31337

@31337@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In the US, is this actually the moment past the point of no return?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Meh, I would’ve given 3/5 stars to U.S. democracy since the Voting Rights Act. Stars taken away for FPTP, gerrymandering, campaign finance, “lobbying,” and the electoral college. I believe we’re going to go to 0/5 stars with completely rigged elections rather than just manufacturing consent and lightly tipping the scales like they’ve been doing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In the US, is this actually the moment past the point of no return?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I think this could be the end of free and fair elections in the U.S., and there’s no coming back from that without a revolution. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think most of us will directly be killed by this change; our lives will just be shittier. It’ll be like living in Russia. Given how utterly incompetent the administration is looking, and the things they say they’re going to do (mass deportation of a significant part of our workforce, blanket tariffs, gutting social safety-nets), we may speed-run an economic and societal collapse. That could sow the seeds for a horrible and bloody revolution.

  Or, maybe I’m wrong and the important institutions will somehow hold against a christo-fascist party controlling all branches of the federal government and a president with immunity. If there are still are free and fair elections, then congress could block a lot of things in 2026, and start repairing some of the damage in 2028.

  Still, it does not bode well that the U.S. elected these people in the first place, and at best, the U.S. will slowly crumble for decades.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Half-Life 2 is currently 100% for its 20th anniversary⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I remember liking Opposing Force and Blue Shift too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon falls through the cracks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Happens when you’re not proud of what you’re contributing to. Probably most workers, tbh.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries programming in Java⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Idk. Maybe it’s because I learned OOP first that it makes more sense to me; but OOP is a good way to break down complex problems and encapsulate them into easily understable modules. Languages like Java almost force everyone on the project to use similar paradigms and styles, so it’s easier for everyone to understand the code base. Whenever I’ve worked on large non-OOP projects, it was a hard-to-maintain mess. I’ve never worked on projects such as the Linux kernel, and I’m hoping it’s not an unmaintainable mess, so I’m pretty sure it’s possible to not use OOP on large projects and still be maintainable. I am curious if they still use OOP concepts, even though they are not using strictly OOP.

  I also like procedural python for quick small scripts. And although Rust isn’t strictly OOP, it obviously borrows heavily from it. Haskell is neat, but I haven’t used it enough to be proficient or develop good sense of application architecture.

  I’ve done production work in C, but still used largely OOP concepts; and the code looks much different than code I’ve seen that was written before C++ was popular.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do Americans win their country back?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ok, yes, I support actions like these, and they are good for community defense against small civilian fascist groups. There are not the numbers to counter organizations like FBI, DHS, or national guard though. Things are a bit different when the fascist group you’re trying to counter is the federal or state government with the will to kill and immunity from their actions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do Americans win their country back?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The left is such a small population in the US, it’s irrelevant. If we are to believe Trump’s rhetoric, any group that becomes too much of a nuisance will be deemed “the enemy within,” and be shot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US Democracy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Things are quite different. While Trump was in office, he did multiple things that were worse than what Nixon did, and was never forced to leave office. I think our institutions were stronger back then. We didn’t have a very good democracy when Hoover was president, and it took many decades for the Voting Rights Act to get passed (which has recently been weakened by SCOTUS, and will probably be weakened much more). I think we’ll regress quite a bit. Republicans obviously want more of an autocracy/oligarchy. I think it’s a very real possibility we have Russia-style “elections” in the future, and I don’t even know how you come back from that. Assuming democracy isn’t completely destroyed, it may take many decades of fighting and changing the minds of the people who aren’t disenfranchised to get back to where we were. Hell, even civil war is on the table if Trump follows through on some of his more egregious promises (i.e. if he deems Democratic state governments as the “enemy within” and tries to use the military to depose them).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Calculatable⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  NCalc+ is pretty good. I don’t use it for anything complicated though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If Trump wins the election thru fraud how can the democrats refute it and prove they won? Or will it just be like another Jan 6 and four years of whining like Trump?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  IMO, the U.S. will become similar to Russia. It’s not some sudden societal collapse scenario; just an oligarchy with high levels of corruption and incompetence. Most people will conform or keep their heads down to avoid the consequences of stepping out of line. If you’re in a possibly targeted group, you may want a valid passport though. And it’s always been a good idea to keep at least a months worth of non-perishable food on hand in case of supply chain disruptions. Possibly stuff like emergency propane heaters and a propane tank could be useful too (they’ve been useful for me in the past already without an authoritarian government or social unrest). Knowing your neighbors and helping eachother out in little ways is probably the most powerful thing though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If Trump wins the election thru fraud how can the democrats refute it and prove they won? Or will it just be like another Jan 6 and four years of whining like Trump?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Source? First I’ve heard of anything like this. I’d imagine a lot of things would have to be settled in court given the US’s strange laws giving states so much leeway in how they conduct federal elections.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't we have cool vending machines in the US?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Factories I’ve worked at had vending machines filled with microwavable food (burritos, burgers, sandwiches, etc). All of it was pretty disgusting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Artifical Intelligence⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  AI image generators have been around for a fairly long time. I remember deepfake discussion from about a decade ago. Not saying the image in discussion is though. I remember Alex Jones making conspiracy theories that revolved around Bush and lossy video compression artifacts too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games industry layoffs not the result of corporate greed and those affected should "drive an Uber", says ex-Sony president⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t know why society tolerates these dumbass parasites.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨First contact when?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think I’ve seen calculations that we could explore every star in the galaxy with self-replicating probes in something like a million years; and other civilizations could do the same.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Balls⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s also Delecta Ltd, which is an Australian sex toy maker and a mining company.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are vegan and gluten free items more expensive?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For the things you mentioned, the vegan and gluten-free options are processed much more. Beef, for example, is arguably a “whole food.”

  Gluten-free isn’t healthier unless you have specific conditions. Most people can handle gluten fine, and some vegan foods are primarily gluten (such as seitan).

  Vegan isn’t inherently healthy, especially if your eating mostly processes foods. A primarily whole-food vegan diet is likely healthier and cheaper than most people’s diets though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Actors demand action over 'disgusting' video game sex scenes⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Meh, some of my favorite shows and movies have a lot sex scenes. Sometimes, they just add realism or contribute to aesthetics. Other times they show personality, relationship dynamics, are symbolic of other things, or are important to the plot.

  I don’t see sex scenes as any different than other potentially “unnecessary” scenes, like a long shot of a dripping faucet, for instance.

  But, yeah, most sex scenes in games make me cringe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The heart we can't neglect indeed⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wealth isn’t zero sum, it’s created all the time (and at a rate literally not achievable simply by underpaying employees, to pre-refute the expected response).

  Explain. In a very basic sense wealth is created by acquiring resources (some of which are finite), then adding value through labor. So, the way I see it, the workers are creating the wealth, then the business/owners/investors/shareholders take a significant portion of the employees’ surplus value of labor. I.e. there is a pie of value/wealth that an employee creates, and the more of that pie the business/owners/investors/shareholders get, the less the workers/wealth-creators get.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tea Time⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve never used it, but the idea is that nutrient uptake will be faster than if someone just dressed the top of the soil with compost. The extra aerobic bacteria could also be beneficial.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨meme⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess most of what I’ve heard from her wasn’t “bad,” but it wasn’t “good,” I’d describe it as just “uninteresting.” It’d probably start annoying me if I had to listen to a full album of hers, because it’s not the type of music I enjoy at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Solve a puzzle for me⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  4o scores worse on some benchmarks than 4. 4o is just faster and uses less resources.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Solve a puzzle for me⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  One hypothesis is that having more tokens to process lets it “think” longer. Chain of Thought prompting where you ask the LLM to explain its reasoning before giving an answer works similarly. Also, LLMs seem to be better at evaluating solutions that coming up with them, so there is a Tree of Thought technique, where the LLM is asked to generate multiple examples of a reasoning step then pick the “best” reasoning for each reasoning step.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Solve a puzzle for me⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The set up is similar this well-known puzzle: en.wikipedia.org/…/Wolf,_goat_and_cabbage_problem

  It was probably trained on this puzzle thousands of times. There are problem solving benchmarks for LLMs, and LLMs are probably over-trained on puzzles to get their scores up. When asked to solve a “puzzle” that looks very similar to a puzzle it’s seen many times before, it’s improbable that the solution is simple, so it gets tripped up. Kinda like people getting tripped up by “trick questions.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Solve a puzzle for me⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I tried it once with GPT-4o, GPT-4, and GPT-3.5, Meta AI, and Gemini. They all failed. Pretty interesting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It is very therapeutic to garden, though.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of industrial produced food is cheap because of child, forced, and otherwise exploited labor (undocumented workers, for example). Heavily mechanized farming (mostly used for grains) is cheap because of the vast amount of fossil fuel “energy slaves” used. And that’s only cheap because the costs are externalized.

  Anyways, growing your own food can definitely be cheaper than buying it. Of course, not if you start plants under lights, build raised beds and fill them with purchased soil, buy organic pelletized fertilizer, or stuff like that. It can be nearly free to grow your own food (if you don’t count the cost of your own labor) by saving seeds and intercepting materials from waste streams (wood chips, lawn clippings, manure, used coffee grounds, etc) to “feed your soil.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It is very therapeutic to garden, though.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What are the solutions to #4? Had that problem this year. Something killed about a 1/4 of my tomato and pepper starts because they were still really small when it was time to plant them outdoors (guessing snails or cutworms; I have a lot of both).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Way Forward, an update from the team behind Cities: Skylines⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  CK2 was a complete game at launch IIRC. They just kept releasing new DLC for it for many years, much of which was outside the scope of the original game (playing as Arabic rulers, vikings, Indians, etc). I think that’s fine. Them selling music, portraits, and new models separately was kinda shitty though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I miss windows⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wages are usually much lower in rural areas (if there are even jobs available), so this still applies. And, as others have said, there’s plenty of pollution caused by farms and factories in rural areas. I grew up in a rural area, and still remember the seasonal smell of cow manure, and the river that was so polluted you could only eat 1 fish per month from it. I also got a check from a class action lawsuit because a waste disposal facility caught on fire and spewed toxic smoke all over a 50 mile radius. And a local factory got caught just dumping toxic waste in the ground.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why has the world gone to shit?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh, I’m not sure what position Bezos has now. If I ran Amazon, I’d probably covertly support unionization of the entire workforce. I don’t really care about a luxurious lifestyle, and don’t plan on having kids to give an inheritance to, so yeah, I’d probably just give almost all away and buy a small farm to garden in and work on open source projects or something. Like, that’s my dream. It would actually be really hard to figure out how to give all that money away. Could provide the initial funding to like 100,000 decently sized worker-coops I guess.