scarabic
@scarabic@lemmy.world
- Comment on What's the deal with people liking old devices? 1 week ago:
Older tech did stuff for us. Newer tech does stuff to us. If you think everything newer is better, I can understand that, but it probably means you are young and don’t know what tech used to be like. One small way people try to recapture those times is by opting out of all the latest apps and fuckery and using something simpler and retro.
I have no idea why you want to make this about gender identity. Those parts of your question seem to challenge the name of the sub.
- Comment on YSK: The US Government Assassinated MLK 1 week ago:
I really believe everyone has their thing. I would die to keep trees from being wiped off the face of the Earth, or to permanently free the world from nuclear weapons. Or to protect another member of my family.
This is how I read King’s quote. Not as “You piece of shit! You won’t die for the cause?” But more as “if you really don’t see anything world dying for in this world, you must not be looking, because it doesn’t take much to find something.”
- Comment on Is there still anyway to bypass Youtube "Sign in to confirm your age" bullshit in 2026? 1 week ago:
The precise situation is that US states don’t have age verification laws right now but Texas tried to implement on on Jan 1 (it got blocked by a judge as u co stititional) and Louisiana and Utah have laws coming into effect soon.
So it’s both true that there are no laws but platforms are moving because of laws. The laws have been announced for many months. They aren’t trivial to implement so of course they are doing advance work. They might even want to test it and see how badly it hurts them.
No company wants to do age verification IMO. There is no upside for them. Maybe if we actually prosecuted tech companies for harming children, there would be, but lolz.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Okay, that was condescending. Elitist just didn’t seem like the right word to me.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Won’t your donation be even more meaningful if it turns out they don’t have much now?
Why do you need to know that they already have a good library before you’ll help improve their library?
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
I don’t think it’s elitist to say that you should read books before you build a library. That’s just good advice. And it’s fair to wonder if someone who cannot string a sentence together reads many books.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Oh my god it’s the same person who made me think I was having a stroke with the Rodney Dangerfield post. For fucks sake, I think we’ve found a use for AI at last.
OP, allow me to help:
“Rewrite this as if your brain is not melting like a crayon that’s been farted on a thousand times a second” (and then paste in what you want to post).
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
The professor seems to understand the difference between the full complexity of the real world and a limited educational exercise with a manageable scope. Mr. Melon does not understand this and seems to only be able to engage with the real world at full complexity. The professor is completely open about the fact that he’s running an artificial scenario with a limited focus. Mr. Melon just lobs confounds at it repeatedly. I will have to say that the professor is in the right here.
But because the professor has a british accent, glasses, and a bow tie, he’s coded as an elitist prick. And Mr. Lemon’s vernacular, colorful clothing, and casual style is supposed to contrast with this in a classic “book smart” versus “street smart” trope. In fact the entire movie is built on this premise: real world wealth and popular appeal help Mr. Lemon triumph over age, social hierarchy, institutional rules and many other obstacles to achieve social success and the attention of eligible young women. Therefore, in the language of the film, Mr. Lemon is most obviously “right.”
- Comment on If someone opened a store and just sold stuff at cost, which undercuts every other competitors by alot. Would this not for the big corps to come way down on their prices? 1 week ago:
I think you are asking, essentially, why there are no retail non-profits. Operate them like a charity for the common good, etc, but all you do is sell stuff. No fancy human rights work or animal rescue. Just sell stuff. Cheap. As a non-profit.
Here’s the best possible answer to this: good idea - go do it.
I think what you will find is that you can’t get any kind of investment to help you, not even a small business loan. So it’ll be hard for you to compete at all. And in the beginning you’ll be so small that you probably won’t be able to sell for less than the big stores. They buy at special lower prices because they are so big. You don’t get that. And even if you frame the whole thing as a charitable enterprise to help the poor, who will your donors be? Why would anyone give their money to this cause over something that helps the most vulnerable directly?
- Comment on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says ‘I think we’ve achieved AGI’ 2 weeks ago:
Oh… so it’s kind of like taking something that’s few-to-many and making it many-to-many, and the number of connections is what costs you.
- Comment on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says ‘I think we’ve achieved AGI’ 2 weeks ago:
You seem to know more than me so can I ask you a question? I have a general sense of what the context window is / means. But why is it so small when the model is trained on huge, huge amounts of data? Why can the model encompass a whole library of training data but only a very modest context window?
- Comment on Is school cafeteria food in America trash? 2 weeks ago:
Locales differ but in my experience:
- no one is required to eat the cafeteria food
- the cafeteria food has a cost
- the cafeteria food quality was low when I was young but not terrible, and is much improved now
- many kids absolutely do bring their own lunch. My kids look at the monthly menu and decide if they want to bring something from home or eat what’s being offered at the cafeteria
To be honest I find your question confusing. It seems to start with the question of whether everyone has the option to buy items or eats at the cafeteria, but then jumps suddenly into “is the food that bad.” I don’t honestly understand quite what it is you want to know.
- Comment on So say, someone lives in an English speaking country and wanna see a movie in the threaters but they struggle to understand English, how are they supposed to watch it? 2 weeks ago:
I definitely agree the language issue is much more solvable at home. Going back to the OP, their goal was to counteract depression by going out to a movie. I’m not sure that watching TV at home is going to fulfill the goal. Maybe - watching a DVD together is better than doomscrolling at least.
- Comment on Could my daughter, who is a lawyer, defend my son’s girlfriend, who killed my cousin’s family in a DUI accident? 2 weeks ago:
My best friend is a public defender and he ranted to me recently about how his family still won’t ask him legal advice because he’s still the baby of the family.
- Comment on AI still doesn't work very well, businesses are faking it, and a reckoning is coming 2 weeks ago:
Yeah. I use it at work as a glorified search engine of all company wikis and docs and tickets. It’ll work basically just as a search or it can also summarize - not terribly.
Our AI meeting notes are also pretty good. I’m always impressed at how it leaves out personal chore chat and anything negative we say about someone who isn’t present.
- Comment on I am an American. I used to be proud of my country. Now it feels like a turd circling the drain. Is there anything going on behind the scene that America is actually doing good in? 2 weeks ago:
I would suggest you focus on outgrowing the need to be proud of your nationality. It’s not necessary to be able to wave a flag happily to live a good life, do good things with your time, and appreciate others who are doing the same.
The second you try to take this to the level of the entire country, and specifically the nation-state itself… now you’re into a whole mess. The US has a lengthy history of atrocities, toppling democracies, massacring innocents, dominating weaker groups… just don’t go there.
- Comment on Am I right to be afraid of germs / is my family disgusting or am I overreacting and this is germaphobia? (read post) 2 weeks ago:
It does sound like they are careless but you also sound a little reactive. The thinking I see in your post goes like this:
- a thing is either wholly corrupted or wholly pure
- corrruption spread from whole thing to home thing by touch
It’s kind of a “cooties” mentality. The trash can? Wholly corrupted! It’s trash! And it touched the table now so the table is wholly corrupted! The table is where you eat!! It’s exactly the same thing as eating trash!!
It’s not. Truth is that the ideal is somewhere between sterility and filth. Sterility is not healthy to grow up in, nor is filth. Sterility may be preferable to filth, but that doesn’t make it ideal.
How clean does a thing actually need to be? This is always my question. Am I serving my soaghetti straight onto the tabletop? No, it’s on a plate. So do I care if something touches the edge of the table? No.
Spare yourself the anxiety of pursuing an ideal that isn’t even healthy.
- Comment on Why do we eat dessert? 2 weeks ago:
There’s some logic in putting it last. First make sure you get nutritious food. Once you have, you can safely enjoy some indulgence. First of all it won’t displace actual nutrition, because you took care of that first. And second, you’re more likely to indulge moderately because you filled up on real food first.
So if there is any method here, I think it’s to put dessert last, not to put dessert before bed.
However none of this explains why, after a meal, I immediately get sugar cravings.
- Comment on The 49MB Web Page 3 weeks ago:
I explained this above but their design philosophy is that a user shouldn’t be overwhelmed with every possible function on day 1, nor will they have advanced needs on day 1 like “how can I more quickly scroll to the top to reveal a navbar.” The idea is to make what’s needed most visible, and tuck more advance functions out of the way of top prototypes ones. Then users will discover them over time, either by accident, experimentation, from a friend, or reading tip lists off the internet…
Now if this is a conversation in good faith, you won’t immediately say “so they expect everyone to learn everything by reading tip sheets off the internet??”
- Comment on Would you ever call your son a disappointment? 3 weeks ago:
You can choose and change what you do.
You can’t choose or change what you are.
If you get confused about do / be just refer back to those rules and you’ll know which one applies.
- Comment on Would you ever call your son a disappointment? 3 weeks ago:
This is a key distinction. To make sure they understand it properly, I usually push it even further to “You did a disappointing thing.”
- Comment on Would you ever call your son a disappointment? 3 weeks ago:
Never. My son is a person I could never have imagined. I don’t see what relevance my expectations of him are to anyone or anything. I’m not sure I ever had any.
Why should I? Our children are not products we purchased or objects we crafted. They are new beings coming into the universe under our care but for a while.
You discharge that responsibility on their behalf. That’s it. Of course that means setting standards for them to meet, but even this discipline you do for their own sake. You don’t get expect them to be anything.
That’s negotiating with fate - about as pointless as negotiating with death.
- Comment on The 49MB Web Page 3 weeks ago:
It’s no obscure. It’s core. Apple has this entire UI philosophy called “revealed power” which is about the UI not having a big button for everything necessarily, and letting the user discover added layers of functionality as they go on. This keeps the UI simple in the beginning, or for people who always need simplicity, but allows others to discover it in time. You won’t have to like it but it’s very intentional.
What’s “discoverable” is also relative. I was on a PC today struggling to figure out how to do something. Eventually I tried double clicking the element in question and that finally worked. I thought wow I don’t use PCs much anymore because double clicking hardly even occurs to me. Can you tell me how any user ever finds out that you need to double click an icon on their desktop? Seems obvious, but there is no label or visible indication.
- Comment on The 49MB Web Page 3 weeks ago:
The iOS browser has always supported “tap the top of the viewport to scroll all the way up,” which largely allows for what you say: just leave the nav way up there. Last time I looked was years ago, and Android Chrome didn’t did this. Does it now?
- Comment on The 49MB Web Page 3 weeks ago:
That was a great read. I have worked at companies that lived on display ads and it’s a terrible, terrible business to be in. Personally I think branded display ads have always had zero value (or even negative value) and the better the net has gotten at tracking their value, the more this has come to light, the less advertisers are willing to pay, and therefore the more fuckery publishers engage in to try to survive. It’s extremely hard or impossible to deliver a good user experience under this set of incentives.
Thinking back to the print news era, a lot of the ads were local, which made them much more valuable. But now the net has snuffed out local retail too, so that model isn’t even there to fall back on if we tried.
I’m grateful now to be working somewhere that doesn’t survive on display ads, and that may be one of the big reasons I’ve stuck with this employer for almost a decade now.
- Comment on If Tyler Perry is a billionaire with his own successful movie studio then why are his films so bad? 3 weeks ago:
Yeah I could be totally wrong on that example - was just looking for some example.
- Comment on If Tyler Perry is a billionaire with his own successful movie studio then why are his films so bad? 3 weeks ago:
I’m quite certain it tracks directly with restaurants by revenue. I’m not really aware of many restaurants I’d consider truly healthy. They aren’t all as bad as fast food, but none of them are really in the business of taking care of your health.
- Comment on If Tyler Perry is a billionaire with his own successful movie studio then why are his films so bad? 3 weeks ago:
Visualize that base: people who like Tyler Perry Movies. They would probably say Monty Python are shit and they can’t believe how much garbage they produced.
Basically: Tyler Perry movies are not for you (or me). And other people think the same thing about the stuff you like.
- Comment on Do people in countries outside the US believe our bases in their countries like terrorist cells/bases our country videws theirs? How is the reputation of our military being in a peacefull country? 3 weeks ago:
Please get your leaders to force US bases out. If you actually want to do something that’s in your own power, that’s it.
- Comment on ‘Devastating blow’: Atlassian lays off 1,600 workers ahead of AI push 3 weeks ago:
Trying to get Rovo to do things in JIRA is like trying to train a chimp to cram shit back into an elephant’s ass.