azertyfun

@azertyfun@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Musk 'Pressured' Reddit CEO to Silence DOGE Critics, Leaving Moderators Outraged: Report.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
  1. He’s dumber than you give him credit for
  2. What is the point of the supposed cover story? To cover from who, about what? He’s literally paying people to vote, again. Next to that, buying a social media to influence it almost sounds democratic.

  The reason that conspiracy theory is appealing is the same for all conspiracy theories; it’s more comforting to think the powerful have a clever masterful evil plan than the sad reality that we’re all making it up as we go, even the literal Nazis.

  Relevant ContraPoints from 4 days ago

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Israel publicly announces genocidal intent⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This ain’t an insurance claim. Multiple parties can be, and are, in the wrong.

  The democratic party leadership should resign effective 10 years ago. It’s obviously entirely corrupted by corporate interests. The citizens who decided that was an excuse to sit on the sidelines to enable a full-blown fascist takeover are fascist enablers - which is not mutually exclusive with being victims. And they share the blame.

  Anyway none of that fucking matters anymore because america had its last free federal election. You’ll excuse the rest of the world for being bitter about it because, and I cannot stress enough how deadly serious I am writing these words, we’ll be insanely lucky if the Palestinian Genocide ends up being the worst humanitarian disaster to come out of Trump’s electoral win. This motherfucker has fully and irreversibly upended 80 years of Pax Americana and now after decades of relative standstill Nuclear Proliferation is once again underway as american allies can no longer rely on the nuclear umbrella and enemies are no longer betting on a coherent and predictable foreign policy. Canada, Poland, South Korea, and probably more are now seriously contemplating or already working on a nuclear weapons program, not to mention that he expedited Iran’s own nuclear program in his first term in case you forgot. The genuine threat of Nuclear War is once again looming on the horizon, even if most people are too dense or too wrapped up in culture wars to notice.

  So yeah, I’m real fucking mad at any fucking idiot American who ate the lies and astroturfing about Palestine, who refused to participate in harm reduction and subsequently enabled Trump and potentially doomed the whole of Humanity to a nuclear war in the medium term. From the bottom of my heart, fuck them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Eat the rich" is verboten⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
  1. This still broadly prevents any slogan from reaching critical mass
  2. Eventually, most people are going to be afraid to even try. Self-censorship is actually worse than actual censorship, because it’s insidious and invisible.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just started playing Life is Strange⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve always despised teen drama in media. Back when I was a teen, and now. Can’t stand it. For that reason, I have zero interest in playing the sequels. Furthermore, some of Life is Strange’s writing is downright amateurish.

  But somehow, the game threads the needle of the formula in a way I can’t explain (and from what I read the developers weren’t ever able to fully replicate it either). The gameplay, the themes, the great acting/directing, the amazing soundtrack, the perfectly paced escalation of the stakes… It all works together to attach the player very deeply to the characters. I played it a decade ago and the ending absolutely shook me to my emotional core. To this day one of my favorite works of fiction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Grids work on economies of scale. The bigger the better. Ask anyone who lives on an isolated island for their power bill. That’s why it was such a big deal when the Baltics switched from the Russian grid to the EU one.

  Bigger grid = more intertia&redundancy = less likelihood of failure, more options, lower costs.

  Electricity isn’t like chicken eggs. Transporting it is for all intents and purposes free. The network is expensive, but whether your house is pulling 1 A or 5 A is a non-difference to your utility. So to think local generation is “better” is a complete fallacy. Unless your house is fully disconnected from the network (not “net zero”, disconnected) then it’s not helping to generate power locally. Like someone else said, it’s actually way more expensive per kWh than grid-scale solar.

  Now this would all be a “you” problem, except the big problem with microgeneration is that current tech is “dumb”. It’s either pushing power on the network, or sometimes tripping if the voltage goes above 250V or so. Which actually happens in rich neighborhoods on very sunny days where everyone is pushing power.
  What this means for the operators is that on very sunny days, they cannot do anything but account for the extra residential solar power. Which might mean they have to very quickly spin up or down alternative power generators which were not meant for this. Or they might be dealing with complex issues with current flowing the other way than designed and large voltage fluctuations on specific parts of the network that don’t have the necessary infrastructure to “dump” that extra solar somewhere else.

  The end result is that, counter-intuitively, microgeneration is one of the many failures of the neoliberal electricity market. It’s more expensive and more disruptive for society than if those solar cells had been put to use in grid-scale solar production. They only end up where they are through political mismanagement and misaligned incentives (e.g. net metering which does not account for negative externalities).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta’s AI Profiles Are Already Polluting Instagram and Facebook With Slop⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Any source on any significant amount of children wasting time talking to AIs, or just anecdotes and a bad case of “youth these days”?

  The whole concept smells like fringe NEET 4chan-adjacent behavior. LLMs aren’t capable of maintaining an even remotely convincing simulacrum of human connection, and anyone who would project companionship onto these soulless computer programs obviously has preexisting and severe mental issues (relying on AIs to fill a void in human connection is certainly unhealthy but a symptom, not the root cause).

  The potential market for these AIs will never be any bigger than the market for anime waifu body pillows, because it’s same audience, different decade. Literally everyone else thinks AI girlfriends and body pillow waifus are weird as all hell, and that’s not going to change because neurotypical people want and need human connection and can tell the difference between a rock with googly eyes and a friend.

  Also arguably a rock with googly eyes has more charm and personality than Musk’s horror show.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨nighttime pollinator gang rise up⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.