Schadrach

@Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stop whining. Do it yourself.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  On my instance you just click “Communities” at the top and it gives you a list of communities with three options at the top Subscribed/Local/All just like the main feed. Click all and you can browse or search the list of all communities, though the search is not great.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨...⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you or have you ever worked in science? I did for a bit and that was not my impression.

  I imagine it depends heavily on the field. In some fields there are ideas that one can’t seriously study because they’re considered settled or can’t be studied without doing more harm than any believed good that could be achieved. There are others subject to essentially ideological capture where the barrier to publish is largely determined by how ideologically aligned you are (fields linked to an identity group have a bad habit of being about activism first and accurate observation of reality second).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Because a carrier’s data on you is not your person or belongings. The companies holding this data are selling access to it, so it’s not being searched, it’s being offered.

  In other words, the same reason as why they don’t need a search warrant if there’s a breaking and the business across the street volunteers their security camera footage, even if you’re on that footage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Missed Connection⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I have one of those ridge wallets (birthday present, decent wallet) and apparently they had a giveaway for a gold cyber truck. That would be the single most conspicuous vehicle on the road. Like, obnoxiously so. I feel bad for the winner.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s easy - they’d come to Lemmy and become Lemmy mods to achieve the same thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Smart TVs take snapshots of what you watch multiple times per second⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I can top it - my first desktop PC was an Epson. Come to think of it, my first printer was an Epson dot matrix. Loud as fuck but it was a good little workhorse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Smart TVs take snapshots of what you watch multiple times per second⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  They are. They just aren’t the only one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Paralyzed Jockey Loses Ability to Walk After Manufacturer Refuses to Fix Battery For His $100,000 Exoskeleton⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  With the introduction of protected mode it became possible for programs to run in isolated memory spaces where they are unable to impact other programs running on the same CPU. These programs were said to be running “in a jail” that limited their access to the rest of the computer. A software exploit that allowed a program running inside the “jail” to gain root access / run code outside of protected mode was a “jailbreak”.

  I still miss the narrow window in which you could make use of paging without technically being in protected mode. Basically there was like one revision of the 386 where you could set the paging bit but not protected mode and remain in real mode but with access to paging meaning you got access to paging without the additional processor overhead of protected mode. Not terribly useful since it was removed in short order, but neat to know about. Kinda like how there were a few instructions that had multiple opcodes and there was one commercially distributed assembler that used the alternative opcodes as a way to identify code assembled by it. Or POP CS - easily the most useless 80086 instruction, so useless that the opcode for it got repurposed in the next x86 processor.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wait a minute, we've been going about this all the wrong way!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s to point out that Isreal is capable of causing less collateral damage in Gaza but chooses not to.

  That comes down to how often Hamas orders things that can reasonably have small bombs put inside them on a large scale and that Hamas are expected to have on their person’s most of the time, how secure their supply lines are, how paranoid they are about looking for that kind of thing, that sort of thing. It involves a lot more moving parts and rare opportunities than just dropping some bombs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wait a minute, we've been going about this all the wrong way!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah dude. “Only.”’ You’re right though, I guess Israel really has raised the bar when it comes to indiscriminate murder of civilians. Those are rookie numbers.

  When your enemy disperses themselves among the civilian population?

  This killed way less civilians than a traditional bombing that would have got the same Hezbollah fighters would have.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US can’t ban TikTok for security reasons while ignoring Temu, other apps, TikTok argues⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They care about companies they have less control over and a foreign adversary has more control over invading privacy, for reasons unrelated to seeing privacy as a good in itself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The only times I’ve had it be remotely helpful is when you want something specific that’s going to appear near the top of search results and is also likely to be buried in a bunch of irrelevant faff. Which is to say that occasionally “search for X and summarize the top result” is a useful tool but not often enough for them to front and center it like they do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, that’s because googles AI over view is designed to summarize search results on a topic. On one hand that reduces the degree to which it will simply hallucinate, on the other sometimes the top search result is already as concise as it can be at the target grade level of writing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin, leaving over 30 million Chrome users susceptible to intrusive ads⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Advertising company makes it harder to block ads on their browser, news at 11.

  Or did anyone forget that they made an explicit effort to block another ad blocking extension a while back, including blocking it from the Chrome store, blocking you from installing it manually and even blocking at least some versions of it from being manually installed in developer mode?

  Ad nauseam, because it also simulated as clocks and thus ruined their metrics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Spreading of the 100 biggest Lemmy communities⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Only insofar as some instances block communication from some other instances. Not mine though, that’s actually one of the reasons I picked it. That and it being by an org that’s older than the web and runs a public unix server and a bunch of retrocomputing type services as well as fediverse stuff. They started out as a dialup anime BBS.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ah sweet!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean it worked for gay sex!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Decentralised YouTube alternative Odysee no longer serving ads⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Free speech is protection from government oppression. Last I checked, I’m not the government, neither is Lemmy, neither is any other site on the internet that doesn’t end in .gov (typically), and this isn’t a free speech issue despite what MAGA idiots would have people think. If the platform wants that shit there, so be it, and I won’t use it when it’s painted on their front page. I use Lemmy because I was here (on another instance originally) before the MAGA weirdos decided to join to spread their bullshit, so I’ve had time to curate – apparently I have to do it again, or simply leave this instance.

  This appears to be an argument against a position I wasn’t taking. You just appear to be upset that alternative video streaming sites don’t ban people you disagree with. Good luck with that.

  Just because I use the internet (which I have been doing since only a few years after the WWW was invented), doesn’t mean I have to tolerate bullshit when I see it.

  Hey, you may been around longer than I have. Only had the internet since the mid 90s. So it depends on how you define “a few”. It was a very different beast back then, and I for one miss the relative lack of concentrated corporate control and mandatory advertiser-friendliness.

  Perhaps if everyone was like this, the internet wouldn’t be the shithole it has become.

  I chalk that up to said concentrated corporate control and mandatory advertiser-friendliness, but then I don’t think it’s become a shithole because people I disagree with also have a voice, but because of aggressive monetization and the enshittification that that inevitably entails.

  And I’m done responding now, because clearly you and many others in this thread will never understand, or even care to understand.

  No, you are well understood. You are opposed to alternative video platforms (and apparently some other unnamed Lemmy instance) because those things do not necessarily reinforce your echo chamber, and you consider that reinforcement a vital feature. I’m waaay over on the far end of the spectrum, and chose my instance specifically because they do not defederate, they keep everything available and leave it up to the user to decide what they do or do not wish to see (and I to date have nothing blocked - no users, no communities, no servers).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Decentralised YouTube alternative Odysee no longer serving ads⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  (such as screaming fire in a movie theater when there is no fire)

  This idiom comes from an analogy in a SCOTUS opinion arguing that checks notes it’s a violation of the Espionage Act to distribute flyers that oppose the draft. That case was later partly overturned in Brandenburg v Ohio and the standard is that speech isn’t incitement unless it is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action. To the point that “$SLUR should hang from trees” is probably protected speech (because the lawless action isn’t imminent), but “you guys, grab that $SLUR over there so we can string them up!” probably isn’t.

  So defending free speech inevitably means defending white supremacists and the like because free speech doesn’t actually protect anything if it doesn’t protect upsetting, outrageous, or offensive speech (and likewise, the arbiter of what counts as offensive is not guaranteed to always be on your side). It’s why the ACLU has defended them on more than one occasion. H.L. Mencken put it best.

  “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” ― H.L. Mencken

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Decentralised YouTube alternative Odysee no longer serving ads⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, that is technically promoting violence against an identifiable minority political group.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Decentralised YouTube alternative Odysee no longer serving ads⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Let’s see…I’ve been banned from subs I’ve never viewed so much as a single post from for having commented on other, entirely unrelated subs.

  I’ve been banned from r/atheism for “egregious immorality” which ironically sounds like the sort of thing you’d be banned from a religious sub for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Decentralised YouTube alternative Odysee no longer serving ads⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The point of course is that if you don’t want to see it, you refuse to use any platform that allows others to see it. Which must make it awfully hard to use the internet. Surprised you manage to even use Lemmy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The AI-focused COPIED Act would make removing digital watermarks illegal⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Except I couldn’t. Because a person being influenced by an artwork and then either intentionally or subconsciously reinterpreting that artwork into a new work of art is a fundamentally different thing from a power hungry machine learning algorithm digesting the near entirety of modern humanity’s art output

  The big differences there are whether it’s a person or a machine and just how much art one can digest as inspiration. Again, reference my example of a commission above - the main difference between a human and an AI making it is whether they look up a couple dozen examples of each element to get a general idea or 100 million examples of each element to mathematically generalize the idea, and the main reason the number of examples and power requirements need to be so different is that humans are extremely efficient pattern developing and matching machines, so efficient that sometimes the brain just fills in the pattern instead of bothering to fully process sensory inputs (which is why a lot of optical illusions work).

  to churn out an image manufactured to best satisfy some random person’s text prompt.

  At a level, “churning out an image to best satisfy some random person’s” description is essentially what happens when someone commissions a work or when producing things to spec as part of some project. They don’t generally say “just draw whatever you are inspired to” and hope they like the result. This is the thing that AI image generators are specifically good at, and is why I say it’s about protectionism for a class of workers who didn’t think their jobs could be automated away in whole or in part.

  But we’re not just talking about automating someone’s job.

  Except you are, you are just deeming that job “someone’s dream career” as though that changes whether or not it’s a job that is being automated in whole or part. Yes, it’s going to hurt the market for commissioned art works and the like. Again, upset because those jobs are supposed to be immune to automation and - whoopsie - they aren’t. Join the people in manufacturing, or the makers of buggy whips.

  We’re talking about automating someone’s passion.

  Literally no one is going to ban or forbid anyone from creating art because AI art exists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The AI-focused COPIED Act would make removing digital watermarks illegal⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is problematic at best and flat out dishonest thievery at worst.

  You could say that about literally all art - no artist can name and attribute every single influence that played even the smallest effect on the work created. Say I commissioned an image of an anime man in a french maid uniform in a 4 panel pop art style. In creating it at some level you are going to draw on every anime image you’ve seen, every picture of a french maid uniform, every 4 panel pop art image and create something that’s a synthesis of all those things. You can’t name and attribute every single example of all of those things you have ever seen, as well as anything else that might have influenced you.

  Whereas a work made by a person that is dirivitive or parody has actual work and thought put into it by an actual person.

  …and this is the crux of it - it’s not anything related to the actual content of the image, it’s simple protectionism for a class of worker. Basically creatives are seeing the possibility of some of their jobs being automated away and are freaking out because losing jobs to automation is something that’s only supposed to effect manufacturing workers.

  Even if it is dirivitive it’s unique in some way simply by virtue of being made by a person.

  Again, the argument is it’s nothing to do with the actual result, but with it being done by an actual human as opposed to a mere machine. A pixel for pixel identical image create by a human would be “art” by virtue of it being a human that put each pixel there?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Hey Google, Turn my balls off"⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Male contraceptives are difficult to approve to begin with, specifically because there’s no political will to expedite anything that benefits males as a sex. They don’t need to go after this sort of thing until something actually gets approved.

  The FDA also requires tighter standards regarding side effects because they do not prevent or treat a condition that the patient has (because pregnancy is not a concern for male persons). If you ever hear someone talking about a male pill and implying that the guys in the study couldn’t deal with relatively minor side effects, it wasn’t the patients that ended the study and it wasn’t because patients were unwilling to continue using it.

  There was also a pill derived from cotton plants, but it had two major issues: The first was that the difference between a contraceptive dose and a toxic dose was too small to be comfortable. The second was that sometimes (but not always) the effect was permanent.

  There’s also a technology developed in India for a sort of reversible vasectomy that requires an injection of a polymer in each vas. It started out as an attempt at an artificial heart design, in the 70s was used as the basis for a water pump, and still later became the basis for the contraceptive. US IP rights to it were bought by a US company in 2011, and a slightly different formulation of it was in testing until 2023 under the name Vasalgel (which proved less reversible than the original). The rights were bought by a different company in 2023 who are looking to try to bring it to market under the name Plan A For Men.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The worst pick-up line I've ever gotten⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re a nonhuman species and one probably shouldn’t assign human views and norms to them.

  But then I’ve always preferred scifi and fantasy where the various other species aren’t just humans with weird ears but are actually very different than humans. Stuff like Three Worlds Collide or the Crystal Society trilogy for examples that are free online.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The worst pick-up line I've ever gotten⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Harry isn’t a “cop”, like hes not walking the beat arresting people, hes a dark wizard catcher. Which is perfectly rational given dark wizards killed his parents and they’re pretty explicitly fascists.

  He’s part of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, the closest thing to his job IRL would be something like a cop in a gang task force.

  I literally work with a guy named Ying Yang.

  I had two professors in college named Bing Yang and Chingmin Yang. Both math professors. Had one for probability and statistics and the other for discrete math.

  I’m not defending Rowling as a person at all, or her statements about trans people, but the criticism of Harry potter feels very much like going back and reexamining them with an agenda.

  Because that’s exactly what it is. It’s mostly people that were huge fans that know the books well enough for those kinds of analyses, and they mostly didn’t start these kinds of positions on them until JK said things about trans people.

  And TERFy stuff was still common enough just 15 years ago that when Mary Daly died all the big feminist sites wrote these glowing memorials about how she was so influential to their feminist beliefs and then most issued an apology, retraction or the like when they realized the size of their trans audience.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The worst pick-up line I've ever gotten⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Just glad to be out of that field entirely. Married for almost 5 years, met 2 years before that on OkCupid. Apparently she was nervous about it and her friend told her it was just pizza, she didn’t have to marry me. Never been so happy her friend was wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stay Mad⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I used to joke back in 2014 that if Milo Yian-whatever, Ben Shapiro and Gavin McInnes just had a biweekly meeting and decided on a hand sign, an image and a word to use heavily in social media for the following month that everything could be made into a dogwhistle within a year.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So is Israel just going to finish Palestine off?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It feels like people downplay how much our policitians are in israels pocket. AIPAC is flaunting publicly that they practically own all American politicians.

  I find it wild that people say this so openly now, when before Oct 7 saying something like this would get you branded as a neo-Nazi. AIPAC being a massively powerful lobby is nothing new, it’s just socially acceptable to oppose them now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Automation⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m just going to assume bolts of lightning and Usain Bolt are off the table.

  The only thing I know about the procedure for tightening Usain Bolt is that I am not part of performing it.