cecilkorik
@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca
- Comment on [Meta] Removing definitions from Decronym? 8 hours ago:
If this is about the bot I think it is, I haven’t personally complained but I have noticed it’s weird and often wrong, it seems to detect HTTP/HTTPS in every post (perhaps seeing links and URLs?) and it seems to maybe possibly be detecting any words with those strings of letters somewhere in them and presumably also doesn’t care about case sensitivity? The short ones in particular like “AP”, “CA”, “CF”, “HA” and “IP” seem to come up frequently almost every time it posts, and “NAT” and “IoT” seems common, and none of things seem to be actually mentioned in any of the comments that I see.
- Comment on Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to its New AI Assistant, Internal Documents Reveal 19 hours ago:
Capitalism has cooked these people’s brains. There is nothing of value left inside them.
- Comment on Flashforge closes ecosystem & puts AI ads into printing software 🤦 1 week ago:
The poor man is just trying to keep up with all the shitty companies doing shitty things all the time, he’s only got one lifetime and he needs to fit a lot in. It’s like that scene in Spaceballs where President Skroob is running everywhere, “The ship is too big! If I walk, the movie would be over!”
- Comment on (UPDATE: a different issue??) What are these burn marks on my failed 3D print? 1 week ago:
It’s typically called a raft or a brim depending on whether it’s underneath the whole print or just around the edges.
- Comment on Todd Howard says that Starfield's New Game Plus was "us asking you this weird, deep question that I actually think got lost on a lot of people" 1 month ago:
It wasn’t even interesting enough to play it the first time, nevermind a second time.
- Comment on Will Starfield Ever Get a Cyberpunk-Style Renaissance? 1 month ago:
There’s a fundamental difference between a game that was designed with love and passion and too much exuberant ambition, so it released full of terrible game balance issues, catastrophic bugs and lacking content, and a game that was designed with such an utter lack of ambition and milestone-chasing-box-ticking that it is just an empty, hollow, soulless cliche of bland samey slop.
Bugs and balance and game mechanics can easily be improved and fixed to the point that criticisms are completely forgotten, and that’s what happened with Cyberpunk. Content takes a lot of time but is easy and seamless to add if the foundation is there and the fundamental bones of the story are strong enough to hold them up. But it has to have those bones from the beginning. Complete story-bone-replacement-surgery is not going to be survivable for the patient.
A forgettable story is forgivable if the game mechanics eventually make up for it, because you can easily start from the position that you don’t care about the story. But that’s not going to happen here, and the story can’t really realistically redeem itself after the fact. An unforgettably insipid story is not forgivable when the game mechanics are as bland and tedious as Starfield, and I don’t think there’s any scenario where those mechanics suddenly become good enough to redeem the story and setting in this case. Bethesda has never had any decent track record at making compelling mechanics the star of their games (although Fus-ro-dah! gets a honorable mention it was not really a core game mechanic as much as it was so accidentally fun that it became a meme) and it’s no surprise that most of their games live and die by the quality of their stories and quests alone, but that’s the problem, it’s the story that’s let the game down here and Bethesda can’t save it with mechanical changes. Nobody was expecting outstanding mechanics here, although we might’ve hoped for them. But it absolutely needed a good story to survive. Instead, Starfield really had no obvious interest in picking either lane, and there’s really very little redeemable about it.
No Man’s Sky might be a better analogy for where Starfield needs to go, but I think it falls into the first category of having a forgettable story where the game mechanics make up for it. You can start playing NMS without having any interest in the story at all, it’s a sandbox, the story is ignorable by design. To follow in its path, Starfield would need not just years of dedicated effort, but also to effectively throw their whole storyline under the bus, sideline it where it belongs, and focus on improving both the game engine and the more compelling procedural, economic and gunplay aspects of the gameplay, which is not their strong suit and I frankly just can’t imagine it ever happening, and if they do it’s not even really going to be the same game anymore. It’s like being behind at halftime in the superbowl, and in order for your star quarterback to get his confidence back, he needs to win at chess first. Like not only were you not doing particularly well at the part you’re supposed to be good at and you’re already trying to come from behind, you’re now adding something you’re not even good at into the recipe for success, you’re certainly welcome to try and I’ll wish you luck but it’s probably not going to go well for you.
- Comment on AI 2027 2 months 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!) 🚀 2 months 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? 2 months 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? 2 months 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 months 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 months 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 months 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 months 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 months 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 months 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 months 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 months 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? 2 months 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? 2 months 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 2 months ago:
Ironic that they have their repos hiding behind Cloudflare, then.
- Comment on Are users data protected on the fediverse? 2 months 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 2 months 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... 3 months 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.) 3 months 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? 3 months 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 3 months 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 3 months 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? 3 months 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? 3 months 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.