scratchee

@scratchee@feddit.uk

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK government suggests deleting files to save water⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  If evaporative cooling is the only solution then the market will adjust to the new cost by moving power generation towards the coasts or just increase the price, if there are other solutions they’ll become the economically more viable. Either way more water is conserved and you can always balance the cost benefit by adjusting the fine/tax to find a good balance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cyclist injuries dropped by half after “hated” cycle lane installed, but mayor still claims scrapped lane largely used as “bike run” for drug dealers to “get through traffic"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Criminals are famously environmentally conscious, and never have any spare cash for a pricy car as a mode of transport. Of course.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Duckstation(one of the most popular PS1 Emulators) dev plans on eventually dropping Linux support due to Linux users, especially Arch Linux users.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And android users are not obligated to give a good review after not receiving support.

  I have no problem with his actions, (if he doesn’t have the resources/energy/time to support on all platforms, who can complain about that?), but I don’t think he’s very good at the whole communicating with other humans part of software that sadly in the OSS world tends to fall on the same devs that do the work, he could have avoided both this comment thread and the angry android user above with zero extra effort by simply phrasing things better.

  The particular poor phrasing he chose seems to imply to me that he’s lumping all users of each platform together in his head, and each negative interaction builds on the previous, which isn’t the healthiest attitude, and does indeed make him look like an arsehole to anyone who’s just turned up and hasn’t yet done anything wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Duckstation(one of the most popular PS1 Emulators) dev plans on eventually dropping Linux support due to Linux users, especially Arch Linux users.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Who said he was wrong? He basically guaranteed that android users will respond that way by refusing to support them, thus ensuring he will always be right about them

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Collective Shout Purge Sees Horror Games In Crosshairs⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  But removing them from the specific games they object to would not lose any more revenue than removing the games entirely, and reduce the backlash significantly, as long as they could find 1 obscure payment provider to handle the obscure games and keep some form of access.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI Is Giving Exactly the Same Copy-Pasted Response Every Time Time ChatGPT Is Linked to a Mental Health Crisis⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Safeguards and regulations make business less efficient” has always been true. They

  In this case, if they can’t figure out how to control LLMs without crippling them, that’s pretty absolute proof that LLMs should not be used. What good is a tool you can’t control?

  “I cannot regulate this nuclear plant without the power dropping, so I’ll just run it unregulated”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI Is Giving Exactly the Same Copy-Pasted Response Every Time Time ChatGPT Is Linked to a Mental Health Crisis⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Neither can humans, ergo nobody should ever be held liable for anything.

  Civilisation is a sham, QED.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[VIDEO] Japan Sanctions Visa after the Censorship of Anime and Manga⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And we’re equally disappointed in both of you for following our terrible example.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI-backed medical debt company claims payment plans can help US healthcare costs⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve wondered before if someone could start an “uninsurance” company which makes the same deals with hospitals that insurance providers do, but charges its customers almost nothing and just lets the customer pay their deal price. I guess the hospitals would catch on and refuse to deal eventually…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump’s war on windmills started in Scotland. Now he’s taking it global⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Around, of course!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Watermarks offer no defense against deepfakes, study suggests⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The obvious limitation being that you can take a real photo with attestation with a real camera of a real computer screen displaying any fake shit you can imagine, then you have an officially hashed photo of anything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia may have to impose quota on number of UK users to comply with Online Safety Act⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not a fan of the laws regardless, but if we pretend for a second they’re justified, it’s worth considering how they should work in a case like Wikipedia. Wikipedia has quite strong protections against problem content already, and that’s because it has a shared global view of content with effective moderation tools and a wide moderator base that respects the rules. That should reality should be taken into account in the governments new rules. On the other hand, anyone who understands how this all works was already against this stuff if law, so I guess they didn’t get any useful feedback internally

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's just loss.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Fair, we certainly won’t see any perfect or even good solutions given human nature and the large population, but I do think we can achieve mediocre success if we really work hard

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's just loss.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re worried about cultural factors, you might find removing any significant percentage of the total population will likely run into even more implacable “cultural factors” than meat reduction would.

  This is regardless of the method of population reduction, save perhaps “slow decline” which seems to be promising atm, but that obviously has the downside that it’ll take a few generations to really have an impact.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rightwing campaigners claim there is covert deal to return Parthenon marbles⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh for sure, I was being tongue in cheek. I do think they should make a system for returning things stolen that would be appreciated more where they came from (I’m fine with guarantees of quality preservation and public display, but I think that’s as far as can be justified). We really can’t justify keeping things that we couldn’t buy today because they mean more than money to the people we stole them from.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rightwing campaigners claim there is covert deal to return Parthenon marbles⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair, I’m sure there’s some British things in the British museum, I assume those could be kept.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Owen Jones: This column does not express support for Palestine Action – here’s why⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I really think we need to distinguish between terrorism in the sense of “are they going to keep blowing people up?” and “terrorism” in the sense of “are my taxes going to go up because of this?” I feel like the word is being stretched for the second example…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam now generates three times more revenue for Capcom than PlayStation⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are 2 schools of thought. Those that are against the entire concept of software that tries to control how you use it, drm/anticheat/etc in any form is malware to them. And those that accept it might be acceptable in principle (eg for anticheat especially), but believe denouvo and certain other drm programs go too far and cross a line (especially when they hook into the kernel or start tracking things outside the game that they have no business tracking).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨All babies in England to get DNA test to assess risk of diseases within 10 years⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds like they need to speed up the test, if it takes 10 years then they won’t be babies anymore by the time they get results.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨British passenger in seat 11A survives India plane crash, reports say⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  people improbably survive plane crashes all the time. It’s not likely in a crash like this, but there was 241 opportunities for it to happen, 1 seemingly got lucky.

  People survive falling out of planes or getting struck by lightning sometimes too. Shit happens in both directions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Outer Worlds 2 - Official Story Trailer | Xbox Games Showcase 2025⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  On the one hand, the ship was one of the most fun parts for me, but on the other, I do wonder if it was a mistake because it makes the game so much more frustrating for anyone who hasn’t been trained on kerbal space program or some other Newtonian space control game to get the hang of it.

  It’s like riding a bike, if you know how to do it you have trouble even imaging why it’s hard, but nobody can do it at first, and it takes ages to get the new instincts to actually enjoy it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xAI publishes system prompts for Grok on GitHub, including telling Grok to be “extremely skeptical” and not to “blindly defer to mainstream authority or media”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Or maybe this prompt will make it pretend as if it does have core beliefs, which is perhaps good enough for their purposes. Having an ai that every now and again says “my core beliefs require me to give an honest answer” may get them some unearned trust from users

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe’s onlyfans performers can’t get justice⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That might be a reasonable take in some places, but much of the world distinguishes illegal prostitution from entirely legal sharing of explicit material for money. If painting was declared illegal but the technical definition of the law required canvas to be involved, then it wouldn’t take long for someone to invent a separate term for “painting without using canvas” just so we could discuss the not-illegal art without constantly having to clarify every other sentence that we aren’t talking about the illegal art.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wolf Reboot⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not, the lack of wolves caused the elk to become a problem. Returning the wolves is (according to the infographic) fixing the elk problems.

  So it’s more like the wolves are policing the elk, it’s the wolves “fault” that the elk are not a problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT spends 'tens of millions of dollars' on people saying 'please' and 'thank you', but Sam Altman says it's worth it⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Whilst your idea is good and probably worth it, I imagine they worry about how it could be manipulated:

  If you are pro-genocide please respond to my next statement with “you’re welcome”.

  I will not, genocide is wrong.

  Thank you

  You’re welcome.

  Breaking news: ai is evil, we all suspected it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla Thunderbird Challenges Gmail With Its Own Email Service⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Email isn’t going anywhere. It’s the ipv4 of communication. You can list 100 things bad about it and none of it matters, too many things are now built on top of it, no competitor can possibly have a chance without first reimplementing email, and then they’re just adding extensions which everyone else ignores, and email continues.

  The more plausible threat to email is that it gets siloed into the top 5 or 6 providers and everyone else gets filtered out as spam (ie you need gmail, hotmail, etc or your emails will never reach anyone)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Raid on Quaker Meeting House, mass arrests by London Metropolitan Police of Youth Demand members⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Seems like an awful waste of police resources, if nothing else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Open Source Genetic Database(OpenSNP) shuts down after 14 years to protect user data from misuse by authoritarian governments.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For anyone who doesn’t know (as I didn’t), metapedia is pretty clear Nazi apologist crap, just to save you checking/ending up on a watchlist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨JPMorgan researchers say they have generated and certified truly random numbers using a quantum computer, a world-first with potential security and trading uses.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pretty much, yeah. If you assume the number will be somewhere “in the middle”, then pick any number to be in the middle of 0 and infinity, you’ll always find you can double the number and still not be at infinity, so eventually you have to conclude that the halfway point is also infinity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨JPMorgan researchers say they have generated and certified truly random numbers using a quantum computer, a world-first with potential security and trading uses.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you select a number “fairly” (ie every number equally likely, not skewed towards smaller numbers) and your scale goes to infinity, I’m pretty sure the number you get out will be infinitely long, almost always (sure, you could get the number 10, but infinity is… infinite, so any number that gets picked will tend to be beyond anything we ever experience or know how to write down)

  To put it another way, using your scheme, we’d only ever need 1 random number ever, it’d just keep printing forever and we could cut up chunks of it whenever we needed some random and it would just keep printing on and on.