BananaTrifleViolin @ BananaTrifleViolin @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

It's called confabulation, and it's not "normal" aging, it's a sign of memory loss. Dementia is a common cause.

I find it staggering that the democratic party are going with him as their presidential candidate. Feels like a mix of the sunken cost fallacy and a fear of turning away from someone who is currently beating Trump in the polls.

Arguably Trump confabulates too but it gets dismissed as he's been a liar for so long no one notices.

2024 is looking like an election with two elderly men with dementia vying for the whitehouse, and another one as senate leader. That's how extreme US politics has become - you could put up a literal monkey now and as long as he's in the right party he would get nearly 1/2 the vote.

It's all a sign of how dangerously broken the US electoral system is.

I dunno, I think it's a game somewhat damned by faint praise. I hear "It's good, not great" a lot and I get it. If you like Skyrim you will like Starfield. But I'd say the big achievement is to scale up a game like Skyrim into such a big playspace.

It's certainly good quality in terms of the look and what they've technically achieved. But the actual gameplay isn't that far away from what they did in Skyrim and Fallout. I get it - if it ain't broke, don't fix it - but to be honest it feels a little dated. And No Man's Sky does alot of the non-RPG elements better.

It's been a strong year for games; and look at Baldur's Gate 3 - that game actually pushed forward narrative game play.

Starfield is huge and interesting, but ultimately a bit samey. I think the "ocean wide, inch deep" is too far and unfair but the basic concept kinda applies in a crude way. Baldur's Gate 3 is smaller in scope but so much richer and varied. Time was Bethesda was the undisputed king of RPGs, but I think CDProject Red supassed them with the story telling in Witcher 3 (and then fell back with Cyberpunk 2077) and now Larian have supassed both with Baldur's Gate 3.

It's a good game, but it's impact is dimmed a bit by what else has come. It'll make a ton of money and probably be around for years, but it doesn't feel the same huge leap forward as when Skyrim came out. But hey, hard act to follow to be fair.

Keep going. It get's much much better. Each season is better than the last, but Season 2 is where the feel of the show stablises and softens; it'll always be jarring when you go back to season 1 after you pass it. Season 3 is definitely where it starts to hit it's stride.

It's largely an episodic show; you could skip to season 3 and go back to the season 1 & 2 later without missing much. A few recurring characters and themese like do Q make more sense if you watch from the start though.

If you're really wavering definitely skip to season 3.

Are you sure it's cats?

Have you seen the cats pooping or just sniffing the poop?

Depends where you are, but foxes would be a more likely bet. Fox poop stinks too - really foul stuff. Cat poop generally is quite inocuos once it drys out, although a lawn mowing bot slicing it up would make sense for making it worse.

I have never heard of cats pooping in the middle of a lawn before. Normally they like private and safe spaces to poop as they're vulnerable when pooping, and normally they're fastidious about burying it where possible.

iF it really is cats, then maybe get a gravel section next to your lawn that they might prefer to go in? A litter box essentially.

I think you will find this conundrum on any software you switch to. FOSS is hard, and needs a big enough community of motivated people with the right skills to make a project successful. People are largely doing this work as hobbies; it's hard to fund such projects. Doable but hard.

The most obvious alternative to go for is the Reddit code base which was open source and has been forked as Saidit. This is the most likely place to find something mature enough and feature rich enough for what you may need but again whether things will progress is another conundrum as who else is maintaining or using that codebase?

Lemmy and any other project like Kbin will need people and work to get it where you want, not just suggestions and a list of requests. The problem is not a lack of interest in achieving what you want from Lemmy, it is realistically that it is a small project team with a big task on their hands and Beehaw are not it's only users.

Ultimately Lemmy may not be the software now to do what you want for your community. Federation may also not be the right thing for a community of your ethos. Maybe the simplest solution is complete defederation and build the community in an environment you can completely control, even with the limits Lemmy current provides with it's software. Come back to the fediverse when you feel the software matches the ambitions, but in the meantime build the community you want.

A mesh has others have said. I use Google WiFi as it's cheaper and gets the job done. But it's a potential compromise as the more expensive mesh systems offer better bandwidth.

I tried Homeplug systems - they can work well on a well wired house, but mine was giving me about 10% of my bandwidth from the router downstairs to my home office upstairs.

For comparison Google WiFi is giving me 100% of my 250mbs connection. If you're looking at much higher bandwidths or users, you may need a more expensive system. Alot of mesh systems have a dedicated back channel separate to the user facing channels but Google WiFi does not - that makes it cheaper but could be a bottleneck if you you're at the very high ends of internet speeds and home usage. For most home users though I suspect Google WiFi is more than enough.

It's a rather bizarre argument, essentially saying "it's not the whole solution so it's not a solution at all"

The article dismisses lab grown meat because the technology might cost $450m to build one 10,000 metric ton per annum producing factory, claiming it won't work because of economies of scale. But they clearly have no understanding of economies of scale. There is economies of scale in the building of factories and reactor production too. One novel reactor is expensive and difficult to maintain, but a global chain of 100s of factories become much cheaper to build individually and maintain as you have a whole supply chain and supporting infrastructure built out.

A good example of this is Apple's Vision Pro. The 1st iteration of this technology will be prohibitively expensive for most people. But by starting production Apple is stimulating the building of factories and infrastructure to build all the component parts at scale. Version 2 will be cheaper per unit, as will Version 3. The production capacity will increase reducing cost, even if the components iteritively get more advanced and complex from generation to generation. It's an expensive proposition for investors up front, but the long term potential to scale up is what makes it so powerful.

A "bio-reactor" to make meat is the same - the more you build, the more you invest in the supporting infrastructure, the cheaper it gets. There will be a risk barrier to starting, but it's crazy to dismiss the whole thing based on the projected cost of the first industrial scale factory. This is similar to Fusion power; the ITER fusion reactor in France is crazily expensive but the idea is the lessons learnt and the build out of the supportive infrastructure is what will move Fusion from a lab experiement to a real world source of power.

The reality is there is no one single solution to climate change, it will by multiple different things happening together that will improve the climate situation. Lab Grown Meat will help reduce methane from animals, while renewable energy will reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, and Electric Vehicles with renewables will do the same and so on.

This doesn't make sense. It's more likely we'll pack more into a high end device then say goodbye to them in tasks like gaming.

Computing power has been constantly improving for decades and miniaturisation is part of that. I have desktop PCs at work in small form factors that are more powerful than the gaming PC I used to have 10 years ago. It's impressive how far things have come.

However at the top end bleeding edge in CPUs,.GPUs and APUs high powered kit needs more space for very good reasons. One is cooling - if you want to push any chip to its limits then you'll get heat, so you need space to cool it. The vast majority of the space in my desktop is for fans and airflow. Even the vast majority of the bulk of my graphics card is actually space for cooling.

The second is scale - in a small form factor device you cram as much as you can get in, and these days you can get a lot in a small space. But in my desktop gaming tower I'm not constrained such limits. So I have space for a high quality power supply unit, a spacious motherboard with a wealth of options for expansions, a large graphics card so I can have a cutting edge chip and keep it cool, space for multiple storage devices, and also lots and lots of fans, a cooling system for the CPU.

Yes, in 5 years a smaller device will be more capable for today's games. But the cutting edge will also have moved on and you'll still need a cutting edge large form factor device for the really bleeding edge stuff. Just as now - a gaming laptop or a games console is powerful but they have hard upper limits. A large form factor device is where you go for high end experiences such as the highest end graphics and now increasingly high fidelity VR.

The exceptions to that are certain computing tasks don't need anything like high end any more (like office software, web browsing, 4k movies), other tasks largely don't (like video editing) so big desktops are becoming more niche in the sense that high end gaming is their main use for many homes users. That's been a long running trend, and not related to APUs.

The other exception is cloud streaming of gaming and offloading processing into the cloud. In my opinion that is what will really bring an end to needing large form factor devices. We're not quite there but I suspec that will that really pushes form factors down, rather than APUs etc.

Not OP but I'm the same; I use Firefox to do stuff. All I need is a web browser and do it manually.

On my Android phone I've turned off assistant, and use Nova launcher's search bar to open Firefox and search on DuckDuckGo.

Assistants really aren't that great; you sacrifice privacy for a tool that can launch a search for you when you can just type it in yourself - whats the point? The only time I've ever found an assistant app vaguely useful was when I tried it while driving. But after a couple of days I decided to turn it off again because I didn't want the phone listening all the time just so I could occasionally say "Ok Google, play the news". I found it too poor to manage Google Maps. I might try it again for a longer trip, but day to day, don't get the point.

I'd also feel self concious using it out and about, and lose privacy not just to Google but to every rando I walk past. And then I don't get in the habit of using it in my own home. Add to that the general creepy feeling of devices always listening and it's a hard pass. I suspect I'm not alone in that.

I've seen reports suggesting Amazon is struggling to justify Alexa, because apart from a novelty and basic voice control for playing music it just doesn't make them money and people don't use it that much. They were hoping people would use it go shopping but who wants to shop without seeing something? I'm not going to say "Alexa buy me a TV" and I'm also not going to say "Alexa order me some washing powder". I've honestly never see anyone in real life saying "Ok Google" or "Siri"; the only times I've ever seen them used is chatting in a bar and someone is showing off something silly.

As far I can tell, Voice Assistants are just gimmicks on phones. Cortana was utterly useless on PCs and died a death. About the only useage I can see them being useful for is as fancy switches for smart homes. "Alexa, turn on the lights". That doesn't exactly require high end artificial intelligence. Maybe useful on PCs in the long term if they can actually do sophisticated tasks like analyse a spreadsheet or summarise a paper for you. But day to day now? Pretty pointless to me.

Maybe it's making a final upload to the cloud.

Yeah I agree they went too far. Season 2 was disappointing; they seemed to want to spend their time indulging themselves with musical shows and cross overs. It feels like they alternated each episode - one moment you get a serious episode and the next a silly one.

However the season also gave us Ad Astra per Aspera which was one of the best star trek episodes I've seen in a long time. Among the Lotus Eaters wasn't bad; they just didn't need to shoehorn Khan in - it undermined what was actually otherwise a nice character driven story for La'an. The "should I kill hitler/my grandad" bit at the end was something that could have been impactful but was just didn't feel right.

Among the Lotus eaters and Lost in Translation were decent serious stories. Under the Cloak of War was an another attempt at a serious episode; it just didn't come off in the end.

And for me, Those Old Scientists was actually one of my favourite episodes. It was not Ad Astra Per Aspera good, and it was undeniably silly, but there was just something very warm and wholesome about the episode, and it actually reflected much better on Lower Decks than SNW; Boimler and Mariner felt a bit more fleshed out by the episode and it made me more appreciative of the show and what it's doing.

I think all in all, it was a decent season. It didn't maintain the high level of quality of the first season, and there were some really poor episodes (the opener Broken Circle and Cherades were terrible, and the muscial episode was just too far EVEN in a season with a crossover with a cartoon) but the highs were high and most of the other episodes were decent even allowing for some silliness. Season 1 was masterful TV in my opinion. Season 2 was decent.

Did they overdo the gimmicks? Yes. I still enjoyed the show despite the flaws but I sincerely hope they reign it in in season 3.

I get where you're coming from but I think you're overstating the impact in this day and age. If this had been 1995 it'd be a big deal. Now it's rediculously easy to install any alternative you like for free.

Libre Office is an entire free fully features office suite.

I'm less bothered about removing WordPad than I am about Microsoft advertising and pre-installing it's products in Windows - they force Edge on people, they push OneDrive and preinstall a preview of Office. That's the real problem - not losing WordPad.

At one point Anti-Trust / Anti-monopoly regulators globally punished Microsoft for pushing Internet Explorer to consumers and for a long time in Europe had to offer a choice of Browsers to download on new Windows installs. Now it's allowed to get away with abusing it's dominant position to force it's products on consumers.

Yeah it is also good for a bit more privacy on the internet. I have separate containers for Amazon websites, Google, banking etc. Even more powerful tool if you pair it up with a VPN - can have different VPN locations on each container so break up attempts at tracking and profiling you across the web.

Tbf I don't think I'd hold YouTube's enshittification against Firefox. Google is very active in trying to ensure users see adverts on YouTube on all platforms, which makes it hard for any extension to stay ahead.

What is suffering about that graph? I do most of it already and it saves me money.

For example LED light bulbs are nicer and cheaper to run - I have 60W equivalents where I used to have dingy 40W old bulbs.

Cold washing and hanging drying saves me money. My Hybrid car saves me money and I intend to move to Electric next, and that will help reduce pollution in my neighbourhood so it's win win.

Recycling is easy enough when your council provides the tools for it. I recycle paper, metal, glass and separate out my plastics; I just separate at the time I bin stuff. I take batteries back to the supermarket where they legally have to take them for recycling, and take other items to the recycling centre when I need to and put them in the appropriate skips rather than just bag it all as general waste.

I don't have a plant based diet and I don't live car free, and I don't specifically pay for eco energy yet (I'm thinking about getting solar though).But I don't have kids and don't want them so am doing that by default.

I lead a very good quality of life, and none of the things I do from the graph seem detrimental to it to me. What exactly am I missing out on quality of life-wise?

How do you know it said fucking? Might have said Knob-gobbling Enterprise and Cunty Millennium Falcon.

We can fill in our own expletivesa and send it back to whichever sanatised and sterile commercial place it came from.

Yeah I agree with you there. Dystopia, collapse, Humanity meeting it's own hubris, or a few good people in an evil world - those ideas seem to fuel a lot of Sci-fi. AI is bad, and Robots are generally evil is another trope.

The Culture is refreshing in that it shows a utopia that feels like it could actually happen - AIs aren't automaticlaly bad, but also post-scarcity really does mean something. So much Sci Fi tries to avoid the truth about post-scarcity as a concept; even in just our own Solar System there is immense wealth we can barely grasp the scale of, and with AI and Robotics the idea that humankind would be freed to a life of leisure, art and pursuit of invidual goals.

It all comes down to some fundamental questions which we as a civilization will have to answer: who "owns" an AI? Who owns a robot and it's output? What is the point in captialism if AI and Robots can produce everything we need? Getting there may be a rocky road, but I think we really only have two end points: Utopia or complete collapse on the way. Anything in between doesn't make much sense as a stable state when you consider meaning of a post-scarcity society or the technological singularity.

Interesting; I've read the whole series and am a Star Trek fan but to me they're nothing alike.

The Culture series does show a utopian future, but one where the post-scarcity era feels more realistic to me. In an era where everyone has the wealth of gods at their fingertips, the whole shape of civilization is completely changed. There is no government, there is not structure, instead there are attempts at consensus between the AIs and the Humans. And the AIs are all powerful, meaning the Humans are redundant and have to find meaning in life.

Star Trek on the other hand shows a familiar morality and structrue we're used to sans capitalism (supposedly). It has a very american view point in that these are the good guys, spreading the benefits of their society, knowledge and wisdom to the rest of the galaxy. As much as I like it, it's pretty imperialistic in it's way, with all the other species being shown as flawed compared to the enlightened federation. Individual episodes and stories can be extremely interesting, but the overall Star Trek universe is basically good guys vs bad guys and pretty simplistic.

I find the Culture series refreshing in comparison to something like Star Trek; it's more willing to be morally ambiguous and present the Culture as both a Utopia but also hints of a Dystopia. The humans also have an illusion of freedom and self determination; ultimately they're entirely dependent on the AIs who at times act like benevolent owners with pets. The stories explore those dynamics as well as the dynamics woith civilizations outside the culture.

Lens is a visual search tool. Take a picture, ask it to search or answer a question based on what's in the picture. Like take a picture of a tree and ask it what species is it

Yeah. For apple users Lens is not the simple andtoid camera app (which yes can translate text on the fly and read QR codes) - Lens is a visual search tool that can answer queries based on pictures.

Like if you take a picture of a tree you can ask what species it is, or a picture of a person you can ask where the clothes are from etc.