cecilkorik
@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
“remove any thing that they might be able to do” is a hilariously broad brush to apply to three letter agencies in this day and age that were doing things like this 50 years ago.
I’m not saying it’s realistic that OP is being targeted for such surveillance. But if they are, good fucking luck! Flashing your firmware ain’t going to do shit when they’ve just gone ahead and replaced the chips on your board with their own that act exactly like a normal chip but have extra code that doesn’t get flashed when they don’t want it to.
- Comment on Why do fancy cars look fancy and cheap cars don't? Can't you just slap a Lamborghini-style chassis onto a lawnmower engine if you want? 6 days ago:
You absolutely can slap a Lambo body on anything (provided it fits) and there is a literal cottage industry that exists around doing so. It’s not popular because, let’s be honest, it’s pretty silly, and everyone involved acknowledges its pretty much just for fun and entertainment. The status symbol of “owning a Lamborghini” goes away forever the second you start the engine.
There is a lot of psychology that goes into designing the appearance of cars. Like, an extreme amount. Car companies spend millions designing and refining body shapes and styles, and building brand images, and pushing commercials that seed these ideas into your head about their brand looking a certain way and that look therefore implying quality, they’re connecting all those dots in your head, one marketing campaign at a time, and it works because we’re honestly pretty gullible creatures at least when somebody wants to spend millions upon millions of dollars researching exactly how they can weasel their way into your brain.
And this might surprise you, but the same “looks incredible but the worst piece of shit ever” can certainly apply to luxury vehicles. Aside from notorious reliability and repairability issues, Lamborghinis don’t usually win any races either. They won’t win a drag race, they won’t win an oval track race, they won’t win a rally race. They’re fast, certainly, but they’re not the fastest and for what you pay for a Lamborghini you could build a much, MUCH better purpose-built race car. You could probably build 10 purpose-built race cars. Hell, people build race cars out of junkyard parts that can beat Lamborghinis. They’re not the end-all-be-all of cars, nor are any of the other luxury brands. They have some nice features but they also have a lot of dumb features and yes, a lot of cut corners too. They’re designed to be desirable and profitable, not to be the best.
So to answer your question, it absolutely IS the case for cars, in fact it’s probably even moreso the case than it is with computer parts. Unless you really need to roar down the highway towing a 10,000 pound trailer at 80 mph and still get up to that speed in 5 seconds flat, you really only need like probably 30-50 horsepower max for most of the daily driving that people do, but people’s driving habits and attitudes would have to change and they would hate the feel of gradual acceleration, so they would simply never buy such a car. I think we really underestimate how incredible even the cheapest “crappiest” cars are. We’re talking about machines cheap enough for almost everybody in our society to own, that can drive at high speeds, in perfectly dry, climate-controlled comfort, carrying many passengers and cargo, in almost any weather short of a tornado or flood, with excellent reliability for hundreds of thousands of miles, that provide constant lighting and electricity and entertainment, all while maintaining a high degree of safety for the occupants.
If you’d rather putter around on a riding lawnmower with a Lamborghini body kit on it, you absolutely can do that, but you have to understand that once you start comparing the limited features and abilities it provides you will quickly find what you’ve constructed is the real “piece of shit” in comparison. Just don’t forget your slow-moving vehicle sign!
- Comment on What's going on with moths and lamps in lemmy? 1 week ago:
That’s awesome thanks! (Community discovery is still something I struggle with on Lemmy)
- Comment on What's going on with moths and lamps in lemmy? 1 week ago:
Reddit had a community “OutOfTheLoop” for these type of questions. It was very helpful for people like me who do our best to ignore these nonsense viral image macros that get blown out of proportion. The problem on Lemmy is, judging by the comments here, I think almost everyone here avoids those things like the plague, so there’s few if anyone “InTheLoop” around to explain for us.
- Comment on Why are you here and not on Reddit? 1 week ago:
Welcome!
But I have to ask, why are you guys here and not on Reddirt?
Hilarious typo if it wasn’t intentional.
Where the population us much larger and its basically the same?
First thing you quickly realize here is that larger is not necessarily better. Small is beautiful, you can have actual thoughtful conversations with individuals here without the incessant dogpiling and low effort meme replies. I have even got smacked down (and rightly so) for accidentally bringing some of that with me at one point. It’s not needed or desirable here.
It appears a few instances dominate this landscape anyway?
When you actually look at the comments I usually find almost everyone is on a different instance, in fact when there are relatively small numbers of comments like the are on most posts, you often won’t even see the same instance in the comments twice unless it’s the same person. Yeah, some instances have “huge numbers” of people and communities (lemmy.world) but I think a lot of them are honestly just rarely used, abandoned, or otherwise non-participatory, and the communities can be used by anybody (which is exactly the point of federation). The people actually spending their time here are on a wide variety of instances, often even using different frontends or software. And that’s great. To me, the ecosystem feels healthy and diverse.
Its not like this is unchecked social media, they still moderate these places right?
The point is you can choose an instance whose moderations suit you. (Almost?) all instances moderate to some degree, complete unmoderation is how you end up infested with child porn and other horrible shit. But the directions they moderate in, and the specific things they moderate, can vary wildly depending on the preferences of the owners and the countries they operate in. They also federate with and defederate different instances, which is a large-scale form of moderation. Most instances defederate (and have been defederated by) hexbear and lemmygrad. But not all of them do. Some also defederate lemmy.ml. But not most. And of course those three still federate with each other, and with some other instances. The point isn’t to completely prevent isolated echo chambers, it’s to allow the instances themselves (and the users who join them) to choose how much echo they want to hear compared to how many challenging views they disagree with. Everyone should be able to find a balance that suits them. Most of the people complaining about the content on Lemmy have probably just chosen the wrong instance, frankly, because most people don’t understand how this works and the biases and moderation attitudes inherent in all these different instances is not always super obvious at first glance.
Reddit sucks now. I still check there regularly but I find both the content and the commenting less and less interesting and find myself spending less and less time there. It hasn’t been a sudden process, but the more time I spend on Lemmy the more I like it and the more communities I find and engage in.
- Comment on What would it take to make Gemini suitable to be president of the world? 1 week ago:
Honesty, empathy and respect.
Good luck ever convincing me an LLM has any of those. I’m not even convinced most of humanity does.
- Comment on What did Musk and Trump fall out over? 1 week ago:
That’s exactly my point. If they do in a few days “come back from” that and are all buddy buddy again, then I think that indicates it was just a staged performance for show and distraction and none of it was real fighting. Suggests it was all just an act. (IF they do come back from it. Which remains to be seen)
Muskrat has already backed down from a few things he said in the “heat” of the argument, like that he was going to disassemble the Dragon capsules. So I wouldn’t jump to your conclusion that they can’t possibly “come back from” this, my point is just that if they do, it was probably all just an act to begin with because I agree if it’s real, stuff was said that either one of these vindictive sociopaths is likely to forget.
- Comment on What did Musk and Trump fall out over? 1 week ago:
I’m putting 50/50 odds that it’s an intentional, theatrical distraction from other more important things that are going on, or it’s just the inevitable outcome of two malignant narcissist sociopaths being in the same room together too often. If they quickly kiss and make up I’ll lean more towards the former than the latter.
- Comment on Is this genocide denial? 1 week ago:
It also sounds like sealioning. So yeah genocide denial by either shutting you up or making you appear to be the bigot would be the goal.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
If Barbra Streisand cannot delete her name from her house on the Internet, you cannot delete your comments. The Internet only forgets when you don’t want it to. If you want it to forget, it never will.
Posting a comment on the Internet is something that can never be undone. Once it’s out there, it’s out there forever. You can try and delete it, and you might make some progress, you might even be successful, but there are no guarantees, and the more you want it to be deleted the less likely you’ll be able to pull it off.
In a practical sense, just use to built-in features to delete your account and posts. It’s not perfect or guaranteed, but it’s the best you’re going to get.
- Comment on Why don't people like Melon Tusk get tired of the shit they gave you pull through literally every day ? I mean doesn't the guilt of bad decisions pull them down enough like the rest of us ? 2 weeks ago:
A lot of the current crop of billionaires literally became billionaires by disrupting the establishment, overhauling whole industries and toppling the old systems of power and control. They were by definition anti-establishment. The problem is… now they’re the establishment and they’ve implemented their own, even worse systems of power and control.
Much of the pre-Trump establishment is gone now, and no one should regret that, except for the unfortunate detail that the post-Trump establishment is far, far worse than anything that came before it.
The problem with popular revolutions is that they don’t always end up being very popular once the revolution has succeeded.
- Comment on How does HTML actually run on a computer? 2 weeks ago:
You are conflating a bunch of different things here and it’s hard to tell exactly what you’re even asking. HTML is completely separate from Javascript and CSS. Together, they are web technologies and typically all three are used to display a webpage, but only HTML is actually required. The others provide additional functions, each in their own way.
More to your point. HTML is not a programming language. It is not turing-complete. It is a markup language. It does not get “compiled”, it gets “rendered”. This may seem like a semantic difference, but these are actually different things and they are handled differently by code and in fact by completely different engines within the code. HTML rendering engines are still very complex beasts, and while you can draw some similarities with a compiler, they are not the same thing.
Most web standards are defined by the W3C, that includes HTML and CSS. But there are many different standards, even ones defined by the W3C, and many versions of those standards as well. All of these are handled by the browser’s rendering engine. However, there’s also a lot of bad code in the world that still needs to be rendered correctly, and you might be surprised how recently some of these standards actually developed. The browser wars have flared up many times and each time “standards” were usually the casualty. Mozilla has this brief explainer of the three different “quirks” modes currently used for compatibility on the modern web.
Javascript engines are their own whole different ballgame, as Javascript/ECMAscript is indeed a turing complete programming lanaguage, and all the big players (V8, Spidermonkey/Warpmonkey) are highly sophisticated JIT compilers with multiple layers of on-the-fly optimization. The deeper technical details are frankly beyond me.
Modern web browsers are as complex, feature-rich environments as any traditional operating system, and they have as many different aspects to them as any complete operating system does. They are not “one engine” or “one compiler” or “one standard” as much as they are an ecosystem of engines, compilers, standards, protocols and libraries all working together while remaining compatible with each other and all the other software that is out there, to ultimately present the user with a coherent, consistent and accessible representation that hides most of the immense complexity of what is going on behind the scenes.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
The US is not really a functioning democracy right now so it’s kind of a crapshoot to be discussing what they do now, however if you’re interested more in the idea of what they’re supposed to do, they propose and vote on new legislation, same as the members of the house of representatives. Generally, bills can be proposed by either group, and both bodies must pass the bill for it to reach the president to be signed into law.
What makes the two different is that the senate is intentionally much smaller, and all states are equally represented (2 senators each), unlike the house which is proportionally represented with more populous states having far greater numbers of representatives and thus votes. The senate also changes members less frequently with senators being elected for 6 year terms compared to the president’s 4 years and the representatives at 2 years. The idea for the senate is for it to be responsible for considering longer term effects of proposed legislation, as well as to consider and propose legislation on issues that affect the whole nation equally including the smaller states that have less of a voice in the house of representatives. In theory, it’s a very thoughtful and well-balanced system. The reality is… well, we can all see what’s happened to it.
- Comment on Can a person use AI or whatever and get rid of their name and history off the net? And can it create a new ident with a bunch of history pictures and so forth? 2 weeks ago:
The internet remembers forever. Literally. The more you want something gone, the more tenaciously the internet will preserve it and treasure it and amplify it.
You can absolutely create a new fake profile. You can create lots, an endless amount of them. That’s trivial. AIs are doing that all the time, some people legitimately believe most of the internet nowadays is just bots with fake profiles arguing with other bots with equally fake profiles. And it’s plausible they could be at least a little more right than most people would imagine. See the dead internet theory
But trying to have something removed from the internet is like asking your family to stop telling that embarrassing story at every gathering. All it does is let everyone know there’s an embarrassing story, and intrigues everybody to find out what it is. And they won’t stop until they do. See also the Streisand Effect.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
If a government raises taxes for something so that working class people cannot buy it, that government becomes richer by exploiting the working class.
Governments don’t become “rich”, and if they do, that either signals unchecked corruption, or a government that is investing wisely in the nation’s present and future, depending on where the money is going. This may seem contradictory, but the reality is, you need a much deeper and broader understanding of your government’s finances and economic plan before the accusations you’re making will hold any weight. This is not something that can be reasoned about in the abstract and addressed with news-bite talking points. It a hugely complex situation and people spend lifetimes studying this.
A government that is genuinely exploiting the working class should be replaced by the working class with a government that supports and protects the working class. If you do not have the power to choose your government, then you need to figure that out how to organize the working class and acquire that power first, otherwise you’re wasting your time trying to change a government you have no control over, and that’s not going to work and it’s never going to support and protect you.
CO2 makes up a miniscule amount of our atmosphere.
This is accurate.
In the past there have been ice ages while the atmospheric CO2 level was 10 times higher than it is now.
This is misleading disinformation
The notion that eating insects will save the world seems a little dubious.
This is accurate.
- Comment on "Official" Russian Military game depicting invasion of Ukraine released on Steam as Yunarmy propaganda 2 weeks ago:
“Blatant land and money grab with impossible grind. Offers pay 2 win, but even pay 2 win doesn’t even get you through the grind. I’m selling all the oil I can for in-game currency and it’s not even making a dent. Huge rip off”
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
When you join the largest “catch all” instance, then you browse “all”, then you get the good with the bad. large means large, all means all. the point of the Fediverse is that you can create your own feed, starting from scratch if you wish, but nobody ever said that would be trivially easy. Federation gives you the ability to see literally everything, if that’s what you choose, but you have to choose whether you want “everything” to be the default or “nothing” to be the default. If you want showing everything to be the default, you can join the hugest mega instance available (lemmy.world) that’s what you did.
If you’d rather opt-in to new communities instead of having to opt-out, start small. Go join a very small or heavily moderated or both instance, or start your own using a whitelist that only federates with communities you know are okay.
Also consider that you don’t have to click on shit you don’t want to see. You’re choosing to go to “all”, you’re choosing to click, to engage, to be angry. Nothing you say or shout or scream or rant about is going to stop this stuff from being out there in the world. I understand you don’t want to see it, neither do I. That’s why I have joined a smaller instance that has already rather strict rules and relatively strong moderation, and I have further tailored my communities based on that, and when that fails and I occasionally see something I don’t want to see, I downvote it or hide it or report it and move on with my life, because that happens, shitty things exist, I accept that is part of the reality I exist in and I don’t have to like everything I see and if I can’t do anything useful about it I’m not going to lose my mind about it.
I’m not trying to tell you you’re using lemmy wrong but… you’re using it wrong.
- Comment on Heroes of the Seven Islands is a hand-drawn fantasy rpg with anthropomorphic characters DEMO is OUT on Steam - I would be glad to have your feedback! 3 weeks ago:
You had me at “Might and Magic”.
Actually, you had me at the art style when I saw it was actually pretty convincingly hand-drawn, not just some filters slapped on to make it look that way. I hope it is not AI or I’ll start having to question my damn lying eyes again.
- Comment on Moonbase Alpha: That time NASA made a meme video game 3 weeks ago:
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Digital media deteriorates too, it can be corrupted subtly or obviously and it can fail catastrophically. Backups and archival especially over the very long term are not simple or straightforward, it’s easy to make mistakes and for accidents to happen and a broken link in the chain can lead to the failure of the whole chain.
“Defense in depth” is a good principle to rely on here. Digitization of physical media media makes sense and the risks are on the whole probably easier to avoid since keeping multitudes of digital copies is logisticially trivial compared to making physical copies. But that doesn’t mean it’s without risks, and may fail against risks that a physical copy wouldn’t. Both is better than either one, and either one is better than none.
- Comment on What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with? 3 weeks ago:
Do you have to agree with everyone you give your money to? What sort of economy would that be?
Probably a pretty nice one, actually.
- Comment on What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with? 3 weeks ago:
Yeah that would be bad. I think we can agree that if there’s one thing that’s even more important than the ideology of an author, it’s definitely capitalism, which is conveniently not an ideology at all, just one of the fundamental laws of the universe. That’s why it’s important to not pirate things for ideological reasons.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
It’s a screening number. It’s not supposed to be “trustworthy” because it doesn’t mean anything other than as an arbitrary point for grouping individuals into categories that can be used to estimate risks and make generalized decisions.
As a thought experiment, consider another commonly used screening number, that breast cancer screening should become routine at age 40. Does that mean breast cancer doesn’t happen to women below age 40? Of course not. Does it mean breast cancer will always happen eventually above age 40? Also of course not. What does it mean? Basically nothing. There is nothing magic or medically significant about being 40 years old specifically. It’s just that we decide that’s a good approximation of the time when the benefits start to outweigh the costs for most people.
For an individual it’s a pointless number that is completely erased by a massive number of individual risk factors and situational factors. You are an individual. It does not apply to you.
For large populations, it’s a decent generalization. For people working with large populations, it can be a very useful measurement. But it’s not really supported to be anything more than that, and it’s not particularly useful to apply to you individually. We do of course frequently apply it individually, including many doctors (usually following the direction of insurance companies who DO care about large populations and DON’T care about you as an individual), but that’s not really particularly justifiable, that’s just a reflection of how our health care system works (or doesn’t).
- Comment on Why is it okay for shit to go down the drain but not food? 3 weeks ago:
Your link isn’t too helpful for what you’re describing.
All household wastewater (including kitchen) ultimately goes into the sanitary sewer in most places, if it comes out of a house it’s all called “sanitary”. The alternative to sanitary sewer is storm drain, which is intended ONLY for surface rainwater and usually never have any household hookups, except potentially from rain gutters on the roof or tile drainage below ground, but municipalities are often pretty strict about that as these systems are very important for managing stormwater and avoiding flash flooding.
The third option, which I think is what you’re getting at, is called graywater, and indeed you could have sinks and even showers plumbed into graywater drains, but never toilets, and it’s often clean enough or can be filtered so that it can be re-used for flushing toilets, irrigating lawns and gardens or other forms of non-potable re-use that won’t be bothered by things like soaps and lotions and bacteria and other things that might get rinsed off. This is common for RVs and boats and other situations where fresh water might be scarce, but very much less typical for household plumbing in most places in my experience, and there is rarely any municipal system hookup for it and the graywater is usually intended to be used on-site within the household plumbing system itself, but it can help divert or reduce wastewater into the sanitary sewer and can help reduce the use of clean potable water, so it is a good thing in general.
- Comment on Why is it okay for shit to go down the drain but not food? 3 weeks ago:
I’d also point out that the toilet pipe is significantly larger than than the kitchen pipe, and uses a multi-gallon, siphon-powered flush to help move it along. Your kitchen sink has none of these plumbing advantages. If you wanted to have a 3 inch kitchen drain and some kind of powered flush apparatus you might have a better time with food waste, but it’s still probably not a good idea for the reasons other people have mentioned. A normal kitchen sink drain configuration, even with the assistance of a disposal, is still quite ill-equipped to handle that kind and quantity of waste.
- Comment on Are there any initiatives aimed at training generative AI using 100% public domain works and works authorized by the creator? 3 weeks ago:
I was just making some snide commentary for fun. It was a little bit at your expense I admit. I appreciate you for not taking it personally! This is why we can sometimes have nice things.
- Comment on Are there any initiatives aimed at training generative AI using 100% public domain works and works authorized by the creator? 3 weeks ago:
Ultimately we want as smart LLMs as we can,
We do? I want LLMs to die in a fire (which they will likely cause by vastly and rapidly increasing global warming, so the problem at least solves itself)
We are not the same.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
It’s not even about lack of trust in the future, it’s about what we picture that future to be. I think it’s more about not wanting to continue this unsustainable pyramid scheme based on the myth of infinite growth. Things that grow infinitely kill their hosts, become plagues, destroy ecosystems, and then eventually die out because they have nothing left to live with.
To me, it’s about deciding whether we are going to spread out into the solar system and maybe eventually the galaxy if we manage to survive that long, chasing that unsustainable goal of endless growth like a plague of locusts, consuming everything in our path and leaving behind only destruction and death and waste, until we can find nothing more to consume or until we starve ourselves to death before we can find enough. The other option depends on whether we can see the potential of thoughtful progress, embrace sustainability and think about controlling our growth and maintaining our population at a comfortable level, allowing us to find a more harmonious and intelligent way forward. The question is not whether we can continue to grow unsustainably – we have the ability to continue growing for the foreseeable future and certainly can pursue that if that’s what we decide we want, the question is whether we should, and the answer I think most people would come up with if they actually think about it is that we shouldn’t.
I don’t think most people necessarily think of it in those terms, I think a lot of people just look at things like the cost of living and at their own general happiness and comfort and value they get out of living, and that subtly but consistently influences whether people decide whether to have 0, 1, or 2 kids and stop there, or whether to have 3, 4, 5, or more, with people who are in poorer overall situations tending to have more, not less. This is why developed countries tend to have lower birth rates, typically below even replacement rate. One benefit of the globalization that has been done and the resulting massive wealth transfer to less developed countries is that it is lowering their birth rates and slowing global population growth. That is clearly visible through data. Demographics are a deceptively complicated thing, and are not always intuitive, but we do have a pretty good handle on it despite what it may seem like, and the world population is currently projected to stop growing around what is probably a reasonably sustainable level (about 10 to 11 billion).
The problem is that our attitudes towards sustainability and equality tend to get thrown out the window every time another major technological change or social upheaval happens, and then all bets are off again as we figure out how to fit that back into the new picture of existence and expectations and growth and progress. Some medical breakthrough causing significant human life extensions or essentially immortality could throw the entire population situation completely off base in mere decades and that will rapidly become a serious maybe catastrophic challenge. If you think the housing crisis is bad now, imagine how bad it would be if every homeowner lived for eternity and babies still keep getting born and growing up and then imagine you try to fix it by telling people they have to stop having babies or that they can’t live as long as they want to.
A lot of the population growth we saw in the last century or two, from mere hundreds of millions into the many billions, came about almost entirely due to human life extensions and reduction of infant mortality. And of course that’s a good thing, and we are right to strive for it, but it strains our economic foundation more than anyone realizes. Even small changes to these data points, resulting in people living a little longer on average, can have massive and continuous impacts on population growth until they reach a new equilibrium, which may be far higher than you expect and adds up to enormous amounts of additional resources needed.
Technology has given us all so much more resources than any generation in history, the problem is there are also a lot more people to share it with, so in some very real ways it is in fact less per person. Some of that is intentional, some of it isn’t. The math of demographics and population growth are absolutely relentless and sometimes pretty unforgiving. We have to be really, really smart about it if we want to get ahead of it. And it’s risky business dealing with very sensitive subjects.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
That’s the point of the comment. It’s pointing out why the analogy doesn’t work. A stray feral cat, with few exceptions, MUST hunt to survive. A homeless person can use a food bank or scavenge or beg. They are not in the same situation and cannot be directly compared in potential fighting effectiveness.
- Comment on Is Pop_OS! kind of bad? 4 weeks ago:
I like Pika but it’s mostly personal preference in my case, I’ve got a completely unsupportable and probably counterproductive addiction to apt. I agree with your assessment.