cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does the Chinese government even work⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  At the end of the day all governments are desperately afraid of making people angry (at them), from the healthiest democracy to the most totalitarian dictatorship, because the people are always the overwhelming majority, creating all the goods and services, creating the surplus that the rich and powerful exploit and enjoy, and therefore ultimately holding all the real power no matter how much legal, policing and enforcement structure is built around them. Some governments are just extremely creative at making people forget that or preventing them from learning it in the first place, while finding ways to manage their expectations to either convince them to be happy enough, or to make sure they’re always going to be angry at somebody else (or each other), or some combination of the two. They usually turn to the latter when they fail at the former. When they fail at both, it tends to become a revolution.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is insulting people for their state (Florida) ok, but not gender or race?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I regret attempting to answer your question in good faith. I should’ve known you’d be an asshole about it. All your other comments on this thread are asshole replies too. Fuck off, loser.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is insulting people for their state (Florida) ok, but not gender or race?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This is an overgeneralization. It is not always okay to insult someone for their state. In fact, I would argue that it is only rarely “ok” and that requires certain rather specific conditions to be the case.

  People often do it without it being fully okay, because not everybody agrees exactly what these conditions are, and that creates an unwinnable situation where you’re guaranteed to offend somebody, and some people decide that is acceptable. Is this is a “majority rules” situation where if the majority are not offended it is okay? Not really, but many people (perhaps even the majority) treat it that way.

  I would offer to describe some examples of the sort of conditions that apply, but doing so is fraught and dangerous, not just because nobody agrees universally, but also because anything I could possibly say about someone’s state, someone else will invariably chime in and try to apply the same logic to gender or race. They will use it as an excuse to justify racism and sexism as if they are simply being reasonable. It is a trap and I will not fall into it.

  Instead I will offer you some questions that you can use for yourself to decide what conditions you might think should apply. And then you can feel free to apply them or not. I’m not your dad. None of these are absolute anyway, they are always on a sliding scale, there are always situational elements and not every situation is going to be the same.

  • Does a person choose to live in a state? Were they born there, and did they have a choice about that? If they do live there, would they choose something different given the opportunity? Is it plausible that they might get such an opportunity eventually?
  • Does a person sometimes insult their own state? Is it okay when they do it? Is it a joke when they do or are they serious? Familiarity breeds contempt, but sometimes we just need to vent about our own situation, and that doesn’t mean it’s automatically okay for others to do the same or double-down, or sometimes you are welcome to play along. How do you know the difference?
  • Could the target of the insults be interpreted to be directed at the state’s government, law enforcement, education or other specific state-level systems rather than an individual or the state’s population as a whole? These sort of things probably qualify more as free speech rather than hate speech.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not hypocritical if you are providing affordable housing for someone.

  Despite the kneejerk hate towards landlords lately, which is largely justified due to the extreme levels of rent-seeking behavior evident in today’s completely unaffordable rental market, affordable rental housing is actually a legitimate market and there needs to be availability to meet that demand. Renting on its own is not a crime. Some people even prefer it. It can provide significantly more flexibility and less responsibility, stress and hassle, at a lower monthly cost than home ownership IF (and ONLY IF) you have a good landlord, either because they choose to be or because the laws require them to be, which is not so much the case with most of the laws.

  So for me those are the dividing lines. If you are not:

  • A slumlord providing “affordable” rental housing by leaving your tenants in unsafe, unsanitary, and unmaintained properties.
  • Demanding luxury-priced rents for an extremely modest property with no features that can be considered a luxury and no intention of maintaining anything to luxurious standards.

  Then maybe it’s not hypocritical. And I don’t mean just taking the highest price you can find on rentfaster and posting your property for that price because “that’s what the market price is” I mean actually thinking about whether that price you’re asking is actually affordable for real human beings living in your area.

  Basically, if you treat your tenants like actual human beings with the understanding they may be struggling to get by, trying to raise a family, working as much as they can even when work is not reliable, and dealing with all life throws at them, and you don’t treat these things as immediately evictable offenses like a battleaxe over their head just waiting to drop, then yes, you absolutely can argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone – because you are helping provide it.

  If, after contributing to legitimate maintenance expenses and reserves, you are making a tiny profit, barely breaking even or even losing money renting, good. If you are treating it as a cash cow that funds your entire life, fuck you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google will not be forced to sell Chrome, despite its near-monopoly, as its dominance is not 'sufficiently attributable to its illegal conduct'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well you see after being the shot the man decided to stop breathing, therefore his death is not sufficiently attributable to your single bullet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rogue.site is a new worker-owned, reader-funded gaming site⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yahtzee and his coworkers and team recently escaped from The Escapist (pun intended) to form a new independent group called Second Wind, too. I’m enjoying the direction that gaming media is going. Corporate media can mercilessly suck all value out of the industry until it withers and dies, and the names and legacies of these places will die with it, but they can’t destroy the talent if the community are still behind them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Getting old sucks, it’s only preferable because the alternative sucks worse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Centipede Simulator Steam Page is now live⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks I hate it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Four wheels good, two wheels bad: why are there no exciting cycling games?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Paperboy, duh. /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't they have simpler names for brain disorders, where perhaps even the person suffering the disorder might be able to remember the term themself?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nothing wrong with asking the question and I’m sorry if my response sounded dismissive or hostile, I actually think you asked a great question and your heart is definitely in the right place. I think we should do a lot more discussion and education around brain diseases and brain aging, if we spent as much time trying to understand how natural intelligence works as we do how artificial intelligence works these days, maybe we’d have a lot less chaos in the world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't they have simpler names for brain disorders, where perhaps even the person suffering the disorder might be able to remember the term themself?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Is “senile” not simple enough for you? The problem is, it’s maligned because its too loosely applied and becomes used as an insult. So it’s really a no-win scenario. Make it too simple and it becomes clinically useless and people will throw it around like an insult, make it too complex and it becomes only useful in clinical settings and average people can’t remember it. Is there a middle ground? I’m not sure. Alzheimer’s and dementia/demented are kind of in the middle, but they both get used inappropriately and are clinically useless, so they end up being a worst of both worlds.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did Ukraine provoke Russia by building a dam?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  He is misinformed or deliberately revising history to fit his narrative. Ukraine’s damming of the canal was done after the annexing of Crimea, and in direct response to it. The other relevant dam, the Kakhovka Dam was built by the Soviets in the 1950s. It was destroyed (after a few failed attempts) by Russian demolition charges, though they continue to deny it.

  There were arguments from Ukraine about the continued Russian occupation of their Sevastopol naval base in Crimea, which Ukraine wanted to end. That was the real provocation that Russia could not tolerate, but that is not so sympathetic of a story as saying the “Ukrainians cut off the water to the poor independence-minded Crimeans” /s

  Of course, if someone is going to wholesale believe one side or the other I doubt there is any way of convincing them otherwise, but the facts simply do not fit the Russian narrative. If, indeed Ukraine “damming the canal” was such a great provocation that they had to start a war over it, why then did Russia subsequently destroy Kakhovka dam during said war which dried up the canal anyway? Of course they claim they did not, because it is a war crime, but it’s pretty absurd to pretend that Ukraine had the means to do it given the dam and surrounding area was very thoroughly under Russian control at all times.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨At Gamescom, it felt like the industry now has a plan: make games quicker | Opinion⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  *me looking at most of the graphical-atrocity indie games I play non-stop still being in “Early Access” after 10+ years* Yes, games taking too long to make definitely is the problem. Work faster, not smarter. Sounds like a winning strategy AAA-studios, good luck!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are drivers for food delivery apps so often listed wrong?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s fucking amazingly hilarious(ly bad) but mostly just hilarious. The systemic enshittification of the entire concept of service jobs is basically complete at this point. As an anonymous, replaceable delivery drone nobody cares about your name not even the company employing you just, like, leave it empty it’ll use the default name or some shit and get to work, deliveries are waiting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does one join a terror group? Like example ISIS , do people go to a secret website sign up and get provided flags, bomb parts, or whatever? Or is it just a person saying what they did was for ISIS⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Your imagination is oversimplifying the process. It’s not “this morning I decided to be a terrorist so I signed up for jihad on their website and later that evening I was planting IEDs on tanks”. It’s a gradual process of recruitment and radicalization, testing and evaluation over months or years, with many intermediate steps and countless small tests of loyalty along the way as you work your way into the organizations and then up within them. Trust is not given it is earned. Your first “job” will probably be from someone who acts like they’re just being social and having conversations with you as a friend, and they’ll likely to encourage you to do something like parroting their propaganda on other places on social media, and as you do they’ll judge how well you follow instructions and how resourceful you are and might start giving you hints of other things you can do and see if you take the bait and judge how you react to those suggestions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where has the tax money "saved" in uk austerity gone?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  During the 2008 crisis, QE made the debt a problem for some people.

  I read this as “Queen Elizabeth made the debt a problem for some people” and was struggling to figure out what she had done or said in 2008 that influenced this, before I eventually realized you meant “Quantitative easing”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it everywhere?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is like a running joke they do. They reuse the sounds on purpose. The Wilhelm Scream is everywhere when you know how to listen for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lemmy.World blocks VPN?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Because you have to choose who to trust. You can’t “trust no one”. You’re currently trusting your VPN provider. Are you willing to trust lemmy.world? No? Fine, then don’t. Set up your own instance, or use another one you are willing to trust, or find one that allows your VPN that you trust. No one promises these would be easy decisions but you’re going to have to make these choices. A web without any trust is a useless cesspool. Believe me, it’s been tried.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is the spellchecker in Firefox so abysmal?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Such as?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Survey for July 2025 shows Linux approaching 3%⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Is “Stop Killing Games” also dramatic? Maybe we need to be dramatic to accomplish actual change. Thanks for the backhanded compliment though, I guess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Survey for July 2025 shows Linux approaching 3%⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The only way to do that is to use Linux anyway, ditch Windows, and give them the middle finger until they make their game available. No amount of asking politely or screaming obnoxiously will make them care if people just continue using Windows because they feel like they “have to” play this game and keep paying them money, because all they care about is money. Only when they can clearly see their position is losing them money (3% is probably not clear enough for many of them but time will tell) are they going to change their behavior. There’s nothing else that motivates them more than seeing money slipping through their fingers.

  Depending on white knights like Valve and CDPR to ride to our rescue is good but they can’t do this on their own either, and in fact they’ve already done very close to as much as they reasonably can. They need our help, we consumers are the ones who are statistically not doing our part. We need to recognize that we have the bulk of the agency here and we need to start to use it.

  We have to choose what matters more to us, the future of playing video games on our own terms or letting the developer dictate how much we need to spend and what rights we need to give up to able to play a popular video game right now. We’re not talking about something we need to live. This is a choice we can make. Will enough people choose the future instead of immediate gratification? I don’t know, available evidence doesn’t paint a particularly reassuring picture, but I never am willing to give up on hope.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Whatever happened to the blockchain/smart contract 'revolution' we were told about?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Vaporware turns out to be vapor. Shocking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I tried Servo, the undercover web browser engine made with Rust⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It is crazy. And maybe it could be distilled down, but maybe because of what it’s become and how it’s used, that’s just not an option anymore. The context is that the “web” that browsers are browsing has grown from mere rich text and links into basically a fully distributed operating system. There are entire software suites that exist only through web protocols now. Literally anything you used to be able to do on a Desktop OS you can now do directly on the web, often at very close to bare metal performance levels. And over the years and decades the standards have evolved to not just enable that anymore but to actually require that level of functionality. It has become completely expected to have javascript APIs allowing extensive and instantaneous DOM manipulation, HTML5 canvas and storage and WebGL available, they’re not just “optional addons” you can pull in with an extension or that a text based browser might not bother to implement, they’re a core part of the web and little will be functional without them.

  So when you’re building a “modern” web browser what you’re effectively really doing is implementing an entire cross-platform OS, sandboxed and virtualized for security within any host OS you choose to support.

  Of course technically “the web” is still backwards compatible with the old pure HTML, no javascript, no CSS, web 1.0. There’s nothing stopping anyone from writing such a simple site today, and those websites are still out there. And that’s still sort of where you have to start with projects like Servo, because that’s just the basic level of absolute minimum functionality. But it’s taken a long time to build all the features of the modern web and so of course it’s going to take a long time for a new browser engine to implement all of them or even enough of them to actually start supporting the most commonly used websites.

  While there are definitely a lot of quirks related to handling old sites and the various inconsistencies and incompatibilities that developed over the years, I don’t think that’s the real sticking point on developing a new web engine at this point. I think the issue is simply the fact that the web does so much and is such a comprehensive technology platform, and if you tried to simplify it, to make it easier to develop browsers, you would lose a lot of actually important functionality for developing websites that allow them to do the things they are doing today. Granted some of those things I wouldn’t mind losing either, but a lot of them are legitimately required for what we do with the web now and what we expect it to be able to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  So - if it cools the place from, say, 29 degrees outside to 22 degrees inside, that’s the same as warming it from 15 degrees outside to 22 inside?

  Oh my, not at all. If it runs for 1 hour continuously in cooling mode that’s going to be electrically largely equivalent to running for 1 hour continuously in heating mode (again, provided it’s not variable speed). Even then the electrical load will vary slightly according to various conditions. The actual temperatures achieved though, depend entirely on the thermodynamics of the system (both inside the pump itself and your whole house and the environment it’s in) which are extremely dynamic and complicated. There are almost no simple, linear relationships you can use to approximate what is actually going on. Even the approximate calculations that HVAC installers do called “Manual J” are hugely idealized and oversimplified. You’ve got things going on like solar heat gain through windows, heat losses through insulation, and heat transfer through gaps in the insulation, air losses through vents and doors and windows and gaps that are specific to your individual home and that you can’t even really measure accurately. It’s a very difficult thing to even attempt to compute or simulate no matter how much we try to develop models that accurately estimate things. On a larger scale, this is why we still struggle to accurately predict the weather.

  Only the next bill will tell

  That’s a reasonable position. You can make all the estimates you want but at the end of the day the only thing that really matters is what you get billed for and that will tell you the truth about what’s actually happening in your house, environment, climate, and situation. I would be confident that given the same temperature conditions you really won’t see much practical difference in electrical usage between a heat pump in cooling mode and an air conditioner (if anything they tend to be somewhat more efficient just due to better design and higher build quality). But you won’t know the true situation until all the measurements are actually done and posted to your bill, and even then you won’t be able to directly compare them because there are so many other variables that are always changing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s exactly the same as an air conditioner, and no: it uses the same amount as when it’s heating. The compressor is either running, or it’s not, plus or minus a little bit depending on how hard it’s actually working to compress the gases at the temperatures and pressures involved. Unless you have a variable speed or dual stage compressor, in which case the power usage may be somewhat proportional to the amount of cooling or heated actually needed since it will slow down for smaller amounts of heating or cooling. Otherwise, the main difference in power usage and power efficiency is how long it runs to achieve the desired temperature.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  run any game at max settings, 4K, future proofed (at least for a while)

  You do understand how excessive that is right? Like “any game max settings 4k” on its own is already like asking for a Formula 1 car, asking for it to be future proofed on top of that is like asking for not just any Formula 1 car but one that can dominate the next 5 seasons.

  That said, if you truly do believe your daughter needs this is can’t live without max settings 4k on every game imaginable, then your friend did a good job trying to meet your requirements.

  … but is it truly necessary? Only you know the answer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI Seeks Additional Capital From Investors as Part of Its $40 Billion Round⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  And of course they will get it, because many fools and their money are easily separated.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  We let tech and advertising companies whose ultimate goal and generator of revenue is to sell things to users by convincing them of things, and they created LLMs that they are using to sell LLMs to users by convincing them that the LLMs are great, something they are in fact uncannily good at. Finally, we have closed the loop. The sales pitch is the product. The product is the sales pitch. Everyone will just fall down the AI rabbithole and never come out again, all productive work will cease, all dollars will be consumed. ???, profit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I really want to like the new ff7....but it's just so buggy.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That sounds annoying. The old FF7 is also buggy, but mostly in funny and delightful ways.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are password managers secure to use?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There are weaknesses and attack vectors, but they are in my opinion more secure than almost all realistic alternatives. If you think you’ve come up with a better system, by all means, implement it. I commend your skepticism of following the herd and may it serve you well. But beware of pursuing security through obscurity. People recommend password managers because they are one of the best solutions available for navigating this complex threat environment we live in and they are appropriate for most people’s situations.