ChunkMcHorkle
@ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
- Comment on The one tool more effective than censorship is noise 2 days ago:
Truth. So much of what is happening on any given day can be explained by asking the simple question,
“If the US president were Putin’s puppet, what would Putin do?”
And there it is. Regardless of the individual crises, of which there are many, the bigger picture is decreasing national force, cutting off traditional allies and setting fire to the established world order, and maximizing internal unrest. All of this benefits Putin.
- Comment on Trump audibly loses control of his bowels during a press conference - via Forbes Breaking News 5 days ago:
Not the Epstein files, but Sascha Riley. Stabbed in the ass with a tent stake.
For those who don’t know who he is, this is the original reporting: …substack.com/…/dont-worry-boys-are-hard-to-find
A partial overview of the same reasons I personally tend to believe him: …substack.com/…/a-new-survivor-speaks-epstein-fil…
- Comment on Update: Disrupt the Amazon/Melania movie premiere weekend 1 week ago:
I’ve been thinking that ever since I saw her sitting next to her obviously stroke-afflicted husband at that failed Army extravaganza on his birthday, looking like she was just waiting to snatch his soul. There’s even a mention of her in the Wikipedia page:
It’s definitely a look that suits them both, lol.
- Comment on AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns 2 weeks ago:
Maybe, but speaking for myself, my revulsion to the way they are currently trying to use AI is nothing short of visceral. No headline has a chance. It is such an intrusion to personal privacy, and toward incredibly bad ends all around, that I don’t give a shit what they say at all.
To get past that, they’d have to stop trying to data farm everything that crosses someone’s monitor, stop using AI to support and further large-scale national operations like genocide, and not use every word that anyone’s ever written that they can get their hands on to train their LLMs. Oh, and something more than a “You’re overreacting!” when it is pointed out that AI output is not at all neutral, but shaped to deliver their own chosen narratives, which its devotees tend to accept without question. They could even – and I know this is a novel concept – pay authors and artists for all the work they used without consent and without compensation.
It’ll never happen. And I will never not hate AI, for all of these reasons and more (like how they took my fucking em-dash and made it unnatural, so now I’m taking it back).
TL;DR: I hate AI so much and so deeply it’s automatic, there’s literally nothing they can say I would care about, and the more they try the more repulsed I am. Fuck 'em all.
- Comment on Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch 2 weeks ago:
No, you’re right. It’s a problem. Someone in another thread said, “Hey, I’m considering moving to Linux from Windows, what do you think of these distros?” and got downvoted to hell just for asking, because apparently one of the distros they mentioned is disliked by others.
It’s a problem, generated by some of the exact same people who loudly wonder why more people aren’t on Linux without ever considering how having their own noob question thrown back in their own face by someone who has made their OS their identity would turn them wayyyyy the fuck off Linux as well.
For myself I will always be grateful for the many others who have generously and graciously answered my stupid Linux noob questions.
- Comment on 200 million records exposed in massive Pornhub data breach — here’s what we know so far 4 weeks ago:
South Carolina has entered the chat
- Comment on 200 million records exposed in massive Pornhub data breach — here’s what we know so far 4 weeks ago:
You can use the yt-dlp executable in the Youtube-DLG GUI interface. The interface is fine, the only thing wrong with it was that the executable behind it couldn’t keep up with YT fuckery. They may have fixed it since then, but once I started manually updating it with yt-dlp I never stopped, so I don’t even know anymore. And I’m sure there are better alternatives, I just got used to using this one.
So if you want the GUI front end, it’s profoundly easy. Download youtube-dlg, rename yt-dlp.exe to youtube-dl.exe, and then put it into the appropriate folder (%appdata%/youtube-dl/ on Windows). Overwrite or just delete the existing youtube-dl.exe because it doesn’t work anyway.
If you are installing Youtube-DLG for the first time you may have to manually install ffmpeg as well, if memory serves.
The sole drawback is that, for obvious reasons, updates are now manual. Every so often YT breaks it again and I just go download yt-dlp again, rename it, and put the new one in the Youtube-DLG folder. Job done.
- Comment on YSK the Venezuelans community in the US is not representative of Venezuelans as a whole. 4 weeks ago:
I don’t doubt you, but where are you getting that figure?
- Comment on WIRED Database Leaked: 40 Million Record Threat Looms for Condé Nast 5 weeks ago:
This isn’t great, but it has more information than the above: infostealers.com/…/wired-database-leaked-40-milli…
- Comment on Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons: The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich 5 weeks ago:
I wrote a longer comment elsewhere, but while the facts this article presents are in themselves correct, the conclusions the authors have reached, I think, are not. There are a number of glaring omissions that, to me, add up to trying to erase the very likely blackmail Epstein was conducting all along.
Or, to put it another way, I think the NYT represents NYC’s many billionaires very well, a non-zero number of whom were directly engaged in this behavior with Epstein and/or helped him to keep his lifestyle and social standing intact, not just before his 2008 conviction in Florida but well after.
Frankly, I think people like Leon Black and Les Wexner and all these other Epstein “theft, but only theft” victims are shaking in their sordid little boots right now because it was NEVER just theft, or they’d have brought charged and/or sued, and that’s what NYT wants the public to forget about, and why this article was written the way it was, excluding not just the extreme audio/visual evidence from Epstein’s mansion search and his data collection practices in St. Thomas and private islands, but his time at Dalton.
These very well-heeled New Yorkers for the core of NYT’s subscriber base. Something to bear in mind as you read.
- Comment on YSK Condé Nast got breached, you should change all your passwords if you are a subscriber 5 weeks ago:
Really appreciate this, thank you for posting it.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
I think blanket downvoting happens regularly in political communities and discussions, and a lot of time you can see it without even looking up any votes: if every single comment in a six-comment thread has two downvotes and three upvotes, it’s pretty clear. I looked those political ones up a few times but don’t even bother anymore. Everywhere else, by which I mean non-political and/or non-controversial topics, it genuinely seems to be just a core handful of users.
And no, you’re not an outlier, just a decent person. I like to think most of us vote for actual cause, and that it’s only a handful who don’t. But at some point I do think the admins are going to have to deal with it, because downvoting just to downvote IS toxic and does tend to have a stifling effect on the discussion and community as a whole.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
These single downvotes were never followed up by further commentary, and at least one of them looks like a voting-only account with zero posts, so the more I looked the more they just seemed like fuck you votes.
I really don’t think there’s any link to content at all because I did this across multiple communities (whatever I don’t have actively blocked that crosses my feed) and it was largely the same handful of downvoters throughout, but with outliers here and there. I wasn’t taking notes, but when I started to see the same names over and over in wildly disparate communities it seemed less and less likely it had anything to do with content.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Because the fediverse is still fairly small, downvotes stick out a lot more. A number of them I think, “How could anybody downvote that?” and just wonder because often they seem to be “I had a shitty day and I particularly don’t like YOU” downvotes.
I often sort a thread by Top, and even the highest voted posts are often +(big number) -1. Because I personally do not downvote without cause, I assume they are sincere, but then it becomes a question of why, and I could never figure it out. Okay, whatever, no biggie.
But recently I had some time on my hands and I am aware of lemvotes.org, so one day I saw this again and decided to just informally start looking up these weird ass loner downvotes. Nothing sustained, just whenever one stuck out to me as being why??? I’d go and look it up. I’ve been doing this for roughly 2-3 months now, no schedule or commitment other than whenever I felt like it, across the board, no attention paid to community or post content (other than anything political pretty much not being worth the trouble, lol).
What I expected was a variety of usernames attached to these single downvotes.
But what I saw was a core handful of users across the board, with the occasional outlier.
Kinda pathetic, honestly.
- Comment on I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right. 1 month ago:
They’re here to stay
Eh, probably. At least for as long as there is corporate will to shove them down the rest of our throats. But right now, in terms of sheer numbers, humans still rule, and LLMs are pissing off more and more of us every day while its makers are finding it increasingly harder to forge ahead in spite of us, which they are having to do ever more frequently.
and they’re going to get much better.
They’re already getting so much worse, with what is essentially the digital equivalent of kuru, that I’d be willing to bet they’ve already jumped the shark.
If their makers and funders had been patient, and worked the present nightmares out privately, they’d have a far better chance than they do right now, IMO.
Simply put, LLMs/“AI” were released far too soon, and with far too much “I Have a Dream!” fairly tale promotion that the reality never came close to living up to, and then shoved with brute corporate force down too many throats.
As a result, now you have more and more people across every walk of society pushed into cleaning up the excesses of a product they never wanted in the first place: being forced to share their communities AND energy bills with datacenters, depleted water reserves, privacy violations, EXCESSIVE copyright violations and theft of creative property, having to seek non-AI operating systems just to avoid it, right down to the subject of this thread, the corruption of even the most basic video search.
Can LLMs figure out how to override an angry mob, or resolve a situation wherein the vast majority of the masses are against the current iteration of AI even though the makers of it need us all to be avid, ignorant consumers of AI for it to succeed? Because that’s where we’re going, and we’re already farther down that road than the makers ever foresaw, apparently having no idea just how thin the appeal is getting on the ground for the rest of us.
So yeah, I could be wrong, and you might be right. But at this point, unless something very significant changes, I’d put money on you being mostly wrong.
- Comment on Is there a uBlock Origin filter or extension for LLM slop in search results 1 month ago:
I don’t use an YouTube account and haven’t used for years for privacy reasons.
Same here. Trick is to not use the YT search function. My strategy changes depending on specifically what I’m looking for, but in general for anything factual I start with a no-AI text search on DDG and then go to YT once I know what I want to see, or just use DDG to trawl through the videos. It’s not perfect but it cuts out a LOT of the slop.
For entertainment, if my current list of “known good” seems exhausted, I keep my subscriptions in FreeTube and go with the recommendations there where I can hide channels more effectively, but that’s pretty rare because I collect what look like promising channels as I go along in regular browsing, like Lemmy or news articles, and not from any algorithm.
- Comment on The Fediverse and Content Creation: Monetization 2 months ago:
If you allow artists to display their work in various communities along with the ability to post links in their profiles, but you restrict actual posts to disallow self-promotion, it’s the best of both worlds, IMO.
In other words, if you can’t include self-promotion in your community posts, but everyone knows you have the links in your profile, it attracts less grifters and keeps the feed clean, while allowing anyone interested to contact a poster directly or ask them promotional questions via DMs.
That said, hosting a full-fledged marketplace is not a good idea, IMO. There are laws and banks involved, which mean lawyers and taxes, and volunteer management does not work for that. There are already marketplaces that do that well, and allowing artists to post their own links of choice in their profiles will let them steer actual business to other platforms, while keeping the fediverse for display, review, share and critique. My opinion, anyway.
- Comment on HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs 2 months ago:
I shoulda looked it up, lol. Thanks for the correction.
- Comment on HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs 2 months ago:
Both HP and Dell are partnered with Microsoft, and have been for decades. Isn’t a discrete GPU one of the things required for Microsoft Recall ready machines?
There’s NO way they broke HEVC just for 4¢. Something else is paying them a lot more, and Recall would be one of those things.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 2 months ago:
I’m sick and tired about hearing about Zorinn when there’s a dozen excellent Linux distros that aren’t derivative trash that astroturf social media and pass off other Foss projects as their own.
Your quote, but when asked to name a better “easiest distro for Windows users” Fedora KDE was the best you could do.
Somebody asked you a genuine question, looking for real information, and you just shat out the name of one of the more advanced distros out there.
Hell yeah, try harder. People who ask genuine questions deserve genuine answers. Unless that’s just your best and you need pity.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 2 months ago:
Nothing against Fedora KDE, it’s the best of the best, but it is hardly the easiest for a noob to Linux: just the install process alone requires a working understanding of the Linux filesystem and partitioning if you’re not using the entire disk space, you have to understand root vs sudo, god help you if you want to encrypt a disk, and there’s a lot more CLI at every step than other distros. Try harder.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 2 months ago:
I’d be surprised if he does. If he’s “sick and tired” of hearing about Zorin, it’s because Zorin is getting a lot of deservedly good reviews from the Windows crowd right now. If it really were ass he’d have nothing to say about it. The only social media I’m on is Lemmy, and I tried Zorin because it was highly ranked on Distrowatch, so if people are getting “astroturfed” elsewhere it’s news to me.
But you should know I tried over twenty (conservative estimate) distros before I settled on Zorin. USB drives are cheap, and you can try as many distros as you like without ever having to install one. Don’t take my word for it, nor his: buy a handful of USB drives, create some LiveUSBs and start trying out whatever distros catch your attention. I found distrowatch.com to be a good front page to the distro world, with rankings and extremely detailed reviews: start there if you’re looking for a fairly exhaustive list of what’s out there.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 2 months ago:
Oh, they’re customer focused, alright: focused on scraping customer data via the installed OS to feed to their AI and then aggregate for sale to other data brokers and/or interested governments.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 2 months ago:
The Dell logo is the BIOS loading, the black screen is your bootloader and the beginning of your OS loading, and of course the Z is Zorin loading. While it could be hardware, to be honest where it’s hanging for you makes me wonder about how well your Zorin video driver suits your actual hardware, based on some similar issues I had with Fedora doing the exact same thing that you describe.
I am still learning Linux myself so I am not the best person to tell you what to do, but I know where I’d start if I were in your shoes: use the lshw command (see below) to get the details on your actual hardware, specifically the graphics chip; see if anyone else is having similar problems with the same graphics hardware; and in the meantime put Mint on a LiveUSB and run Mint for a while to see if it performs better or ends up doing the same thing.
That’s just beginner tips off the top of my head; I know you will get better advice if you run your problem by the Linux communities, esp because they can tell you how to capture the load process to see exactly what’s causing it to hang, and I’m just guessing. But at least you now have some hints of where to start.
Quick primer on lshw: To use lshw to see your hardware specs, type at a command prompt:
sudo lshw -shortIf it says it’s not installed, to install it type
sudo apt-get install lshwThat will get you started, I hope. Either way, whatever you do will get you further toward a solution, whether that solution is a different distro or tweakling this one. I hope this helps.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 2 months ago:
Love it. Just wrote a separate comment about it. I ran the free versions for over a year, then decided to go to paid just to support the project. Paid gives you GUI for appearance adjustments and desktop “personalization” but not a whole lot else; other than superficials like that, under the hood the free version is exactly the same. I can’t remember what the Zorin folks say about it, get the details directly from them of course, but IMO don’t feel like you have to buy the paid version to get a true taste of how it will work for you.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 2 months ago:
Just for clarity, when you say it won’t boot, where in the boot process does it fail? Do you get as far as loading the BIOS, do you get a little way into the OS and then it crashes, or does it just not start at all?
I ask because depending on how far it gets into the boot process, you may not be looking at a software problem at all. Generally speaking, you have to get past the BIOS and into the bootloader before assuming the problem has to do with your choice of OS.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 2 months ago:
Further comments may have been disabled, but a number of them are still up and are highly entertaining:
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 2 months ago:
Zorin is working out really well for me, esp on my older machines with slower processors and less RAM that choke a little on fuller distros. I enjoy the KDE Plasma distros, for example, but they’re a little too heavy for my older boxes and I was getting a lot of video stutter and unexplained shutdows, etc. I don’t get that with Zorin or Mint. For me Mint works just as well as Zorin and picks up all my hardware just as handily, it just feels a little basic for what I’m used to. But Zorin hits just right in every direction for my needs. It’s a good distro for Windows noobs, that’s for sure.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
If you’re not actively curating your own choice of reading material and relying on unknown others to make those choices for you, then you absolutely deserve everything you are “forced” to read.
But even that is far too generous: nobody held a gun to your head loaded with the article you clearly did not read, lol.
- Comment on Microsoft is making every Windows 11 PC an AI PC 3 months ago:
I’ve been using Duckduckgo with uBlock for years, so I had no real problems with anything like the hell of Google “sponsored content” until Duckduckgo started putting up their own AI search assistant. Since then I’ve gone from start.duckduckgo.com to noai.duckduckgo.com because I got tired of turning their search assist off and couldn’t reliably block it with uBlock because they kept changing it. (I delete all cookies after every browser session and do not maintain individual app accounts, so their AI settings options were never gonna work for me.)
Because of the way my brain works, I literally don’t even want to see what AI says until I’ve done my own looking. Yet I never failed to turn it off, because I just can’t rely on it.
Usually when I’m looking for something I’m in a hurry, so it’s less trouble for me to just pick my own sources, preferably older than 2023 if possible, and read a bit myself than to spend time getting blithely lied to, or even just suspect hallucination/omission to the point that I think I need to verify it before I can rely on it.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that for me, it is literally faster to skim three or four completely different primary sources than it is to try to verify the assertions in a single search assist paragraph: one is just light reading, the other is point by point comparison of the AI offering against multiple independent sources. So I read.
I’ve never regretted summarizing a topic myself, but I’ve definitely gotten some rotten eggs from AI, both in blatant non-truths AND in holes of omission you could drive a truck through. I won’t make that mistake again. So for me, AI summaries are well worth staying wary of for now.