chicken
@chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on [Video] American militants stealing gold during their 2003 invasion of Iraq 1 day ago:
Looks like it only works when it is embedded, not when you go to imgur itself
- Comment on Cable and movie rentals was probably the optimal amount of digital media for a functional society. Get rid of commercials and that was probably peak. 3 days ago:
If much of what it displaced was books and conversation, seems like a big step backwards for a variety of reasons. Less depth, less interactivity, more centralized control and utility for propaganda. The general mindsets of older generations probably reflect its influence.
- Comment on I built a self-hosted period tracker because I couldn't find one worth using 3 days ago:
because I don’t know jackshit about coding and I am not gonna pretend I do.
But if OP does know and apply that knowledge to what they are doing, it’s not the same thing and doesn’t make sense to have the same disclaimer.
- Comment on I suck at reading comprehension... what the heck does this law even mean? [8 U.S. Code § 1451 - Revocation of naturalization] 3 days ago:
Damn those are some long and wordy sentences
- Comment on Cable and movie rentals was probably the optimal amount of digital media for a functional society. Get rid of commercials and that was probably peak. 3 days ago:
I don’t know, I have a feeling that television by itself was very damaging to society and Fahrenheit 451 was basically right.
- Comment on Assuming an average value of $500k per-house, a millionaire could own two houses and a billionaire could own the entire neighborhood 3 days ago:
Rather than a hard cap, I like the idea of property tax rates that go on an exponential curve depending on how many houses you have beyond the one you live in, which are used either to subsidize building more housing or somehow redistributed.
- Comment on Polymarket Takes Down Betting on Nuclear Detonation After Backlash 5 days ago:
800k could buy a lot of hard drugs, and those underground bunkers might last a few weeks
- Comment on Highguard will permanently shut down on March 12th. 6 days ago:
What a waste, make all these people spend years of their lives building a whole videogame and then immediately make it impossible for anyone to ever play it again. A company shouldn’t have the right to erase a game from existence, even if it is a bad one.
- Comment on California law to require operating systems to check your age 6 days ago:
Forcing everyone to use an approved OS is draconian.
I agree, but my point is that it wouldn’t be that easy to do either. I am hopeful that a system where servers take the OS’s word for it that you are in a certain age category would not smoothly transition into one where they also need proof that the owner of the hardware cannot decide that category, and that the system working this way would be accepted as a long-term status quo like those age selection menus were, because it would be actually a bit more effective at stopping kids who don’t know how to reinstall an OS so legislators could plausibly claim they did something.
- Comment on Pissing in the shower is better in every way than pissing in the toilet. 1 week ago:
How can you tell that this is even happening? There isn’t a visible yellow mist. There isn’t a smell.
- Comment on This plastic is made from milk and it vanishes in 13 weeks 1 week ago:
Probably more associated greenhouse gas emissions than the plastic one
- Comment on California law to require operating systems to check your age 1 week ago:
At least there’s some nontrivial additional challenges to make the jump, such as authenticating the user is on an approved OS, and the infrastructure for identity verification itself. I like this better than other age verification mandates because those make the latter the first step, fueling the growth of surveillance tech and the companies providing it as a service.
- Comment on The same people who rage against authority love moderating communities where their ideology is the only one allowed 1 week ago:
for some percentage of the population, morality isn’t a guardrail
There’s more to human behavior than expressing ideas of correct behavior and violent enforcement of those ideas. Both of those are very limited, rely on oversimplified abstractions of how people are, and often have adverse side effects. What we are like and how we live is a complex product of how we engage and relate to our environment and the people around us; the best overall solutions to problems will be holistic improvements to that environment.
To extend your medical analogy, sometimes serious threats to your health call for antibiotics, but it is not the case that scouring your body of foreign organisms will make you healthier in the absence of an antibiotic-treatable threat, it’s actually important to have those.
Bringing it back to how online spaces are organized, I think it’s important for most people to feel like there is a way to express their genuine thoughts because if it’s all just people finding different ways to repeat a dogma, that’s a failure of communication, communication is not meaningfully happening, and an environment where you are unable to communicate is a shitty and dysfunctional one. That doesn’t mean all spaces must accept all points of view, but sincere and open communication should generally be a priority, protecting that is what free expression is about.
- Comment on Millions worth of prediction market bets placed on US airstrikes on Iran 1 week ago:
The article is insinuating that inside information was used to make money on the specific date:
Now there are suspicions that other insiders used the Iran strikes to get rich. Six accounts on Polymarket reportedly won approximately $1.2 million by predicting the U.S. would launch a strike on Iran on February 28, according to CoinDesk.
The other example is more convincing though:
When the U.S. captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January, an individual with a relatively new account pumped $30,000 into a bet that Maduro would be ousted. Hours later, the Trump administration captured Maduro, earning the gambler more than $436,000.
- Comment on Millions worth of prediction market bets placed on US airstrikes on Iran 1 week ago:
What I’m hearing from this article is that all recent US military operations have been leaked in advance
- Comment on Ultra rare floppy disk game twisted and slashed into shards by US Customs or DHL checkers — ruined Tsukihime 1999 demo was one of only 50 ever produced 1 week ago:
Using authority for personal gratification
- Comment on Burger King will use AI to check if employees say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ 1 week ago:
Very creepy and dehumanizing
- Comment on AI-Generated Passwords Are Apparently Quite Easy to Crack 1 week ago:
Sometimes there’s something wrong with the way a website does login and the password manager options won’t trigger. In this case AI can be useful for telling you to install pwgen.
- Comment on An always up-to-date sheet with verified accounts from news organizations in the #Fediverse 1 week ago:
I also noticed that, maybe it would help to add some kind of loading progress indicator?
- Comment on (XMPP Setup Guide) Discord Was Never the End Game - TonyBTW 1 week ago:
The main complaints about Matrix I’ve heard though are about behind the scenes stuff rather than features, which the video touches on:
But there are some reasons why I think XMPP is superior. In Matrix, when you join a room, your server downloads and stores the entire history of that room. If someone on a federated server posts illegal content in a room you’re in, your server is now hosting it, and you are liable. Whereas in XMPP, messages are relayed in real time. Group chat, MU history stays on your server hosting that room. So your server only stores messages for your users which means that no content caching there is no content caching from other servers. This is a fundamental architectural difference which makes the XMPP protocol better in my opinion.
Personally I don’t know that much about it but I briefly looked into what it would take to write a client for Matrix a few years ago and it seemed pretty daunting to work with. Maybe it would be possible to write software that implements more Discord features on top of XMPP to have something that works more smoothly.
- Comment on Using huntarr? Perhaps you shouldn't. 2 weeks ago:
The term ‘vibe coding’ I think was originally about generating and using code without understanding it
- Comment on Heavy snow when you're a kid is a dream come true, heavy snow when you're an adult is a nightmare. 2 weeks ago:
Nothing like being a kid and realizing that the snow is deep enough to build a network of tunnels, and you are free to spend all day doing that
- Comment on Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires are publicly shielding their children from the products that made them rich 2 weeks ago:
Weird way to pitch government mandated identity checks to use the internet. I guess that will really show those billionaires.
- Comment on Hazardous substances found in all headphones tested by ToxFREE project 2 weeks ago:
There is no ‘safe’ level for endocrine disruptors that mimic our natural hormones.”
I think the article is probably right that headphones have these chemicals and it is a bad thing, but as someone wearing headphones a large portion of hours in the day for the past few decades I’m wondering how much risk there actually is, which it doesn’t seem to weigh in on very much.
- Comment on Texas Republican Primary having a normal one 2 weeks ago:
Parents make a whole host of medical decisions for their kids that they don’t formally consent to
Just pounding on consent gets you in the same circle as the anti-vaxers
Frankly I somewhat sympathize with those people because physical/medical autonomy is a topic that deserves respect. The only reason ignoring their choices is justified is because vaccines vault over a high bar of being important for public health and avoiding the clear and significant harm of disease. Also because that’s again choices parents are making on behalf of their children in defiance of what is medically justifiable.
I see a desire to make false equivalency between two very different procedures, because they both have “circumcision” in the name.
They aren’t equivalent, but the difference is severity of harm, not the type of harm. Both procedures are intended and have the effect of inhibiting normal sexual function. If you want to only argue against FGM and draw the line at supporting a circumcision ban, that’s fine because the former is especially horrible and deserves special attention, I just think most arguments for this position are a little bit incoherent.
- Comment on Mewgenics becomes the most-played roguelite ever on Steam 2 weeks ago:
The headline says “roguelite”, the Berlin Interpretation is safe for now
- Comment on Texas Republican Primary having a normal one 2 weeks ago:
I think the point is that it’s not a great comparison because the main argument against circumcision is that it’s permanent and babies can’t consent to it, I don’t think many people try to say that no one should ever be allowed to get a circumcision.
- Comment on Why are we not getting stress relief games where we take our stresses out on normal people? 2 weeks ago:
I feel like this is what people do with the multiplayer games where they are allowed to be mean to each other
- Comment on What happens to a car when the company behind its software goes under? 2 weeks ago:
Its entire model relied on centralized servers, subscriptions, and proprietary software to authenticate vehicles and manage battery exchanges.
I would otherwise be excited about the idea of getting an electric car but the way they are steeped in bullshit like this makes me end up planning to only drive old cars indefinitely.
- Comment on When DinoCon is doing more than the US Gov 2 weeks ago:
I like that they’re also banning anyone not doing a similar ban