BertramDitore
@BertramDitore@lemm.ee
- Comment on Japan to create digital archive of manga, anime and games 1 week ago:
This seems great. I hope this will include Japanese live action content too, which to me is really underrated around the world.
I just wish production companies would start including English subtitles with all their dramas and movies. I know it’s often considered an unnecessary expense so it’s not included in the contract, but I’m an English-speaking American and I love Japanese media. I usually have to wait for some kind stranger to do their own custom subtitling before I can enjoy the content, often years after the initial release.
I’m slowly trying to learn Japanese, but I doubt I’ll ever be good enough to follow some of that hilariously fast-paced dialogue I love so much…
- Comment on Better music management 2 weeks ago:
I come back to this problem every year or so because I’m never satisfied with my music metadata. Years ago I had my musicbrainz picard settings dialed in really nicely, where I could drag folder over and it would spit out the right thing like 7 out of 10 times. It still required a lot of doubled checking and manual oversight though, so I was never satisfied.
I tried mediamonkey for a while, because it has decent metadata support and plugs into most of the expected APIs. But when all is said and done, all these tools use the same data sources, and none of them are exactly consistent with each other so matches aren’t as straightforward as they should be.
Lidar never quite did it for me, so I haven’t looked at my install in a couple years. But based on @skoberlink@lemmy.world’s recommendation I’ll try a fresh install and see if get I better results this time. I’m always happy in the arr interfaces.
- Comment on The horns emoji is the hearts emoji for boys 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, I totally understand the potential creepiness factor with coworkers, but I just try to read the room, and as far as I know, I haven’t creeped anyone out. I find the heart emoji should be used sparingly regardless of gender. My (female) manager recently wished me well while I was sick, and a heart emoji was the perfect response.
- Comment on The horns emoji is the hearts emoji for boys 2 weeks ago:
Don’t limit yourself like that. I use hearts, peace signs, horns, spock hands, thumbs up, whatever I feel like. There’s no need to add gender to this stuff.
- Comment on 1955 was as old in 1990 as 1990 is in 2025. 2 weeks ago:
You’re correct. The 90s has always been and will always be ten years ago.
- Comment on The world was a nicer place before the advent of leaf blowers 3 weeks ago:
I understand your skepticism, but gas-powered leaf blowers have annoyed the hell out of me for years. I live in a relatively small city in Northern California, and I can always hear and smell a leaf blower before I can even see it. I can’t overstate how strongly gas-powered leaf blowers smell. The smell of gas permeates my apartment, even with the windows closed, and is the kind of smell that gets stuck my nostrils for hours. The noise is pretty disruptive, but the smell is way worse to be honest. I’m not sure why they smell so much worse than other gas-powered things, but it’s like they’re just spewing gas out into the air.
I have no problem with electric or battery-powered leaf blowers, just please use them at a reasonable time of day - after 8am and before 10pm.
- Comment on Sumo community tournament relaunch! 4 weeks ago:
Yes! I haven’t watched the movie, but apparently a few of the older cast members on the show were also in the movie. I’ll definitely check it out!
- Comment on Sumo community tournament relaunch! 4 weeks ago:
If anyone’s interested in sumo but doesn’t know where to start, I recently watched Shiko Funjatta! (Sumo Do, Sumo Don’t!) and really enjoyed it. It’s a lighthearted show about the struggle of keeping a very old college sumo club running in the modern era. Serves as a very cool intro to the sport, but it also has great drama and an excellent cast.
- Comment on Why does it seem like every other post on here is deleted shortly after being posted? 4 weeks ago:
I kind of get it in cases where no one has commented yet, and the OP realizes a mistake or how stupid a question it is. But once there’s engagement, I wish the OP would leave it up.
I’ve noticed this a lot lately: I’ll comment, my comment will get engagement, so I’ll check the thread again to reply or read other comments, do that, then come back later to follow up again, and it’s all been deleted. Like, even if the original post was stupid or embarrassing, the fact that there was genuine engagement, to me, means it shouldn’t be deleted.
But again, I understand the anxiety of leaving your own stupid words up if they really bother you, so I won’t lose sleep over this.
- Comment on Marc Andreessen predicts one of the few jobs that may survive the rise of AI automation 5 weeks ago:
Thank you. He gets more normalized any time someone talks about this asshole and doesn’t mention his extremist and wildly unpopular views. He is a terrible person, and not enough people know why.
This article does a pretty solid job of explaining how horrible he is, though I’m sure there are better ones.
- Comment on World's first 3D-texture UV printer for consumers now available for pre-order — prints onto 'nearly any surface' 1 month ago:
Wow, that’s really impressive. I don’t really know why, but I want this.
Though I initially thought it was handheld, which would make their claim to be able to print on nearly any surface a little more believable. Still seems like incredible tech.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
You’re not paranoid, it’s a real pattern, and that pattern is racism. Some white people, in their wildest dreams, can’t imagine how a person of color might get a role instead of a white person. It’s not about skill, it’s not about creativity, it’s not about the quality of the film. It’s just blatant racism.
Remember how the little mermaid live action movie started getting shit before it was even released? That was because the lead actor was black, and peoples’ imaginations are so underdeveloped that they couldn’t see that she is legitimately an amazing talent who played the role just as well if not better than any white lady could have. Now, live action Disney remakes are stupid, so maybe that’s not the best example, but it’s all just racism.
- Comment on "Cheers", but set in a fantasy tavern. 1 month ago:
One of my favorite Japanese dramas, Isekai Izakaya Nobu, based on an anime of the same name, has a plot kind of like this. Lots of fun.
- Comment on Google shows new AR glasses, VR headset at TED 1 month ago:
don’t think that FAANG companies realize how toxic their image is
Ain’t that the truth. Their behavior and the products they’ve been launching the last few years prove this to me. They’re completely out of touch with society and what consumers actually want. LLMs are another perfect example of that.
- Comment on An LLM would probably run the USA better 2 months ago:
It isn’t just you and me. Not even the people who designed them fully understand why they give the responses they give. It’s a well-known problem. Our understanding is definitely improving over time, but we still don’t fully know how they do it.
Here’s the latest exploration of this topic I could find.
LLMs continue to be one of the least understood mass-market technologies ever
Tracing even a single response takes hours and there’s still a lot of figuring out left to do.
- Comment on An LLM would probably run the USA better 2 months ago:
I highly doubt that. For so many reasons. Here’s just a few:
- What data would you train it on, the Constitution? The entirely of federal law? How would that work? Knowing how ridiculous textualism is even when done by humans, do you really think a non-thinking algorithm could understand the intention behind the words? Or even what laws, rules, or norms should be respected in each unique situation?
- We don’t know why LLMs return the responses they return. This would be hugely problematic for understanding its directions.
- If an LLM doesn’t know an answer, instead of saying so it will usually just make something up. Plenty of people do this too, but I’m not sure why we should trust an algorithm’s hallucinations over a human’s bullshit.
- How would you ensure the integrity of the prompt engineer’s prompts? Would there be oversight? Could the LLM’s “decisions” be reversed?
- How could you hold an LLM accountable for the inevitable harm it causes? People will undoubtedly die for one reason or another based on the LLM’s “decisions.” Would you delete the model? Retrain it? How would you prevent it from making the same mistake again?
I don’t mean this as an attack on you, but I think you trust the implementation of LLMs way more than they deserve. These are unfinished products. They have some limited potential, but should by no means have any power or control over our lives. Have they really shown you they should be trusted with this kind of power?
- Comment on D.A. Hochman officially brings death penalty back to Los Angeles 2 months ago:
Yup, Marcellus Williams was executed on September 24, 2024, after significant evidence of his innocence was well known. Even though the victim’s family had consistently said they did not want him to be executed, the Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey acted liked a one-man murderous mob and insisted that this innocent man be killed, after already being wrongfully imprisoned for nearly 24 years. He didn’t even want the evidentiary hearing to go forward. What legitimate reason would someone ever have to deny someone the right to show evidence of their innocence? It’s not the first time that asshole AG Andrew Bailey didn’t care about whether or not someone actually committed a crime.
There are few things that make me angrier and more afraid than someone who genuinely thinks they have the power to purposefully work against the truth when someone’s life is on the line.
- Comment on D.A. Hochman officially brings death penalty back to Los Angeles 2 months ago:
Yup, that’s what it all boils down to.
- Comment on D.A. Hochman officially brings death penalty back to Los Angeles 2 months ago:
Just try a little empathy exercise: what if you were arrested for a heinous crime, that you know for certain you didn’t commit, but you don’t have an alibi and there’s enough evidence that points to you, that you end up being tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death.
You know that you didn’t commit the crime, but nobody else believes you or can properly make your case. In carrying out your sentence, the government is murdering an innocent person who was wronged by the justice system. If you had been sentenced to life in prison, there’s a good chance some new facts might have come to light and exonerated you. This happens all the time.
Why does the government get to kill people, when killing people is one of our worst crimes? To me, the death penalty is state-sanctioned revenge. It’s the government saying it’s entitled to commit an awful crime, in order to punish an awful crime. Sometimes it’s committing the very same crime the person was sentenced for. That logic has always been completely confounding to me.
Still curious what’s wrong with the death penalty?
- Comment on The Phony Comforts of AI Optimism. 2 months ago:
Casey Newton founded Platformer, after leaving The Verge around 5 years ago. But yeah, I used to listen to Hard Fork, his podcast with Kevin Roose, but I stopped because of how uncritically they cover AI and LLMs. It’s basically the only thing they cover, and yet they are quite gullible and not really realistic about the whole industry. They land some amazing interviews with key players, but never ask hard questions or dive nearly deep enough, so they end up sounding pretty fluffy as ass-kissy. I totally agree with Zitron’s take on their reporting. I constantly found myself wishing they were a lot more cynical and combative.
- Comment on The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem 2 months ago:
That’s an interesting article, but it was published in 2022, before LLMs were a thing on anyone’s radar. The results are still incredibly impressive without a doubt, but based on how the researchers explain it, it looks like it was accomplished using deep learning, which isn’t the same as LLMs. Though they’re not entirely unrelated.
Opaque and confusing terminology in this space also just makes it very difficult to determine who or which systems or technology are actually making these advancements. As far as I’m concerned none of this is actual AI, just very powerful algorithmic prediction models. So the claims that an AI system itself has made unique technological advancements, when they are incapable of independent creativity, to me proves that nearly all their touted benefits are still entirely hypothetical right now.
- Comment on The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem 2 months ago:
The article explains the problems in great detail.
Here’s just one small section of the text which describes some of them:
All of this certainly makes knowledge and literature more accessible, but it relies entirely on the people who create that knowledge and literature in the first place—that labor that takes time, expertise, and often money. Worse, generative-AI chatbots are presented as oracles that have “learned” from their training data and often don’t cite sources (or cite imaginary sources). This decontextualizes knowledge, prevents humans from collaborating, and makes it harder for writers and researchers to build a reputation and engage in healthy intellectual debate. Generative-AI companies say that their chatbots will themselves make scientific advancements, but those claims are purely hypothetical.
(I originally put this as a top-level comment, my bad.)
- Comment on The Internet Desk 2 months ago:
Your description of those desks totally knocked some of my old memories loose. I remember going to a friend’s house in the late 90s when the first smallish “all-in-one” PCs started coming on the market (before the iMac claimed that space in ‘98). They had their new all-in-one PC set up on a tiny desk in the hallway outside their office. It was there so everyone in the family could use it, but I remember being shocked at how small it was, and so impressed that it didn’t need the whole corner of a room.
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 3 months ago:
Yeah, I hate the interfaces, but especially the super-loud non-mutable beeps which seem to be common on every model I’ve seen. My two-burner induction setup has analog knobs for temp control, which is awesome, but it stills beep when you turn them, with every single temperature increase. Drives me crazy.
I’ll never go back to gas though. My new apartment came with a gorgeous brand new gas range, and it absolutely sucks compared to my $50 countertop induction.
- Comment on Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian 3 months ago:
Ah got it, thanks for the clarification.
- Comment on Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian 3 months ago:
Yup! I should have been more specific, Mobius Sync uses syncthing on iOS.
- Comment on Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian 3 months ago:
It’s always been free for me using Mobius Sync…
- Comment on Pope funeral 'is being rehearsed': Swiss Guard 'prepare for pontiff's death after the 88-year-old warned 'I may not survive' pneumonia 3 months ago:
Well, the previous pope was a member of Hitler Youth, though he was conscripted like everyone his age. So yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next one was a proper full-fledged Nazi.
- Comment on Introducing Muse: Our first generative AI model designed for gameplay ideation. 3 months ago:
Ugh.
- Comment on Why there is no photos of earth from space? 3 months ago:
I’ve earnestly answered some of your other questions, when it was quite clear you were either trolling or incredibly stubborn, and this additional question (which purposefully ignores the basic answers I gave you weeks ago) makes it obvious you don’t actually want to learn anything. Stop asking questions if you don’t intend to genuinely engage with the people who are taking the time to respond.