cley_faye

@cley_faye@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kindle Is Making It Harder to Switch to Rival eReader Brands.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Locked-in platform closing the door. How surprising.

  Accepting DRM in the first place is the problem. Hard to avoid, but still. I just got a boox; great value, can’t use adobe DRM. Didn’t have any problem there. Of course, money is going everywhere except big “publishers”, but that’s hardly an issue; they choose their business model, I choose my customer model.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Man Trying to Buy Entire Landfill to Recover Lost Bitcoin Hard Drive⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Plot twist, he does get exemption to dig it up, causing mass damage all around. He finds it. The board is completely busted, but it seems the platters are fine, so he pays some very expensive data recovery team to access the data. They manage to do it! Now he got all the files from the drive, in a safe place. He just have to find where the wallet is stored. Easy enough, he lucked out using a common software for it, so it’s well documented, and he retrieve the files. It costs an inordinate amount of money to get the rights to the landfill, to “convince” local authorities to allow the digging, to actually do the digging, to put the drive in a recoverable state, but finally, his wallet is in his hands! He inputs his password… which doesn’t work.

  That would be hilarious.

  (note: this is a fantasy scenario. I never bothered actually reading these articles, as it sounds like a stupid story, so there may be approximations there)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ENHANCE⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Last time I had to wear glasses was during the heavy phase of covid, and wearing masks caused a LOT of fogging up. I’m sure that exact same reason made a lot of people aware of proper glass treatment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ENHANCE⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Glasses are mildly inconvenient when it’s cold, somewhat inconvenient when you have to wear headgear that don’t take it into account, and very inconvenient when you have to move your head a lot or look down a lot. Anyway, I took the laser instead of the plastic bit that costs a lot and gets lost easily.

  …and I keep wearing glasses anyway because the sun is still a thing that exists outside, anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Those YouTube ads everyone hates made $10.4 billion in just three months⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  And since they made so much while people are effectively using adblocker, there’s no need to fight them back, right?

  Right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No good excuse to still be on Xitter⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You should check. I’ve been surprised by the amount of “suggested accounts” on bluesky that were people I lost track of when quitting twitter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No good excuse to still be on Xitter⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So true. Two years ago I still used twitter for nsfw content, but even that got weird (and really suspicious sometimes).

  This is why we can’t have nice things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I put on my robe and my wizard hat⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I assume kinky people that are not D&D players just haven’t tried it. And D&D players that aren’t kinky… well, same.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Has Fast Food Gotten Worse, or Am I Just Getting Old?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Seeing the brand names you cited, I’ll assume you’re in the US, so my comment may or may not be as useful as some brands are way different in France (for example, Subway is decent most of the time).

  Growing up I sure got less and less attracted to fast food, and trying it occasionally did feel bad in some case. Although there’s a definite shift in not wanting to clog my own arteries, it’s not all there is to it. Some brands really feel awful now (McDonald’s being the worst fast food out there these days), but there are also other that still “hit that spot” (BK mostly). I think it’s safe to say that some big names let themselves go bad, AND it is still possible to find good fast food stuff.

  With that said, it do gets more expensive, as everything else. The craving for fast food really become less common as time pass, and although it’s still good while eating, there’s still a tinge of guilt afterward, knowing it’s both too expensive for what it is (I mean the actual food, not necessarily that it’s too expensive for service and stuff) and that it’s not that great for yourself.

  I’d say if you keep them as an occasional treat and know a few good places to indulge, it can work. But it sure feels like it requires more thinking than just dropping in any fast food joint to have a good time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not likely to be AI-generated or Deepfake⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  …you know people made fake picture before image generation, right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bitwarden Makes Change To Address Recent Open-Source Concerns⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I use this setup for my personal passwords, using nextcloud as the sync solution. A semi-fix for that was using Keepass2Android (on Android obviously). It integrates with nextcloud directly, keep a local DB of passwords, and would only load the remote one (and merge) on unlock and updates, not keeping it “constantly” sync on every remote change. It works well… most of the time… with only two devices that almost always have connection to the server… and for only one user.

  It’s overly clunky though. It’s the big advantage of “service based” password manager against “single file based” ones. They handle sync. We have plans to move to bitwarden at my workplace, and since the client supports multiple accounts on multiple servers, I’ll probably move to that for personal stuff too. The convenience is just there, without downside.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bitwarden Makes Change To Address Recent Open-Source Concerns⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Except for the part that it’s not a question of trust (being open source), there’s no third-party architecture to trust (it can and should be self-hosted), the data on the server are also encrypted client-side before leaving your device, sure.

  Oh, and you also get proper sync, no risk of desync if two devices gets a change while offline without having to go check your in-house sync solution, easy share between user (still with no trust needed in the server), all working perfectly with good user UI integration for almost every systems.

  Yeah, I wonder why people bother using that, instead of deploying clunky, single-user solution.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI-powered weapons scanners used in NYC subway found zero guns in one month test⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not exactly, no. From other comments, it also have an incredibly high false positive rate, so it’s negative security.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI-powered weapons scanners used in NYC subway found zero guns in one month test⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Look, we can either look at facts and check the claims of that company that we’re going to invest a lot of money into, or we can accept their bribe and move on. It’s all about efficiency.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google looks to be fully shutting down unsupported extensions and ad blockers in Chrome, such as uBlock Origin – which might push some folks to switch to Firefox⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Move, yeah. To Firefox… meh. The writing’s not on the wall yet, but we’re not going to ignore the very heavy signaling Mozilla has been doing for years now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I have the weirdest aesthetic preferences⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Spec says 4.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Mozilla Graveyard⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re right, they aren’t google. Not for lack of trying though.

  You see posts putting some shade over Mozilla, and your immediate reaction is “it feels almost coordinated”. Well, that may be. But it would be hard to distinguish a “coordinated attack” from a “that’s just the things they’re doing, and there’s report on it” article, no? Especially when most of it can be fact-checked.

  In this particular case, those abandoned projects got picked up by other… sometimes. And sometimes not. But they were abandoned. There’s no denying that.

  If you want some more hot water for Mozilla, since you’re talking about privacy and security, you’d be interested in their recent switch regarding these points. Sure, the PR is all about protecting privacy and users, but looking into the acts, the message is a bit more diluted. And there’s always a fair amount of people that are ready to do the opposite of what you claims; namely discarding all criticism because “Mozilla”, when the same criticism are totally fair play when talking about other big companies.

  Being keen on maintaining user privacy, system security, and trust, is not the same as picking a “champion” and sticking to it until the end. Mozilla have been doing shady things for half a decade now, and they should not get a free pass because they’re still the lesser evil for now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's coming! :(⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Even better, they took actual extensions and made them built-in and impossible to remove. The work was already done to keep a lightweight browser with extra features in option, and they reverted it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's coming! :(⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s been going for years now. We just don’t want to move away because, frankly, there’s little viable alternatives.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marques Brownlee says ‘I hear you’ after fans criticize his new wallpaper app⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “curated wallpapers” including random generated stuff, and “shares profits” on a 50/50 basis, for a shitty app developed by what looks like three fivers in a trench coat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are people seemingly against AI chatbots aiding in writing code?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The point is, they don’t get “competent”. They get better at assembling pieces they were given. And a proper stack with competent developers will already have moved that redundancy out of the codebase. For whatever remains, thinking is the longest part. And LLM can’t improve that once the problem gets a tiny bit complex. Of course, I could end up having a good rough idea of what the code should look like, describe that to an LLM, and have it write actual code with proper variable names and all, but once I reach the point I can describe accurately the thing I want, it’s usually as fast to type it. With the added value that it’s easier to double check.

  What remains is providing good insight on new things, and understanding complex requirements. While there is room for improvement, it seems more and more obvious that LLM are not the answer: theoretically, they are not the right tool, and seeing the various level of improvements we’re seeing, they definitely did not prove us wrong. The technology is good at some things, but not at getting “competent”.

  Also, you sweep out the privacy and licensing issues, which are big no-no too.

  LLM have their uses, I outline some. And in these uses, there are clear rooms for improvements. For reference, the solution I currently use puts me at accepting around 10% of the automatic suggestions. Out of these, I’d say a third needs reworking. Obviously if that moved up to like, 90% suggestions that seems decent and with less need to fix them afterward, it’d be great. Unfortunately, since you can’t trust these, you would still have to review the output carefully, making the whole operation probably not that big of a time saver anyway.

  Coding doesn’t allow much leeway. Other activities which allow more leeway for mistakes can probably benefit a lot more. Translation, for example, can be acceptable, in particular because some mishaps may automatically be corrected by readers/listeners. But with code, any single mistake will lead to issues down the way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rockstar Games DDoSed Heavily By Players Protesting New AntiCheat Code⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It is perfectly possible to run anti-cheat that are roughly as good (or as bad, as it often turns out) without full admin privilege and running as kernel-level drivers. Coupled with server-side validation, which seems to be a dying breed, you’d also weed out a ton of cheaters while missing the most motivated of them.

  As someone who lurks around in different communities (to some extent; Steam forums, reddit, lemmy, mastodon, and a few game-centered discord servers), the issue is not much against anti-cheat for online play. It’s the nature of these piece of software that is the issue. It would not be the same if the anti-cheat was also forced on solo gameplay, but it is not the case here.

  (bonus points for systems that allow playing on non-protected servers, but that’s asking a bit too much from some publishers I suppose)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rockstar Games DDoSed Heavily By Players Protesting New AntiCheat Code⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Aside from it being code you don’t want on your machine

  Code you don’t want on your machine, that have sometimes more permissions than you yourself have on your own files, is completely opaque, and have the legitimacy to keep constant outgoing network data that you can’t audit.

  Yes, aside for that, no reason at all. No problem with a huge risk on your privacy for moderate results that don’t particularly benefit you in the long run.

  (and all that is assuming that they’re not nefarious to begin with, which is almost impossible to prove)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are people seemingly against AI chatbots aiding in writing code?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
  • issues with model training sources
  • business sending their whole codebase to third party (copilot etc.) instead of local models
  • time gain is not that substantial in most case, as the actual “writing code” part is not the part that takes most time, thinking and checking it is
  • "chatting" in natural language to describe something that have a precise spec is less efficient than just writing code for most tasks as long as you’re half-competent. We’ve known that since customer/developer meetings have existed.
  • the dev have to actually be competent enough to review the changes/output. In a way, “peer reviewing” becomes mandatory; it’s long, can be fastidious, and generated code really needs to be double checked at every corner (talking from experience here; even a generated one-liner can have issues)
  • some business thinking that LLM outputs are “good enough”, firing/moving away people that can actually do said review, leading to more issues down the line
  • actual debugging of non-trivial problems ends up sending me in a lot of directions, getting a useful output is unreliable at best
  • making new things will sometimes confuse LLM, making them a time loss at best, and producing even worst code sometimes
  • using code chatbot to help with common, menial tasks is irrelevant, as these tasks have already been done and sort of “optimized out” in library and reusable code. At best you could pull some of this in your own codebase, making it worst to maintain in the long term

  Those are the downside I can think of on the top of my head, for having used AI coding assistance (mostly local solutions for privacy reasons). There are upsides too:

  • sometimes, it does produce useful output in which I only have to edit a few parts to make it works
  • local autocomplete is sometimes almost as useful as the regular contextual autocomplete
  • the chatbot turning short code into longer “natural language” explanations can sometimes act as a rubber duck in aiding for debugging

  Note the “sometimes”. I don’t have actual numbers because tracking that would be like, hell, but the times it does something actually impressive are rare enough that I still bother my coworker with it when it happens. For most of the downside, it’s not even a matter of the tool becoming better, it’s the usefulness to begin with that’s uncertain. It does, however, come at a large cost (money, privacy in some cases, time, and apparently ecological too) that is not at all outweighed by the rare “gains”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla exits the fediverse and will shutter its Mastodon server in December | TechCrunch⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The ethos of Mozilla

  That’s the thing that changed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"what happened??"⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So, saying people should “get used to cloud gaming and subscription only” in the future gets a free pass, even if the people that said it are the one trying to create cloud gaming and suscription only games?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"what happened??"⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No worries, at no point in recent years have I been feeling I “owned” a ubisoft game. Not even played them. I’m that committed to follow thge instructions of some dipshit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Le cancer⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It says “I don’t really speak french but I’ll write something good enough”.

  Seriously, it sounds really weird.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are LLMs capable of writing *good* code?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For repetitive tasks, it can almost automatically get a first template you write by hand, and extrapolate with multiple variations.

  Beyond that… not really. Anything beyond single line completion quickly devolves into either something messy, non working, or worse, working but not as intended. For extremely common cases it will work fine; but extremely common cases are either moved out in shared code, or take less time to write than to “generate” and check.

  I’ve been using code completion/suggestion on the regular, and it had times where I was pleasantly surprised by what it produced, but even for these I had to look after it and fix some things. And while I can’t quantify how often it happened, there are a lot of times where it’s convincing gibberish.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When shitposting becomes constiposting⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  From Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content. to Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content*.

  *: limitation may apply