vacuumflower
@vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
- Comment on Thank Mozilla for Killing Localization on Support Mozilla (And Replacing Human Contributions With AI Bots) 9 hours ago:
Calling objections to what some unelected jerks in the foundation (which is a supposedly public organization) are doing is not “anti-Mozilla”. And I would first suspect of astroturfing everyone pretending it is.
Raising voices and putting pressure about things spoiling something is caring about it. And yes, people who care try to make real effect and not just safely complain to be ignored.
Mozilla honestly has been becoming worse and worse since Australis.
- Comment on OpenAI says dead teen violated TOS when he used ChatGPT to plan suicide - Ars Technica 11 hours ago:
Modern version of “suicide is a sin and we don’t condone it, but if you have problems you’re devil-possessed and need to repent and have only yourself to blame”.
Also probably could be countered by their advertising contradicting their ToS. Not a lawyer.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 day ago:
internship
As in getting interned and working for a bowl of rice
- Comment on [deleted] 1 day ago:
Microsoft’s oligopoly (officially sanctioned and enabled by US society) has cost the world hundreds of billions of dollars if not more.
It has cost everything the tech industry made since then and everything it could have made if MS and its helpers hadn’t killed most of the interesting companies, from DEC to Nokia. I’m not naming Sun, because honestly they are seen through rosy glasses by many today, they were the dotcom bubble locomotive and in general had that weird authoritarian vision of future tech which is similar to what we are getting, but without cool industrial design of Sun. They were not the corporation of good.
Microsoft’s oligopoly is a device of fate for the world similar to what tech monopolies were for Japan, leading it into recession, or to China’s isolation policies that led to its 200 years old catastrophes. It’s not something that will be hidden by bigger events or undone. It has defined our world for many decades.
Perhaps it will be named in the future as one of the main reasons for WWIII.
That being said, I don’t think everyone at Microsoft or Google is evil, but a far larger percent of their employees are evil than one would think (i.e. it’s not only the senior executives).
Not even evil, just spineless apes who shouldn’t have civil rights (it’s not a dog whistle, I mean independently of race, such people actually tend to be racist when they can get away with it).
- Comment on Elon Musk Had Grok Rewrite Wikipedia. It Calls Hitler “The Führer.” 1 day ago:
Most people do, feeling of power or at least positive connection to someone’s feeling of power are very intoxicating. I even wonder how many 16 years old girls you knew when you were in high school. No justice or mercy there if you try to keep moral high ground and ignore that component. (I did, LOL.)
The thing about Nazis is that they’ve lost, so one could get pretty believable feeling of power from their own military and patriotic aesthetic in most of the western nations and socialist bloc, while Nazis would be something of that past with fraktur lettering and stylish evil. A bit like vampires.
Now, today both western and Soviet patriotic aesthetic have kinda rotten. The Soviet kind is associated with murderous madness between two strongest former members, the western kind is associated with paying 20x the right money to kill brown people in their homeland without even getting their oil in the end.
While Nazis, eh, lost. So haven’t lived till now and are remembered young and cute, so to say.
- Comment on Elon Musk Had Grok Rewrite Wikipedia. It Calls Hitler “The Führer.” 1 day ago:
I mean, yes, they gave him that title. Roughly translatable as “the leader” or “the chieftain”.
What’s the problem?
Britannica, for comparison, has contained and still contains Armenian genocide denial in plenty of its articles touching upon Armenia even in little ways. It’s honestly not that good on most other subjects I know anything about. It’s good enough, I’ve heard, on scientific and technical subjects, point in time year 1960. And its articles are, eh, far less detailed than Wikipedia, usually. Yet people don’t bark at Britannica because that’s not in fashion. Actually people still recommend Britannica as a beacon of sanity in the age where anyone can silently abuse a Wikipedia article, or something like that.
Come on, it’s just another internet encyclopedia which is like Wikipedia, but with creators’ truth not burdened with proof and all wrong people banned without bureaucracy, “truth” and “wrong” being up to subjective interpretation here.
- Comment on Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They're Doing 1 day ago:
They understand what they’re doing. They’re treating the problem as a black box - they want to decide what you can do in the field where they are strong, making laws and rules as the (in their piss cockroach opinion) dominant apes in the crowd. They are breaking the technical possibility for you to avoid that. They don’t see a problem with breaking it for everyone, because if some use they need as well is broken so, they can make an exception for themselves, it’s in the domain of making rules too, and they can make punishments so gruesome that nobody will bother except for mafia and law enforcement, just like with heroine.
And the answer doesn’t lie in protecting VPNs or making technical means to avoid them further, by using plentiful possible information channels in the standards comprising the Internet. The answer lies in dipping them face into their own shit and saying “don’t do that again or I will kill you”. Because it’s a social, not technical, problem. It can be reduced to unauthorized people telling you what to do and you obeying.
- Comment on In wake of Windows 10 retirement, over 780,000 Windows users skip Win 11 for Linux, says Zorin OS developers — distro hits unprecedented 1 million downloads in five weeks 2 days ago:
That’s not just MS, that’s all the world. I think it can be called pessimism at rational design. With Apple’s 90s decline and rebirth, and with many things in the 90s dying, the idea that you can’t ever rationally predict what humanity will need, or at least what will win markets, has become the easiest for executives and public alike.
So they, like everyone else, were trying to catch the vibe. This has recently culminated in jumbo extrapolators being stuffed as a solution for every purpose involving computers. Honestly if before that mess someone would tell me that computers are going to present a text prompt as the universal human interface again, and it would be conversational, I’d be excited and say that this is all I need.
I think that it’s similar to many other things - the first attempt at solving the problem is the wisest and the deepest. Machines had controls before computers available to everyone. Computer displays show UIs as those controls, traditionally. The same rules then apply that did before, control elements should differ by purpose and that purpose should be clearly indicated by form, color, feel and well-readable label. Computers also had, since teletypes, command line as a UI - you send a message of input, you get a message of output. A clear concept, connected to what a computer is.
We don’t need to go further and invent some new UI paradigms just because we’re not in digital-assisted heaven yet. But until the wide mass of users too knows that there’s no digital heaven, they will want it, and they will want to break paradigms and be given something new, not what they have, but the better thing that their magic thinking tells them they can have, because of human instincts.
We have been there with metaverses in early 00s, people still use Second Life. Most of us have grown and understood, internalized there’s no metaverse that can be built to create a digital heaven, or at least a digital space of cleaner philosophy and insight, like Lukyanenko’s “Depth” (sorry, I have a limited cultural context, and this in feeling seems to fit better than classical cyberpunk).
Now we are living through a new wave, of people and families and social subcultures that didn’t want to find such a metaverse, or create such a space, ever in their lives, and so didn’t learn the lesson, personally or collectively. But they do want another heaven, one mixed with reality, more similar to Star Trek, and they are hungry for it, and they are trying to find it similarly to how 9yo me was trying to find knowledge how they make all those 3d games and how can you make one not just draw objects, but live.
Sorry for an emotional dump.
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 2 days ago:
Not better, it’s more of rules of punctuation and word order and such, in their normalized forms, being more fit for one use or another. At the expense of something.
Like those enormous sentences in German building up to unload like a cannon volley with one verb in the end. I also hate German capitalization. But it’s impressive how many floors an atom can have, so to say, in one literate German sentence. Perhaps their capitalization is too caused by necessity, I can’t bear trying to read Dutch, the eye has nothing to cling at.
Or in Russian there’s no strict word or sentence order, but playing with them one can give different flavors to whatever they are saying. Where you should use commas and where dashes (and sometimes semicolons), and where you can skip those and where you can’t, and whether you are giving a different intonation or meaning to your phrase or just making a mistake ; taken together - whether such a thing as “author’s individual punctuation” exists in Russian or not.
(All people actually writing well in Russian whom I know, BTW, make mistakes all the time by common rules and definitely have their own punctuation. And this is not much of a rebellion, they praise Zhukovsky - he made his own rules, they praise Pushkin - that punk not only made his own rules, he also used lots of Church Slavic not knowing the difference between that and archaic Russian, they praise Mayakovsky - well, that type wouldn’t object to any abuse of formal rules.)
I mean, I admit I often write in very bad English, but saying “you should proofread your texts” was absolutely useless, that person could just quote the specific place politely.
- Comment on In wake of Windows 10 retirement, over 780,000 Windows users skip Win 11 for Linux, says Zorin OS developers — distro hits unprecedented 1 million downloads in five weeks 2 days ago:
I actually kept it in dual boot alongside Linux to play SWTOR.
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 2 days ago:
You’re just an all around shitty human being.
Says some anonymous moron.
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 2 days ago:
No it’s not, it’s just you talking outta your ass ascribing your wishful interpretations to others. Your interpretation doesn’t obligate anyone other than yourself and your butt buddies.
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 2 days ago:
Side thoughts in the middle of sentences are definitely weird in written form.
That depends on the language. Similarly to how different prosody doesn’t indicate different national character or whatever.
In Russian that’s normal enough, in German much more. Considering some weak sides of the English language, might not work.
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 3 days ago:
Ah. OK. So I speak a language, where such constructions are a bit more normal, except commas and dashes are used more generously, and synthetic grammar helps.
“You can fit a (can’t stress how good) planetary map into RAM wholly” might be a bit better? Anyway. OK, they’re struggling. They are choosing a weird way to inform me of what.
- Comment on In wake of Windows 10 retirement, over 780,000 Windows users skip Win 11 for Linux, says Zorin OS developers — distro hits unprecedented 1 million downloads in five weeks 3 days ago:
One can resize the Windows partition from Windows itself, then install Linux alongside it. But have backups and be careful.
- Comment on In wake of Windows 10 retirement, over 780,000 Windows users skip Win 11 for Linux, says Zorin OS developers — distro hits unprecedented 1 million downloads in five weeks 3 days ago:
I remember. I also remember Windows 8 which was supposed to make everything metro stylish and convenient, with tiling, ARM version, claims of being optimized and good for updating even on oldish boxes.
Same times as Nokia Lumia.
- Comment on Polish Ministry of Digital Affairs confirms that legislative work on mandating RSS channels' maintenance on government bodies is underway 3 days ago:
Very cool. If only there were things similar to RSS for things other than news feeds.
Like XHTML, that “semantic web” thing of old.
- Comment on Apertus: Switzerland government release a fully open, transparent, multilingual language LLM 3 days ago:
Another argument in favor of living in a police state of rich blokes doing banking for mafia and dictators, which doesn’t need any surveillance because police already sees everything, and what it doesn’t notice, it chooses not to, and also it can legally bend you over when required. I mean, OK, nobody’s inviting, LOL.
I mean, seriously I like such news, every polity gets its turn to be a force for good.
There’s even been news of an attempt by a group of Swiss politicians to create a committee on Nagorno-Karabakh refugees’ return and future political existence.
And they are propping up Taler.
Just - I value this family of technologies for one main trait, it’s destructive to superficial authorization. As in - where in the olden days bot campaigns in social media could just work, possibly unnoticed, now you can be certain it’s mostly bots unless you can’t transparently establish connection to a person, backed by cryptography.
But OK, a public confirmation bot is good, especially if it talks in your Jura dialect unintelligible not just to me, but to most native German speakers.
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 3 days ago:
But it’s funny
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 3 days ago:
Yes, that’s very nice when you are already storing that something in a database. I said “suppose”.
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 3 days ago:
No, and you are not an authority on my own logic.
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 3 days ago:
So in how many languages do you write, and in which of them do you write better than I sometimes do in English? Other than your first one.
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 3 days ago:
It’s convenient to keep positions of many things, have marks, make comparisons. Ideally have multiple windows looking at the same file.
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 3 days ago:
I’m altering the rules
- Comment on In wake of Windows 10 retirement, over 780,000 Windows users skip Win 11 for Linux, says Zorin OS developers — distro hits unprecedented 1 million downloads in five weeks 3 days ago:
I’ve been using a PC with C2D till it died. And I’m still having thoughts of checking whether it’s solvable with a bit of soldering, perhaps replacing power.
It’s enough for music, text editing, a little bit of web browsing and old games. Old games here includes a lot of goodness, but even World of Tanks worked under Wine on it back when I used it. Slow, but playable (when you have friends and it’s a social event, alone kinda sad).
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 3 days ago:
The only thing I got from your text is that text editors load an entire file into memory, which has been the case for decades unless you go with a special purpose editor.
Holy crap, and these people think they have right to talk about computers.
You can have a 12G text file, logs, suppose, you are going to load the entire file into memory? And you think it’s normal?
You might want to proof read that.
I think you might want to put more effort into reading. This seems to be your weak side.
- Comment on I work long hour and make little money 3 days ago:
Right now, the Russian Navy is based in Murmansk (brrrr. limited routes to get out into Atlantic) and the Black Sea. The Black Sea is bad for them because Turkey (a NATO member) makes sure to maintain total control of what passes through the Bosphorous.
Technically the Baltic fleet was in Soviet times the most respected part of the navy. With Riga and Tallinn being capitals of other nations, that’s a bit less pronounced now, but coast guard and missile cruisers and marines are still important forces to have.
That could have had some use for power projection, but I think they lost it when a certain opthalmologist was expelled.
No, they made a deal with his beheading and allahuakbaring successors. Not sure how good a deal, but apparently the other side upholds it for now.
because real Americans just take their total abundance of ports that don’t freeze over completely for granted.
Honestly this is not as important as it seems. Russia doesn’t have the kind of ships to use global logistics and network of good ports as a system of power projection. Air carriers, all that. While Bosphorus is not such a big deal, of course it’s leverage, but Turkey does let Russian ships out and back.
And Vladivostok, despite being for Russia efficiently as if on another continent, is a warm water port with good location, and used as such, including militarily.
Your judgement in some way shows the same bias as you named.
- Comment on I work long hour and make little money 3 days ago:
It’s a double joke, it’s literally an adaptation of a Russian meme of “I is simple Russian worker Ivan from city Tver, we very respect mighty jade rod comrade Xi, every week we discuss achievements of Chinese leader and communist party, a hit”, roughly translating the grammar.
pikabu.ru/…/ya_prostoy_rabochiy_ivan_iz_gorod_tve…
^that kind
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 3 days ago:
RAM is not really expensive. You get enough RAM for most tasks the use of which you can understand, as a fraction of the normal amount for any machine.
You can load a can’t stress how good planetary map into RAM wholly, without paging it.
Many text editors today just load the whole file into RAM.
That there’s much demand from some other side - oh yes.
BTW, I just got a thought that this might be aimed at hurting China and East Asia in general, when the bubble pops, in the west it’ll be just investors losing what they deserve to lose, but in East Asia it’ll be actual production rebuilt for the bubble dying in pains.
- Comment on Feds Say You Don’t Have a Right to Check Out Retro Video Games Like Library Books 4 days ago:
BS. Greed is a motive that has been here always. The difference is in ability. That ability lies in preventing public from organizing, crowd control. It’s been given by the Internet and computers. Because where before public would organize in their own spaces, now it’s someone else’s ground where all kinds of meddling and weird rules can exist.
What must be obscure has become apparent for those who want it.
Because of ability to process information and fulfill manipulations of worldwide scale.
That aside, the ethos of breaking rules doesn’t exist.
Some people think they can do any evil to a person who disrespects them, and surely don’t owe them what they paid for, or payment for their work, or something else. Some other people think that any obligation is lit in titanium, and whatever were the circumstances of taking it, you owe it in full, and if there’s contradiction, then the less certain obligation loses. Some people think this depends on one’s weight in society.
All these are defeated by power. The first kind - they are just miserable slaves, no honor at all, and they’ll always be manipulated to others’ goals, and will never know when to make a dignified sacrifice, but they will be sacrificed. The second kind - they think they are honorable, but of the internally contradictory net of obligations they choose those imposed by power, and ignore those countering it, and pretend to be oblivious of there being a system in their choices, they are hypocrites and the least reliable kind. The third kind - these are obedient jackals, you might get betrayed by them, but generally can safely treat them as furniture.
In some sense following rules is surrendering your own dignity and responsibility. A person responsible for themselves decides whether to follow every rule existing.
OK. Shorter - when you have a city, eventually you’ll have to demolish something old to build something new. When you have a house\apartment, eventually you’ll have to throw out some old furniture, break some walls, dispose of the garbage.
It’s similar with legal systems. Between nice good IP laws supposedly protecting creators and ability to freely communicate and exchange information, the latter is more precious. It’s our common interest to resolve the contradiction without conflict, but those people seem to think they don’t have to compromise. It doesn’t matter what they think.