and find myself spending less and less time there. It hasn’t been a sudden process, but the more time I spend on Lemmy the more I like it and the more communities I find and engage in.
- Comment on What would it take to make Gemini suitable to be president of the world? 5 weeks ago:
Honesty, empathy and respect.
Good luck ever convincing me an LLM has any of those. I’m not even convinced most of humanity does.
- Comment on What did Musk and Trump fall out over? 5 weeks ago:
That’s exactly my point. If they do in a few days “come back from” that and are all buddy buddy again, then I think that indicates it was just a staged performance for show and distraction and none of it was real fighting. Suggests it was all just an act. (IF they do come back from it. Which remains to be seen)
Muskrat has already backed down from a few things he said in the “heat” of the argument, like that he was going to disassemble the Dragon capsules. So I wouldn’t jump to your conclusion that they can’t possibly “come back from” this, my point is just that if they do, it was probably all just an act to begin with because I agree if it’s real, stuff was said that either one of these vindictive sociopaths is likely to forget.
- Comment on What did Musk and Trump fall out over? 5 weeks ago:
I’m putting 50/50 odds that it’s an intentional, theatrical distraction from other more important things that are going on, or it’s just the inevitable outcome of two malignant narcissist sociopaths being in the same room together too often. If they quickly kiss and make up I’ll lean more towards the former than the latter.
- Comment on Is this genocide denial? 5 weeks ago:
It also sounds like sealioning. So yeah genocide denial by either shutting you up or making you appear to be the bigot would be the goal.