cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it normal to, as a depressed person, be very emotionally attached to a subculture whose members have saved my life and offered me emotional support even though I was a complete stranger to them?⁩ ⁨⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Provided they’re not nazis or fascists or sex traffickers or anything like that. There are bad people out there who prey on vulnerable depressed people and they can be really really nice (at first), and they can wear any costume they want, to fit into any subculture. But some subcultures are more hospitable for them than others. Most subcultures are pretty okay, there’s a few where I would potentially be very careful. Just be smart about it, and be vigilant for abusive behaviors, grooming, and other red flags.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there anything of any interests for the tech bros in Greenland?⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s probably also so Canada’s surrounded so that when he invades us too Europe won’t be able to help. I wish I was joking. I now think that’s a real possibility. And it might come sooner than we think.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What common American habits do people find quietly annoying?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Some people are screaming. Most are not. And the words, from those screaming, are cheap. The silence of actions continues to be, and likely will continue to be, deafening.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Not for long!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'I swapped my personal trainer for AI - and it's working'⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’ll keep working too, maybe until it encourages you so much you have a heart attack and die, because you know, it’s AI, it doesn’t have any knowledge or accountability and it certainly doesn’t have any concern for human life.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would happen to a werewolf in space?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, I’m not going to pretend stuff’s not going to get real weird for a werewolf, but I can clarify some of the orbital mechanics a bit.

  First of all, the moon still has all its normal phases from orbit and in pretty much the same durations. For the moon to always be full, you would have to be permanently between the sun and the moon, which is not where an orbit will typically put you. A couple ways you could do this: You could orbit the sun instead, or at least orbit closer to it than Earth does. From Venus’s orbit, both Earth and our Moon are always “full”. You could set yourself up at a lagrange point between the Earth and the Sun.

  The other simple way you could achieve an always-full or at least frequently-full moon is to get into what’s known as sun-synchronous orbit.

  The simplest way though, might be to just land on the Moon’s surface. The terminator between day and night on the moon’s surface only moves at about 9.6 miles per hour, even slower the closer you get to the poles. An athletic werewolf could probably jog to keep up, and stay permanently on the “full” day side.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How is Donald Trump able to get away with being part of a child trafficking ring but I get 20 years in jail for littering?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem is you have failed at least one, probably both, of the foundational rules of any capitalist society.

  First rule of capitalism: Be rich. Second rule of capitalism: Don’t be poor.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Enshittifinancial Crisis⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh PLEASE let them completely enshittify the entire financial system. If anything will ever completely free the world from money’s tyrannical yoke, it will be tech billionaires’ incompetent attempts to “improve it”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How open are you about yourself to others online in general?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Sometimes I’m open, but I also lie a lot, to keep the AI bots and advertising algorithms guessing. What’s real and what’s fake? Who knows, we live in a post-truth world anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How much money should one person realistically make or have?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If that’s what you learned from your economics degree, you’re part of the problem. Spend a lot more time on business ethics and humanities, maybe get some degrees in that too before you start feeling like you’re qualified deciding how the world ought to work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you preorder games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Situationally. I carefully consider the developer in question to try and judge the risk of failure, while also considering the chances that my contribution will actually make any meaningful difference to the likely outcome.

  Basically, if it’s a passionate and seemingly competent indie dev working on something that I personally want to see become a reality in the world, I might throw some early money their way despite the obvious risk. If it’s a tentative and inexperienced indie dev with goals too big I’ll probably wait and see. If it’s some AAA publisher who don’t actually NEED the money and have a high chance of fucking everything up anyway, they can shove their preorder and preorder bonuses right up their own ass where they belong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How long until we can start shorting years to 2 numbers again?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  After 2100 should we start using three digits?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No, I will not identify all the pictures with bicycles in them.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s one of the fun things about AI model collapse. The AIs will start polluting their own training data (already have, actually) and the more prolific AI gets the stupider their training will become, and it will never get better again, it will just eventually reach a steady state of some stupid AI creating training data just barely non-stupid enough data to be believable to the other stupid AI deciding whether it’s valid training data, which makes them both slightly stupider until it can’t create non-stupid enough training data anymore, at which point the data quality will start to improve marginally due to the increased proportion of human efforts, and then the cycle will repeat, endlessly. There is no way out of an AI polluted training data set except by adding more real human data. Arguably we’ve already hit peak AI because of this, and this is where it’s plateaued and where it will likely stay once the bubble pops, with only slight incremental progress from then onwards. It’s probably not going to be taking over the world anytime soon. It’s a reflection of our own collective creativity and effort. It’s a confusing, byzantine, hall of mirrors reflection, sometimes funny-shaped reflection, sometimes a scary reflection, but it’s always ultimately a reflection. It’s not intelligence. It’s just ourselves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it all a dream?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  AI is really shitty, but it will never be as shitty as some SEO blogspammer humans are. AI is simply not capable of going to such depths on its own, being that shitty is a uniquely human ability that AI can only aspire to achieve someday with human assistance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what was the worst enemy of feudalism?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Anarchism. It sounds scary and dangerous and insane, because you’ve been taught to casually believe it is so you shut down your brain about it and back away slowly, but it is the worst enemy of any structure that elevates one person above another. Feudalism certainly included.

  It’s really about equality, and the abolishment of artificial hierarchy and leadership. But it doesn’t sound so scary like that. And the powers that be (which are all on top of said hierarchies) would prefer that you not be too interested in that.

  I’m not personally an anarchist per-se, but I do believe it contains some valuable ideas and it deserves a lot more serious consideration and conversation than it gets. (cue: people immediately dogpiling about how bad and stupid it is despite never having studied it at all or been interested in it in any serious way)

  Eat the rich, and shit anarchy. It may not solve the world’s problems, but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t an improvement. Except for the rich, obviously. At this point, fuck them. Crooks, sociopaths, and pedophiles, the lot of them as far as I’m concerned…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it really worth starting a lemmy community?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Here’s the secret. You have to not think it is work. You have to be passionate enough about the topic that it’s not work, it’s just something you do because you enjoy talking about <topic>. You like having friends also commenting on and talking about <topic>. You have to live and breathe <topic>.

  If you are starting a Lemmy community simply for the sake of creating it, you’re probably wasting your time. A community is a passion project, sometimes of only a single person, but more commonly, the combined passion of many different people about a particular topic. If you’re the only one who cares about <topic> you’re going to have a difficult time even if you’re passionate about it. If you’re not passionate about it either, then it becomes an impossible task, and if neither you nor anyone else is passionate enough about <topic> to build a community around it… does Lemmy really need that community? Probably not.

  So basically this problem generally solves itself. If you don’t feel passionate about creating a community, don’t bother. Either someone else who is passionate enough will, or nobody else will. It’s not your job. Unless you want it to be.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does everyone put celery in soup stock?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are dozens of us, literally dozens! But yeah I’m with you and OP, celery is foul, deeply offensive stuff. Cilantro too, but my hatred is reserved for celery. I’ve been told it’s genetic or something but frankly none of that matters when one hates celery as much as I do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't call it a Substack⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah they’ve got a point. I don’t Google things anymore either. Fuck Google.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do you hate AI?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You mean a bunch of advertising and media companies that control and gatekeep the news are hyping something that’s making them trillions of dollars? That seems… so unbelievable!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why did the proposed *Red Sea–Dead Sea Water Conveyance* project involve pumping water instead of siphoning it?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The first problem would be the height of the intervening terrain and even if you could overcome that, you still have to contend with friction inside the pipe which is a factor most people don’t think about for short distances but when you start trying to carry water long distances through a pipe, friction becomes massive. An ideal siphon inside an ideal pipe is simply a question of height between source and destination. However in the real world, a siphon isn’t unlimited or ideal. There is a height it can’t overcome and it’s actually not very high at all, geographically speaking. The maximum height of a siphon is only around 10 meters. The terrain between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea is pretty flat, but it’s probably not that flat. I’m not going to pretend I’ve done a precise survey of potential routes, but I’d expect there’s probably some bumps in elevation along the way that’s realistically going to need say, 100 meters of lift to overcome. But even 11 meters would simply end the conversation. There’s simply no way around that for a siphon.

  The reason for this height limitation has to do with the atmospheric pressure required to keep the water liquid, because once it no longer has enough pressure on it to keep it liquid, it simply vaporizes before it reaches the height it needs to and the siphon is broken before it even starts. In a vacuum, at standard temperature, water instantly vaporizes. The external atmospheric pressure (which is acting on the entire water column up to its highest point, to get it over the hill) is all that is keeping the water in its liquid form inside the siphon. The higher you go, the more work that external pressure is doing, and eventually the weight of the water column exceeds the pressure at the bottom of the water column and again, the siphon breaks.

  The friction is the other problem. Even if you could limit your route to no more than 10 meters above the Red Sea, you’re also asking the siphon to not only lift it to that height, but also carry that water through 200 kilometers of pipe or more. We don’t think of pipes as having friction, but they do, and it’s very significant at those distances, especially when your power source (gravity, in this case) is already operating near its absolute limits due to the height problem we already discussed. What you hoped would be a gusher of a siphon will end up being a trickle, if anything at all, with most of the water just sitting idle in the pipe to maintain the siphon while a little dribbles its way slowly through to the destination.

  Finally you’ve got all kinds of other more obscure effects at play at those scales, like water’s surface tension, variability of flow rates, possible pinhole leaks in the pipe that will introduce air, offgassing of dissolved gases in the water or even from the pipe itself, and temperature gradients inside the pipe. All of these are going to play havoc with the ability to form and sustain a reliable siphon.

  In short, siphons are actually pretty limited, we don’t see much of those limitations on the small scale, but on the larger scale of this project those limitations become very serious, very quickly and basically remove the possibility of using a siphon for any realistic practical water relocation project. Almost all of those go away very quickly when you pressurize the system with a pump instead of relying on atmospheric pressure alone. It’s a fun thought experiment, but in practice a simple electric pump turns out to be a pretty cheap way to solve a lot of otherwise really complex hydrodynamic problems, and when that’s the case, it’s not really worth teasing out a solution to those problems with all kinds of complicated engineering. Just throw a pump at the problem and call it a day, job done.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How will the Military be after this mess with Trump?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You may not agree with what the military does, but you have to respect them for that reason alone, above all else.

  This premise must be rejected. You do NOT have to respect them for that reason alone, and certainly not above all else.

  Did Nazi soldiers deserve respect, because they were just following orders and they followed those orders and what options did they really have? Were they not also facing the potential of harsh punishment if they did not?

  Not having good alternative options is not an excuse for following orders you know are wrong. Respect is earned when your morality supersedes your orders, despite the potential (and sometimes very real and significant) punishments. Your intentions only get you so far, eventually you need to act or else any remaining respect for you will be gone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Introducing the INDX! Fast and affordable 8-material printing exclusively on the CORE One - Original Prusa 3D Printers⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds great, I’ll plan on waiting a year or so until I’m convinced they’ve got the bugs worked out, and then buy it just before they announce a new and upgraded version, as is tradition.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon CEO steps down with €1M payout and a deep sigh⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It was, and still is. It hasn’t moved to the US, it just also opened a nonprofit there, so the US donations they receive from US people are tax deductible in the US. If I remember correctly they have also opened a non-profit in Belgium which is I think where they are intending to actually move their assets and do most of their work going forward as I think they’ve had various issues with the German organization also.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Will this become Lemmy’s “test post please ignore”? I guess we’ll see.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TV has a burn-in image that has moved over time⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s definitely not burn-in, it’s likely some kind of defect in the backlighting system. For most LCDs the “backlight” is essentially a big thin white/mirrored panel reflecting or diffusing light in a very carefully consistent way from a very bright light source, typically either a fluorescent tube at the bottom or more commonly nowadays evenly spaced strips of LEDs. Some higher end models use more elaborate designs but they’re the minority. Defects in the backlight panel, the back of the LCD panel, or stuff like dust or even insects getting inside that reflective/diffuser chamber will affect the consistency of the backlight as it both blocks a bit of the light from reaching some places and reflects it to other places it shouldn’t be. That’s what it looks like is happening here. It could be some kind of delamination of some of the surfaces inside the TV, or it could be some puff of dust that somehow got inside, or even something like a spider decided that was a great place for a cobweb. Without opening the panel it’s hard to say what’s going on exactly, it might just need a very delicate cleaning or it might need replacement parts.

  If you’re afraid of spiders, I’m sorry, you just have to burn the house down now, it’s the only way to be sure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  User’s post history offers some clues that it may not be worth engaging with them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Gamer's Nexus was] Contacted by the US Secret Service | The AI Surveillance Center Dystopia⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  When the antichrists leading the formerly-free-world attempt to crucify Gaming Jesus we’ll know the end times have truly arrived.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gamepad for Linux Gaming?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  As a veteran of gaming on Linux for several years, I have to admit I keep a small collection of various usb bluetooth dongles, because honestly, built-in bluetooth support still remains questionable and unreliable in many cases, at least for me and the systems I use it on. I don’t necessarily blame Linux as much as I blame the manufacturers of the chips and devices, but unfortunately we have to live with the chaos that their reverse-engineered-firmware-reliant devices create. Any cheapass bluetooth dongle is probably fine, the cheaper and more ubiquitous it is, the more likely it uses the same shitty chinese chip that all the others use and that a bunch of someones already hammered out drivers for, but honestly even with multiple different models and brands it still seems like a crapshoot which one feels like working properly at any given time, but usually one or the other will work and get things to connect, and it’s usually perfectly reliable once all the drivers have loaded and it’s all paired up and things start working. The struggle is real, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gamepad for Linux Gaming?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Its wireless is much more compatible, supporting several different connection methods for use with different proprietary systems, and is just generally a better and more capable device. They’re worth every penny, IMHO. 8bitdo’s quality changed my opinion on gaming controllers that had developed after years of being frustrated by cheap, wonky, second-rate, third-party garbage controllers like MadCatz and Logitech that used “features” to cover for the fact that they were cheaply made, overpriced, and deeply inferior. 8bitdo controllers are the only ones I trust anymore. Even Nintendo apparently can’t be trusted to make quality controllers for their own systems anymore. But 8bitdo can.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are platforms like reddit just "internet noise" and bots or just genuinely the darkest parts of humanity?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s generous helpings of both.