cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did AI 2027 predict US government restricting access to a very advanced ai?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There are really only two options here. Either this is:

  • Late-stage capitalism grift, or
  • Genuine approach to technological singularity

  If I was interested in betting on it, and since we live in late-stage capitalism we pretty much have to be interested in betting to survive, then I would place all my bets on late-stage capitalism grift.

  If it’s the former, then it’s just a thousand monkeys on typewriters hiding inside a gorilla suit and reading the best one and who really fucking cares what “future” these assholes are trying to sell to us. Don’t buy it.

  If it’s the latter, then all bets are off, nobody can predict what happens after singularity is reached, it’s literally unknowable, and if this is indeed the pull of technological singularity that we are feeling, then I think we are either too close and have too much momentum and too little thrust to escape now, or we are already past the event horizon anyway. Humanity as we know it is over.

  I’m 99.9995% sure it’s capitalism grift though. Just watch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨do you think more reddit users will move to lemmy eventually?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, I think it will grow organically, and often in bursts when Reddit does something particularly publicly stupid or frustrating. We’ve seen this before, we’ll see it again. I don’t know if we’ll ever see a mass exodus. I don’t know if this will ever “replace” Reddit per se. Obviously it has for me, but on a whole, I think it will continue to be a niche community, and I’m fine with that. There are good people here, my kind of people, and I like it for what it is, not for what it could become. I really don’t need the tiktok-memelord-masses and the teenagers and the onlyfans trolls in my life. I think they’ll find their own places to congregate and feed off each other, and I don’t think it will ever be here, no matter how shitty reddit and tiktok and whatever other dumb apps they use become.

  I don’t want the Fediverse to be massively exclusive but it doesn’t need to be massively inclusive either. Its nature means it can be inclusive, and I welcome any community who really feels like they belong here. But I’m realistic about who is actually going to feel included here, and I don’t think we need to go out of our way to “attract” more users, we just need to do enough that the people who want this sort of thing, can find it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What does the word data mean per se ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You have to start by understanding that for mobile phone companies, they are using an extremely specific and industry-focused definition of “data” that relates ONLY to the way mobile phone networks are implemented and billed.

  If you are trying to understand it purely from any sort of more general, widespread definition of “data” which is what most people seem to be describing below, there are way too many steps and details between that and what the mobile phone company calls “data” for you to wrap your head around in a single question.

  So I’m going to tell you what data means to a mobile phone company:

  It means ANY internet traffic you use (upload or download) on your phone (or if you are sharing your phone as a hotspot, any used by the hotspot) AS LONG AS none of the following are true:

  • That internet data is not for the purposes of sending and receiving phone calls to your carrier-assigned phone number across the carrier’s own telephony network (ie, it is a “regular” phone call, you have no control over how the carrier routes its voice calls but even if they do route it across the internet, typically you will not be charged data for this)
  • It is not a SMS text message, and
  • You are not on WiFi at the time (the WiFi goes through somebody else’s physical internet connection where the WiFi is connected to, not your phone’s).

  There are exceptions and edge cases, but as a general rule, that’s what a mobile phone company will consider “data”. Anything you upload or download or stream on the internet almost always qualifies, unless you’re on a WiFi connection like at home or work, assuming you have that WiFi connection enabled. Youtube is data. Netflix is data. Emails are data. Phone calls can be data, if you’re using an “app” like WhatsApp or FaceTime or VOIP or any sort of video-calling feature.

  It is measured in millions (mega) or billions (giga) of bytes. Text and static images, like wikipedia and many other webpages are, use negligible and almost irrelevant amounts of data. Apps, app and OS updates, streaming audio and especially downloading or even just playing games and video content (movies, TV shows, video calls) use very significant amounts of data and can quickly use up the quota in hours depending on the quality settings.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨On an emergency power supply with AC and DC electrical plugs, which do I use to charge or power appliances?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Changing power types is inefficient.

  Batteries (which is what your emergency power supply uses) and solar panels are DC. They will be most efficient powering other DC devices directly.

  Rotating generators (powered by engines, turbines, wind, anything that creates movement through motion pretty much) are AC. They will be most efficient at powering AC devices directly.

  As soon as you’re changing DC into AC, or AC into DC, you’re losing power (usually a quite significant amount) in the conversion process. DC->AC requires an inverter. DC->AC requires a rectifier. Both are inefficient.

  The direct answer to your question is that your DC power bank will be most efficient powering DC devices, and less efficient powering AC devices.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there any such thing as "edutainment" shows for adults?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Technically almost everything is educational in some way, if you’re willing to engage with it in the right way. Like you said, period dramas and historical dramas are often a great way of learning about (some aspects of) history. The problem is you need to be able to sort out the fictional elements from the non-fictional elements and without at least a little bit of background that becomes challenging. Some methods that might be useful is cross-referencing by watching multiple shows about the same topic from different sources. If both shows include the same element, there’s a good chance it’s based on some real historical evidence. But you also have to understand that evidence is not proof, and there’s a lot of disagreement in science and understanding, and that’s good and natural. Not everything is going to match up exactly. You have to do your own research and actually study real sources and do your own experiments. This is why edutainment starts to become of limited value.

  The problem with growing up is that you’re getting to a higher level of education and understanding, and that comes with caveats. No longer can you just rely on simplistic expositions of “this is absolutely how it works” and you start to get into a lot of “seems” and “maybes”. There’s a lot of stuff we just don’t know with absolute confidence and as we have learned from the historical documentary Star Wars, only a Sith deals in absolutes.

  Most things at the adult level are not explicitly going to teach you things (because they effectively can’t) as much as they are going to motivate you to research further, experiment yourself, or become interested in things you might not otherwise find interesting.

  With that said, there is tons of educational and entertaining content out there. Sometimes stuff that seems stupid is actually very educational. Sometimes stuff that seems boring and educational can be entertaining as hell. If you want a bunch of Youtube channels to help point your recommendation algorithm in the right direction, try some of these channels (in no particular order or topic consistency):

  • Hydraulic Press Channel
  • Technology Connections / Technology Connextras
  • Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t
  • styropyro
  • NileRed / NileBlue
  • Xyla Foxlin
  • Chris Spargo
  • Wilson Forest Lands
  • James Condon
  • FarmCraft101
  • Tom Scott

  Honorable mention for bugfishhhh’s insane and comedic hour-long video on the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England which came out of nowhere but I’m here for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do people really "need" friends?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A romantic partner is ideally also a friend. They can often handle both, but they’re just one friend and that’s putting a lot of weight on their shoulders. And things in life change. What happens if your romantic partner gets seriously ill and you can’t confide in them anymore? What if the romantic partner is the person you’re having issues with and you need an outside point of view? Not everything is so minimalist in real life. Good luck trying to keep it minimalist like you’re proposing, but life often has other ideas.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Delivery robots are spreading across LA. Residents ‘both pity and hate them’⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe give people the UBI before the jobs go away and they become homeless? Just a thought.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If AI is so smart, how come it doesn't track the time and date?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not “smart” it’s a “convincing text generator”. It’s very good at being convincing, like making you think it is smart. But it doesn’t know anything, it doesn’t understand anything, it is a parrot repeating what other people on the internet have said in similar situations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So, has age verification really become the new normal?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t age verified anything and I don’t plan to. It’s only normal when you normalize it. If something will no longer allow me access without verifying my age, I will either find a way around it or I will no longer use that thing. If Youtube is not going to let me watch age restricted videos, so what? I will not watch age restricted videos on Youtube. I will instead use an addon to find them on odysee or peertube instead if possible, or I’ll just live my life accepting that video probably wasn’t one I really needed that contained the only key to living a happy life. It’s not that important, certainly not important enough to verify my age to the surveillance police.

  If they try to make me age verify my home internet connection, well then I’m gonna have to get real creative, sure, but rest assured I will (with the help of the rest of the privacy-oriented community) find ways to obfuscate the fuck out of all traffic in and out of my network so thoroughly it won’t even matter if they know who owns my internet connection because it won’t even be relevant anymore. VPN everything. Become an open relay. Join the I2P project. Embrace mesh networking. Fuck them, they can’t stop us all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds like an opportunity to find it yourself and then be the first to upload it, right when a whole bunch of other people are about to suddenly decide they need it too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should I pretend to care about the lives in Gaza and Palestine?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You sound kind of like a psychopath. I don’t mean that as an insult, but since it’s something that can significantly affect your life, maybe you should talk to a doctor or something about your feelings.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  One is fiction, the other is reality. I understand why, these days, it may be difficult to distinguish the two, but I can assure you that FNAF is fiction, and the AI bubble is reality, and underneath all the slop and the fiction and the scams there is still in fact an objective reality that still exists and will eventually outlast them all, FNAF and AI bubbles alike.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Experience with Drauger OS?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m pretty sure Debian’s default desktop environment out of the box is Gnome, but like any decent distro you can usually either get it preinstalled with different environments, choose it during installation (I think it’s part of tasksel on Debian) or changing the desktop environment should not be much harder than installing the appropriate package or metapackage, typically on Debian this is something like task-kde-desktop but there are more details for KDE specifically here. PikaOS likewise has a KDE installer image.

  I think guides are even better on Debian personally but YMMV. I understand the attraction of having a good ecosystem for stuff like that, and Debian is itself very popular, maybe not quite Ubuntu level, but being the upstream for almost every apt/deb based distro means that there is usually pretty good compatibility between guides for different flavors and often the Debian one is where things get started and you can often use Debian guides directly on Ubuntu or PikaOS with no issues and no modifications needed. Occasionally you might need to tweak some package names or paths slightly, apt-cache search <name> or dpkg -l <package> can often help a lot with any inconsistencies you might encounter.

  The reverse is often also possible: I know I have probably used Ubuntu guides directly on Debian in the past, although I can’t remember the last time I actually did that, because the Debian-specific guide is usually what the Ubuntu ones are actually based on and I can’t remember finding a Ubuntu guide where I couldn’t also find something corresponding for Debian. Sometimes I do kind of look at them both and try to understand if they’re doing certain things differently for some particular reason and that helps me understand if there might be version or library issues that might be something to keep an eye on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Experience with Drauger OS?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  PikaOS is gaming Debian, and Debian is just pre-Ubuntu-Ubuntu without the Ubuntu-shittiness that Ubuntu adds.

  If you like apt and dpkg and deb package management, that’s all Debian’s work, not Ubuntu, and I don’t see why you wouldn’t be just as happy with Debian. If you like snap… well, then, there’s something wrong with you and I don’t know how to help you. :P

  Debian is the base for a huge number of distributions (including Ubuntu itself) for good reason. PikaOS is built on that good foundation. I’m running PikaOS with KDE on basically all my (modern-ish) machines, and I would happily recommend it to anybody.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Looking for input/feedback on what work would look like in solarpunk settings⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I would expect it looks a lot like what good teachers and librarians and other genuinely useful and intelligent people of culture do, right now, every day. They teach and educate, yes, even when the curriculum is crappy, and they care, and they help and support and defend and they do their best with what they have, they do a huge amount of largely thankless and currently unappreciated and minimized and relentlessly attacked work, not for the money or the recognition, but because it’s the right thing to do and it benefits society and our future.

  That’s real work and real progress. That’s not about benefiting private equity and the stock market and making numbers go up. That’s about improving the world we live in and improving the lives of the people in it for their entire lives, sustainably, on and on to the next generation and the next. That’s pretty solarpunk if you ask me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  No, you will just be able to talk to Mlario, the legally-distinct sicilian plumber who fights tortoises instead. /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What’s the difference between communism and socialism?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Capitalism with wealth redistribution is considered to be a potential method of achieving socialism or at least a significant amount of it.

  When you really get into the weeds on a lot of these ideologies you’ll find that the 40,000 foot overview of the single word that defines them is actually quite different from the actual process of getting there, and the people arguing for these ideologies actually understand that. They also understand that the means of getting to the goal, or even just closer to the goal, is sometimes the more important and worthy part than the actual end which may not even be realistically attainable nor permanent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What’s the difference between communism and socialism?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What you’re describing sounds more like communitarianism than communism. Despite the confusingly similar name they are actually very different ideologies. (though they also have some similar precepts at the same time)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Beamdog's Whimsical Baldur's Gate 2' - Warlockracy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  “And on top of everything else, Viconia is consorting with vampires… lesbianly.”

  I died.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluetooth tracker hidden in a postcard and mailed to a warship exposed its location — $5 gadget put a $585 million Dutch ship at risk for 24 hours⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Stories like this always feel like misdirection efforts to deflect blame from the actually responsible devices and organizations. The amount of normalization of openly-broadcasting-at-all-times cellphones in our society can’t really be explained with anything less than an overwhelming multi-level propaganda campaign.

  Who needs spies anymore when you can just convince everyone, even military personnel, to carry around an always-on camera and microphone with onboard power and various long-range wireless options (and get them to willingly keep it continuously charged for you!)

  WTF are we doing to ourselves and why anybody tolerates this nonsense I have no idea.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who's receiving and who's loosing electrons?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Does it depend on which one has more or less loose valence electrons?

  I think that’s a reasonable rule of thumb to start from, but like most things in physics it’s not guaranteed and is rarely exactly that simple.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is it that when the graphics driver freaks out in your browser when watching a video, the page always turns this specific shade of green?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This is probably just someone’s effort to pick a color similar looking to a green-screen in film, since it is serving the same technical effect.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When a sports drink list sodium and chloride as separate ingredients, separated by other ingredients, is there a difference between that and just listing salt as an ingredient?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you have any examples? I’m not a chemist but I don’t believe you can have “chloride” alone as an ingredient. If it were alone it would be elemental chlorine, which is an entirely different animal and I sincerely doubt any drink maker would be putting free chlorine into their drinks.

  A “chloride” on the other hand is a compound of chlorine already combined with some other element, which is presumably not sodium or you would’ve not said the sodium and chloride were separate. So you could have “potassium chloride” for example, but this would not turn into “sodium chloride” simply by existing in the same liquid as elemental sodium, because it’s perfectly happy sticking with the potassium and being potassium chloride.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why does almost nobody live here?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Basically, that’s not where the farmland is (or, when it was first being settled, the fur, which provided the major economic incentives for why that area was settled in the first place). You also have to think about how the land was settled. Settlers from the east used mountain valleys to get around. Mountain valleys in that circled area aren’t easily traversable and don’t go anywhere or lead anywhere useful. Settlers from the southwest used ships and followed shipping routes up the coast. When you consider both these settlement methods simultaneously (and they were in fact used almost simultaneously) you will come to the conclusion that these are some of the most remote areas to be settled in the continental US, and their relative remoteness has a lot to do with why they were settled the way they were.

  Meanwhile, from the perspective of a ship sailing up the coast there are few good protected anchorages to use as a sheltered waystation or safe harbor in case of inclement weather directly along the coast, but if you go just a little further you’ll reach good port lands (it’s literally called “Portland”) or Seattle and you might as well journey just a little further to stop there instead if you possibly can. When you consider people taking a long and perilous journey around the horn of South America (there was no Panama Canal) you’re almost at the end of the line, and you aren’t going to want to stop 99% of the way, you’re so close that you’ll push on to the end, and that’s why Portland, Seattle and Vancouver developed where they did. The farmland got worse the further north you went and became increasingly unsustainable so nobody really went much further before the gold rush provided yet another economic incentive to draw people there, but that’s a different story.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I was in the market for a good used car, which car would be the best to outrun the cops?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That seems like the kind of problem that a radio and a spike belt were designed to solve.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The blue light from your phone isn't ruining your sleep⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hot take: Manipulative and mentally destructive social media algorithms are the reason your sleep is disrupted. It’s what is on the screens that is the problem, not what color it is.

  But of course, the tech companies would rather have you blame the color of the screen than their own products. I’m sure they loved adding those color-shifting features to their next products too. not only do they avoid the blame, they get to sell you the solution.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I was in the market for a good used car, which car would be the best to outrun the cops?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  White Ford Bronco. What can I say, I’m a traditionalist and I prefer my police chases to be conducted at a safe and comfortable speed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's 9PM, any word from Iran?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.