azertyfun
@azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Games that stuck with you 2 hours ago:
Life is Strange’s writing is trope-y and often not that great, and my neurospicy ass doesn’t even relate with pretty much any of the nostalgic tropes about teenagehood (as far as I’m concerned these were the worst years of my life, by far, and any piece of media that wants to make me relive them is very unlikely to make its way onto my computer).
However the game manages to more than make up for all of that with an enthralling story that fully immerses the player with compelling gameplay, meaningful choice-based storytelling, great artistic vision, and ground-breaking character acting. The whole thing is expertly calibrated to deliver emotional gut-punch after emotional gut-punch.
Hellblade is just straight-up amazing and the Melinda Juergens’ character acting is hauntingly raw and poignant.
- Comment on xkcd #2933: Elementary Physics Paths 1 month ago:
High school chemistry felt less like imperfect modeling and more like alchemy that sometimes yields tangible results. I can’t remember specifics anymore but there were many moments where I was like “you’re using too many shortcuts and this doesn’t make any damn sense mathematically or dimensionally anymore”. I know real chemistry is too complex to fit a high school program, but the way it was taught really was like a soft science cosplaying as a hard science.
Also chemists would use any pressure units before they used Pa. mmHg as a unit suffers from congenital defects I can only assume stem from repeated inbreeding.
- Comment on Report: Microsoft to face antitrust case over Teams 1 month ago:
New notification, old notification, either way it auto-dismisses the system notification after 5 seconds. Why? I guess they don’t trust the DE to manage notifications properly??
So my colleagues know if they send me a message I’ll get to it when I’ll get to it because I probably will have missed the notification.
- Comment on Kagi silently removed all references to Google's index from their website 1 month ago:
I know Brave browser has had a lot of controversy in the past regarding their business practices, including rolling out their own crypto-coin.
They apparently make the really bold claim of using their own index exclusively. If true (given their track record I am not 100 % willing to accept that as truth without seeing some independent analysis), that would do wonders for the search ecosystem. I’m definitely interested to see how it pans out.
- Submitted 1 month ago to technology@lemmy.world | 66 comments
- Comment on Google Kneecaps Loads Of Very Big Websites After SEO Change 1 month ago:
Wow, looks like they just updated that page and removed all references to their external indexes. Very shady stuff, Kagi. I’d go as far as to say they are now lying by omission.
The archived version of that page from December does open with (emphasis mine):
Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Mojeek and Yandex, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information like Apple, Wikipedia, Open Meteo, and other APIs.
Then it goes on to say:
Kagi’s indexes provide unique results that help you discover non-commercial websites and “small web” discussions surrounding a particular topic.
Now reading between the lines, and more importantly knowing how much sheer capital goes into indexing the entire web, I can say with much certainty that Kagi is probably powered mostly by Google since it and Bing (which they aren’t using) are basically the only meaningful players in the space. Yandex is for the Russosphere, and Mojeek is nice but nowhere even close to Google or Bing’s coverage. By their own admission Teclis is more narrowly focused and not meant to replace Google’s index. So I’m going to go ahead and call them big fat liars.
- Comment on Google Kneecaps Loads Of Very Big Websites After SEO Change 1 month ago:
Kagi is just Google’s index with fancy features and filtering on top. They include a few other sources but for regular search it’s almost always going to be Google’s index providing the base results.
- Comment on Imagine denying other living and breathing lifeforms agency to thrive amd change lol lol lol 1 month ago:
Who is going to keep them accountable? Trees have a record high abstention rate, and if these representatives are elected by humans that’s just proportional voting with veneer on top.
Democracy is about balancing levers, and that’s why there is more than one branch of government. Special interest groups do have power, and so does the judiciary (who may sue the government for unlawful cutting down of trees) and the executive (who may have power to declare certain government-owned land to be Protected).
The real ecologist move would be to write a duty to protect the environment into the constitution, so that the judiciary can strike down any law that does anything to the contrary.
- Comment on Found this great deal on a new chair for my living room. Almost 50% off! 1 month ago:
If I saw that in someone’s house I’d think “well that’s terrible but no-one’s first woodworking project looks great, at least it’s creative problem-solving”.
Hearing the price tag is where I’d probably faint.
- Comment on The more air conditions in an area the hotter becomes around it. In turn increasing the demand for AC. Talk about infinite money glitch. 2 months ago:
proper thermal insulation
what an understatement. it’s very unsexy but also incredibly effective. if your house is over 20 years old, you don’t need fancy-ass blinds, you need to get your house insulated ASAP. everything else must wait.
insulation is the number one most effective thing anyone can do to improve the energy use of their living space. only when your house is properly insulated can you think of shade management, greenery, passive ventilation, heat pumps, etc. in an insulated house, those either won’t work at all or will be wildly inefficient.
- Comment on acceptable screws 2 months ago:
I’ve heard that was more of a European thing, but the only two serious contenders are Pozidriv vs Torx for screws (and hex vs Allen for bolts).
I just checked my local hardware store’s website, and out of the 176 kinds of 4/4.5mm screw boxes in their inventory, 74 are Torx, 55 are Pozidriv, and 38 are Phillips (ew).
Either Torx or Pozidriv is fine when used properly, however most DIYers don’t understand the difference between PZ and PH and end up stripping their heads. Also it’s much harder to use the wrong-sized bit with Torx than PZ.
So yeah, Torx wins in just about every category and other heads only get manufactured to appease old people and penny-pinchers.
- Comment on Threads is automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed 3 months ago:
It’s not. You have the “explore” tab which is more like “today’s viral toots” (which tend to be a lot more varied than Lemmy’s “All/Top 24h” since Lemmy is a link aggregator and doesn’t really lend itself to jotting down thoughts or diatribes), and you have your personal timeline which is people you actively follow. It’s not a cafeteria, it’s your RSS feed.
Where it gets shouty is in replies, especially as those get federated weirdly. But that’s only a problem for the few percent of users who are making content, not for consumers.
- Comment on bioluminescence 3 months ago:
We do that all the time to diagnose cancer.
Except the glow is gamma rays from radioisotopes that clump up in fast replicating cells (i.e. tumors) but potato potato, do you want your insides to glow or not?
- Comment on They lied to us 3 months ago:
I mean, they’re close enough to French. As a Belgian, it pains me to admit that they probably originated in Paris anyway, though we perfected the recipe (and they’re called French fries in American English for a different reason).
- Comment on Leaked SpaceX documents show company forbids employees to sell stock if it deems they've misbehaved 3 months ago:
At that point he’d outed himself as an asshole to the general public, but he still got big results with SpaceX and Tesla. That incident could have been lost to time and a legacy of undeniable successes.
Hyperloop is where things went cuckoo-bananas business-wise IMO. The delays and broken promises at Tesla were weird, but anyone who’d heard of subways could tell the whole hyperloop thing was doomed to fail, and it became increasingly obvious to anyone who read tech headlines that he wasn’t just any asshole, but a clueless asshole.
- Comment on They lied to us 3 months ago:
It’s crazy to me that they felt the need to include safety instructions lol. Handmade Filet Américain for sure I’d eat same-day or at most next day, but the store-bought variety uses preservatives and can last for 3 days in the fridge no problem.
Americans be acting like beef is like fugu or something, but if fresh raw beef gives you E. Coli you need to be suing people! My understanding is this pathological phobia of raw meat goes back to the mid-20th century where long supply chains and untrustworthy cold chains led to the advice that all meat had to be done well, but that’s outdated advice that would not develop nowadays. Red meat just can’t go bad that fast at 4°C, so if the supplier is trusrworthy there’s no issue.
Brits have kind of the same thing with electrical plugs in bathrooms, they’re scared to death of them and you can’t convince them it’s safe and that the rest of the world does it just fine. Interesting how there are these localized “fear islands” around certain topics that people take for granted.
- Comment on They lied to us 3 months ago:
Belgium and Northern France have Filet Américain (American Filet). So an American dish right? Well no, it’s raw ground beef, basically the last thing most Americans will ever willingly eat. Here it’s basically the default sandwich topping.
- Comment on F.A.A. Audit of Boeing’s 737 Max Production Found Dozens of Issues 3 months ago:
“Because safety isn’t a thing we can measure” reads exactly like a dril tweet.
… holy shit there’s a whole academic-level analysis of dril’s tweets. I am enchanted.)
- Comment on English may be a hot mess but at least we don't have to worry about this nonsense 4 months ago:
Just wait to learn how we gender “dick” and “cunt” in French (hint: it’s not the way you’d think).
It’s the one thing people who aren’t fluent in a gendered language usually fail to grasp: Grammatical gender is in most situations completely separate from social gender. The grammatical gender in “une bite” has absolutely no social function and is not in any way contradictory to its traditionally opposite social gender.
Ironically it’s also why using the wrong grammatical gender feels so wrong/unnatural to a native speaker (not that it’s an excuse to be a dick to non-native speakers ofc): gender is not just “a social concept attached to a word”, it is an inherent property of the word that matters fundamentally to sentence structure and so misusing it throws everything off-balance.
- Comment on She...she made a dildough 4 months ago:
My guess is the pp was some kind of traditional “fertility amulet” for granddaughter to have a son of her own.
Which, still weird AF on multiple levels, but also believable gram-gram stuff.
- Comment on When "Everything" Becomes Too Much: The npm Package Chaos of 2024 - Socket 4 months ago:
You mean npm duplicates even if the the two dependency versions are compatible?
By default yes, unless you explicity use the “peer dependency” system which isn’t the default. The “default” naive implementation is for every package in your
node_modules
to have anode_modules
of its own, all the way down recursively. There are tricks nowdays to deduplicate packages with the exact same version, but not to automatically detect “compatible” versions and use those instead (in my experience nothing would work if that was the case, deleting package-lock.json causes way too many issues due to the… uh, let’s call it “brave” approach of JS devs to stability).That couldn’t be, right? Otherwise, if you installed two packages that rely on different incompatible versions of another package, one of the two would break
Correct. This is intended behavior which is solved in several ways:
- Correctly declaring your dependencies. If newer versions of a dependency break your package, disallow them, but that is not normally needed for minor version changes.
- Focus on quality. Semver exists for a reason, and
1.2.3
should not break something built against1.1.2
. JS and NPM’s cascade of stupid implementations bred a culture of “move fast and break things”, but that’s not the norm in any other commonly used ecosystem - Linux distros almost exclusively use curated repositories, so they are (mostly) internally consistent and incompatibilities are rare and quickly fixed. A good package manager will resolve dependencies and automatically detect incompatibilities, proposing several fixes (typically abort the upgrade or uninstall one of the problematic packages)
- Not breaking down packages into a constellation of smaller packages.
glibc6
isglibc6
, notglibc_string (1.2.3)
+glibc_memory (2.6.5)
+glibc_fs (1.5.3)
+glibc_stdio (1.9.2)
+glibc_threads (6.1.0)
+ …
Internallyglibc6
is a bunch of modules, but they get bundled into one package specifically to simplify dependency management.
Not being able to install two versions of the same package sounds restrictive, but it’s a HUGE security benefit:
glibc6 (1.2.3)
is vulnerable to CVE-2024-1, then updating toglibc6 (1.2.4)
secures your entire system at once. With NPM though, you have to either wait for every. single. dependency on that vulnerable package down your tree to recursively update, or patch those versions yourself (at your own risk because again, small version changes often break things since developers think that NPM’s dependency model means they don’t have to actually provide stability guarantees). - Comment on When "Everything" Becomes Too Much: The npm Package Chaos of 2024 - Socket 4 months ago:
It’s saner, not perfect. With virtualenvs it does basically what you describe except that it re-downloads everything for every virtualenv, but that does not typically matter much since it’s not downloading a billion dependencies.
With NPM there’s no choice but to have hundreds of duplicates installed for every project, that’s not just inefficient but it is a security, maintainability, and auditability nightmare.
- Comment on When "Everything" Becomes Too Much: The npm Package Chaos of 2024 - Socket 4 months ago:
npm
downloads every dependency recursively. Ifa
depends ond (= 1.2.3)
andb
depends ond (= 1.2.4)
, then both versions ofd
get downloaded intoa
andb
’s respectivenode_modules
.All other package managers I’m aware of resolve dependencies into a flat list then download, and you can only have one version of the same package on your system.
- Comment on When "Everything" Becomes Too Much: The npm Package Chaos of 2024 - Socket 4 months ago:
- Like Python, have a large and featureful standard library such that > 80% of NPM packages are redundant. Other languages allow you to make very large projects with only a few tens of dependencies. JavaScript requires THOUSANDS.
- With this in place, stop with the recursive dependencies, immediately and forever. Every other package manager under the sun installs the dependencies next to each other.
I’d say
pip
is saner, though not by much as its support for private registries is very bad and seems designed to facilitate supply-chain attacks. I’ve heard a lot of good things aboutcargo
but haven’t used it enough myself to have a strong opinion. - Comment on ‘There is no such thing as a real picture’: Samsung defends AI photo editing on Galaxy S24 4 months ago:
It’s actually way worse. Modern smartphones do a LOT of postprocessing that is basically just AI, and have been for years. Noise reduction, upscaling, auto-HDR and bokeh are all achieved through “AI” and are way further removed from reality than a film print or a DSLR picture. Smartphone sensors aren’t nearly as good as a decent DSLR, they just make up for it with compute power and extremely advanced processing pipelines so we can’t tell the difference at a glance.
Zoom into even a simple picture of a landscape, and you can obviously tell whether it was shot on smartphone. HDR artifacting and weird hallucinogenic blobs in low-light details are telltale signs, and not coincidentally rather similar to telltale sign of AI-generated photorealistic pictures.
Anyway it’s still important to draw a line in the sand for what constitutes a “doctored” picture, but the line isn’t so obviously placed once you realize just how wildly different a “no filter” smartphone pic is from the raw image straight from the sensor.
- Comment on I love my Gitea. Any tips and tricks? 5 months ago:
You’re completely missing the point. Even Gitea (much simpler than GitHub, nevermind GitLab) is much more than a git backend. It’s viewable in a browser, renders markdown, has integrated CI functionality, and so on.
Even for my meager self-host use-case, being able to view markdown docs in the browser is useful from time to time, even on my phone.
As for the things I use (a self-hosted) GitLab instance at work for… that doesn’t even scratch the surface.
- Comment on Passenger phone found on ground after Alaska Airlines emergency 5 months ago:
Damn, this ARG stuff goes hard.
- Comment on European Union set to revise cookie law, admits cookie banners are annoying 5 months ago:
Which free websites? The modern web is just:
- (Quasi-)monopolistic platforms (meta, google, xitter, etc.)
- Newspapers
- SEO filler
- Webshops
- Free sites already operating out of the goodwill of some random admin and making single-digit ad revenue anyway <– you are here
- Porn aggregators
- SEO filler
- SEO filler
- Wikipedia
- End of list
The only ones whose business model would truly be threatened and whose loss would be problematic are newspapers.
OTOH newspapers accidentally cornering themselves in a “freemium” business model has fucked journalism over so bad I’m not sure how it could even be worse.Free websites like the ones we are on barely exist anymore anyway, because how the fuck do you “compete” in the “free marketplace of search indexing” when some russian troll is burying you to page 5 of google’s search results and you can’t reach anyone via facebook or twitter without paying thousands?
- Comment on UK fossil fuel use drops to lowest level since 1957 5 months ago:
In electricity generation *. Probably not as good once you take all primary production into account, especially transportation.
However coal specifically is amazing. I thought "lowest consumption since 1757 was a typo, but it is not.
- Comment on Steam has now officially stopped supporting Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1. 5 months ago:
99 % of people didn’t “upgrade windows” back then. That would have required buying a whole new, full-price, license (or pirating). Even Service Packs were a whole deal to install. In those days you’d use your OEM Windows license the computer came with and that’d be that.
What did actually happen was OEMs selling millions of brand new shitbuckets, particularly laptops, with 1GB of RAM. That was fine on XP, but barely enough to boot Vista and if you stared any program it would swap like a motherfucker (sure, maybe it should have used less memory, but 7 wasn’t any better yet people were fine with it). Microsoft’s real mistake was allowing OEMs to sell new machines with 1 GB of RAM (IDK if it was to allow OEMs to install Vista on existing SKUs, but regardless it was the critical mistake that made everyone despise Vista).