RedFrank24 @ RedFrank24 @lemmy.world

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9 mo. ago

No arguments from me about giving them somewhere to live and the healthcare they need. If you have any kind of soul, that's the least you can do. In an ideal world, there should be enough service to cover 100% of the homeless population (plus some buffer to cover any sudden increase) whether they take it or not. The question I have is do you have the right to force them to take it?

Why wouldn’t we as Americans want to help our fellow citizens overcome drug use, treat mental illness, and help rehabilitation efforts on their behalf?

It's kind of a two-part question, that.

1. Do we want to spend the money to get fellow citizens off drugs and treat their mental illnesses?

That's a pretty easy question if you have a soul: Yes.

2. If those fellow citizens refuse any and all help because they have a fundamental mistrust of the system. What do we do?

That's the more difficult question. Forcing them to get treatment breaches their human rights and only stokes further mistrust in the system. Leaving them just leaves them open to exploitation and doesn't make their lives better.

Homes are easy, it's all the support that comes with it that's difficult, especially if the person you're trying to help either refuses to engage or actively fights you every step of the way.

Whether someone is a drug addict with severe mental illness is irrelevant to whether they're homeless or not.

Do they have somewhere to live that has a permanent address? No? Then they're homeless and need help.

Obviously there's a bit of nuance with things like ProxyAddress where homeless people can have permanent addresses but still be homeless, but the gist of my point is the same! Do they have a home or not?

If you're buying lego to build fine motor skills, it doesn't need to be the Lego brand or even building bricks.

Hell, remember Meccano? Now if you want something age appropriate for an 8-year-old that develops fine motor skills, Meccano is the way to go! Sure none of it is licensed like Lego, but you can build some crazy stuff! They were building full-on steam locomotives back in the day! Meccano was actually used to build differential analysers in the 1930s.

How the fuck can a faucet be smart? It's a valve! It turns one way, or it turns the other way! It is only slightly less dumb than the counter top!

I disagree that Reddit would gain in value over time if they kept banning automation, because it is increasingly difficult to avoid AI-generated material polluting your dataset, no matter how much you avoid automation and try banning it. Inevitably, some AI-generated material is going to get in.

It's a problem in two ways:

1. The vast vast majority of data on Reddit has already been sold, so you can't rely on that data for future revenue
2. The remaining data that's current is polluted by AI and is therefore worth less than the historical data because the more AI pollutes your dataset, the more likely it is to lead to Model Collapse, where an LLM is poisoned due to unverified data generated by other LLMs

I am firmly of the belief that sites like Internet Archive will be some of the most valuable companies in the AI space, because they hold an immense amount of untainted data created prior to 2019.

Is there some magic to rotating a PDF? I just opened one and there's a button in Firefox saying "Rotate clockwise" and "Rotate anticlockwise". Are we talking something rotating and then saving the PDF so it stays rotated or just rotating it after it's already loaded? Or is this about rotating the PDF so it can be printed out?

I'm not sure why anyone would ever buy Reddit stock. There is no money to be made in Reddit. They failed to make any money before they went public, and they're failing to make any money now.

They tried the whole NFT thing, failed. They're trying to sell the data to AI companies but once that's sold they can't sell any more of it because the benefit of Reddit data was historical data unpolluted by AI, but new Reddit data is polluted by ChatGPT posts and is therefore worth less.

It's not even about banning people, it's about the fact that Reddit was never a sustainable business model from the start, at least not in the traditional capitalist sense where you're actively trying to make a profit to please shareholders.

The only benefit to owning Reddit stock is if you have voting shares and can manipulate the algorithm to benefit you in some way. Suppress some voices, amplify others to back what you want to do etc. but you need money to burn in order to achieve that because you aren't going to be making money directly by owning Reddit stock and manipulating public opinion takes time.

Don't worry just let my dad do the gardening. He killed the mint, the rhubarb, the blueberries, the redberries and the apple tree with his genius ideas!

The funny thing is you can still buy Office standalone but you have to actively go looking for it and Microsoft doesn't advertise it because 365 subscriptions make more money.

Microsoft doesn't want you buying standalone versions of software, but they still have to sell it because there's still a market for it.

The one thing I don't like about oldschool forums is that I have to make an account for each one. With each account comes a new place where your email address is registered, and a new password, with each password comes a new avenue for attack if you're shitty about web security and use the same password (or a variation thereof) for everything. If you use a password manager you're fine, but I don't want my email being put everywhere.

There needs to be some kind of SSO that's open source (like Google but not Google), so I can log into any forum that implements it, but with that comes the cost of running an identity provider and I don't think forums are going to want to pay for that in addition to their own costs. Maybe some sort of distributed system or something where each forum donates a little bit of compute power to running the IDP, I dunno...

Discord, Reddit and Lemmy are bad choices for forums. If you want ANY useful information to stick, put it on forums you know are gonna get indexed and archived reliably. Reddit is indexable but there's no guarantee the page will still be there when you search for it through Google.

Discord is completely unindexable so any information that exists on a server that gets deleted is lost forever.

Lemmy is a half-way house. As far as I know it's kinda indexable but not really.

Why would you want to though? I can understand the retro market because there is software like games that either won't run very well, or won't run at all on modern hardware. I'm in the market for a 'powerful' machine circa 2003-2005 for that exact reason.

When it comes to machines made in 2015? I'm not sure there's a lot you can run on those machines that you couldn't on modern hardware, apart from Windows 11.

I guess you could use them for things like media servers, but it would have to be phenomenally cheap, as in cheaper than cheap modern hardware.

Personally, my rule is a 10 year gap is old, a 20 year gap is retro.

There's more employees than just the border guards themselves. There's the HR, the IT, Accountants, Legal etc etc. Block all of them. If those services are contracted out, ban their workers as well. Might be a bit troublesome with companies like Amazon or Microsoft, but since you're banning individual workers rather than whole companies it might work out a little easier.

Make it so the deal is "If you associate with this company and you aren't a Canadian citizen, you are personally not allowed to enter Canada"

At this point Canada should be playing hard ball. Ban all visas from anyone working for those companies, or anyone who delivers services to those companies for as long as they work for those companies. If they lie about who they work for, the ban is permanent and they personally are not allowed to set foot in Canada ever.

...Neither of those time periods are cushy. The Old Republic is a constant war between the Sith Empire and Republic, reaching far into the core worlds. I wouldn't call that cushy for the average dude. You're either enslaved by the Sith, enslaved by the Hutts, or conscripted by the Republic.

Post-OT in Legends wasn't exactly nice either, what with the Yuuzhan Vong War which killed an estimated 300 trillion people and multiple planets completely destroyed. You'd actually be better off in the Galactic Civil War! At least then only one planet blew up.

Thing is, unless you live in the core worlds in any time period, and even then a relatively rich part of the core worlds, your life is gonna be pretty shitty in Star Wars. The Outer Rim is notoriously shit for anyone living there. Naboo might be nice, or Alderaan if you can actually find a place to live there and pick the right time period, so basically a couple decades before the prequels.

Trade it in to who? Who's buying PCs that can't be used? I mean there's the retro market, but AFAIK they aren't buying anything after Windows XP.

I have certainly found that to be the case with developers working with me. They run into a small problem so they instantly go to Copilot and just paste what it says the answer is. Then, because they don't know what they're asking or fully understand the problem, they can't comprehend the answer either. Then later, they come to me having installed a library they don't understand and code that's been hallucinated by Copilot and then ask me why it's not working.

A little bit of stepping back and going "What do I hope to achieve with this?" and "Why do I have to do it this way?" goes a long way. It stops you going down rabbit holes.

Then again, isn't that what people used to do with StackOverflow?

I wouldn't call that a particularly insightful observation. Ever since humanity settled down in agricultural societies there have been governments, and with governments come a monopoly on force, so obviously governments have killed more people than anything else. Any organisation of humans is gonna have at least some threat of lethal force backing it.