cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My possibly degenerating brain and typing comments: Does font make a difference? Can I change this site's font?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  If you have any basic CSS/HTML knowledge and you’re using a firefox-based browser (or maybe it’s on other browsers too IDK) the addon Stylus allows you to easily create custom stylesheets for any site. It’s very powerful.

  Something like:

  body { font-family: "Your-Prefered-Fontname-Goes-Here"; }
  

  is probably sufficient in most cases.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Thematically it doesn’t sound like my jam personally, but I love the idea of MUDs and text in general. One of the few good things that LLMs have done from my point of view is to make people think about and help prove to a general audience how effective and powerful “chatrooms” using a text-based interface really are and can be. It’s foundational to the way we think. As humans we developed language for a reason, it’s a huge part of our survival and continuation as a species and how we have come to dominate this planet the way we do. It’s how we process information. It’s how we communicate information. We developed keyboards specifically to have a hyper-efficient and accurate way of entering those languages into a computer, and it actually makes sense that generative AI relies on that fact so heavily.

  But at some point, some people decided that typing commands was too hard to learn and we wanted to make everything “easier” and more “visual” but that came at a subtle but significant cost that was never really accounted for in how efficiently we can individually convey our own thoughts. Anyone can write a message or description or a story in the same way that, yes, anyone can also draw a picture or act out a scenario, but the difference is in how broad the skill gaps become and how dramatically less efficient the information transfer becomes as you move away from written language into more complex ways to illustrate thoughts and ideas. A crude and amateurish story is not as far removed from a brilliant story as a crude and amateurish drawing is from a brilliant drawing. Fewer people are capable of being decently skilled artists than they are decently skilled writers. By the "making things more visual, more easy, more slick, we steadily put up heavier and heavier barriers to entry on the creation side at the same time it lowered the barrier to entry for the consumption side. It shifted the balance away from creators and towards non-participative consumption. Even when people do participate and engage, the most common form of participation we see on social media is people writing a comment. Again, it’s text. There’s a reason for that. It’s the lowest effort and most accessible means of communication in the vast majority of cases and situations. Even popular images and videos usually feature (or are exclusively!) filled with text.

  Having your entire environment built out of text makes it accessible in a very fundamental way. It lets people interact with it on a more equal footing, everyone has the same tools and limitations, but the freedom is almost unlimited. It lets people participate in it more creatively, not just moving a pre-rendered graphic around or picking appearance choices out of a menu but actually inserting their own thoughts and feelings and ideas into a roleplay or a description with a level of freedom that no other kind of user-interface would actually allow.

  All this to say, I appreciate how text-based environments like MUDs promote the democratization of creation, interaction and thought, and I think they or something like them will and should always have a place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Female approached by man⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This scared me for some reason, I think how fast he walked up and sat down near me.

  Editing to add a key detail, he sat down close to me

  I don’t directly know OP’s age or the man’s age in this case, but I’m giving OP the benefit of the doubt, and from context I’m inferring that the man was probably older than her given that she refers to him as a “man” and it just sounds like she’s relatively younger (especially if this is sort of one of her first experiences with this sort of thing).

  The “sat down close to me” also makes it sound like there was sufficient open seating, and the man specifically chose to sit directly next to and close to this girl. I understand that public spaces often have inadequate seating options and seats that are packed too close together for comfort, and that’s a separate problem, but there’s nothing suggesting that’s what actually happened here, and as I said, I am giving OP the benefit of the doubt.

  With those contextual details in place, in my world and perspective, I would suggest that the older man approaching the younger girl to talk should probably approach with some caution, not “fast”, and perhaps even ask permission before sitting and trying to strike up a conversation. I don’t think that’s unreasonable or too much to ask. I’m not saying anyone can’t strike up a conversation with anyone they choose to, of any age, but for the people that choose to do so with strangers, they would benefit from having some social awareness if the situation is anything like what I am picturing (unfortunately realistically) in my head.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Female approached by man⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d say that’s a little bit overly dramatic take on what I was trying to say. I understand where you’re coming from, but I wasn’t calling for anyone to read any minds. But a little bit of sensitivity to the facts and statistics is not an unreasonable ask:

  Approximately 4.7 million women in Canada — 30% of all women aged 15 and older — have been sexually assaulted outside of an intimate relationship at least once since age 15. [Source: Statistics Canada, 2019]

  That’s almost 1/3 of women, that’s a serious statistic, and it means that, as a man, you have a responsibility to approach unfamiliar women with at least a reasonable measure of respect for their safety and comfort. And it doesn’t even account for any potential bias towards exactly the sort of “attractive” women who tend to get approached by men much more frequently than others because they are in fact attractive: they literally attract these sort of situations and you can’t assume it’s because they choose to.

  For someone throwing around accusations of being entitled and self-absorbed, you sound very much like you’re in fact the one saying ‘everyone else should cater to me and they are shitty if they don’t do that’.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think that’s actually true. I think it’s more just AI propaganda. Most of the so-called “advances” that I’ve seen advertised seem to be far less than they seem when you dig deeper, often relying heavily on previous, human reverse-engineering efforts or simply being injection points built into wrappers for the actual binary game code. It’s just suddenly cool and polished looking because AI padded it out with a bunch of fragile and flaky filler code whose only purpose is to make it look finished and beautiful at first glance when it actually isn’t. The typical AI gameplan, in other words.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If college is a scam, where do you go to get better education?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on the field and how specialized and regulated it is, but in some cases, the answer’s simply “Youtube”. The trick is, even in fields where it works, you still have to pair it with personal practice and experimentation, it’s not a free ride, you still have to do the work. That’s how your brain actually develops the neural connections into skills, and that’s what makes it so different from mere memorization. Until you actually start to do it, you haven’t really learned anything. People have different learning styles, some people really need the structure of formal college education, and some fields are heavily gatekept (sometimes for good reasons and sometimes not) to require that formalized structure for accreditation, but outside those fields, life’s never been better for people who have the skills for self-directed learning. And if you’re not interested in working in those fields, there’s typically (except in a few specific fields) no law saying you can’t still learn all about them from outside the confines of formally accredited institutions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Female approached by man⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It is a shame, but it’s not simply individual personal attitudes that’s causing this. People are afraid of strangers. The problem is, there are too many cases where that’s actually justified now.

  The bad people have in fact ruined it for everybody. They have made it legitimately dangerous to have this sort of openness and trust in most slices of society, at least for people who look and behave a certain way, or were born certain ways. The problem is, under the influence of traditional media and social media and government and all the other dysfunctional and corrupt systems in our society, we’ve started tolerating the actually bad and dangerous people in society, instead of punishing them. Often we’re actually celebrating them, and in some cases even electing them President. It makes it almost impossible to sustain a functioning society when bad people are allowed to do bad things with impunity or worse, reward for their behavior. This is what’s causing the breakdown of society. Trust is hard to build and easily broken, and now it’s been broken and it seems like fewer and fewer people are interested in trying to rebuild it.

  Why the fuck would women trust anyone in this society when allegedly half of the people in the world’s most economically powerful and culturally influential country voted for a party who is now occasionally saying women shouldn’t have the right to make decisions about their own bodies or even have the right to vote. These horrifyingly regressive attitudes are not just extremist throwaway comments because they are being paired with actions in the US and around the world, and they have serious consequences.

  And yes, I am allowed to bring politics into this, because society is literally made out of politics. That’s what politics is, it’s the primary ingredient for making civilization function and it defines how it functions. Our aversion to discussing contentious “politics” is what has allowed society to decay to the point it has. This is not about being “woke” this is about being intelligent enough to want to live in a civilized society. Civilization requires not just moral boundaries but also the willingness to treat those who push at or exceed those moral boundaries as an existential threat, because they are. If you want your society to be good, you cannot tolerate evil. The boundaries and definitions are not always clear, but we must grapple with them as they stand, not avoid them. Grappling with these issues is the day-to-day work required to make civilization function. It is not a failing that we will always have these issues and always struggle with these issues, but it is a failing if we stop trying to struggle with them, because then we’re no longer keeping society functioning. Politics is life. Life is politics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Female approached by man⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It is totally reasonable to react the way you did. You don’t owe it to other people to be comfortable around them. They should be thinking about what they can do to make you comfortable, ideally before they do it, and this guy clearly wasn’t. If it is because of some disability or something that’s totally plausible too, but that’s his problem and his cross to bear, not yours. You weren’t rude or cruel, but you were uncomfortable, and you’re allowed to be. If he is capable of learning from that, maybe he will, and I think it would be a good lesson for him to learn.

  You don’t have to feel bad about it, it makes sense that you regret how the interaction turned out after the fact, but that regret comes from the additional information and processing time you had afterwards to think about it. If you want to reconsider that guy as a possibly decent fellow who deserves another chance in retrospect that’s alright, and maybe if you see him again you can extend a little more tolerance for his behavior if you think it’s safe. But it doesn’t mean you were wrong in the first place. In general, you should trust your instincts and listen to them, they’re just trying to keep you safe, and better safe than sorry. You should not have to be scared of a man sitting down next to you, but the way some men act in the world we live in, you have every right to. It’s sad, but it’s realistic, and you are not responsible for solving this problem on society’s behalf. When we’ve built a society where you can have a man sit next to you and feel safe about it, then that’ll be great. But we’re not there yet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why do reverse thrusters work on an airplane, but a fan on a sailboat doesn't work?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  For what it’s worth, a thrust reverser is also a very inefficient deflector of air. It’s better than nothing, and jet engines produce a lot of thrust, so even inefficiently reversed it still provides a significant amount of reverse thrust which happens to be quite useful for slowing down an aircraft when there’s minimal weight-on-wheels or on slippery runways, but it’s still only a tiny fraction of what the engines produce in normal operation for forward flight.

  A fan blasting air at a sail is also quite inefficient, but as other comments note, it does technically work. It just works so poorly for the amount of energy you’re putting into the fan that you’d probably be better off rowing or just using the sail properly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  When using local models for coding, it frequently edits the same files repeatedly until it’s satisfied with it. But that’s what the prompts built into the coding harnesses tell it to do, in case its first pass doesn’t compile properly or doesn’t satisfy all the necessary functions.

  So to answer your question, it depends on what model you’re using, and what instructions you’ve given it, what goal it’s trying to achieve and what guardrails apply to your harness. If your harness does not allow it to edit comments then it won’t. Otherwise, it certainly has the capability to, and if the goal you’ve given it can be achieved by editing a comment, it certainly might. For the purposes that most bots are used for on social media, it doesn’t need to, and it probably won’t. But if someone wants their bot to act human for whatever reason, then they might have it do that occasionally or maybe frequently.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fix the system..⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In my experience, everybody wants to work, always have and always will, they just don’t want to work like that, or at least not for those wages. Either demand less from me, or make it worth my while. It’s some pretty simple mathematics even a CEO can figure out if they try.

  People will even work without pay, if there is something they personally enjoy doing or find worthwhile. It’s called hobbies and volunteering. Make it make sense, and people will work. It’s what we do.

  Have these soul-sucking corporations that are supposedly struggling to find affordable workers considered being less soul-sucking? Is that an option we can put on the table, maybe? Worth experimenting with? Just a thought.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨do men leggings also push up your butt like women's do?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s true, the movie does address this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would taking a tbs of olive oil before each meal lower the GI of everything else you eat?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No, but it might make you eat somewhat less of everything else, lowering the total glycemic load of your meal. The index just tells you if that food is high in sugars, that hasn’t changed. If you eat less of it, that will help. The olive oil can make up some of the rest of your calorie needs, so you won’t need as much of the high-GI foods.

  I guess. In theory.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This is primarily a North American concern. A 15amp 120V circuit does not heat water fast enough for the pre-wash cycle to actually have hot water in it. The wash cycle will eventually get hot water but not until at least halfway through, so for half of it you’re washing with cold/warm water at best. Depending on what you’re washing, that may be okay, but the dishwasher will definitely wash better if it is connected to the hot water supply and the hot water pipe is pre-filled with hot water by running the tap at the sink. European dishwashers are often connected to cold, because they have 220V+ heating elements that can deliver a lot more heat energy and they are designed for this. North American dishwashers are not.

  The drain does not matter, you can pour whatever you want down the drain. The concern is on the supply-side only, and only applies if the dishwasher is in fact connected to the hot water line (which it should be, in North American installations, but sometimes it is installed wrong)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  In video games, when you are offered a choice between two horrible options which both have the same outcome, you quickly realize that you either have either done something terribly wrong prior to this event and that’s led to this bad ending, or you are being pushed to search for the secret third option.

  I think in this case the same thing applies. We can either accept the bad ending and quit, or search for the third option. Neither of those two choices are going to solve these problems. There’s one that maybe offers a few more minutes of dialogue before you get there, and maybe the secret option is down that path, but we’d better start searching for it now instead of assuming that things are going to turn out okay if we pick the less-bad option.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This is why Americans hate Socialism.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That sounds more like it’s probably a problem related to living in a house built out of toothpicks with paper-thin walls and windows in a place where too many humans have been forced to congregate in a small area for primarily economic and sociopolitical reasons. But, you know, you can also blame the people stuck there with you too if you want.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Temp Check on Blood of the Dawnwalker?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I only meant it came out of nowhere to me. I’m not trying to universalize my experience onto everyone else or attack the game, I’m just living and sharing my own experience, and this is how it works and looks from where I am, which I thought was the kind of perspective OP was asking for. I’m glad they’re enjoying it, but I’m going to be holding off.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Temp Check on Blood of the Dawnwalker?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The temperature is too hot for me. That’s because I get suspicious of games that are mega-viral and seemingly come out of nowhere to have everybody talking about them all at once. I figure it’s often either a fad, a masterfully executed guerilla marketing campaign, or genuinely outstanding, or some combination of these things. Of course, sometimes it is just genuinely outstanding, and if that’s the case I’ll probably pick it up eventually. But there’s no rush, so regardless of which it is, I’m a patient gamer and I’m perfectly willing to wait and let the dust settle so I can get a better perspective, and very often I find these kind of games fade pretty quickly and are forgotten and in the clear light of day I’ll often realize they’re not really the kind of game I like anyway. And if they’re the kind of genuinely outstanding instant classic they seem to be at first, they’ll still be around once I’m ready for them, and potentially on sale. So, overall this strategy of suspicion-by-default and wait for more data has served me well.

  There are plenty of games I’ll impulse-buy, but it’s never the popular ones, it’s the ones that have a dozen reviews. I’m always suspicious of popularity. I do not believe in the wisdom of crowds, at least for my own entertainment preferences. I have very specific interests and preferences, and frankly I know them when I see them, and this probably isn’t it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valheim: Deep North 1.0⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I highly doubt you are a developer of this game, but if you are, well… that explains a lot I guess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why do we punish people when nothing bad happened ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I absolutely can and do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why do we punish people when nothing bad happened ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Nothing bad happened yet. Keep doing it, and something bad’s going to happen. An ounce of prevention is better than a truckload of cure. Some things can’t be cured. You can’t punish someone hard enough to undo road deaths. The victims are still going to be dead. They don’t come back to life once the killer goes to jail. There is no other reasonable way to handle road deaths than by stopping them before they happen. Drive at a reasonable and appropriate speed, or someone’s going to die. Those are your options.

  No it’s not a perfect solution, people still die on the roads, and they probably always will, but we’ve chosen the speed limits at a point that prevents some deaths, you cannot realistically argue that, and that is all you have to know to understand that they are justified, and they do have an appropriate punishment.

  Does that help you understand?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨is there a name for when you stop preventing a problem thinking it's solved and it comes back?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  In software development this is called a regression, and it is why we have regression tests. If you don’t run or check the regression tests, the problems they’re testing for can (and do) come back.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happens if I call the family of Karoline Leavitt?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Trump and his buddies are very, very petty and vindictive. The law will not protect you, even if the things you say are protected by law, and if the FBI has nothing better to do (which seems likely these days) you may be in dangerous waters. I would never recommend intentional aggravation of bullies unless you’re very confident you know a way to make sure they can never hurt you again in the future.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could heating oil subsidies be reduced or replaced with subsidies for installing electric heating and houses.?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The HVAC trades are run kind of like a mafia, at least in my part of the world. It’s a savage business, and it’s not because they’re competing on price.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could heating oil subsidies be reduced or replaced with subsidies for installing electric heating and houses.?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Using secondary heat for a few days or even a month a year is still a huge improvement, huge cost savings, and adds up to a massive reduction in annual carbon footprint, even if you’re using a fossil fuel furnace for secondary heat. People are crazy to not consider heat pumps as the primary heat option, especially if you already have central air conditioning, it’s basically the same machine, typically with the same connections and location, just physically somewhat bigger. Obviously it won’t work absolutely everywhere, but for the vast majority it’s a brilliant option and almost a drop-in replacement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How com the ad industry make so much money?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know how that’s a conspiracy. Like you suggest, it’s basically tautological, that’s what advertising/marketing IS by definition. Whether you think that’s a bad thing or not (I do in almost all of its current forms) is an entirely different question and a matter of opinion, and while I might be guilty of letting that opinion leak into my commentary I also don’t see a lot of facts we actually seem to disagree on, so I’m not really sure what else there is to discuss. I don’t think it would be productive to get into the weeds of why I think that’s such a bad thing, it’s not really relevant to the question that was asked. I just thought understanding the profit motives that make the advertising industry so lucrative would probably be pretty useful to appreciate why the industry is the way it is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How com the ad industry make so much money?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Because they are funded by literally almost every other industry and business on the planet, small and large. They have established themselves as the critical and inescapable middleman between consumers and providers, not necessarily directly or exclusively but in every practical way possible and in such subtle ways that it’s not always obvious how much they actually control. They are the gatekeepers of all commerce, they control the information of even knowing what businesses exist and what they do and are the only way of finding them and are often the only way of finding a price too. All commerce flows through them, and so they inevitably take their cut of all that business. Few other industries are as widespread through the rest of the economy as advertising is, and none are able to establish effective monopolies as easily as advertising has.

  Oil comes close, but even oil is ultimately a commodity that can be take from or moved around from place to place for the right price. It doesn’t separate businesses from their consumers the way advertising does. A business or consumer can find a different source for oil – but they have to use information to do that. And the advertising industry controls most of the information.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Whats the point of the 2nd amendment⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Have you tried stating your opinion one way or the other, since your questions clearly indicate you have some thoughts of your own on the matter, instead of sealioning people with “just asking questions”?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Obama wing of the Democratic Party is declaring “war” on progressives. Why don’t they ever bring this energy against Trump? Why do they hate working class people even more?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Because the working class have always held the real power, being the real reason work gets done, and as a result have always been the real enemy of the people in power and the real threat to their power. Some of them are just better at pretending, because they want to play “Good cop, bad cop” against us, and that strategy has been working really well for them lately.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How no-techy/"common" people know if a Open Source code is secure?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It is always possible. The point is that while open source software doesn’t solve this problem, it gives you a non-zero chance of someone detecting it and raising the alarm. Non-zero may be large or may be small, it is probably never 100% chance, but large non-zero is very good, and even small non-zero it is much better than the 0% detection chance that closed source offers.