ThePowerOfGeek
@ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world
- Comment on Forced to lie on a questionnaire 1 week ago:
That’s objectively poor survey design. For questions like that there should always be an ‘Other’ option. There should also be a ‘None’ or ‘N/A’ option.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Disqualifying in a social sense? Unfortunately, yes I think it would be. It doesn’t matter how awesome your husband is, for a significant chunk of the American electorate, a candidate’s calibre is eclipsed by the voters’ prejudices. And there is a hysteria-level paranoia towards LGBT folks among these people.
It took ages for a Catholic to be elected President due to evangelical paranoia about ‘papists’. And we still haven’t elected a woman, which is insane when you consider women make up half of the electorate. We did have a black guy elected twice, but that was due to a few mitigating factors: a) the timing was right (in the sense that he ran when diversity was seen as more acceptable); b) he was ridiculously charismatic; c) he was also half white; d) he was a Protestant Christian (despite what the ‘secret Muslim’ clowns kept screaming).
IMO it sucks that someone’s orientation, ethnicity, gender, religion, or heritage still bars so many good candidates from running (because this isn’t just a case of the visible candidates like Harris, Buttigieg, or even the likes of Carson, Hilary Clinton, or Palin getting denied at the final hurdle; many candidates never make it close to running due to these biases). But this is the ass-backwards, self-immolating world we live in.
- Comment on What DeleteMe and Incogni aren't telling you 1 week ago:
They are basically more digital data versions of LifeLock. And we all know the legal issues they ran into for disingenuous products/services.
- Comment on Constituents Erupt at North Carolina GOP Town Hall Over DOGE Cuts 2 months ago:
I suspect there are a lot of faces that were eaten by leopards in that room.
- Comment on I recently learned the term "Vibe Coding" and I can't believe that it doesn't mean to be doing spaghetti coding but you don't care because you're just vibing with it. 2 months ago:
Well, given the subpart quality of most complex AI-generated code right now, it could easily mean that too. You just have an AI system generate some code and then just vibe with it and ignore the cavalcade of errors and issues that code causes.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
“Scruffy’s on break!”
- Comment on Have people that have been held captive hallucinated an entire other world ? 2 months ago:
I’m not sure, but probably. I know there was a guy who was in a maximum security prison and often put in solitary confinement for long stretches who said in an interview that he learned to go into a meditative state and project himself into fully immersive scenes of his own creation. And he could do that for hours on end and at will.
- Comment on why is EVERYTHINGGGGG behind a paywall? 2 months ago:
It’s basically the evolution (or devolution?) of the Internet in a capitalist global economy. This is just the next step in the effort to profit off digital Data and communications.
Back in the early 2000s pretty much everything was free to use, and revenue came from passive ads. Then ad blindness and ad blockers kicked in, revenue went down, and the cat and mouse game began of companies trying to find ways of getting clicks and views while the consumer didn’t want to do that. This has escalated over the last 20-odd years.
We’re now at a point where paywalls are fairly effective (for now). So that’s what’s being pushed. Plus, subscriptions and everything-as-a-service is in vogue right now.
I expect that will end when the money-making enshitification of the Internet reaches a critical mass and the economy nosedives for various reasons.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Given the context, no I don’t think you are being aloof. They both knew what they were doing, and no amount of toadying up to you can make up for that.
- Comment on Is Severance the new Lost? 2 months ago:
Oh no, that’s giving me Game of Thrones / ASOIAF / George RR Martin /Kind Bran vibes!
- Comment on The Genius of Meg White's drumming for The White Stripes | Drumeo [12:38] 2 months ago:
I agree with this. Unfortunately it was mostly because she’s a woman. But it’s also because she hits towards the end of the window of each beat. To a lot of people that makes it sound like she’s late or that her timing is wrong. But technically that’s not accurate. It’s the same problem Ringo Starr had. He got a lot of shit for the same thing, but he was also a good drummer.
- Comment on How is my bedroom being heated? 2 months ago:
Are you on the ground floor? If not then maybe whatever is below you is really warm and the heat is coming up through the floor. But I guess in that case the floor would feel warmer.
- Comment on lemmy.world slow loading and timeouts, Jerboa app, morning of 2-18. 2 months ago:
I’ve been seeing this on Voyager too.
- Comment on How does this pic show that Elon Musk doesnt know SQL? 2 months ago:
Elon Musk is the walking talking embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
since everyone here including Americans themselves seems to have a deep hate towards America and the values it stands for
C’mon, seriously? This has to be a troll post. Either that or this is the most absurd generalization I’ve heard in quite a while. And given the state of the media right now, that’s saying something.
There’s a difference between ‘no stupid questions’ and ‘extremely inflammatory and reactionary questions’.
- Comment on Today I got hate speech in my inbox 2 months ago:
So it’s not even coherent hate speech. How old was the person who posted that? 10?
- Comment on What even is fire? 3 months ago:
Fire isn’t a material. It’s the effect of a change in state of other materials. It exists in the same way that freezing or photosynthesis exists.
- Comment on How is the current AI bubble when compared to the .com bubble in the early 2000's? 3 months ago:
Interesting question.
It’s different in the broad mechanics of the hype and the technology, obviously. AI isn’t really a basic information delivery mechanism like the 00s web was. It’s a lot more than that, thanks to the progress we’ve made since then. Plus, it has a lot more potential to impact artists and creative types. The web promised to propel them. Generative AI is threatening to make them completely obsolete.
But a lot of the psyche/sales hype stuff is very similar. The dot com boom started out so about democratizing the world and giving everyone a voice. Then it quickly became a capitalist free for all of coming up with any and every idea to shoehorn the Internet (and especially the web) into every walk of life. And the venture capital money-grabbing frenzy that inevitably led to. So that second aspect is very similar to where we are at right now with AI. And the first aspect isn’t a million miles away from the frequent assurances that AI will better society.
The technology stack for AI is more stable and well thought out than the nebulous web was. But it clearly still has some pretty big implementation challenges. Not to mention the resource/energy ceiling we are currently fighting against.
The potential of AI to destroy huge swathes of professions is massively different from the early commercial web. Back then it was widely seen as a new source of careers, not a career killer.
- Comment on how do I show a coworker that I care about her after her mother died? 4 months ago:
The best way to show her that you (platonically) care about her in this difficult time is to check in with her - especially a couple of weeks after the funeral. That’s when most people who are trying to help her mentally move on. Not that they don’t care, just that everyone has a life to lead. But that’s the period when the bereaved can feel most lonely and struggle a lot.
Just a simple “I hope you’re doing okay” and “let me know if you want to talk about it” will mean the world.
- Comment on what unbiased media sources do you use? 4 months ago:
NPR isn’t too bad.
- Comment on This message will not go away unless I agree to their spyware. 4 months ago:
And switch to another financial institution that don’t act like such asses.
- Comment on Why do games like Minecraft require a launcher? 4 months ago:
It usually makes it easier to centralize authentication. But more importantly (from the company’s perspective), it gives the game producer a chance to upsell other products and micro-transaction content.
- Comment on Why does .World have so many benign and EMPTY communities with no posts? 4 months ago:
That gives me pretty strong Little Bobby Tables vibes.
- Comment on NBC News Does Entire Piece Trying To Link CEO Shooting To ‘Violent Video Game’ 5 months ago:
Massive boomer energy right there.
- Comment on Is there anything Lemmy has more/better content for than Reddit and other mainstream sites? 5 months ago:
Agreed. While there are a few ranty, hostile, irrational replies here, they are much fewer and farther between than on reddit. Not to mention the raiding and mod witch-hunts here are much milder. That shit got insane on reddit back in the day (I don’t know what it’s like now, since I abandoned reddit about 18 months ago).
- Comment on Does anyone else think the NYPD photos of the UHC CEO shooting suspect don’t match? 5 months ago:
Plus the left two have a beige backpack, while right bottom has a dark grey backpack.
- Comment on Do you want the murderer of the UnitHealthcare CEO prosecuted? 5 months ago:
From a rule of law perspective the shooter needs to be punished.
But considering the amount of suffering that CEO and other senior leaders at that company have inflicted on innocent sick people, there’s a big fat dose of karma that goes with this incident, . And I wouldn’t throw the book at the shooter (although you know they will).
- Comment on My brothers Chuwi laptop had major problems. Now he got a wal-mart gift card for the price he paid for the Chuwi. He is eyeing an HP laptop with 256gb ssd. Is that the same as a regular harddrive? 5 months ago:
Yes it’s the same storage size (SSD vs mechanical doesn’t change that). But I would caution to get a larger drive. From my experience, 256gb gets pretty limiting. I would go with at least 512gb.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 months ago:
The funny thing is that they’ve actually improved the graphics of the game a lot over the years. Not just things like water animation, but in improving the resolution of bitmaps for characters, landscapes, etc. they’ve even totally overhauled the graphics for some races (e.g. gnomes, which for a while in beta led to nightmarish animations of their eyes bulging through their eyelids when they blinked).
But to your point: yes, they’ve deliberately left the characters having a goofy, disproportionate cartoonist feel. Because it’s such an integral signature of the game, always has been, and always will be.
- Comment on Most of the trick-or-treaters have been skipping my house, and I finally figured out why 6 months ago:
I just got back from taking one of my kids trick or treating with his friends. It was great. My wife and I got to walk and chat with the other parents while all of our kids knocked on doors and shouted “trick or treat!”. Lots of friendly, generous, nice people. And lots of shouted reminders from us for the kids to not walk on people’s front lawns, to say thank you, to be careful crossing the quiet roads. There were so many other kids out too. It was pretty crazy, but in a good way. About half of the houses were giving out candy in some way or other, with only about a quarter having an un-monitored bowl.
Then on the way home we drove past a church that was having a ‘trunk or treat’ in their parking lot. That just looked sad. There was no excitement for going up to the really cool houses that were decked out in amazing props and decorations. There was no need to hone analytical skills to determine which houses were giving out candy and which ones probably weren’t. Just going very short distances from one car to the next getting candy. My kid asked why they do that. I said it’s probably because they are a closed community who don’t really want to associate with ‘outsiders’. Give me the conventional experience over that all day every day!