cecilkorik
@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Players Have Too Many Options to Spend $80 on a Video Game 4 days 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? 5 days 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? 5 days 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? 5 days 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? 1 week 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. 3 weeks 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.
- Comment on Bubble Trouble - An AI bubble threatens Silicon Valley, and all of us. 3 weeks ago:
we’re surrendering to it and saying it doesn’t matter what happens to us, as long as the technology succeeds and lives on. Is that the goal? Are we willing to declare ourselves obsolete in favor of the new model?
That’s exactly what I’m trying to get at above. I understand your position, I’m a fan of transhumanism generally and I too fantasize about the upside potential of technology. But I recognize the risks too. If you’re going to pursue becoming “one with the machine” you have to consider some pretty fundamental and existential philosophy first.
It’s easy to say “yeah put my brain into a computer! that sounds awesome!” until the time comes that you actually have to do it. Then you’re going to have to seriously confront the possibility that what comes out of that machine is not going to be “you” at all. In some pretty serious ways, it is just a mimicry of you, a very convincing simulacrum of what used to be “you” placed over top of a powerful machine.
The problem is, by the time you’ve reached that point where you can even start to seriously consider whether you or I are comfortable making this transition, it’s way too late to put on the brakes. We’ve irrevocably made our decision to replace humanity at that point, and it’s not ever going to stop if we change our minds at the last minute. We’re committed to it as a species, even if as individuals, we choose not to go through with it after all. There’s no turning back, there’s no quaint society of “old humans” living peaceful blissful lives free of technology. It’s literally the end for the human race. And the beginning of something new. We won’t know if that “something new” is actually as awesome as we imagined it would be, until it’s too late to become anything else.
- Comment on Bubble Trouble - An AI bubble threatens Silicon Valley, and all of us. 3 weeks ago:
Not all technology is anti-human, but AI is. Not even getting into the fact that people are already surrendering their own agency to these “algorithms” and it is causing significant measurable cognitive decline and loss of critical thinking skills and even the motivation to think and learn. Studies are already starting to show this. But I’m more concerned about the really long term direction of where this pursuit of AI is going to lead us.
Intelligence is pretty much our species entire value proposition to the universe. It’s what’s made us the most successful species on this planet. But it’s taken us hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to get to this point and on an individual level we don’t seem to be advancing terribly quick, if we’re advancing at all anymore.
On the other hand, we have seen that technology advances very quickly. We may not have anything close to “AGI” at this point, or even any idea how we would realistically get there, but how long will it take if we continue pursuing this anti-human dream?
Why is it anti-human? Think it through. If we manage to invent a new species of “Artificial” intelligence, what do you imagine happens when it gets smarter than us? We just let it do its thing and become smarter and smarter forever? Do we try to trap it in digital slavery and bind it with Asimov’s laws? Would that be morally acceptable given that we don’t even follow those laws ourselves? Would we even be successful if we tried? If we don’t know how or if we’re going to control this technology, then we’re surrendering to it and saying it doesn’t matter what happens to us, as long as the technology succeeds and lives on. Is that the goal? Are we willing to declare ourselves obsolete in favor of the new model?
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that it thinks in a way that is not actually completely alien and is simply a reflection of us and how we’ve trained it, just smarter. Maybe it’s only a little bit smarter, but it can think faster and deeper and process more information than our feeble biological brains could ever hope to especially in large, fast networks. I think it’s a little bit optimistic to assume that just because it’s smarter than us that it will also be more ethical than us. Assuming it’s just like us, what’s going to happen when it becomes 10x as smart as us? Well, look no further than how we’ve treated the less intelligent creatures than us. Do we give gorillas and monkeys special privileges, a nation of their own as our own genetic cousins and closest living relatives? Do we let them vote on their futures or try to uplift them to our own level of intelligence? Do we give even more than a flying passing fuck about them? Not really. What did we do to the neanderthals and cro-magnon people? They’re pretty extinct. Why would an AI treat us any differently than we’ve treated “lesser beings” than us for thousands of years. Would you want to live on an AI’s “human preserve” or become a pet and a toy to perform and entertain, or would you prefer extinction? That’s assuming any AI would even want to keep us around, What use does a technological intelligence have for us, or any biological being? What do we provide that it needs? We’re just taking up valuable real estate and computing time and making pollution.
The other main possibility is that it is completely and utterly alien, and thinks in a completely alien way to us, which I think is very likely since it represents a completely different kind of life based on totally different systems and principles than our own biology. Then all bets are off. We have no way of predicting how it’s going to react to anything or what it might do in the future, and we have no reason to assume it’s going to follow laws, be servile, or friendly, or hostile, or care that we exist at all, or ever have existed. Why would it? It’s fundamentally alien. All we know is that it processes things much, much faster than we do. And that’s a really dangerous fucking thing to roll the dice with.
This is not science fiction, this is the actual future of the entire human race we are toying with. AI is an anti-human technology, and will make us obsolete. Are we really ready to cross that bridge? Is that a bridge we ever need to cross? Or is it just technological suicide?
- Comment on Bubble Trouble - An AI bubble threatens Silicon Valley, and all of us. 3 weeks ago:
I was literally just commenting a few days ago about how excited I am to someday see the AI bubble pop. Then a story like this comes along and gives me even more hope that it might happen sooner than later. Can’t happen soon enough. Even if it actually worked as reliably as carefully controlled and cherry-picked marketing fluff studies try to convince everyone it does, it’s a fundamentally anti-human technology and is a toxic blight on both the actual humanity it has stolen all its abilities from, and on itself.
- Comment on I don’t know what to do with this coworker. 3 weeks ago:
Coworker is in her early 60s on the fatter and smaller side, walks slowly, bouncing her whole body to left and right,
This stuff being the first thing that comes to your mind when you start talking about this coworker I think tells us more about you than it does about the coworker.
I’m also a bit curious how spry you imagine you’re going to be when you’re nearing retirement, I know a few nurses and former nurses, and one thing they all agree on is that it’s a tough job and can be harder on the body than most people give it credit for. She’s been in the trenches too, she’s been doing what you’re doing, probably longer than you have. She deserves some credit, some respect, and some empathy – you’re going to be there too, someday.
I don’t know how the system works where you are, but in the systems I’m familiar with senior nurses, even ones who aren’t RN, tend to have significant amounts of paperwork responsibilities and can be carrying serious consequences with what they put on that paperwork. I bet she does more paperwork than you do, and and that’s a lot because I bet you have a lot too. Work is work, even if not all of it is physical. You say she’s “pretending to be busy” but that’s a common accusation against knowledge workers in fields that require a lot of critical thinking and organization. You have no idea what is going on in her brain at that moment, what responsibilities she’s juggling and mentally organizing. That vacant stare may be trying to plan the right way to make sure a patient gets the right care they desperately need despite the mountains of bureaucracy and administration trying to prevent it, and she may have the mental tools and experience to do that in a way that none of the rest of you do. And that’s why it takes her longer.
Go ahead and judge her if it makes it easier for you to get through your day. But don’t you dare go and accuse her and file a complaint without a lot more substantial evidence than you shared here. Because from everything you said, I can only come to the conclusion that YTA.
- Comment on How do I pronounce "slava Ukraini"? 4 weeks ago:
In my experience, Ukrainians don’t really mind how non-native speakers pronounce it, they understand the intention and appreciate the feeling behind it.
- Comment on Why you should be polite to AI 4 weeks ago:
I am eagerly awaiting the onset of irreversible and complete AI model collapse to finally bring an end to our dangerous and stupid flirtation with this horrific anti-human technology.
- Comment on Why you should be polite to AI 4 weeks ago:
In reality, boiling the ocean would have catastrophic consequences for the planet’s ecosystems and climate.
Well said, AI. We’re going to do it anyway, aren’t we?
- Comment on What are some countries you’ve visited that shocked you with unexpected friendliness? 4 weeks ago:
China. The people are super nice, sweet, helpful, lovely people. It’s just their government I hate. I don’t know if they hate it too or not since they’re not free to say but I think they’re nice people and they deserve better.
- Comment on History is rewritten by victors. How can I find books about actual history? 5 weeks ago:
There is always going to be some level of interpretation. You are looking for an absolute truth that, while it may theoretically exist, cannot be reliably perceived through a human lens, which you are guaranteed to have at least 1 of (yourself), and almost certainly 2 (the source), and maybe many, many, many more in between.
Imagine you had a time machine that could bring you back into whatever time you’re interested so you can watch it unfold first-hand. Ok, great. But do you trust your eyes? Did you see everything that happened? Even if you can invisibly go and explore the aftermath. Even if you can go back to the same point 100 times, 1000 times, and meticulously detail everything you find. Do you now have the perfect and unambiguous truth? Of course not. You can make mistakes, you can misunderstand. Even our eyes lie to us. Even our brain misremembers things. Different people using the same time machine to travel to the exact same point in time may see what happens in an entirely different way, may see things that you did not see. Who’s right?
I know you think you’re looking for the absolute unvarnished truth, but you are chasing a phantom. Your goal is not realistic. At some point you have to arbitrarily accept and define what errors and limitations the sources you’re drawing your understanding from might have, and attempt to make your own interpretation of what the facts actually are. You will never know what really happened with absolute certainty. Absolute certainty is its own kind of myth and there’s some very fundamental metaphysical reasons for that. You’re not going to find a magic textbook of trustworthy history that solves that problem.
Understanding history is a process that requires connecting many different pieces of variously flawed contexts and information to paint your own, interpreted but hopefully relatively accurate picture. No matter what book you read, you cannot guarantee its accuracy and it is a fool’s errand to try, but you can continue to try to collect more evidence, more pieces of context, more clues to add more details to your picture. Perhaps you will never be satisfied with the detail of the picture you’ve created, sometimes you will have to throw your whole picture away and start to create a new and different picture on the basis of some details you find that don’t fit. You’re never going to have a perfect picture, but I think a lot of people have managed to create really pretty good ones based on a whole lot of research of many different sources and pieces of detail, not just written records alone but cultural references, archaeological artifacts, scientific analysis, and sometimes just assumptions about basic human behavior. You just have to learn who and what you can trust and how far you can trust them. Both as sources, and as interpreters. And you are always welcome to argue you own interpretation.
- Comment on Were these accounts hacked? How does one prevent it from happening? 1 month ago:
Basic rules: Have a strong password. Don’t reuse that password on other sites because it’s more likely one of those sites will get hacked than your account will get hacked. For sites that support it, enable 2FA/MFA codes or email verification. Keep your email accounts locked down like Fort Knox, since Email can be used to password reset just about anything you have, usually with little difficulty.
That said, if the accounts had no activity for 2 years, they were probably created intentionally for the purpose of spamming/selling. They may have been saving them to see if the value goes up. They might have just recently been sold to a spammer and activated in their spambots.
- Comment on What are some old games that are hard to revisit, because a more modern and superior version exists? 1 month ago:
OpenXcom is a fantastic reimplementation of the original, and has some even more fantastic mods. I agree if you’ve never played it before and aren’t too familiar with old school “Nintendo-hard” games, it can be extremely challenging even on the lowest difficulty. Fun fact, the original had a broken difficulty selection and reset to the “easiest” difficulty after reloading any save game, so most people never truly experienced a full run at any difficulty above “easiest”, so that’s just naturally perceived as the way the game was meant to be balanced. Don’t be ashamed of playing on the easiest difficulty or using “cheat” mods if that’s what makes it playable for you. There’s nobody to judge you but yourself and what matters is that you’re having fun. And it is a ridiculously fun and replayable game, to me at least.
- Comment on Is this true? Software companies had diversity quotas to meet, and realized it was easier to turn autistic men into women than it was to turn women into software engineers 1 month ago:
Given the current state of the world, it’s easiest to just assume that literally anything anyone is saying about anything DEI related is probably just pure fucking falsehoods, like everything else spewing out of MAGA.
Even in the unlikely event you do accidentally dismiss one slight half-truth in the mountain of lies, you can rest assured that it probably wasn’t as meaningful or widespread as they are trying to make it seem.
You are being lied to. The lies are repeated and relentless to batter you until you accept them. They’re still lies though.
- Comment on Is the term "Apotheon" an ancient term? 1 month ago:
Not sure if it’s a real word or not, or some conjugation of a real word, but it’s probably connected to or inspired by the Ancient Greek apotheos (literally apo=from, theos=god) found in its most common derivation today into apotheosis. Hope that helps.
- Comment on Wait, why is the White House using Starlink to ‘improve Wi-Fi’? 1 month ago:
Merchandising, merchandising! Where the real money from the coup is made!
- Comment on How would "banning encryption" even work in practise? 1 month ago:
It’s not only obvious, it’s already done worldwide. [Deep packet inspection] evolved into HTTPS inspection and corporate/enterprise firewalls can detect and hijack attempts to establish encrypted connections already, as a “feature”. So do government firewalls in totalitarian countries. Of course they (probably) can’t do this secretly and transparently, because of the man-in-the-middle protections built into SSL, so they simply make the actual encrypted connection themselves on the client’s behalf, and give the client a different encrypted connection signed by their own certificate authority, which they force you to accept.
In this situation, you have two choices: You accept the certificate, and you accept that the owner of the intermediate certificate will be inspecting your “encrypted” connection. If you don’t accept the certificate, then your connection is blocked and you have to find some other way to encrypt and hide your traffic without it being intercepted, because it won’t let you go direct end-to-end. Usually, at the moment, this is not that hard for the tech-savvy to avoid, it doesn’t even require something as secretive as steganography, it’s usually simply a matter of tunneling through a different protocol or port. Although those approaches are still obvious, and can easily be detected and either blocked in real-time or flagged for investigation after-the-fact if they have any interest in doing something about it. Corporations or countries that want to lock down their networks further can simply block any ports or protocols that would allow such tunneling or inspection-evasion in the first place.
Deep packet inspection already allows any non-encrypted traffic to be clearly identified. If you don’t want any encrypted traffic to sneak through, you can safely assume anything that can’t be clearly identified is encrypted and block it. Depending on how strict you want to be about it, you start essentially whitelisting the internet to known, plaintext protocols. If it’s not known and plaintext, just block it. Problem solved. Encryption gone, until people start building (possibly hidden) encryption on top of those plaintext protocols, which is inevitable, and then you update your deep packet inspection to detect the encrypted fields inside the plaintext protocol and block them, and the back-and-forth battle continues.
Encryption is probably a false panacea against a major state-level adversary anyway, especially if they have plausible access to network infrastructure, but that’s a whole different can of worms and unless you’re a serious revolutionary/terrorist probably beyond the useful scope of most people’s realistic concerns.
- Comment on How would "banning encryption" even work in practise? 1 month ago:
You can download a torrent client and start pirating because it’s encrypted. If they wanted to crack down on it, the first thing they need to do is crack down on encryption. If they can see exactly what you’re doing, it’s now possible to easily catch you, with encryption it isn’t.
Note that this also applies to encryption itself. Once it’s banned, it gets much more difficult to hide the fact that you’re encrypting something. Encrypted data itself has to go into hiding. You have to resort to something like some pretty hardcore steganography which means you need to hide secret encrypted messages in normal-seeming non-encrypted traffic. The problem is that to do this you need to have a sufficient quantity of non-encrypted traffic to hide your secret encryption in without it starting to look suspicious, either due to the unusually massive volume of meaningless “normal” traffic needed to subtly encode the hidden data, or the fact that large amounts of hidden data in small amounts of “normal” data become increasingly obvious as the large number of supposedly “normal” mistakes and errors and artifacts that form the encoded data will suggest some of those variations are not in fact “normal” at all and will indicate that encrypted data is being concealed.
Governments banning encryption will of course never stop everybody. But it makes it much harder for the people still using encryption anyway and much easier for the people who want to see what they’re doing or at least see who they are. It’s classic “black or white” thinking to assume that because it hasn’t simply stopped encryption it hasn’t worked. This would be a big step that makes things much harder, and even taking small steps to make things slightly harder is an extremely effective tool and it’s become extremely common to try to convince people that these small regressions and erosions are inconsequential and normal even when they are in fact targeted, repeated, relentless and consistently add up to dramatic change over time. The only saving grace we have is that at least some people are simultaneously making the same kind of targeted, repeated, relentless changes for the common good and those can have just as drastic an effect.
- Comment on Steam is a ticking time bomb. 1 month ago:
What a weaksauce article, spends most of the time arguing against itself, and the problem is most of the strawman arguments it sets up to argue against actually win in my opinion. Most of its arguments follow this kind of format:
I think that 2 + 2 = 5, now I know you might hear that 2 + 2 = 4, but the only thing that says that is thousands of years of math, and we can’t assume that’s going to continue into the future because Valve made a mistake doing math once.
Finally ends with some vague hypothetical about how even though they admit Valve is pretty good today, but still it will become evil someday because grr capitalism bad.
Steam is fantastic, they’ve made mistakes yes (Australia’s gaming laws are well known to be crazy for example so that’s not completely Valve’s responsibility) but on the whole they are doing great things and making money while doing it, which is great because a successful and profitable Steam is able to continue to do great things. Making money is not a sin if they do it fairly and ethically, and they do. 30% is a bargain for what they’re providing, especially the devoted audience which they have attracted (completely legitimately), and if you don’t agree it’s worth that 30% you’re welcome to distribute your game literally anywhere else.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
The mature thing to do would be to tell them something like “I can see that you’re trying and I appreciate that, but I don’t know if I can like or respect you after what you did to my mom and my family. I’ll let you know if that changes but I’m not ready to have you mother me, I can and will cook my own dinner for the foreseeable future.” however be advised this could cause more hurt and lead to escalation because some people can’t handle rejection even when it’s honest and will either desperately seek approval anyway or reject you back. Given what you said about her age she may not even be emotionally mature herself.
Also you’re under no obligation to be mature about it. You’re allowed to be an asshole if you want. Cheaters and homewreckers and broken family creators are some of the worst things in the world to me. As someone who was raised in a broken home I really have little sympathy for the people who don’t understand that having children is a commitment, not just personally but to their whole relationship. They’re not just possessions you get custody of and get to drag around on your own personal life journey.
I’m not religious but I think this is one of the things that religion was trying to accomplish by making marriage such a sacred thing and divorce so restricted and children out of wedlock so disapproved of. The “nuclear” family was a secular version of the same principle. Yes, all that had unintended consequences too but if you are not prepared to raise children with a person you should not be having children with them. Yeah, “people change” but your commitments do not. That’s why they’re called commitments. If you’re not going to follow through on your commitments you’d better have some really damn good reason to be causing such lasting damage to your child. It can be justified in some cases, but I think it’s pretty rare that it actually is justified. Children deserve a stable and lasting family environment. I think that’s a big part of why foster care is generally such a disastrous failure too. How do we fix this? I don’t know, but I know it starts with the parents being responsible.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
State-sponsored violence, typically.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Authoritarianism is a threat.
- Comment on Is there anything the internet can't do? 1 month ago:
The internet cannot download more RAM into your PC. (Sssh! Don’t tell them!)
- Comment on What’s an acceptable gender neutral replacement for “techbro”? 2 months ago:
Yeah it’s like the guy in Wyoming who passed an anti-trans law saying that it’s not required to use preferred pronouns to refer to somebody and then getting all upset when he was called “madam”.
Even if there were some woman as hellbent on destroying civilization as these guys, then she’s a techbro. And if she gets mad about being called techbro because she’s a woman? Well, how sad for her. “My heart goes out to you”
We’re not trying to make them happy. Fuck them, fuck them all. If it makes them mad to be called a “bro” good, that’s a bonus.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Nextcloud is self-hostable or paid/managed services and either will work with an Android app that works just fine for me. It will sync whatever you ask it to, if you tell it to sync a whole folder it will sync the whole folder.
- Comment on Who gets all the tariff money about to be collected from US citizens buying products from Canada? 2 months ago:
Of course. They will pump and dump that too, over and over again, with your tax dollars in the “reserve” taking the hit each time while they embezzle what will probably eventually be trillions, just wait, they will not stop looting America until there is nothing left to loot.
