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ALostInquirer
Posts
218
Comments
706
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Skillsets skillsets, when the darn thing needs jre older than the one you have installed or tiger.dll is missing, what do you do … ?

    where's waldo.dll when you need them?

  • Which word would you employ to address those seeking power through the scapegoating and targeted discrimination of minorities and vulnerable populations?

  • Now that you mention it...What are we supposed to call that anymore? The...Windows menu, I guess? This reminds me that the "icon-ification" so to speak, of interfaces has made things frustrating for everyone involved since there's no name/label for the icons to rely on to communicate what to click/tap.

  • Usually everyday people don’t setup forums, that’s the responsibility of the application owner(s) or provider.

    By this do you mean official forums? If so I think this is kind of missing some of the independent forums for software (whether games or media players or the like) or other media, which some sorta-everyday people set up in the past. Many have migrated to Discord not only because it's easy but, I think, because it's simply more cost-effective.

    Forums don't seem to be cheap. Discourse's own managed hosting goes for $50 a month, from one of their partners it's $20, and looks like somewhere in-between if you try to spin it up yourself (e.g. Digital Ocean droplet runs $4 a month, then add in domain, and mail-provider (~$20-35)). Looking at that, it's little wonder so many either opt for official forums, unofficial subreddits, Lemmy/Kbin communities, or Discord servers instead now.

    Maybe if I dug around some more I could find some options for managed hosting (which makes more sense for regular people, I think, to deal with technical maintenance) for Discourse or the like that are cheaper, but I can't imagine one may find much that beats free. Unless there is something, unfortunately I guess we're kind of stuck with the situation as-is barring some pleasant exceptions.

  • Personally, when I'm looking around for different software, as someone that's in-between unfamiliar and familiar with tech: if it doesn't have an installer/executable/apk and only describes a way to build/compile from source, I have to imagine it wasn't intended for non-devs to start with.

    Yet somehow I seem to find my way to software like that occasionally. 🤷‍♀️

  • Then you’ve got seamless integration with Vscode as a bonus, it’s more like why would you not use GitHub unless you have a specific problem with them.

    Does GitHub still only permit one account? I remember looking into it awhile back and not wanting to get things mixed up between personal/professional arrangements and the one account policy put me off.

  • While I agree, what might everyday people use to set up forums as relatively easily and cheaply as their Discord servers, and not have them riddled with ads or other clunky elements?

    I'm pretty sure those that may have even been considering forums went to Discord because the only other options were more involved in terms of set up/maintenance and cost, the latter to get something without ads.

  • It's kind of interesting that yours is the first reply in this vein that I've seen so far. I honestly expected more.

    I think though that there's possibly more of a gray to this, which is why I was asking. Think somewhere in the space of white lies, benign comments that aren't as forthcoming as some might prefer, but they often serve to make someone feel a little better, and who knows, maybe that feeling better helps lift their self-esteem enough to improve themselves so that the white lies fall away to be honest compliments or comments.

  • Thanks! I hadn't heard of this before, hydrogen fueled cars, sure, but not this. 😄

  • All that aside, the point is that people talking about how it’s not “real AI” often come across as people who don’t know what they’re talking about, which was the point of the image.

    The funny part is, as I mention in my comment, isn't that how both parties to these conversations feel? The problem is they're talking past each other, but the worst part is, arguably the more educated participant should be more apt to recognize this and clarify or better yet, ask for clarification so they can see where the disconnect is emerging to improve communication.

    Also, let's remember that it's not the laypeople describing the technology in general personified terms like "learning" or "hallucinating", which furthers some of the grumbling.

  • Microsoft fucking sucks, but I want people to know ways around stuff so they aren’t wasting time and money if they don’t have to.

    What is the way around Microsoft accounts during 10/11 setup?

  • Which is a fair point, because AI has never meant “general AI”, it’s an umbrella term for a wide variety of intelligence like tasks as performed by computers.

    Do you mean in the everyday sense or the academic sense? I think this is why there's such grumbling around the topic. Academically speaking that may be correct, but I think for the general public, AI has been more muddled and presented in a much more robust, general AI way, especially in fiction. Look at any number of scifi movies featuring forms of AI, whether it's the movie literally named AI or Terminator or Blade Runner or more recently Ex Machina.

    Each of these technically may be presenting general AI, but for the public, it's just AI. In a weird way, this discussion is sort of an inversion of what one usually sees between academics and the public. Generally academics are trying to get the public not to use technical terms loosely, yet here some of the public is trying to get some of the tech/academic sphere to not, at least as they think, use technical terms loosely.

    Arguably it's from a misunderstanding, but if anyone should understand the dynamics of language, you'd hope it would be those trying to calibrate machines to process language.

  • HHO generators

    ...What are these? Something to do with hydrogen? Despite it not making sense for you to write it that way if you meant H2O, I really enjoy the silly idea of a water generator (as in, making water, not running off water).

  • As an analogy, you can try taking a selfie using an old laptop’s front-facing camera. You probably won’t like how you look either - you’d look either sickly pale or drunken red, eyebags appear out of nowhere, the distortion of the lens makes you look fat. All of these qualities aren’t because you are any of these things in real life. It’s simply that laptop cameras are bad. Same is true for microphones and speakers.

    I think you make a good point with the hardware aspects of this, and on this last point I can't help but be a little amused, as while it's often very true, personally I sometimes prefer the lower res quality of a laptop camera as it can help obfuscate some of the finer details I don't much care for. It's basically a hardware lo-fi filter, and I appreciate it not catching every pore. 😂

  • Tbh I'm not a big fan of quotes, but those two captured what I wanted to prod at that I felt them useful. Also yours is pretty much exactly why I'm asking this. It's a waste to argue, so what might be alternatives to change people's minds and spread good info?

    Perhaps free food and beer and some good babble?

  • I suspect this is basically it, however I've often thought similar could be said of one's appearance; as it's distorted by different lighting, whether your clothing's gotten wrinkled up a certain way, the wind's messed up your hair, or you accidentally smudged makeup or some dirt on you somewhere. Although that all is also typically easier to adjust (give or take the lighting and wind) than your voice, so that undoubtedly plays into it.

  • Would you happen to mean readers with filtering tools? If so I'm interested as well.

    I know Thunderbird technically has them, but I've had trouble making them work as effectively as I'd like. RSSOwl had some that were easier to work with, but stopped being updated. There's now a fork of it called RSSOwlnix, but I haven't taken the time to see whether it still works as well or not. May be worth looking into though...

  • Proof-of-stake doesn’t benefit larger stakeholders any more than it benefits smaller stakeholders, the common “rich-get-richer” objection is based on a misunderstanding of how the economics of staking actually operates.

    That wasn't what I was referring to, but I should have phrased that part of my comment better. When I wrote that it may benefit larger stakeholders more what I had meant was that, by my rough understanding, larger stakeholders have more influence or sway over the consent mechanism. It's been awhile since I looked into it last, so I can't remember the details exactly, but that's what I recall of what I read.

    It wasn't the rich-get-richer problem, so much as the rich-hold-outsized-influence problem. Similar but distinct.

  • How are these acquisitions making them enough money to bother with given the state of news outlets in general? Arguably among the reasons they're able to happen at all is that many newsrooms are struggling to even remain operational, resulting in their owners selling them off to cut their losses.

    Yet even after acquisition, have there been any indications that the new owners are doing any better with them financially?

  • Instead of preempting criticism/downvotes, perhaps it would help to more clearly describe what kind of implementation of blockchain you mean?

    If it would still involve some questionable consent mechanism that either consumes a large amount of energy (Proof-of-Work) or may benefit larger stakeholders (Proof-of-Stake), then even setting aside the cryptocurrency associations, I'm not sure it's necessarily worth it. However, if I'm not mistaken, there are implementations that may not require those, but may still provide the sort of benefit you're suggesting, aren't there?