cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI 2027⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  He probably still has stock options he needs to vest. Can’t let the bubble pop yet, there’s still money to be squeezed out of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linkwarden v2.14 - open-source collaborative bookmark manager to collect, read, annotate, and fully preserve what matters (tons of new features!) 🚀⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  No, you are definitely not the only one. I tend to be more judgemental of projects that contain prolific use of emojis in general, but that has been ongoing since before AI became popular.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨swapping out the router maybe?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Running it as a VM also introduces many other potential sources of inefficiency. I always recommend running a firewall on dedicated bare metal hardware, it is a very specialized task with very particular requirements on behalf of both the hardware and the software. That doesn’t mean you need to use a pre-built appliance, but it does explain why it’s so common, and running it on a VM on a server that is doing other stuff is likely contributing to your issues significantly.

  Personally, I run my firewall/router on a very stripped-down Debian with almost no non-essential services and a custom built kernel. I hand-picked a multi-port PCIe x4 Intel NIC with good Linux compatibility and drivers, and I’m using foomuuri to handle the routing and kea to handle DHCP/DNS for my internal network. This is a very minimal, bare-bones configuration and I wouldn’t really recommend it unless you really know what you’re doing, and it’s absolutely not “idiot mode networking” and if that’s what you want you’re going to have a real bad time. But it works for me, so it’s proof that it is possible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Question, Star Trek fans: What makes Captain Kirk a good leader?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Is he a good leader? He always came across to me as a bit of a prima donna with a napoleon complex. I’d point to Picard or Janeway as better leaders to be honest, they are both able to actually inspire their crews to become something better than they would be on their own.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Purpose of Protocols⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I consider the article’s criticisms of SMTP, HTTP, XMPP, etc. (and IRC which was not mentioned but falls in the same category) to be positive and desirable traits and I think it’s a shame that the article characterizes them negatively. HTTP’s job is not to prevent corporate takeover of the web and I don’t think it should be. That’s our job, as people. The protocol’s job is to remain neutral so that when corporate takeover of the web happens, HTTP is still there, open to everybody, providing an offramp to escape it, because it’s neutral. It doesn’t belong to the corporations. It belongs to everybody. They can try to take it over if they wish, embrace and extend, but they can’t extinguish a fire that’s smoldering underground no matter how hard they try. It will always be there, ready to flare up at a moment’s notice. The original is always still there ready for us to revert to using it at any time.

  And many of us already have. Fuck Google, fuck Cloudflare, fuck AWS, they’ll never take the web from us.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Robot dogs priced at $300,000 a piece are now guarding some of the country’s biggest data centers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You might be underestimating how much damage a .22 round to can do to something, especially when that something is probably at least like 60% lithium ion battery by volume. Yeah, .22s are small by bullet standards and have low stopping power, but they’re still lethal.

  That said, if you’ve got a 308 handy, that’ll work reliably too. You won’t be silencing it, but feel free to blow a hole clean through one of these machines and enjoy the fireworks when its battery lights off.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sam Altman Thanks Programmers for Their Effort, Says Their Time Is Over⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are plenty of tards out there living really kick-ass lives. My first wife was tarded. She’s a pilot now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As far as I understand it, only your instance can see your IP. users cannot, and other instances cannot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Am I right to be afraid of germs / is my family disgusting or am I overreacting and this is germaphobia? (read post)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I subscribe to the George Carlin immunity theory. Your immune system is not a perfect machine, but it’s evolved for thousands of years to be able to defend us against the bad germs we are exposed to. Key phrase there is exposed to. If you are never exposed to at least small amounts of germs, your immune system has no training and will be unable to respond effectively to real threats, or it will freak out and panic at minor threats, making you sick from things that wouldn’t even bother someone else, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  In George Carlin’s monologue, which I think is faithfully reproduced in text form here he makes the observation that for his whole childhood he swam in the Hudson River with raw sewage, and he never gets sick. The point he makes is most people’s immune systems cower and hide when they encounter an unknown pathogen, meanwhile his immune system is patrolling his body with automatic rifles and grenades and a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy.

  Most germophobia is sold to us by cleaning product companies (through government representatives that they own). It’s all a fucking scam, they want to convince us to do things that make us sick and then sell us the cures and have the cures also make us sick so they can sell us cures for that too.

  Thousands of years of evolution may not be perfect, but I trust it more than I trust these fucking corporate fucks, that’s for sure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Palworld is going to be the survival crafting game everyone always wanted" and "people will be shocked" at how big 1.0 is, says Pocketpair publishing lead⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If it’s legally not considered copy-pasting their monsters, why do you feel like you can assert that it is plagiarism? I suppose that’s your opinion, and you’re entitled to it, but I also think people have a right to call you out on it for saying it as if it’s a fact when it is not actually a recognized fact. Plenty of people would dispute that, including myself, and certainly Pocketpair would, and evidence suggests the courts probably would’ve agreed with them hence it wasn’t even worth pursuing legally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Define “competitor”. Hackernews, Stackoverflow, heck even Slashdot is still around. Contrary to popular belief there aren’t as many techies around as there are “normies” so a site that like Reddit that also caters widely to normies is never going to be exceeded in size by a site that caters exclusively to techies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does this website feel like the end of FOSS?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It might be the end of GPL-type licenses. But, at least as far as I’ve understood it, the point of copyleft was to use copyright against itself in the first place, because copyright sucks, and at the end of the day we don’t really want copyright OR copyleft. They’re both asserting “ownership” of stuff that honestly belongs in the public domain free to all humans to use (in an ideal world, that doesn’t contain evil corporations that are considered people for some reason). We already know copyleft open source has been widely abused in proprietary software. This is not new nor surprising. We gave them the richly deserved middle finger whenever we could find out they did it before, and we hate it, but it was never “the end” of open source software because making it publicly available is precisely the defiance we are ultimately aiming for and we will always do that no matter how much they steal it and make it closed source.

  People making closed source software are the enemy, and our war of freedom against them continues regardless of what tactics they use to demean our efforts while they make their closed source software. We will never let them win. They think they’ve found a new way around the GPL, that’s a shame, but so be it. The arms race will continue, but open source will not go away, because the point of it has nothing to do with meekly relying on the law to allow open source to exist, that’s just a method that has been used, with some success, and allowed a lot of people to turn it into a livelihood, and it will be a terrible shame to lose that.

  Those things are not the true goal of open source though. The intention of open source, is to not let proprietary, hidden software dictate the fate of humanity and we will do it for as long as we have to. We’ll do it if we’re protected by copyleft, we’ll do it if we’re not. We’ll still do it even if they make it illegal, and we’ll call it reverse engineering, hacking, and piracy if we have to. Because the information and code that humanity relies on must be free, not owned.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would it be possible to have a successful career as a lawyer and never lie?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I would respond that it’s almost impossible to thrive in any sort of human society that has ever existed in history without telling even the faintest hint of a white lie sometimes. I don’t think it’s realistically possible to be a successful human, nevermind a lawyer. Everyone thinks they’re being completely honest all the time, until you spend some years having a bunch of philosophers pick apart the entire basis of the reality you think you’re not lying to yourself or anyone else about, then once you’re done figuring out what reality actually is, you might have a totally different idea of what lying even means. But you’ll never get there, because you’ll never actually figure out what reality even is, nobody comes out the other side of existential philosophy. This isn’t new stuff, the ancient Greeks were struggling with it thousands of years ago, and we only know that because they were among the first who bothered to write it all down.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who Will Remember Us When The Servers Go Dark?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It always gets dark before the dawn. This system sucks and is evil. I expect its collapse to be even more evil, but I’m looking forward to building something better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ironic that they have their repos hiding behind Cloudflare, then.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are users data protected on the fediverse?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Anything you post on the internet is public knowledge forever. End of discussion. Most people won’t care at all, in most cases almost nobody or perhaps even literally nobody will ever even see it, but the harder you try to hide it, the more the Streisand Effect will magnify it until eventually everyone knows about it.

  Anyone telling you they’ll delete your data from the internet without clarifying that it is in fact impossible, is at worst deliberately lying to you usually for their own benefit, and at best making a promise they literally have zero ability to keep.

  I would hope that Fediverse services will never lie to you and tell you your data is deleted, because it can’t be.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your car’s tire sensors could be used to track you⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They would be. That’s why you don’t tell them. If you’re treating your insurance company as your friend not an adversary, you probably don’t understand how their profits grow year over year.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm confused which company is sending data to which company for processing. For example, in the list in the picture, it says OpenAI is one of the Companies. So is OpenAI sending the information...⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  These are described as “subprocessors”, so generally, this means that Persona is (potentially) sending any data they receive to these companies/platforms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What books have a lot of useful information should I get? (I mean like a Wikipedia thing with vast knowledge, but non-electronic.)⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll probably get vote-murdered for this, because this is unfortunately not a popular opinion for a lot of very justified reasons that I actually mostly agree with, but I’m going to throw this out there anyway, and I hope people hear me out for long enough that you can decide for yourself instead of just kneejerk downvoting.

  Imagine if someone created a statistical numerical model that was based on, and could therefore approximately reproduce something close to the cumulative total of all human knowledge ever recorded on the internet which probably represents exabytes of information, but this numerical model was only the size of a few movie files, and you could dump those numbers into a simulator that within some margin of statistical error, reproduced almost any of that information on currently available consumer-level hardware.

  If you’re not picking up what I’m putting down, I just described open weight LLMs that you can download and run yourself in ollama and other local programs.

  They are not intelligences and they do not represent knowledge, because they don’t know anything, can’t make their own decisions and can never be assumed to be fully accurate representations of anything they have “learned” as they are simply greatly minimized and compressed statistical details about the information already on the internet, but they actually still contain a great deal of information, provided you understand what you’re looking at and what it’s telling you. The same way demographics can provide a great deal of information about the world without needing to individually review every census document by hand, but never tell the entire story perfectly.

  While I agree with the suggestions to get a proper encyclopedia or just download Wikipedia, for a more reliable and trustworthy dataset, I think you’re doing yourself a disservice if you dismiss the entire concept of LLMs and vision models just because a few horrific companies are hyping them and overselling them and using them to destroy the world and civilization in disgustingly idiotic ways. That’s not the fault of the technologies themselves. They are a tool, a tool that is being widely misused and abused, but it’s also a tool that you can use, and you get to decide whether you simply use it wisely, or abuse it, or don’t use it at all. It’s your call. It’s already there. You decide what to do with it. I happen to think it’s got some pretty cool features and can do some remarkable things. As long as I’m the only one in charge of deciding how and when it’s used. I acknowledge it was plagiarized and collected illegally, and I respect that (as much as I respect any copyright) and I’m not planning to profit from it or use it to pass off other people’s work as my own.

  But as a hyper-efficient way to store “liberated” information to protect ourselves against the complete enshittification of content and civilization? I don’t see the harm. Copyright is not going to matter at that point anyway, the large companies who control the data and the platforms for it have already proven they don’t respect it and they’re going to be the ones dictating it in the future. They won’t even let us have access to our own data, nevermind being able to do anything to prevent them from taking it in the first place. We, the people and authors and artists and musicians and content creators it was designed to protect, now have to protect ourselves, from them, and if that means hiding some machine learning models under my bed for that rainy day, so be it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do Computer power supply issues look like?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Unlikely. Power supplies usually have internal protection, and as a result, if they become overloaded, they will trip off (and the whole computer either shuts down or reboots). Is it possible the internal protection is not working? Maybe. But it is far more likely the issue is with other hardware, or even more likely, with software/device driver issues. Try booting a LiveCD/LiveUSB with Linux on it or something and see if the problem goes away.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree that quadlets are pretty ugly but I’m not sure that’s the ini style’s fault. In general I find yaml incredibly frustrating to understand, but toml/ini style is pretty fluent to me. Maybe just a preference, IDK.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Systemd killed my father, but it’s okay because he was Darth Vader anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is #FFFFFF white, but mixing red green and blue paint is black?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Subtractive colors like paint create color by selectively removing some colors from existing light.

  Additive colors like backlit or light-emitting displays create color by creating colors of light in various proportions that are then combined.

  If you are in a dark room, all paint is black. Until you turn on something with RGB, because then you have some light for it to selectively absorb. However if your RGB is only displaying green light, and you shine it on red paint, it will look exactly the same as black paint (within a certain ballpark of imperfect materials, anyway). Green paint will look green, or white, depending on how your eye adapts, and green and white will be indistinguishable.

  That’s the difference between the two color models. Does it rely on other light sources (subtractive), or is it a light source (additive)?

  How the brain actually perceives color is really, really wild, so this is all a bit… fluid when you start getting into the weird edge cases, but the general principles of additive=light emitting and subtractive=light absorbing are generally applicable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where Does Community Live?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think ActivityPub is closer to the right answer than ATProto, and ActivityPub’s issues (though many, as the author notes) are more manageable in the long run. I think the article makes a good analysis of the fundamental differences, but is a bit glib in referring to Piefed’s topics and discussion merging as a “joyful mess”. It’s not a mess at all. It’s making order out of the chaos, and it’s the right way to build on top of ActivityPub into something that is actually fluid enough for users to actually use.

  Mailing lists were built on top of federated email in much the same way, and they formed enduring, resilient, well-structured communities, some that continue to this day (the LKML being perhaps the most notorious)

  I think ATProto makes creating enduring communities too difficult, and BlackSky illustrates that perfectly. The author’s criticism of ActivityPub, on the other hand, seems to be that it makes creating communities too easy, and this results in a “mess”. I disagree, I think the mess is a necessary and inevitable part of having community. Communities are messy. They fracture and schism, they rejoin and reshape themselves. That’s normal. It is the responsibility of the software to make sense of the mess and make it presentable, and with ActivityPub, that is not only possible, it is happening. Piefed is the present example. I expect there will be more examples, and a wider variety of them, as the ecosystem continues to develop.

  I think the biggest thing that ActivityPub still needs is better portability, for both users and communities, to allow moving servers more seamlessly. The “Personal Data Server” of Bluesky is not a bad concept, although I don’t love their implementation. I think ActivityPub can find a way to handle portability even better, but it doesn’t seem like it’s been a priority, and that’s fine. But it will need to happen eventually.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did anyone really think the Final Fantasy 7 remake was better than the original PS1 version?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s a fair criticism. The combat/random encounters are generally the most tedious part of any jRPG but certainly FF in particular. There are some really unique and interesting random battles or areas where the constant battling is intense and exciting rather than annoying, but they are rare.

  Overall though, I think the rest of FF7 more than makes up for it. I can certainly understand not being able to get past that though, although I’m curious how far you got. The game goes through a lot of different “stages”, which is one of the things I like about it, but it means the gameplay while you’re stuck in Midgar is quite distinct from the open world, and becomes distinct again once you get access to the Golden Saucer, or the airship, or into Midgar again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did anyone really think the Final Fantasy 7 remake was better than the original PS1 version?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  FF has been steadily turning from actual role playing games where the gameplay was once in the driver’s seat and the scenes and story add spice and flavor, to vaguely interactive “cinematic experiences” where the story being endlessly shoved down your throat is the purpose, and the gameplay is just a repetitive distraction from the real novelty which is the crazy stories and cutscenes they come up with.

  Ironically FF7 itself was probably the beginning of that trend, thanks to the ability of Playstation CDs to hold so much FMV compared to the limits of ROMs at the time. They dove in headfirst and never looked back, and that came to define the franchise from that point forward. 3 Discs of FMV was pretty over-the-top for their first release on the platform, but the franchise’s addiction to relentless cinematics never waned, it only increased. And the relegation of gameplay being put in the passenger seat, then the back seat, then the trunk, then dragged behind the vehicle to its inevitable death as the art and story become the sole focus became more pronounced with each new entry in the series.

  I loved FF7 (and 8, and somewhat less 9, and even 10, and 12 have some redeeming qualities) but the steady and continuous trend away from compelling gameplay towards visual spectacle is abundantly clear.

  I haven’t played an FF game since 12, remakes or otherwise, and I don’t plan to. I’ve read the writing on the wall, and I see who they’re making games for, and it’s not me. Maybe it’s other people. Maybe it’s themselves, I don’t know. All I know is it’s not me. I have no interest.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you cut a cucumber so that the round slices don't roll all over and off of your cutting board?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  My cousin thought pickles came from a different plant than cucumbers and it was glorious, we will never let him live it down.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is amperage more "obscure" than voltage (or watts)?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Steam turbines are actually self regulating because of this. The more power being used, the more amps are automatically produced. Once you spin it up it manages its own speed.

  This is sort of true, within a narrow operating window and an idealized environment, but also pretty simplified. That sort of application of Ohm’s law only works according to the naive interpretation when you’re talking about ideal DC devices. In reality, inductance and capacitance become significant and muddy the waters a lot when you start getting into real power grids with huge inductive loads like motors and transformers all over them, and steam turbines trip and/or bypass all the time to avoid overload or overspeed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you think people from more "privilaged" backgrounds have a right to complain about the struggle and/or abuse that they went through? (eg: "Middle Class" or "Rich" family)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  People from privileged backgrounds didn’t choose to have a privileged background either. What matters is what you have experienced in your life and what you do with that experience. Suffering and trauma is not a competition, there are no winners. Everyone’s experience is valid. Everyone has a right to complain.

  Not everyone has a right for their complains to be listened to and followed up on, though, because complaining on its own doesn’t mean anything. What’s more important is what your complaint is trying to change, what is your purpose in complaining? That makes all the difference, that’s what decides whether you have a “right” for your complaint to be actioned, and that has nothing to do with what background you come from.

  Some people from privileged backgrounds might complain in order to assert, protect and extend their privilege, obviously, that’s not valid. Others may complain because they want their abuser brought to justice or want other people protected from the same situation, and that’s absolutely valid. Has nothing to do with the person being privileged or not, it has to do with their intent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stoat removes all LLM-generated code following user criticism⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  To me, it makes sense for things that are simple to review, have clear, binary acceptance criteria, and little to no meaningful attack surface or dangerous failure modes. If you are trying to make an AI develop a bulletproof filesystem device driver or network stack you’re a fucking maniac and should be pilloried in the town square. If you want to throw an AI-generated github actions build script at me that’s perfectly fine and once I’ve reviewed it thoroughly it doesn’t bother me one bit if it’s AI-generated.