cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I balance my checkbook every day. I manage my bank acount . Why does the goverment have so much problems with this? I get large payouts and such but it always seem they are in the neg??⁩ ⁨⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re trying to use logic to understand it but you also have to understand that the only actual logic about is the logic we’ve intentionally applied to it, by choice. Money only has the meaning we give it.

  It makes more sense when you realize it’s all fiction. It’s just a game we play our whole lives because so many of us are very competitive and the ones who aren’t still have to compete against the ones who are, and at the highest levels of national policy they’re not even playing the same game anyway. They’re using it to metagame against other countries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Relooted - Game made by South Africans has been bombarded by right-wingers⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Free speech issues are not relevant because it’s a private company. Free speech is about limiting the government’s ability to control speech, companies are always free to do so for their own reasons on their own platforms. While that can be problematic when you don’t know whether the government is leaning on the companies behind the scenes, what the first amendment is really written to prevent is the overt fascist gestapo tactics the Trump administration is now using to bully their critics.

  It is important to understand the constitution and why it was written, so people can act accordingly. It’s especially important when the government is not acting accordingly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Relooted - Game made by South Africans has been bombarded by right-wingers⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I am not a fan of platformers and puzzles, in general, and am not too interested in this concept specifically. But I may end up buying it out of spite for hateful people. I also suggest taking a peek at their previous game Semblance which, although also a platformer, looks genuinely sort of novel to me (granted, as I said, I am not a fan of platformers in general so maybe it is in fact not unique at all). Feel free to take my thoughts with a large grain of salt, this is not really my area of expertise.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump says TikTok should be tweaked to become “100% MAGA”⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The moment Trump says any sort of number the event should just end, return to your regularly scheduled programming, no need for any further attention because you know for a fact that everything he says past that point is complete fiction without a shred of usefulness to anybody.

  No one’s going to convince me that an accurate numerical figure has ever passed through that man’s lips, and if it did, it was a cosmic accident.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  True, that’s what I was trying to imply when I said it’s necessary to progress. I suppose someone could maybe devise a mod to provide evidence to the contrary, but I’m pretty sure the starter deck pool simply wouldn’t have enough scaling to survive at higher ascension levels.

  That said, I would absolutely love some kind of mechanic that allows you to control the contents of the overall pool to some limited degree as well. (Too much freedom would essentially trivialize the game and I’m not sure if there’s any mechanic that would provide effective counterplay to a literally stacked deck)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Absolutely. The reason for this is that as you get to understand the mechanics more you’ll naturally start adopting higher risk play which provides access to higher potential rewards, and that is in some ways necessary to progress, and also really incredibly satisfying when it pays off. But the risks will bite you more often, which then feels like you’re just “being worse at the game”. The progression and scaling mechanics of games like these basically force you to adopt riskier strategies to overcome the challenges that higher levels of play bring.

  The really experienced high level players do a very delicate balancing act of min/maxing to do get the absolute most they can out of the minimum level of risk they need to realistically have a sensible chance of success. Finding that sweet spot in the ocean of randomness is the real skill, and people will all have their own different sweet spot of risk vs reward, but in almost all cases there will always be a significant risk of losing because that’s just how the game is balanced especially for higher level play. Luck and trying to make perfect decisions with imperfect information are always a factor.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cracker Barrel Outrage Was Almost Certainly Driven by Bots, Researchers Say⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a difference between thinking the change is dumb, which is something that happens in an individual’s own mind as a passing thought, and thinking you suddenly need to tell everyone about it, and have arguments about it, and seek validations of your passing thought about it in large communities of other people and turn it into a national discussion. Bots are why everyone started talking about it, and that made people feel like they needed to tell everyone else what they thought about it too.

  People were simply not losing any sleep over this (and never would have) until bots made it go viral. Some people might have legitimately formed such a thought without any significant outside influence, but it would have been an empty, meaningless, inconsequential thought, like thousands of others that likely go through everyone’s brain in any given day to be summarily dismissed and promptly forgotten.

  The point the article is raising is that the attention economy has now weaponized such insignificant thoughts, and can exploit them into controlling people’s behavior, and thus, create actual real world consequences, the same way a hacker exploits access into a home computer to turn it into a botnet that they can orchestrate to perform actual attacks. It may not do any particular harm to the individual who has been motivated in this way, but it can do catastrophic damage to the targets of their collective wrath, scorn, and ridicule. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words might destroy civilization.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New U.S. gov't rule says chipmakers have to make one chip in the US for each chip imported from another country to avoid 100% tariffs — Trump admin allegedly preps new 1:1 chip export rule under new t⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So, we’re gonna see a whole bunch of new domestic factories making billions of USB charger and LED lighting driver chips is what you’re telling me? Great, I love cheap chargers and LEDs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I also find it loves to caption background noise “Heat” for some reason.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft revokes cloud services from Israel’s Unit 8200⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  They told us journalism is dead, but they have really just driven it underground and made us uncomfortable to listen to it because it sounds like crazy talk compared to the rotten corporate media. Until the crazy talk keeps happening and evidence keeps piling up until it finally turns out to be true. Support your local crazy person today. They may simply be a rogue journalist in disguise.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Youtube’s AI generated subtitles are the worst. They’re borderline useless, I have to spend as much time trying to explain to my hard-of-hearing grandmother what the people actually said instead of the confusing grammarless gobbledygook that the subtitles said, as I would if we just had subtitles off and I had to simply tell her the words she couldn’t hear. I hate it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon is making it impossible to remove the DRM from Kindle Books⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  They were my first choice, but like this user I found they were quite fragile, arguably poorly designed, and either you’ll get no sympathy from customer support. Two different models, both in cases, both screens broken, one within days of receiving it. Very disappointing.

  Granted, I torture my devices. I read in bed and almost every morning I find the ereader has fallen on the floor at some point during the night. It takes a pretty beastly device to withstand the abuse I put it through, and my Kobo does that without breaking a sweat. That’s why I recommend them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon is making it impossible to remove the DRM from Kindle Books⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The not-ridiculously-cheap Kindles do not have any ads. Yes it’s scummy and gross to sell something with built in ads, but I expect most people who “loved theirs” did not have the cheap ad-supported one, they had the more expensive models. The ad-supported cheap versions are not representative of the general quality or experience of a more common and typical Kindle.

  That said, it is still a locked down piece of shit. There are much, much better options. Kobo is great hardware that is as straightforward to “hack” as copying a file into a directory, as it’s running a stripped down Linux basically. Kobo with KoReader is all I need.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should you copy a person's accent when pronouncing their name?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the risk of that approach is that if you attempt to copy their accent too literally it can sound like mockery, especially if you are clumsy in your imitation. Like you’re breaking out of your own accent on purpose because you think their name spoken in their accent sounds silly, and by repeating it in an exaggerated way you’re demonstrating how silly it sounds to you, and that kind of response can be interpreted as mocking or sarcastic.

  I think it’s safer if you try to strike at most a middle-ground between your own accent and their pronunciation, use it as guidance for the sounds but still keep it clearly in your own voice. When somebody has an accent I expect my name to be spoken at least to some degree in that same accent, so it’s not going to need to be an exact facsimile of the sounds I made.

  That’s my thoughts anyway, as a native English speaker.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should you copy a person's accent when pronouncing their name?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I work with a lot of people around the world and I feel like I mangle my foreign coworkers names so badly, despite my best efforts, especially if I’ve never heard anyone else call them by name before. Sometimes if it looks too intimidating I’ll just ask how to pronounce it and do my best to mimic what they say. Most people are super understanding and helpful and sometimes even amused, but I have to imagine it must get a bit tiresome. I can totally understand why some of them choose to use “western” names instead, and I respect their choice if that’s what they want me to call them. I probably would too if I were in their position.

  Still, I wish I was better at it and could easily speak their native name, I feel like it’s more respectful when I can finally get it right.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google Play is getting a Gemini-powered AI Sidekick to help you in games⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As a user, I respect you and mourn for you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scam Warning: there's a false-flag crypto coin scam campain on GitHub right now⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  All currency is a scam. All the way back to the beginning of currency it’s been about stealing things from nature, claiming it as your own entitled right to have, and then selling it to someone else as if you have the right to sell it and they don’t have the right to it themselves anymore due to your claim.

  As long ago as we are aware of, people traded with animals and animal products like bones and shells, because they were sometimes rare and the animals were good eating and they were the first things that prehistoric humans figured out how to take from nature unsustainably and the first things that we needed to compete with other people for and actively prevent other people from taking. Then we found metals, and eventually metals that stayed shiny forever like gold and used these instead because it was even more rare and it pleases people’s “ooh shiny” magpie brains. It worked great for awhile. Wars were fought over it, empires were built with it, continents were colonized over it. But it wasn’t convenient enough and became too valuable to carry in any meaningful quantity, so we abstracted the gold away and used coins and paper monies that simply represent portions of gold. Then we decided it only needs to represent some of the gold not all of it because we still needed more money and that’s crazy because nobody has that much gold. Then fiat currency said nobody’s actually using the gold anymore anyway and got rid of the gold standard entirely, the money itself is now what’s valuable, because the government says so. Crypto is just taking it to yet another new level saying we don’t even need a government to back it anymore we’ll just do math and have the math say it has value. The scam is the same in all cases. The currency is the scam. It’s a pyramid scheme all the way down. It’s a way for someone to convince you they’ve got something you want, convince you it has value, so you give up some of your basic personal autonomy, rights, and freedoms to do work for them or give them stuff, in exchange for this store of alleged value that you expect you will either be able to hoard for personal pleasure or theoretically later be able to use to convince someone else to give up their autonomy, rights, and freedoms to do work for you or give you stuff, and they convince you that it may even be worth more in the future, but in reality it’s less, because inflation happens and the things you want are a moving target and the target keeps moving to more expensive goals. And the lie is believable because it almost works. And you can attribute the little ways it doesn’t work to bad luck, or personal failings, maybe you didn’t work quite hard enough.

  They’ve created a whole impenetrable mythology around it, western civilization is built on a whole secular religion of easy prosperity, of job satisfaction, of car ownership, of homeownership, of shopping, of consumerism, of retirement, of entrepreneurship, of being independently wealthy, of building generational wealth, but it’s all a fucking lie, it’s an infomercial, acted up to look so easy absolutely anyone can do it, and so obviously wonderful that everyone needs to, while showing any alternative as so hard and awful it’s virtually impossible. It’s all marketing fluff, it has no grounding in reality. The currency itself is the scam, the society expectations are the ad copy you’ve been sold about your future and what you should expect it to look like as a result of your continued acquisition of that currency. Just keep buying into the system, it will give you the returns you’ve been promised eventually. Don’t look behind the curtain, you’ll only find wars and thefts and toxic waste and cruelty and foreigners who are not technically slaves because that has a very specific meaning and the more narrowly we define it the more room we have to use even better, more modern working arrangements. We paint a romantic picture of infinite growth and utopian progress while the only thing that is actually progressing is our accelerating destruction of the planet. Even the most stubborn capitalists won’t be able to deny reality forever, because reality happens whether it’s been denied or not.

  Late stage capitalism has been a long, wild and exciting journey, hasn’t it? Stay tuned for the dramatic and heavily foreshadowed ending, now quite possibly coming within our lifetimes!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what advice can you give me to try and mend a broken friendship so we don't interrupt each other or yell at each other while trying to solve our issues?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Analyzing your own feelings through the lens of stoicism may help. I’m not saying you have to live by the philosophy but it may help you decide which of your feelings actually make any logical sense, and that may help inform whether it’s worth destroying a friendship over them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Looking to get my first 3d printer, any suggestions?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ender printers are good if you want your hobby to revolve around “constantly tweaking and managing and redesigning the printer”. A bit of a hot take maybe, and I’m not just throwing shade, some people legitimately enjoy that aspect of the hobby. It’s a fun printer to tinker with, low stakes, and sometimes the challenge of getting perfect prints out of the cheapest jankiest available 3d printer is a goal unto itself and developing that skill can be very rewarding and educational. But if your goal is to actually reliably and repeatedly print 3d objects in a variety of filaments, in my experience the Ender is an aggravating and limited waste of space.

  Personally, I want the 3d printer to mostly “just work” and I enjoy the part design and 3d modelling and then actually seeing how those parts perform in real life, and for that, I want something that is reliable and easy and works across a broad range of parts and filaments with very little effort needed on my part.

  I spent the moderate number of bucks required to buy a Prusa MK3S, which is just as open and expandable and tweakable as the Ender, the difference is you don’t have to. The options are all there, but as designed, out of the box, it just works. It prints, without any significant errors or issues almost every time, it’s not a constant fight to get a single thing printed. It’s a well designed machine, the company stands behind it and provides everything you need to upgrade it and there’s a huge community building addons if you want them. But you don’t need them. And that’s the nice part.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI model forecasts disease risk decades in advance: New AI model can estimate the long-term risk of over 1,000 diseases and forecast human health changes over a decade in advance⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And we know its forecasts will be very accurate, because we also looked into our crystal ball that tells us the actual future and both showed very similar outcomes. /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do people call it “woke”?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No that’s quite accurate, they are against antifa. For example, Fox News hates antifa. They regularly call them a terrorist organization, use them as a pejorative or a bogeyman to dismiss protests or opinions. One could reasonably conclude they are very anti-antifa, making them anti-anti-fascist. This is indeed a double negative, which can be confusing and even misleading. If you seek to clarify the situation by removing the “anti-anti-” double negative, what does that make them?

  … that’s correct, “fascist”.

  Does that clarify things at all? Yes, I think it does. Interesting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the origin of the whole "X destroys and humilates Y" genre of debate videos?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  …using this one simple trick!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the easiest way to have a self hosted git server?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Horrible idea. You’ll likely end up syncing a mess of unnecessary, incompatible and conflicting binary build files onto different platforms, you’ll end up with internal file conflicts that are impossible to properly resolve and will destroy your repo, especially if you’re still using git on top of it. Don’t do this. Git has its own synchronization mechanisms for a reason, they are extremely mature and specifically designed for maximum efficiency, safety and correctness for the task at hand, which is managing source code. Millions of people use git for source code every day. It is a solved problem.

  Syncthing is literally the WRONG tool for this job. It is a great tool for many situations, but you are using it as a hammer when what you need is a saw.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the easiest way to have a self hosted git server?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You are correct, and I am still a bit sad about it, because gitea was a cuter name and logo TBH. But Forgejo is pursuing a technically superior design and socially better path at this point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does the Chinese government even work⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  At the end of the day all governments are desperately afraid of making people angry (at them), from the healthiest democracy to the most totalitarian dictatorship, because the people are always the overwhelming majority, creating all the goods and services, creating the surplus that the rich and powerful exploit and enjoy, and therefore ultimately holding all the real power no matter how much legal, policing and enforcement structure is built around them. Some governments are just extremely creative at making people forget that or preventing them from learning it in the first place, while finding ways to manage their expectations to either convince them to be happy enough, or to make sure they’re always going to be angry at somebody else (or each other), or some combination of the two. They usually turn to the latter when they fail at the former. When they fail at both, it tends to become a revolution.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨5 Signs the AI Bubble is About to Burst⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  but I would not expect the stock prices too reflect that.

  Agreed. One rule of the stock market is that while it might theoretically rely on sound fundamentals, it can stay irrational longer than you (or anyone) can stay solvent. It will inevitably fall screaming towards reality eventually, but there’s no guarantee it will happen within any reasonable timeframe and expecting it to is dangerous. It’s a rigged casino, the house always wins, and when they don’t their goons will grab you when you try to leave. At this point the billionaires own pretty much the entire house, and their goons are running the world’s largest military and police state. “Invest” at your own risk.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨emergency remote access⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Redundancy. I have two independent firewalls, each separately routing traffic out through two totally independent multi-homed network connections (one cable, one DSL, please god somebody give me fiber someday) that both firewalls have access to. For awhile was thinking of replacing the DSL with starlink until Elon turned out to be such a pile of nazi garbage, so for now DSL remains the backup link.

  To make things as transparent as possible, the firewalls manage their IPs with CARP. Obviously there’s no way to have a single public IP that ports itself magically from one ISP to another, but on the LAN side it works great and on the WAN side it at least smooths out a lot of possible failure scenarios. Some useful discussions of this setup are here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is insulting people for their state (Florida) ok, but not gender or race?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I regret attempting to answer your question in good faith. I should’ve known you’d be an asshole about it. All your other comments on this thread are asshole replies too. Fuck off, loser.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is insulting people for their state (Florida) ok, but not gender or race?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is an overgeneralization. It is not always okay to insult someone for their state. In fact, I would argue that it is only rarely “ok” and that requires certain rather specific conditions to be the case.

  People often do it without it being fully okay, because not everybody agrees exactly what these conditions are, and that creates an unwinnable situation where you’re guaranteed to offend somebody, and some people decide that is acceptable. Is this is a “majority rules” situation where if the majority are not offended it is okay? Not really, but many people (perhaps even the majority) treat it that way.

  I would offer to describe some examples of the sort of conditions that apply, but doing so is fraught and dangerous, not just because nobody agrees universally, but also because anything I could possibly say about someone’s state, someone else will invariably chime in and try to apply the same logic to gender or race. They will use it as an excuse to justify racism and sexism as if they are simply being reasonable. It is a trap and I will not fall into it.

  Instead I will offer you some questions that you can use for yourself to decide what conditions you might think should apply. And then you can feel free to apply them or not. I’m not your dad. None of these are absolute anyway, they are always on a sliding scale, there are always situational elements and not every situation is going to be the same.

  • Does a person choose to live in a state? Were they born there, and did they have a choice about that? If they do live there, would they choose something different given the opportunity? Is it plausible that they might get such an opportunity eventually?
  • Does a person sometimes insult their own state? Is it okay when they do it? Is it a joke when they do or are they serious? Familiarity breeds contempt, but sometimes we just need to vent about our own situation, and that doesn’t mean it’s automatically okay for others to do the same or double-down, or sometimes you are welcome to play along. How do you know the difference?
  • Could the target of the insults be interpreted to be directed at the state’s government, law enforcement, education or other specific state-level systems rather than an individual or the state’s population as a whole? These sort of things probably qualify more as free speech rather than hate speech.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the current state of Matrix?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re absolutely incorrect about IRC. Would you like to learn? Open IRC federation is basically never used anymore and the few networks that exist are very stable (if not completely calcified), but it is a core feature of the design, and in the old days, massive interconnected networks of IRC servers like EFnet and Undernet spanned the globe, there were even some servers that allowed open federation (EFnet is actually named for it – eris-free-net referring to the last server “eris” that supported free federation), and at some points Netsplits were a frustratingly daily occurrence. Like with any federation, abuse is the reason we can’t really have nice things anymore, but IRC absolutely supports federation. Not very well from a modern standpoint since it didn’t really keep up with the abuse arms race, but when it was first conceived it was way ahead of its time.