cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's 9PM, any word from Iran?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Trump makes insane proclamation, everyone is forced to take it seriously, Trump attempts to chicken out, now everyone else is ignoring him until his next outburst. Pretty much the standard news cycle of this presidency. Expect another insane proclamation any minute now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linux kernel maintainers are following through on removing Intel 486 support⁩ ⁨⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  hopefully someone forks off a decent kernel that bridges the gap between older hardware and modern Linux because this feels like a valuable door to keep open in this regressive age of “you’ll own nothing and you’ll like it”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨can i still consider myself to be a valid asexual?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  You can be a valid Apache Attack Helicopter if you want to be. Nobody else gets to decide whether that’s valid except you. You might confuse or even mislead some people, you’ll have to be prepared for that, but before you consider whether it even matters that some people get confused or misled, you should consider why it’s any of their business in the first place, because it probably isn’t. If it is, then by all means, check whether it’s valid with them, not us.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How will you celebrate?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  He’s arguably doing more damage to the fascist movement than he is supporting it lately. I think they will be the ones celebrating when he is gone, but they will not stop pushing fascism. The infection has metastasized extensively, and once he is gone it will really get to work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would/could the US government actually do if they found out the real identities behind all the "guillotine memes" that people post online?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, first they came for the immigrants, and I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t an immigrant… everyone knows how the poem goes, but it never really ends.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Never doubt the commitment of horse-girl fans: Umamusume cosplayers are having actual races at tracks around the world⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  It would be a good thing if we were going away from god in the right direction. I’m not sure this is the right direction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  CEOs get a lot of hate but that’s intentional. They’re really just the fall guys, the disposable lightning rods to attract the hatred and the consequences for the true villains actually motivating the evil decisions the CEOs make. Meanwhile they ride the executive suite carousel, round and round the economy, looking important and golden parachuting from one company to another, pretending they’re making the hard decisions when they’re really just making the only decisions they’re allowed to. They make a lot of money compared to the rest of us, but they typically don’t make billionaire money unless they’re owner/CEOs.

  It’s the owners and the financiers and the corrupt politicians and lobbyists really calling the shots. The CEOs are just their henchmen and executioners. They’re well compensated for what they do, but they’re not really in charge.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are all billionaires and fortune 500 companies famous?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I have absolutely zero interest in discussing anything related to race, religion, or any other hyper-polarized issues in this context, and I have a sneaking suspicion this is some kind of race-baiting sealioning bullshit that is going to quickly devolve into a nazi horror show whether you intend it to or not (and I suspect you might intend it very much).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are all billionaires and fortune 500 companies famous?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Almost certainly not. “Famous” is a strong word. A lot of fortune 500 companies are holding companies, many of them not even holding household name brands but business-to-business providers that nobody outside the business world or industry they’re involved in have ever heard of. I work for one (more specifically, I work for a massive technology company that is owned by one of them), the parent company is on the Fortune 500, I can pretty much guarantee you’ve never heard of them. I hadn’t until one of their subsidiaries purchased the company I was working for. Many of them are just holding companies that own brands you have heard of, but you’ve probably never heard of the company that owns them. It changes more often than you’d think, sometimes they change names and owners so frequently you might suspect they’re specifically trying to avoid the attention of becoming “famous”.

  You can, of course, look them up on the list. But they’re just a name, and a description, and a breathless history of how they started and how innovative and clever they are, and a vague collection of noteworthy brands and assets, but it’s all ephemeral. They have nothing to be famous for. The only thing that puts them on the list is how much they own, and how much new stuff they buy to make sure they keep their share of the market and prevent anyone from challenging them. They don’t do anything besides owning.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My turtle is lazy, what do I do about it?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Respect her life choices? Some of us like to be sedentary. Maybe offer her a Lemmy terminal and teach her to type. /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Question, Star Trek fans: What makes Captain Kirk a good leader?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Is he a good leader? He always came across to me as a bit of a prima donna with a napoleon complex. I’d point to Picard or Janeway as better leaders to be honest, they are both able to actually inspire their crews to become something better than they would be on their own.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨From Zip To Nought: The Rise And Fall Of Iomega⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I still remember all the data I lost when the drive embedded its entire head assembly into the disk I was using. Fuck Iomega.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As far as I understand it, only your instance can see your IP. users cannot, and other instances cannot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Am I right to be afraid of germs / is my family disgusting or am I overreacting and this is germaphobia? (read post)⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I subscribe to the George Carlin immunity theory. Your immune system is not a perfect machine, but it’s evolved for thousands of years to be able to defend us against the bad germs we are exposed to. Key phrase there is exposed to. If you are never exposed to at least small amounts of germs, your immune system has no training and will be unable to respond effectively to real threats, or it will freak out and panic at minor threats, making you sick from things that wouldn’t even bother someone else, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  In George Carlin’s monologue, which I think is faithfully reproduced in text form here he makes the observation that for his whole childhood he swam in the Hudson River with raw sewage, and he never gets sick. The point he makes is most people’s immune systems cower and hide when they encounter an unknown pathogen, meanwhile his immune system is patrolling his body with automatic rifles and grenades and a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy.

  Most germophobia is sold to us by cleaning product companies (through government representatives that they own). It’s all a fucking scam, they want to convince us to do things that make us sick and then sell us the cures and have the cures also make us sick so they can sell us cures for that too.

  Thousands of years of evolution may not be perfect, but I trust it more than I trust these fucking corporate fucks, that’s for sure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Palworld is going to be the survival crafting game everyone always wanted" and "people will be shocked" at how big 1.0 is, says Pocketpair publishing lead⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If it’s legally not considered copy-pasting their monsters, why do you feel like you can assert that it is plagiarism? I suppose that’s your opinion, and you’re entitled to it, but I also think people have a right to call you out on it for saying it as if it’s a fact when it is not actually a recognized fact. Plenty of people would dispute that, including myself, and certainly Pocketpair would, and evidence suggests the courts probably would’ve agreed with them hence it wasn’t even worth pursuing legally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Define “competitor”. Hackernews, Stackoverflow, heck even Slashdot is still around. Contrary to popular belief there aren’t as many techies around as there are “normies” so a site that like Reddit that also caters widely to normies is never going to be exceeded in size by a site that caters exclusively to techies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would it be possible to have a successful career as a lawyer and never lie?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I would respond that it’s almost impossible to thrive in any sort of human society that has ever existed in history without telling even the faintest hint of a white lie sometimes. I don’t think it’s realistically possible to be a successful human, nevermind a lawyer. Everyone thinks they’re being completely honest all the time, until you spend some years having a bunch of philosophers pick apart the entire basis of the reality you think you’re not lying to yourself or anyone else about, then once you’re done figuring out what reality actually is, you might have a totally different idea of what lying even means. But you’ll never get there, because you’ll never actually figure out what reality even is, nobody comes out the other side of existential philosophy. This isn’t new stuff, the ancient Greeks were struggling with it thousands of years ago, and we only know that because they were among the first who bothered to write it all down.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm confused which company is sending data to which company for processing. For example, in the list in the picture, it says OpenAI is one of the Companies. So is OpenAI sending the information...⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  These are described as “subprocessors”, so generally, this means that Persona is (potentially) sending any data they receive to these companies/platforms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What books have a lot of useful information should I get? (I mean like a Wikipedia thing with vast knowledge, but non-electronic.)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll probably get vote-murdered for this, because this is unfortunately not a popular opinion for a lot of very justified reasons that I actually mostly agree with, but I’m going to throw this out there anyway, and I hope people hear me out for long enough that you can decide for yourself instead of just kneejerk downvoting.

  Imagine if someone created a statistical numerical model that was based on, and could therefore approximately reproduce something close to the cumulative total of all human knowledge ever recorded on the internet which probably represents exabytes of information, but this numerical model was only the size of a few movie files, and you could dump those numbers into a simulator that within some margin of statistical error, reproduced almost any of that information on currently available consumer-level hardware.

  If you’re not picking up what I’m putting down, I just described open weight LLMs that you can download and run yourself in ollama and other local programs.

  They are not intelligences and they do not represent knowledge, because they don’t know anything, can’t make their own decisions and can never be assumed to be fully accurate representations of anything they have “learned” as they are simply greatly minimized and compressed statistical details about the information already on the internet, but they actually still contain a great deal of information, provided you understand what you’re looking at and what it’s telling you. The same way demographics can provide a great deal of information about the world without needing to individually review every census document by hand, but never tell the entire story perfectly.

  While I agree with the suggestions to get a proper encyclopedia or just download Wikipedia, for a more reliable and trustworthy dataset, I think you’re doing yourself a disservice if you dismiss the entire concept of LLMs and vision models just because a few horrific companies are hyping them and overselling them and using them to destroy the world and civilization in disgustingly idiotic ways. That’s not the fault of the technologies themselves. They are a tool, a tool that is being widely misused and abused, but it’s also a tool that you can use, and you get to decide whether you simply use it wisely, or abuse it, or don’t use it at all. It’s your call. It’s already there. You decide what to do with it. I happen to think it’s got some pretty cool features and can do some remarkable things. As long as I’m the only one in charge of deciding how and when it’s used. I acknowledge it was plagiarized and collected illegally, and I respect that (as much as I respect any copyright) and I’m not planning to profit from it or use it to pass off other people’s work as my own.

  But as a hyper-efficient way to store “liberated” information to protect ourselves against the complete enshittification of content and civilization? I don’t see the harm. Copyright is not going to matter at that point anyway, the large companies who control the data and the platforms for it have already proven they don’t respect it and they’re going to be the ones dictating it in the future. They won’t even let us have access to our own data, nevermind being able to do anything to prevent them from taking it in the first place. We, the people and authors and artists and musicians and content creators it was designed to protect, now have to protect ourselves, from them, and if that means hiding some machine learning models under my bed for that rainy day, so be it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do Computer power supply issues look like?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Unlikely. Power supplies usually have internal protection, and as a result, if they become overloaded, they will trip off (and the whole computer either shuts down or reboots). Is it possible the internal protection is not working? Maybe. But it is far more likely the issue is with other hardware, or even more likely, with software/device driver issues. Try booting a LiveCD/LiveUSB with Linux on it or something and see if the problem goes away.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is #FFFFFF white, but mixing red green and blue paint is black?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Subtractive colors like paint create color by selectively removing some colors from existing light.

  Additive colors like backlit or light-emitting displays create color by creating colors of light in various proportions that are then combined.

  If you are in a dark room, all paint is black. Until you turn on something with RGB, because then you have some light for it to selectively absorb. However if your RGB is only displaying green light, and you shine it on red paint, it will look exactly the same as black paint (within a certain ballpark of imperfect materials, anyway). Green paint will look green, or white, depending on how your eye adapts, and green and white will be indistinguishable.

  That’s the difference between the two color models. Does it rely on other light sources (subtractive), or is it a light source (additive)?

  How the brain actually perceives color is really, really wild, so this is all a bit… fluid when you start getting into the weird edge cases, but the general principles of additive=light emitting and subtractive=light absorbing are generally applicable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨12-hour days, no weekends: the anxiety driving AI’s brutal work culture is a warning for all of us⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Americans have had business interests blowing smoke up their ass for so long they just think it’s constantly foggy. Canada’s not much better, but we do our best given our proximity to source of this madness.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did anyone really think the Final Fantasy 7 remake was better than the original PS1 version?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s a fair criticism. The combat/random encounters are generally the most tedious part of any jRPG but certainly FF in particular. There are some really unique and interesting random battles or areas where the constant battling is intense and exciting rather than annoying, but they are rare.

  Overall though, I think the rest of FF7 more than makes up for it. I can certainly understand not being able to get past that though, although I’m curious how far you got. The game goes through a lot of different “stages”, which is one of the things I like about it, but it means the gameplay while you’re stuck in Midgar is quite distinct from the open world, and becomes distinct again once you get access to the Golden Saucer, or the airship, or into Midgar again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did anyone really think the Final Fantasy 7 remake was better than the original PS1 version?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  FF has been steadily turning from actual role playing games where the gameplay was once in the driver’s seat and the scenes and story add spice and flavor, to vaguely interactive “cinematic experiences” where the story being endlessly shoved down your throat is the purpose, and the gameplay is just a repetitive distraction from the real novelty which is the crazy stories and cutscenes they come up with.

  Ironically FF7 itself was probably the beginning of that trend, thanks to the ability of Playstation CDs to hold so much FMV compared to the limits of ROMs at the time. They dove in headfirst and never looked back, and that came to define the franchise from that point forward. 3 Discs of FMV was pretty over-the-top for their first release on the platform, but the franchise’s addiction to relentless cinematics never waned, it only increased. And the relegation of gameplay being put in the passenger seat, then the back seat, then the trunk, then dragged behind the vehicle to its inevitable death as the art and story become the sole focus became more pronounced with each new entry in the series.

  I loved FF7 (and 8, and somewhat less 9, and even 10, and 12 have some redeeming qualities) but the steady and continuous trend away from compelling gameplay towards visual spectacle is abundantly clear.

  I haven’t played an FF game since 12, remakes or otherwise, and I don’t plan to. I’ve read the writing on the wall, and I see who they’re making games for, and it’s not me. Maybe it’s other people. Maybe it’s themselves, I don’t know. All I know is it’s not me. I have no interest.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you cut a cucumber so that the round slices don't roll all over and off of your cutting board?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  My cousin thought pickles came from a different plant than cucumbers and it was glorious, we will never let him live it down.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is amperage more "obscure" than voltage (or watts)?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Steam turbines are actually self regulating because of this. The more power being used, the more amps are automatically produced. Once you spin it up it manages its own speed.

  This is sort of true, within a narrow operating window and an idealized environment, but also pretty simplified. That sort of application of Ohm’s law only works according to the naive interpretation when you’re talking about ideal DC devices. In reality, inductance and capacitance become significant and muddy the waters a lot when you start getting into real power grids with huge inductive loads like motors and transformers all over them, and steam turbines trip and/or bypass all the time to avoid overload or overspeed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you think people from more "privilaged" backgrounds have a right to complain about the struggle and/or abuse that they went through? (eg: "Middle Class" or "Rich" family)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  People from privileged backgrounds didn’t choose to have a privileged background either. What matters is what you have experienced in your life and what you do with that experience. Suffering and trauma is not a competition, there are no winners. Everyone’s experience is valid. Everyone has a right to complain.

  Not everyone has a right for their complains to be listened to and followed up on, though, because complaining on its own doesn’t mean anything. What’s more important is what your complaint is trying to change, what is your purpose in complaining? That makes all the difference, that’s what decides whether you have a “right” for your complaint to be actioned, and that has nothing to do with what background you come from.

  Some people from privileged backgrounds might complain in order to assert, protect and extend their privilege, obviously, that’s not valid. Others may complain because they want their abuser brought to justice or want other people protected from the same situation, and that’s absolutely valid. Has nothing to do with the person being privileged or not, it has to do with their intent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you fell out of love with.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Among several other things, yes, that is indeed one of my bugbears, I could name countless others too.

  But like I implied it’s not just one specific bad decision for me, just the general attitude and direction of the developers. Not that they’ve lost the plot completely, but that they just have a specific plot in mind that diverges pretty significantly from mine and it is never going to satisfy me. Every time it updates the feeling grows that it’s always going to be a struggle to get the game I want to play out of Avorion’s future, that I’m always going to have to be plastering mods over top of the decisions I don’t like, and it’s just… exhausting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Video Games Need to Be Cheaper to Buy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s what indie games are for, instead of these absurd-budget blockbusters that often aren’t even fun, but also, the world just needs to be cheaper to live in. Games are first on the chopping block because disposable income for entertainment is always the first to collapse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you fell out of love with.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Check out the workshop for it too. The ship builder is extremely flexible and people create works of art with it, and it can make the game look truly incredible. Of course, things like battle-bricks and battle-sticks (or battle-bricks WITH battle-sticks) reign supreme at actual combat effectiveness, so it’s sort of a tradeoff.