azertyfun

@azertyfun@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨nighttime pollinator gang rise up⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The phonology of “moth” is just bad (not just subjectively but in a way that I’m sure linguistics could pick apart). It’s adjacent to “moist”. That’s the kind of name you give something you don’t like, a name made to be spat out. Contrast to other monosyllabic names like “fly”, a decidedly more despicable insect but with a much prettier name. Which one would be easier to use in a song?

  Also I just checked and moths are butterflies, etymologically it’s just that old Germanic peoples assigned a different name to the less colorful butterflies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨nighttime pollinator gang rise up⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t even know disliking moths was a thing until recently.

  Guess why? In French they are called “night butterflies”. It’s just a nocturnal butterfly so of course it’s brown, duh.

  This feels like the Orca/Killer Whale debate again. Why do the English give such terrible names to animals like they’re trying to give children nightmares?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cyberpunk 2077 released in December 2020. Almost 4 years later, what is your opinion on it?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Uncut diamond is a good way to put it.

  The scenario, world building, graphics, and acting are world-class. Combat was decent. Most side-quests were forgettable and clearly worse than the main quest. The open-world was mechanically massively underwhelming, especially considering TW3 came out five years earlier.

  This game received a lot of love and took a long time to make, but failed to achieve in some key areas. CDPR didn’t have the means to do what R* or Larian could, and that’s fine. I can’t help but feel that if these developers had put the same time and energy into a (semi) closed world à la Mass Effect or Deus Ex, not having to spend so much time filling in a huge open world map would have allowed them to make the whole game as tight and polished as the main quest stuff, and this could have been the best game of the decade or close to it. Only downside is it doesn’t tick the mandatory “Open World” box for AAA games, but does anyone actually care if the RPG elements are good?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨X's idiocy is doing wonders for Bluesky.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  He was really popular on twitter, and if he says mastodon’s worse despite having a smaller audience there, I trust his judgement. Literally his pinned toot.

  “First replies shown are the ones the author replied to and/or liked” seems like an obvious, simple, and transparent algorithm. Like youtube comments. Give lazy reply guys an opportunity to see without scrolling down that they aren’t as original as they think they are. The fact that this isn’t implemented in even a basic form is absolutely insane and shows a very fundamental ideological disconnect between people who want “open twitter with decent moderation” and whatever the fuck it is that the mastodon OGs/devs are trying to achieve.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨X's idiocy is doing wonders for Bluesky.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Some people don’t want a suggestion algorithm but do want full reply federation.

  Alec from Technology Connections stopped using mastodon because of this, every post he made would get nitpicked on by 20 different people from instances who did not federate the replies with each other so each one thought they were the first.

  I have a single user instance and I use a relay, but most replies are still missing if I click on a post unless I go to the original webpage.

  Lazy-federating replies when a post is viewed sounds like an obvious solution but AFAIK the mastodon devs are very opposed to this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sympathy for their PTSD⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  How is “they are responsible for their own actions” dehumanizing? If anything the person you are responding to is arguing that IDF soldiers have free will.

  Do not buy into the “we didn’t know!!!1!” and “we were indoctrinated!!!” bullshit. This is the exact same bullshit that “former” nazis sympathizers peddled after the war. It’s a lie. A transparent one at that.

  Yes, the nazis’ methods of dehumanization were very effective. But that does not, for even a femtosecond, absolve anyone of cold-bloodedly murdering a Jew (or a Palestinian). It didn’t happen on accident, that soldier got in that position through a long series of conscious choices, and it came down to it he chose to run over hundreds of people from the comfort of his bulldozer. That is both very human, and one of the most unspeakable crimes of hate. Human in all the worst ways our species has ever devised.

  Some crimes are just beyond forgiveness, because it isn’t in anyone’s power to forgive. Killing hundreds in an act of genocide is one such crime. To be human is many things, but being owed forgiveness is not one of them.

  I’m sorry for the emotional message, I am assuming you are playing devil’s advocate in good faith but I can’t just let the dehumanization of innocent murdered civilians be compared to the harsh condemnation of the soldiers who killed them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Probably yeah. But also the European honeybee is not the only European bee nor pollinator so the argument holds true to some extent.

  However I’m not convinced the impact is worse than the monocultures which makes up the majority of our calorie intake. Thousands of hectares of nothing but beets or corn probably does more for killing insect diversity than a handful of beehives, but what do I know.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How pen and paper comes to the rescue in an IT crisis⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Bro I wouldn’t trust most companies not to store their only copy of super_duper_important_financial_data_2024.xlsx on an old AliExpress thumb drive attached to the CFO’s laptop in a coffee shop while he’s taking a shit.

  If your company has an actual DRP for if your datacenter catches fire or your cloud provider disappears, you are already doing better than 98 % of your competitors, and these aren’t far-fetched disaster scenarios. Maintaining an entire separate pen-and-paper shadow process, training people for it? That’s orders of magnitude more expensive than the simplest of DRPs most companies already don’t have.

  Friendly wave to all the companies currently paying millions a year extra to Broadcap/VMWare because their tools and processes are too rigid to use with literally any other hypervisor when realistically all their needs could be covered by the free tier of ProxMox and/or OpenStack.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ubisofts stock tanked this morning ahead of the markets opening⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s probably a whole thesis or five to be written on the subject.

  The “traditional” AAA pipeline is “make big games with loooots of assets and mechanics, maximize playtime, must be an Open World and/or GaaS”. Both due to institutional pressures (lowest common denominator, investor expectations for everyone to copy the R* formula, GaaS are money printing machines) and technical reasons (open worlds are easy to do sloppily, you can just deliver the game half finished and have it work (e.g. Cyberpunk), GaaS/open worlds are a somewhat natural consequence of extremely massive development teams that simply could not work together on a more narrowly focused genre).

  That’s not to say there aren’t good expensive games being payrolled by massive studios like Sony or Microsoft. But AAA is a specific subset of those, and blandness comes with the territory. However if I was a betting man I’d say we’re nearing the end of this cycle with the high profile market failures of the last few years and the AAA industry will have to reinvent itself at least somewhat. Investors won’t want to be left holding the bag for the next Concord.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Climate scientists flee Twitter as hostility surges⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, he’s actively supporting the opposition (Trump) right now. Were Trump to win then he’d certainly be in a very good position within Trump’s desired oligarchy. Until then he’s just a very rich asshole whose main major concrete political power comes from his ownership of Twitter and (largely artificial) audience. If anything his support of Trump kneecaps him in his ability to run his businesses as the Biden and hypothetical Harris administrations are not as likely to let him keep getting away with all the blatantly illegal shit he keeps doing.

  Michael Bloomberg OTOH fits the term pretty well, as he’s a very major donor to the DNC and that certainly makes him very close to the ear of the president and policy decisions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Telegram CEO Pavel Durov Arrested in France⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That conspiracy theory is so dumb.

  The government almost certainly doesn’t need a backdoor as telegram is almost completely unencrypted (only one-to-one channels can be but aren’t by default). The real (but more boring) conspiracy theory is that governments generally don’t mind Telegram because its willfully terrible security model allows them to keep an eye on terrorists and activists’ communications (I have a hard time believing that the NSA or even DGSE don’t have their own backdoors already).

  However the EU does have laws mandating the moderation of said unencrypted messages, especially when it comes to CSAM, which Telegram is notoriously poorly moderated. It’s certainly reason enough to arrest and question this guy, at least until formal charges are brought or he walks free. Maybe there are additional political considerations, but there doesn’t have to be.

  Also how would arresting this guy help with backdooring. He doesn’t have access to the source code. Whoever he calls to get that done is out of reach of the French police. He has no reason not to disable that backdoor as soon as he gets out of the EU. If he can be bought off he already has been (Crypto AG style except way lamer because no-one clever&important trusts Telegram), you don’t need to arrest someone to pay them. I’m no DSGSE bigwig but pressuring lower level engineers to backdoor their code seems like a 1000% more effective approach.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bumble⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  We need an app that keeps the gender ratios even.

  Isn’t that what Tinder is indirectly trying to achieve with its “Get Super Gold+++ insta premium” business model? To get a somewhat even gender ratio you need to get a bunch of men to drop out, and asking for absurd amounts of money is certainly one way to go about it. Though I hear even premium tinder users vastly outnumber the women.

  A raffle could work in theory, but upwards of 80 % of men will have to be thrown out and as a woman I wouldn’t see why I would settle for that instead of an app where attractive men will be falling over themselves to talk to me.

  AFAIK the only proven methods for not-super-attractive men to get matches is to either go offline, or be bi/gay. Do with that advice what you will.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Edge-Lit, Thin LCD TVs Are Having Early Heat Death Issues⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What’s the overlap of the general public, people who buy “fancy sculpture TVs”, and people who still buy LCD TVs when OLED has been affordable for years now (I paid a grand for mine)? Keeping in mind that regular TVs already look impossibly thin so you gotta find someone knowledgeable enough to know that 3-5 cm is not as thin as it goes, but not knowledgeable enough to know LCD ain’t shit.

  Maybe there are enough of these people to justify a SKU to cater to their needs. But I can also believe that no market research exists to support that hypothesis, and it reads a lot like the average boomer’s understanding of “the younguns and their flat-screen television sets” as if the switch away from bulky CRTs had only happened 5 years ago and not 25.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Edge-Lit, Thin LCD TVs Are Having Early Heat Death Issues⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Do people buy the thinnest thing? Laptops or phones maybe to some extent, but TVs I sincerely doubt.

  And having gotten to interact with the real process of product development, I gotta say in my (relatively narrow) experience it’s based a lot more on vibes/politics than market research or focus groups.

  I can totally see “make it as thin as XYZ” being a hard requirement for no better reason than a PM felt strongly about it, and no-one had all three infinity stones necessary to call them out (engineering knowledge, understanding of the PD pipeline, and political capital).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trash Icon 🗑⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Frutiger Aero my beloved. The apotheosis of skeuomorphic design, killed by a neverending downward spiral towards the least distinctive, creative, and inspired designs imaginable.

  It’s really ironic that this design cycle coincided with the rise of high-DPI displays. All those pixels used to upscale monochrome boxes with square corners. What a tragedy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games that stuck with you⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

• Kagi silently removed all references to Google's index from their website
  Submitted ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨66⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google Kneecaps Loads Of Very Big Websites After SEO Change⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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!⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨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.