Khotetsu

@Khotetsu@lib.lgbt

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NY bill would require a criminal history background check for the purchase of a 3D printer⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, this is a political issue, and yes, I’m concerned about regulation, because of laws like this that will potentially hurt unrelated people like myself in the process because people who have little understanding of the subject already have an opinion on it. Simply stating the facts can drive somebody who has already formed an opinion based on their immediate emotional response even deeper into their stance without being concerned about how that stance affects others (or they might just jam their fingers in their ears and ignore any facts that don’t align with their worldview, like anti-vaxers).

  I’m a trans woman who runs a business on Etsy selling 3d printed earrings. If I had a criminal record and lived in New York, this law could potentially put my ability to put food on the table at risk as collateral damage in the name of fighting ghost guns. Obviously, I have a strong opinion on the matter, as it could directly affect me.

  My entire life is a “political issue.” In the first 6 months of this year, Republicans tried to pass at least 235 anti-trans laws. That’s more than 1 law per day, attempting to regulate me out of daily life, with the support of a voting populace with little understanding of the subject who have already formed an opinion on it. Like this law, those laws don’t affect me, but they’re still “political issues” that could put my rights at risk, just like laws like this one.

  Obviously, I don’t know your opinion on the matter of 3d printed guns (or if you even have one), but the people who get upset at people who “always make things political” are the people who have never had their rights at risk of being revoked.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NY bill would require a criminal history background check for the purchase of a 3D printer⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I meant to put it in my second paragraph, but I meant 100% printed PLA full auto guns chambered in pistol calibers (with maybe some basic metal parts inside). I’m not really into the gun part of 3d printing, but I keep an eye on it because there’s been a lot of innovation there that has changed manufacturing ideas in the rest of the 3d printing world. They figured out how to rifle a metal barrel with nothing more than a bucket of saltwater and an electric current, no milling machines or anything required! We definitely aren’t in the world of one-shot pistols using rubber bands in the trigger anymore.

  There used to be a fantastic documentary on the history of 3d printed guns I would recommend people watch by a channel on YouTube called 3d Print General, which mostly does 3d printer reviews and stuff, but the video recently got deleted by YouTube, despite some of the VICE videos showing more about how to actually make 3d printed guns than his documentary.

  But the thing I always want to make clear to people is that the vast majority of people printing guns are the equivalent of the guys making kit cars in their garage - hobbyists, not criminals. Because you can buy a $200+ printer and spend the time learning how to use it, or you can go to a state with no gun laws and buy a cheap pistol for $150 from a gun shop.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NY bill would require a criminal history background check for the purchase of a 3D printer⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Your average consumer grade 3d printer cannot print in metal. I looked into this at one point for jewelry, and you need commercial printers that cost thousands upon thousands of dollars for most metals.

  Having said that, yes, 3d printing guns has reached a point where people can make 100% 3d printed full auto guns in pistol calibers. In fact, that’s exactly what the Burmese resistance groups are using to fight back against the genocidal regime in their country. Because nobody in the international community cares enough to support them with military arms, but they can get 3d printers to print enough guns that they can kill and loot soldiers for better guns.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft’s $69bn deal to buy Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard cleared by UK⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Welcome the new management, same as the old management.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft’s $69bn deal to buy Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard cleared by UK⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s a bit of both. King is a big name in the market, but mobile gaming is just such a massive revenue stream for companies anyways. IIRC, the mobile market accounts for more money than all other gaming markets combined.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Twitter / X is losing daily active users. CEO Linda Yaccarino confirmed it.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  We could even use the same photos of the bomb from Die Hard to convince the public that they have WMDs!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not about the global or countrywide scale. It’s about the local scale. If you take a cup of salt and eat it, it’s going to end back up in the ocean eventually, but it’ll make you sick before it gets there. Dumping salt into an area is going to screw with the ecosystem in that area, in a major way. We actually have similar problems in many areas due to stuff like fertilizer runoff from people’s lawns during rainstorms, causing toxic algae blooms in ponds and around beaches.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on what you mean by far away and what kind of fish you’re talking about. Big fish like tuna are often caught far out at sea, but they’re also caught by the same small boats that do charter fishing an hour or two out from the shore. There’s plenty of inshore fishing that would be at risk, especially in bays where the salt would be less easily dispersed. I used to work at a fish market, and offhand I can think of multiple fishing industries that would be put at risk by carelessly dumping salt back in the ocean. The majority of shellfish, for example, is caught within sight of the beach. I don’t know if it’s still the case, but there used to be a ton of fishing done in Boston Harbor, and I’ve heard stories of crates of lobsters being opened only to find the lobsters carrying pieces of bodies dumped by the mob off the docks and into the harbor.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re correct, but so are they. In the long term and at a large scale, it balances out, but in the short term, there is a very real concern about local salinity levels wherever you’re reintroducing that salt to the ocean. Keeping up with the desalination plants will be a tricky business of logistics to avoid destroying the ecosystem around where you’re dumping that salt.

  Adding the salt into water leaving sewage systems before it returns to the ocean might be a good idea, as you could basically kill two birds with one stone: put the salt back in the ocean while also avoiding damaging the local ecosystem with the fresh water of the sewage system reducing local salinity levels. But I’m no engineer or water treatment specialist, so I dunno if that’s at all a real solution.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"waves of technological innovation" have gotten faster over time, "students might now find themselves learning skills in college that are obsolete by the time they graduate"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the real issue is with schooling before college, and this article seems to be looking at college as the same sort of environment as the previous 12 years of school, which it isn’t. So much of everything through high school has become about putting pressure on teachers to hit good grades and graduating student percentages that actually teaching kids how to learn and how to collaborate with others has become a tertiary goal to simply having them regurgitate information on the tests to hit those 2 metrics.

  I have taught myself a number of things on a wide range of subjects (from art to 3d printing to car maintenance and more. City planning and architecture are my current subjects of interest) and I’ve always said when people ask about learning all this stuff that I love to learn new things, despite the school system trying to beat it out of me. I dropped out of college despite loving my teachers and the college itself both because I didn’t like my major (the school was more like a trade school, we chose our majors before we even got to the college) and because I had never learned how to learn in the previous 12 years of school. I learned how to hold information just long enough to spit it out on the test and then forget it for the next set for the next test. Actually learning how to find information and internalize it through experience came after I left school.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Be kind to our financially paired brethren.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re calling it “financially paired” now? Republicans really will do anything to avoid calling it gay marriage…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Be kind to our financially paired brethren.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s also a very clever and awful propaganda strategy. They misuse words with important meanings until they become useless reactionary buzzwords. Like how woke, and politically correct before it, originally meant “to be aware of the unequal treatment of minorities in society” and “politicians should be aware of how the language they use affects people,” and now they both just mean “anything that I, as a conservative, don’t like.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Most U.S. adults don't believe benefits of AI outweigh the risks, new survey finds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Very true, but it’s precisely that wealth disparity that concerns me. I’ve seen the current US wealth disparity described as being on par with the disparity in France just before the French Revolution happened, where the cost of a loaf of bread had soared to more than the average worker made in a day. I worry that the more than half a century of anti-union propaganda and “get what I need and screw everybody else” attitude has beaten down the general public enough that there simply won’t be enough of a unified effort to enact meaningful change. I worry about how bad things will have to get before it’s too much. How many families will never recover.

  But these are also very different times compared to the 1920s in that we’ve been riding on the coattails of the post WW2 economic boom for almost 70 years, and as that continues to slow down we might see some actual pushback. We already have, with every generation being more progressive than the last.

  But I still can’t help but worry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Most U.S. adults don't believe benefits of AI outweigh the risks, new survey finds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The US economy literally depends on 3-4% of the workforce being so desperate for work that they’ll take any job, regardless of how awful the pay is. They said this during the recent labor shortage, citing how this is used to keep wages down and how it’s a “bad thing” that almost 100% of the workforce was employed because it meant people could pick and choose rather than just take the first offer they get, thus causing wages to increase.

  Poverty and homelessness are a feature, not a bug.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Open source community figures out problems with performance in Starfield⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s worth noting that though those are the “recommended” settings, my 2060 runs high settings without any issues, and runs high settings on every other game I’ve played, including other AAA releases from this year. It’s my fault for not making it clear that those are NVIDIA’s recommended settings and not what I actually have it running at. But Starfield is the first game I’ve ever seen that has simply not been able to run on a standard HDD at all. Even Baldur’s Gate 3, which requires an SSD as well, runs competently on an HDD, just with slower load times on models/textures.

  I totally understand that tech becomes outdated, especially with the jump from one console generation to the next. And especially that the recent generations of NVIDIA cards have been nowhere near as long-lasting as the 900 and 1000 series were. But Starfield is an outlier even by those standards. It has never put any real pressure on my CPU or GPU, it’s all been entirely on the speed of the harddrive.

  Running it on an HDD was such a bizarre experience. The game would freeze for about 5 seconds every minute or so, and on initiating any dialogue with NPCs it would stutter for just a moment. NPC dialogue would also be out of sync with their animations, which is to be expected with the stutter. The weirdest part was how the music would stop playing suddenly and the game would go completely silent for about 10 seconds while it was still running smoothly, before all the sounds that had happened in that timespan played out suddenly, like they had been queueing up while the game figured out whether or not it wanted to play them. For this one particular game to have these kinds of issues - especially considering how partitioned the game world is by loading screens - says that the issue lies in the optimization of Starfield and not the specs of my PC. Especially since they all stopped when I migrated the game to an SSD I have plugged into an external SATA dock hooked up over USB C.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Open source community figures out problems with performance in Starfield⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The fact that it literally can’t run on a normal HDD is baffling to me. The game is so poorly optimized that not only does it require an SSD just to run both the graphics and audio smoothly and in sync, but the recommended settings for my 2060 are everything as low as it can possibly go. I got roughly a decade out of my 970 before it truly started to show its age, but my 2 generations old card is barely good enough to run this game?

  And don’t even get me started on how I keep feeling like I’m playing Fallout 4 because so much of the music uses the same underlying score of the music from the reveal trailer. The number of times I’ve heard those rising notes from the leaving the Vault scene in Fallout 4 in my 3 hours in Starfield…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[MEGATHREAD] Starfield - Your experiences!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t played it, but that seems to be the general consensus I’ve seen.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I need advice about whether to dive in or not⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I think they mean that because of the unique process that 3d printers use to create something, stuff that can be made easily on a 3d printer can’t be replicated through other manufacturing techniques, and vice versa. For example, I designed an earring that is 1 solid object, but made up of 3 separate moving pieces; like links of a chain that have no split in them. This would be an impossible task for any other kind of manufacturing process. It would be like making acar engine all at once, rather than having to make the individual parts and then assemble them afterward. You can have gaps and cavities in a print that you could never have in a cast or injection molded piece. But this method means that you also have to worry about things that you wouldn’t using more traditional manufacturing techniques.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pornhub Sues Texas Over Age Verification Law⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, anytime you see somebody making the “think of the children!” argument, look at what the possible end goal could be with that removed. Protecting kids is a favorite smokescreen because kids can’t speak up for themselves in these cases.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Teens Hacked Boston Subway’s CharlieCard to Get Infinite Free Rides⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The worst part is that Boston is ranked like #3 for public transportation in the US (yes, even including the fires). The average commute time on a route is like 30 minutes faster than the national average for public transportation, and somewhere around 50% of Boston’s workers use the T to commute every day.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lemmy is popular nowadays, yet is losing its active users⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  This is the big one to me. It’s much more difficult to search for specific content if it’s isolated amongst communities on different servers, all trying to fill the same niche and splitting the potential userbase for said niche up between them.

  If there was like a tag system in place that communities could use to tag themselves as being for a specific thing, like cooking, for example, and then you could aggregate/search posts from all communities under the cooking tag across all servers federated with yours, it would greatly simplify finding content for less tech literate users while also increasing the resilience of the entire network by allowing more communities for a specific niche to exist, which would prevent content loss if one server goes down without discoverability being an issue.