Excrubulent
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Life is unfair to landlords 1 day ago:
Sure but they still don’t have to raise the rent at every opportunity, that’s still a choice.
Also though the largest landlords are in a position to create artificial scarcity by buying up properties just to keep them empty, so people don’t have other options.
- Comment on Life is unfair to landlords 2 days ago:
Always remember that “the market” is just a signal to the landlord that they could get more if the property were on the market today. It’s still their choice to squeeze you to take advantage of that. “It’s the market” is code for “because I can”.
Also they know that people don’t want to move every year or two, so they can absolutely raise the rent above market level without you wanting to leave yet. This has the effect of pushing the market higher. The switching cost is very high, so it’s in their favour that way too.
A landlord I knew about through a friend said they never raised the rent as long as their property is being paid off, because they would rather have it occupied and being paid than the tenants leave and the place sit empty.
Not to say that’s a good landlord by any means, but there is a choice. The market isn’t a mandate.
- Comment on Tesla confirms it has given up on its Cybertruck range extender to achieve promised range 5 days ago:
More power to the rear makes sense because you get more traction at the rear under normal acceleration, not just when carrying a load. It’s pretty typical of electric cars to do this, just like it’s typical to have bigger brakes on the front of all cars, because there’s more traction at the front under braking.
There’s also the issue of torque vectoring. Without a differential, torque vectoring is essential, but under acceleration torque vectoring to the rear wheels is much more effective than to the front wheels, so that’s another reason to split the rear power but not the front.
- Comment on Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI | The Verge 1 week ago:
- Comment on Don’t watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits - Ars Technica 1 week ago:
Translating a code base between languages has always been a super easy, quick, fun experience for me. It’s like a simple exercise with clear right & wrong answers, a nice break from most coding tasks. Whenever I’ve done it I’ve felt like, “oh god, here goes the next week”, and then it’s done in a couple of hours and nothing was stressful, and I feel great.
- Comment on Don’t watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits - Ars Technica 1 week ago:
And anytime I see anyone advocating this crap it’s always because it gets the job done “faster”, and like, the rule is: “fast; cheap; good; pick two”, and this doesn’t break that rule.
Yeah, they get it done super fast, and super shitty. I’m yet to see anyone explain how an LLM gets the job done better, not even the most rabid apologists.
LLMs have zero fidelity, and information without fidelity is just noise. It is not good at doing information work. In fact, I don’t see how you get information with fidelity without a person in the loop, like on a fundamental, philosophical level I don’t think it’s possible. Fidelity requires truth, which requires meaning, and I don’t think you get a machine that understands meaning without AGI.
- Comment on What are some good examples of "Where the fuck do you go" kind of games? 1 week ago:
Wait, open world, specific upgrades needed to access new areas and progress the story… I think Subnautica is a secret metroidvania. It’s just most of the upgrades are “you can go deeper now”.
- Comment on Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all 1 week ago:
Oh the chicago school you say, as in the people who were happy to slash and burn south american economies just to see what human rights abuses they could get away with in the pursuit of cheaper labour?
Why wouldn’t you hear them out on this labour issue?
- Comment on Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI | The Verge 1 week ago:
Is there an alternative? I just started using it but the experience is incredibly grating, especially the way they gate your progress behind “lives” that stop you learning unless you can pay.
- Comment on Cities Skylines 2, Kerbal Space 2, Planet Coaster 2, Frostpunk 2... What Went Wrong? 1 week ago:
Yup, and honestly even according to that anti-art logic it was a strategic failure. Funny meme gifs were part of how the game gained notoriety, but you don’t maintain a game long term on meme status alone.
Even if “haha funni physics glitches” were still the in thing - I think people got over them fast, like with any comedy style - the longevity of the game came from the deep mechanics and impressive missions people could do, and the community support.
I actually think that “sequels” to breakout sandbox games are always doomed to fail. Like what if they tried to release Minecraft 2? It would be awful, and I think we all instinctively know it would be, which is kind of a self fullfulling prophecy.
Minecraft doesn’t have a monopoly on the special sauce that makes their game good. It has a decade and a half of support and cultural recognition from a dedicated following. You can’t make that happen a second time. I don’t like what’s been done with the franchise commercially, but they figured out how to milk it without doing a direct sequel, which I think is part of why it’s still relevant.
- Comment on List of Alternatives to Adobe Programs 1 week ago:
GIMP has been the photoshop alternative for many years now. It stands for gnu image manipulation program, and it is an image editor. The category is named a bit weird but the program listed is the right one.
- Comment on Open source text editor poisoned to target Uyghur users 2 weeks ago:
And splitting hairs over what exactly constitutes a genocide, conveniently ignoring the fact that the US wanted that excluded from the UN definition for propaganda purposes.
I guess they’re fine with US propaganda as long as it aligns with their chosen capitalist state’s interests.
- Comment on Even PewDiePie thinks you should install Linux on your computer after saying he was "tortured by Windows" 2 weeks ago:
Glamux.
- Comment on Your Phone Isn’t Eavesdropping on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That) 2 weeks ago:
You said “far more likely” and it turns out you don’t have the numbers and you were just making that up? Wow, I never could’ve predicted that.
- Comment on Your Phone Isn’t Eavesdropping on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That) 2 weeks ago:
I live in a country where our ISPs are required by law to keep a record of our internet metadata. When ISPs have been subpoenaed in the past ths answer has often been “we don’t keep that data”.
So in that case we’re looking at a likelihood of 1 vs less than 1. So you’re wrong there.
Plus, I would love to hear your source on these probabilities you proclaim. Can you share how you know this?
You said “far more likely”, so one assumes you have the numbers.
- Comment on To whom it may concern 2 weeks ago:
Also weirdly accepts the premise of the story then calls it a lie. Like at least have some narrative cohesion in your snark, people, it’s not hard.
- Comment on Microsoft rolls Windows Recall out to the public nearly a year after announcing it 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, this is just the thin end of the wedge.
Although I suppose you could call windows itself the thin end of the wedge, this is a slightly wider part.
- Comment on Macaroni and cheese is just nachos made with flour. 2 weeks ago:
Get yourself a nice smokey chipotle hot sauce in your mac and cheese. Best thing ever.
- Comment on I'm bored and desperately search for a proper game 2 weeks ago:
If you like factory designing games, I can recommend anything by Zachtronics.
They’re all esoteric programming/automation type puzzle games, and they all have their own unique solitaire games built-in for whenever you get tired of the main game.
My personal favourites are SpaceChem - scifi molecule factories - and Opus Magnum - steampunk alchemical molecule factories. Something about the molecules just works for me, don’t know why. Plus the Opus Magnum solitaire game is really unique and fun, and it has a user-made level feature, so you can keep playing.
Last Call BBS is a collection of minigames they made as their final release before shutting up shop, so it’s a lot more casual than the others, but a lot of fun.
- Comment on *dies of cringe* 3 weeks ago:
The full list of her titles is a short book.
Even the “full honorifics” are usually a long and boring paragraph.
People usually don’t use them because a) it’s annoying, b) it takes too long, and/or c) we don’t particularly want to honour her and the extremely long list of genocides that those titles are formed from.
- Comment on *dies of cringe* 3 weeks ago:
That doesn’t make her not the queen of England, though, so the other person isn’t wrong.
The thing that makes her not the queen of England is being dead as shit.
- Comment on China’s CATL claims to have overtaken BYD on 5-minute EV battery charging time 3 weeks ago:
And those laws were written under the assumption that “it is surely safe to assume any truck this big is a work truck, nobody would ever drive a truck this big just to go get groceries, that would be absurd”.
- Comment on lion 3 weeks ago:
It’s like a UNION but you don’t STOP at couple of PAY RAISE HANDOUTS you just KEEP GOING till YOU OWN IT ALL.
HELL YEAH BROTHER (INCLUSIVE)
- Comment on Stepping up from Tinkercad but to what? 3 weeks ago:
The 1.0 interface is a night & day improvement on the previous UI, so I’d say that was a good call.
- Comment on Stepping up from Tinkercad but to what? 3 weeks ago:
I was recently using entirely legitimate professional software becuase I was sick of Fusion360’s cloud crap. Admittedly I wasn’t using it at a professional level, but previously I would’ve said the same thing about FreeCAD, which was what drove me to my entirely legitimate alternatives.
But just recently I was trying FreeCAD, and struggling a bit with the interface, when I checked the latest version which was 1.0.0.
So I updated and it’s had a complete UI overhaul. It now looks and runs like pro software. It has a modern look, and the UI interactions are extremely smooth.
My favourite part of it is the spreadsheet system. It’s fully-fledged spreadsheet software, and when you’ve made all the calculations, you just have to name the cells you need, and then you can access them as variables from the design. It’s really powerful for parametric design. That part of it was already much better than autodesk’s parameter system.
Anyway, I’m not going back to Fusion or any of the pro software again. I’m doing my latest project in FreeCAD and it’s a super smooth experience.
- Comment on YouTube Music wants me to verify my age. 3 weeks ago:
Oh cool. I can still access spotify on the computer, so I’ll probably just check and search up the artists I like. Thanks!
- Comment on The fastest bicycle in history is the stationary bike on the ISS. 3 weeks ago:
Viewed from above the north pole, the planet’s rotation, orbit and the ISS’s orbit are all moving in a counterclockwise direction. The ISS’s orbit is inclined ~51° from the Earth’s rotation, and the Earth’s rotation is tilted ~23° from its orbital plane.
I think that means that Earth & the ISS never have their orbits perfectly aligned, but for our purposes that doesn’t matter. All we need is for one moment in time, for the ISS’s vector to line up with the Earth’s, and we should get very close to that at two times of the year, where the ISS’s northernmost or southernmost parts of its orbit fall on the farthest point of its orbit away from the Sun. This should be true regardless of Earth’s tilt at that moment.
At those moments, the ISS is travelling with the direction of the planet, very close to parallel, and its speed relative to the Sun should approach ~134,600 km/h, unless you did the math wrong, I didn’t check that.
In this same orbit the ISS should also reach its slowest point, as the opposite side of its orbit should be aligned against Earth’s orbit.
But also, in the premise of this idea is the admission that the bicycle is “stationary”, because its speed in relation to its immediate environment is what matters, and we all know it.
- Comment on YouTube Music wants me to verify my age. 3 weeks ago:
Just installed that, and it works!
I’ve not been able to get spotify to work for ages. Not through xmanager, not through revanced, none of it. Maybe it’s because I’m in australia, I don’t know, but thanks to your comment I’ve got a music player again.
- Comment on The worst part of all this political nonsense is that porn never makes it to my homepage anymore 3 weeks ago:
Cut to a different version of that scene where they just start humping the computer.
- Comment on I feel like if asbestos was banned today there'd be a huge pro-asbestos movement 3 weeks ago:
Untethered occupants are a serious danger to other occupants in their own car. I wouldn’t agree to drive with someone who wouldn’t put one on tbh, partly because it hints at a lack of judgement and I wouldn’t want that person in charge of my car.