chicken
@chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on US debt is now $37trn – should we be worried? 26 minutes ago:
The lack of a numpad on that keyboard is what sticks out to me
- Comment on Everybody talks about beliefs like they're this big important thing. 21 hours ago:
I think a lot of the time “beliefs” are more about social signaling than actual worldview. Most people aren’t going to do anything to go against the grain for the sake of their beliefs, so one belief or another isn’t going to make a difference for anything that matters.
- Comment on Having the ability to lie and manipulate with no remorse will get you much further in this world than having morals and being correct 1 day ago:
Your other comments in this thread seem to contradict that a little, at least the idea that these harms or benefits would be visible enough to you to evaluate, since you claim to have switched positions when they started becoming more visible and something you would have had to engage with directly. For software in particular, you empower your users to do whatever they happen to choose to do with it.
Which isn’t to say you’re doing the wrong thing. I just see the economy as a whole as an inherently cannibalistic system we have little choice but to be a contributing part of one way or another, with the main form of meaningful available agency being to minimize involvement rather than choosing how to be involved.
- Comment on Having the ability to lie and manipulate with no remorse will get you much further in this world than having morals and being correct 1 day ago:
I feel like that has got to be pretty difficult unless you include jobs where you are personally isolated from and ignorant of the harmful things the company you contribute to is doing
- Comment on Is WW3 more likely to accelerate or slow down anthropogenic climate change? 2 days ago:
Yes, but the opposite way you might be thinking since mass death from war and other catastrophe is strongly correlated with very high birth rates. We’re on track for the global population to stabilize around 10 billion right now, but if billions die in a world war we will probably go exponential again for a long time.
- Comment on So if we're just good with careening into fascism 2.0 what does the future look like? 2 days ago:
I would like that to be true, but I don’t think the numbers really support it, at least for the approval rating:
Last updated on July 2nd 2025
He was 6th lowest approved president ever for his first term, but that was with an approval rating of 34%, which is lower than it is currently. Top 3 are Truman, Nixon, and Bush, with 22,24,25% respectively.
- Comment on China is cracking down on young women who write gay erotica 5 days ago:
The article makes the argument that it is overtly anti queer:
The law targets “explicit descriptions of gay sex or other sexual perversions”. Heterosexual depictions often have more leeway - works by acclaimed Chinese authors, including Nobel Laureate Mo Yan, have graphic sexual scenes, but are widely available.
Although authors of heterosexual erotica have been jailed in China, observers say the genre is subjected to far less censorship. Gay erotica, which is more subversive, seems to bother authorities more. Volunteers in a support group for the Haitang writers told the BBC police even questioned some readers.
- Comment on Wealth of Global 1% Has Skyrocketed by Over $33 Trillion Since 2015: Report 1 week ago:
It’s more that the squeeze is done on your behalf, than that it is not required
- Comment on Dreamsettler, the follow-up to early internet inspired browser game Hypnospace Outlaw, has been cancelled 1 week ago:
- Comment on Reminder that you do not own digital games 1 week ago:
This is a multiplayer freemium game though, I don’t think there are any cracked servers for it, and supposedly there are options for Epic users to retain their accounts with things they’ve bought (the game is also apparently kind of p2w).
- Comment on Researchers create method for converting urine into high-value bio-implant material 2 weeks ago:
that converts urine from wastewater
[into]…
a $3.5 billion industry
Wait so they’re just going to steal our pee and not even pay us for it
- Comment on In this day and age is it possible to create a commune? With majority of vegetables coming from one acre and all put in to get wifi to our subdivision? So the bill is not that high? 2 weeks ago:
I once had a deal with my landlord to provide wifi to the other tenants. Of course I didn’t snoop, but it’s not like they had any real assurance of that. You’d think there might be some privacy concerns but nobody had a problem except when the internet was down. I think in general people don’t tend to care about that, though if you do there’s the option of using a VPN.
- Comment on Americans grapple with affordability crisis: "Hard for me just to survive" 2 weeks ago:
“You do get defeated knowing that homes are so expensive after looking today,” Bartolini said. “I hope people in power, they change the price of things. There has to be a way to make everything go cheaper. There’s no way that it can just keep going up and up and up cause then people won’t be able to live.”
I think he wants to change it but maybe doesn’t totally understand the real options for changing it.
- Comment on Etsy cracks down on 3D printed products — new rules exclude many 3D printed items from listings 2 weeks ago:
sell things that you actually have the rights to print and sell.
This would exclude the thousands of makers who subscribe to designers like Cinderwing3D, and have permission to print and sell her articulated dragon designs.
It sounds like they do have the rights, and this policy is still causing problems for them.
- Comment on Facebook advertised a professional child kidnapping service to me 3 weeks ago:
The fact that these places exist and aren’t shut down has always really bothered me, horrible stuff
- Comment on 🎮✨ Introducing: Dota Player Rating - A Fediverse-Connected Gaming Community Platform 3 weeks ago:
Doesn’t that game already have a “behavior score”?
- Comment on Build Your Own Open Source Powered Air-Purifying Respirator 4 weeks ago:
What is the reason to make one of these instead of wearing a regular respirator? They mention N95 masks being less comfortable, but this thing looks like the part that straps to your face is basically the same as a respirator. Just instead of filters you have to draw air through there’s a fan, but why do you need the fan?
- Comment on Here's for 2 years since I joined Lemmy 4 weeks ago:
Just like old web forums, how nostalgic
- Comment on If AI was going to advance exponentially I'd of expected it to take off by now. 4 weeks ago:
But any actual developer knows that you don’t just deploy whatever Copilot comes up with, because - let’s be blunt - it’s going to be very bad code. It won’t be DRY, it will be bloated, it will implement things in nonsensical ways, it will hallucinate… You use it as a starting point, and then sculpt it into shape.
Yeah, but I don’t know where you’re getting the “never will” or “fundamentally cannot do” from. LLMs used to be only useful for coding if you ask for simple self-contained functions in the most popular languages, and now we’re here; most requests with small scope, I’m getting a result that is better written than I could have done myself by spending way more time, it makes way fewer mistakes than before and can often correct them. That’s with only using local models which became actually viable for me less than a year ago. So why won’t it keep going?
From what I can tell there is not very much actually standing in the way of sensible holistic consideration of a larger problem or codebase here, just context size limits and being more likely to forget things in the context window the longer it is, which afaik are problems being actively worked on where there’s no reason they would be guaranteed to remain unsolved. This also seems to be what is holding back agentic AI from being actually useful. If that stuff gets cracked, I think it’s going to mean things will start changing even faster.
- Comment on If AI was going to advance exponentially I'd of expected it to take off by now. 4 weeks ago:
A few years ago I remember people being amazed that prompts like “Markiplier drinking a glass of milk” could give them some blobs that looked vaguely like the thing asked for occasionally. Now there is near photorealistic video output. Same kind of deal with ability to write correct computer code and answer questions. Most of the concrete predictions/bets people made along the lines of “AI will never be able to do ______” have been lost.
What reason is there to think it’s not taking off, aside from bias or dislike of what’s happening? There are still flaws and limitations for what it can do, but I feel like you have to have your head in the sand to not acknowledge the crazy level of progress.
- Comment on There were probably some people who just really liked "Never gonna give you up" and really enjoyed getting rick rolled 5 weeks ago:
Maybe but iirc the joke started on 4chan, with the idea that everyone there was so used to traditional horrific shock images/videos that they don’t bother them, but such a person might be uniquely vulnerable to being annoyed by a cheesy love song presented in the same way.
- Comment on How I discovered my partner was an undercover police officer sent to spy on me 5 weeks ago:
Maybe not as huge as it should be but
In 2021, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) ordered the Met Police and NPCC to pay a total of £229,471 to Ms Wilson “by way of just satisfaction for the breaches of her human rights”
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
You may not have been anonymous to the people in your immediate community, but you were largely anonymous to the people outside of it, which is something that has been systematically dismantled in various ways through history. Even things as basic as last names are there to make you visible to outsiders.
From Seeing Like a State, p59:
The invention of permanent, inherited patronyms was, after the administrative simplification of nature (for example, the forest) and space (for example, land tenure), the last step in establishing the necessary preconditions of modern statecraft. In almost every case it was a state project, designed to allow officials to identify, unambiguously, the majority of its citizens. When successful, it went far to create a legible people. 38 Tax and tithe rolls, property rolls, conscription lists, censuses, and property deeds recognized in law were inconceivable without some means of fixing an individual’s identity and linking him or her to a kin group. Campaigns to assign permanent patronyms have typically taken place, as one might expect, in the context of a state’s exertions to put its fiscal system on a sounder and more lucrative footing.
IMO the felt anonymity of Reddit, that comes from the fact that hardly anyone cares to remember your username and you don’t directly experience scrutiny, isn’t that useful. What really matters is the potential for someone to look over everything you’ve written (and if they have administrator access, connect that to IP, email, browser fingerprint etc.), and use that information for their own purposes, regardless of their having any connection to or legitimate personal interest in you. In that respect, Lemmy isn’t much better (it kind of can’t be when the premise is publicly posting writing to the internet), but it isn’t worse either.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
It’s really hard, I tried for a while and gave up. Way too many things to pay attention to and get right at once, while doing something dangerous.
- Comment on YSK You don't need Teflon pans for nonstick 1 month ago:
Don’t properly nonstick pans mostly not use teflon anymore anyway?
- Comment on AI use damages professional reputation, study suggests 1 month ago:
The final experiment revealed that perceptions of laziness directly explain this evaluation penalty. The researchers found this penalty could be offset when AI was clearly useful for the assigned task. When using AI made sense for the job, the negative perceptions diminished significantly.
Yeah I was gonna say, seems like the kind of thing that would depend a lot on what it is being used for and how.
- Comment on [NEWS] Mangadex hit by massive DMCA takedown, 700+ series gone 1 month ago:
Are these even available on torrents?
- Comment on New York Bitcoin Miners Are Buying Up Power Plants—and Communities Are Fighting Back 1 month ago:
Besides the climate implications, this highlights the centralization risks in Proof of Work mining; the only way to mine Bitcoin profitably is if you have some kind of privileged access to electricity with effectively low ongoing cost, and that access is gated by government regulation.
- Comment on Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI 1 month ago:
What’s basically being said is, making an AI powered software local-only doesn’t make a difference and doesn’t matter. But that’s not true, and the arguments for that don’t seem coherent.
- Comment on Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI 1 month ago:
But the company hasn’t collected it, because it doesn’t have it. Your computer has it. So long as it stays on your computer, it cannot harm your privacy. That’s why there is such a big difference here; an actual massive loss of privacy, vs a potential risk of loss of privacy.
