azertyfun @ azertyfun @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

The algorithms used to "derank" swear-laden videos on platforms like TikTok and YouTube are the exact same one used to derank "political" content and/or queer content.

So yeah, it fucking pisses me off every time someone self-censors to appease the Algorithm, lending it more credibility.

Not very high on our very long list of items on the Descent Into Fascism checklist, but it's on there.

That's how leftists traditionally point out that the rule of law is often immoral and unfair. An important distinction and longstanding ideological point of disagreement.

But when the law says one thing but the judges say another out of fear of political consequences, it's not even legal system either. Which is what happened with Trump's cases and is going to keep happening increasingly often especially with a strongly partisan SC.

Americans need to understand that the rule of law is dead or dying and won't save them. It does not matter anymore what the law says, the fascists and oligarchs control all three branches of federal government and are open about the fact that they'll drop all pretense of political neutrality or independence. The judicial branch won't stop the executive from violating your rights and vice-versa. The only counterpowers are the states and the people, to the extent that they give a shit (election says about 3/4 of Americans do not give a shit or actively support fascism). It's not a legal system anymore. It does not matter that the law is on your side when your enemy makes regular "campaign contributions" to the rulers.

Honestly the metro design language didn't look particularly attractive for touch screens either. I knew someone with a Nokia Windows Phone, the interface seemed... clunky. Quirky but not in the right ways.

It has to cater to mice and fingers, and so ends up with the lowest common denominator. Can't have information density because of the butter fingers, can't have neat swiping gestures because of the mice and especially trackpads. So, big squares and huge buttons, repeat ad nauseum. Like a DUPLO set.

Surely the UI/UX designers and Microsoft knew this, but I guess Ballmer had his way. Meanwhile Valve didn't have to contend with cranky executives, so they just slapped Big Picture on top of KDE and let use decide when to switch between console mode and desktop mode.

Which versioning????

 yaml

    
somekey: yes

  

Go right ahead and tell me what the YAML version is and what is the type of somekey is. Oh that's right, it's impossible, because the versioning is entirely up to the serializers for some godforsaken reason.

Only 1.1. Which everybody has been fiercely clinging onto since 2009, because YAML 1.2 did not seem to consider it a problem that they broke backwards compatibility on that behavior. So now the only way to keep existing YAML files working is for us all to keep pretending YAML 1.2 does not exist.

What? I'm not privy to RedHat/IBM/Google's internal processes but they are all massive FOSS contributors at least some of which I assume are using Agile internally. The Linux kernel is mostly corpo-backed nowadays.

The development cycle of FOSS is highly compatible with Agile processes, especially as you tend towards the Linux Kernel style of contributing where every patch is expected to be small and atomic. A scrum team can 100% set as a Sprint Goal "implement and submit patches for XYZ in kernel".

Also agile ≠ scrum. If you're managing a small github project by sorting issues by votes and working on the top result, then congratulations, you're following an ad-hoc agile process.

I think what you're actually mad at is corporate structures. They systematically breed misaligned incentives proportional to the structure's size, and the top-down hierarchy means you can't just fork a project when disagreements lead to dead ends. This will be true whether you're doing waterfall or scrum.

Ooooh but with Starfield they called it "Creation Engine TWO", you see.

The least well-kept industry "secret" is that the major version number of a hidden technical component literally doesn't matter as soon as you hear it because the marketing people will get their grubby little hands on it and force an update whenever they need to capitalize on some kind of wow effect.

"CE2" is clearly barely any better or different than skyrim or fallout's CE; in fact as far as I can tell the script extender dropped pretty much immediately after the game's release, which clearly indicates no major architectural change to work around. Also if Bethesda really did enough work to warrant a "version 2" why the hell are there loading screens everywhere like it's 2008.

Skyrim 32 bit to Skyrim 64 bit was probably a much bigger generational leap than anything Bethesda has done since then.

As a developer I believe "just rewrite it from scratch" is a cardinal sin and a beginner's mistake in 95 % of cases. Creation Engine though? They are clearly carrying around technical debt that was already very dated 15 years ago, like the constant loading screens. Now the loading screen look soooo bad it's a complete meme yet they don't seem capable of fixing that. At least apparently they managed to get rid of the FPS lock with Starfield? Only 20 years too late.

Don't worry.

It won't take a century for Florida to sink.

One of these literally shows a dead soldier in a field of flowers so, yeah.

It's idle longing. I could give up my career, move to a deeply rural area, and break my back doing menial jobs until I die of health complications at 64. I won't, but it's nice to long for the imagined simplicity sometimes y'know?

See also:

Fictional characters also have a bunch of naming rules that real people don't. Quite importantly, unless you're GRRM they should not have the same or similar name to another character in your story (i.e. what you're saying, one name per person and one person per name). Else shit's just confusing, as knows anyone who tried to learn anything about Elden Ring's lore.

Names also should match the character's personality. John's John because he's meant to be pathetically average and John is the most average white american name there is. Naming him Bartholomew or Rico would not have worked for that particular character.

I would therefore posit that if John as a fictional character did transition, Jane might be a better fit due to being more common while still being familiar enough not to be confusing. Or perhaps Jess which retains an alliteration but sounds even more "basic" then Jane IMO.

Any source on any significant amount of children wasting time talking to AIs, or just anecdotes and a bad case of "youth these days"?

The whole concept smells like fringe NEET 4chan-adjacent behavior. LLMs aren't capable of maintaining an even remotely convincing simulacrum of human connection, and anyone who would project companionship onto these soulless computer programs obviously has preexisting and severe mental issues (relying on AIs to fill a void in human connection is certainly unhealthy but a symptom, not the root cause).

The potential market for these AIs will never be any bigger than the market for anime waifu body pillows, because it's same audience, different decade. Literally everyone else thinks AI girlfriends and body pillow waifus are weird as all hell, and that's not going to change because neurotypical people want and need human connection and can tell the difference between a rock with googly eyes and a friend.

Also arguably a rock with googly eyes has more charm and personality than Zuck's horror show.

Any examples spring to mind? I've built apps that are only distributed as containers (because for their specific purpose it made sense and I am also the operator of the service), but if ya don't want to run it in a container... just follow the Dockerfile's "instructions" to package the app yourself? I'm sure I could come up with a contrived example where that would be impractical, but in almost every case a container app is just a basic install script written for a standard distro and therefore easily translatable to something else.

FOSS developers don't owe you a pre-packaged .deb. If you think distributing one would be useful, read up on debhelper. But as someone who's done both, Dockerfile is certainly much easier than debhelper. So "don't need it" is a statement that only favors native packaging from the user's perspective, not the maintainer. Can't really fault a FOSS developer for doing the bare minimum when packaging an app.

They've also known about this deadline for years and were always allowed to switch to USB-C at literally any time before then (like they did years ago with the iPad Pro and Macbook).

If any e-waste occurred, it is squarely because of Apple's utter pettiness.

Cease&desist every casino would be a good first step. Casinos are well outside the original intended purpose and if the ToS don't prohibit their existence that can easily be changed. Valve doesn't owe anyone the right to gamble their items, especially not with the weird third party escrow system that casinos use IIRC.

But if we're touching on the subject then we need to reopen the contentious subject of the lootboxes themselves, which are gambling. Which Valve (and the video game industry) has an enormous stake in. To fix that whole mess, I expect a government crackdown will be required.

You'll have a hard time finding a jurisdiction where minors gambling (even behind the veil of "we don't check who our customers are") is legal. The "IRL item gambling" site in the video was in fact blatantly illegal in Denmark despite the lengths to which they went to pretend "it's not gambling because the house always loses".

Asking Valve to police gambling is the next best thing to do if governments won't step in. You say it like it's an impossibility, ignoring the fact that "state-run gambling" is quite a common setup. In France for instance all money games are run by la française des jeux, a state-owned monopoly whose profits are meant to go to charity. In the US it wouldn't be a crazy idea either, given how many US states already have state-run monopolies for alcohol sales for example. It's not like historical precedent is lacking to show that regulating a parasitic industry is possible...

Maybe you can find examples of other industries that are heavily infected with gambling bullshit, but that's whataboutism and in no way relevant to the discussion.

For Ukraine yes, but as far as Ukraine's allies go? Only in principle. In reality we help Ukraine because it fucks up Russia, but we don't give Ukraine the support it really needs or asks for because of [insert litany of excuses for years of delay on new weapons systems].

Proxy wars are nasty business, and Ukraine has precious little say in any of the macro decisions. Russia and Russia's ennemies collectively hold all the negociation leverage.
Zelenskyy's only hope is that domestic pressure will force the West to make a genuine effort at preserving as much of Ukraine's sovereignty as possible, hence this media intervention.

And he's right to be worried, because the situation in Palestine shows, again, that most Western governments only stick to their stated principles when it's politically convenient and shrug at literal genocide when it's not. And the Russian propaganda machine is going to work overtime to make us think that any Russian concession to Ukraine would be against European interests.

From "missile" (me-sigh-lll) to "messuhl" to "m-ssl". Then Americans will make fun of the Brits for dropping vowels from town names.

English has clearly evolved beyond the need for its vowels, and certainly beyond the intended goals of the Latin alphabet. How about we settle on a variant of Hangul, and as a bonus we can probably simplify it by replacing all vowels with a generic placeholder because English clearly doesn't respect them anyway what with consistently dropping them or replacing them with schwa; when they're actually there it's almost systematically accent-dependent which vowel actually gets used.

So you could write missile "me sel" and then everybody would be free to drop as many or as little vowels as they want when reading it.

Sweden has some of the cheapest electricity in all of Europe thanks to all that hydro.

This year my final electric bill was ~ 25 c/kWh. Gas was ~ 8c/kWh (both after distribution costs, and funnily enough for electricity I pay amongst other things a fee to subsidize other people's solar panels' negative impact on the grid).

Not "comically expensive" but to be cost-effective a heat pump must average a COP of at least 3.1 (which is possible in most climates with a decent enough HP), so it's not yet a "jump on it first chance you get" kinda deal because it will take many years to recoup the initial investment. And people remember last year's winter where the electric costs were more than doubled; gas prices tend to fluctuate much less. This makes heat pumps even more of a very long term investment for people who can afford very large surprises in their power bill... Or who have excess PV generation capacity in the winter (that requires a very large house).

Gas is on the way out but all the political sabotage of electricity prices in Europe (nuclear phaseout, asinine financial regulations and fake competition with useless middlemen, misfiring PV legislation meaning PV owners are being subsidized by everyone else, etc.) means it will take a very long time before HP costs drop enough for people flock to replace their existing gas heater with a heat pump.

For hex yes, for Torx no. Your smartphone's itty bitty screws are quite possibly T4 or similar.

Torx > Hex > Robertson > Pozidriv > Phillips > Slot.

This is not (just) the ramblings of a mad nerd, but objective fact derived from contact area between screwdriver and screw.

In practice hex does have one situational advantage over Torx, namely that they are almost always tightened with Allen keys which are more torque-y and can be used in tight spaces. For every other application Torx wins. Every other head type is strictly inferior and only exists for legacy or penny-saving reasons.