cecilkorik
@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Cities Skylines 2, Kerbal Space 2, Planet Coaster 2, Frostpunk 2... What Went Wrong? 1 hour ago:
That’s exactly right. They also had managers/publishers telling them to do shit like make the rockets even wobblier than KSP1 because it made for funny viral videos that would get more PR.
Nobody who actually played the game wanted wobblier rockets than KSP1. Nobody really wanted wobbly rockets at all. Sometimes a bug can actually be a feature, but in this case, it really was just a bug. The people in charge didn’t ever care about the people who actually played the game, they just wanted sales, and they made decisions accordingly. That’s why it looks nice, but plays like shit.
- Comment on Do Starfield's Pipes Make Any Sense? - @any_austin 1 day ago:
Some people are silly. And I embrace that silliness.
- Comment on 🛡️ uSentry - Identity & Access Management 3 days ago:
I have been constantly asking myself why there isn’t something like this, and just wondering if maybe I was missing something about the seeming immense complexity of doing this on a small scale.
Now there is something like this.
- Comment on (Faulty) Tech Utopias provide a convenient justification for ignoring the real problems of today 3 days ago:
Speaking as a software developer, software developers should stick to their lane. There is plenty of stuff the very best software developers are stereotypically terrible at. “Programmer art” is a genuine phenomenon illustrating our lazy, half-baked efforts to create things that we are not expert at. Apparently, “Programmer politics” is another such area of non-expertise, because the tech bros ideas are a fucking stupid fantasy.
- Comment on Microsoft rolls Windows Recall out to the public nearly a year after announcing it 3 days ago:
At least until they sneak it into VS Code’s telemetry. …only sort of joking.
- Comment on I don't get the love for Nextcloud - alternative for just files? 4 days ago:
Nextcloud file sync is a convenient centralized solution but it’s not designed for performance. Nothing about Nextcloud is designed for performance. It’s an “everything and the kitchen sink” multi-user cloud solution. That is nice for a lot of reasons. Nextcloud Sync is essentially a drop-in replacement for Google Drive or OneDrive or Dropbox that multiple people can use and that’s awesome. It works the same way as those tools, which is a blessing and a curse.
Nextcloud is for the same role you SAY you want, “All I want is a simple file sync setup like onedrive but without the microsoft.” That’s what it is. But I don’t think it’s what you’re actually asking for, and it’s not supposed to be. It has its role, and it’s good at that role. But I don’t think you actually want what you say you want, because in the details you’re describing something totally different.
If you want performance sync for just files, SyncThing is made for this. It has better conflict resolution. It has better decentralized connectivity, it doesn’t need the public IP server. It uses a very different approach to configuration. Its configuration is front-loaded, it takes a fair bit of work to get things talking to each other. It’s not suitable for the same things Nextcloud Sync is. But once you have it set up it’s rock solid reliable and blazing fast.
Personally I use both SyncThing and NextCloud Sync. I use them for different purposes, in different situations. NextCloud Sync takes care of my Windows documents and pictures, I use it to share photos with my family. I use it to sync one of the factors for my password vault. It works fine for this.
I also use SyncThing for large data sets that require higher performance. I have almost 400 GB of shared program data, (and game data/saved games), some of which I sync with SyncThing to multiple workstations in different parts of the country. It can deal with complex simultaneous usage that sometimes causes conflicts. It supports fine tuning sync strategies and files to ignore using configuration dotfiles. It’s a great tool. I couldn’t live without it. But I use both. They both have their place.
- Comment on Applying 'extreme heat' to lithium-ion batteries reportedly restores their capacity, and I think it's the sustainable tech breakthrough of 2025 5 days ago:
Nah, set it to broil for optimal results /s
- Comment on aight... i'm out.. 2 weeks ago:
Both the tool and the craftsman are to blame if you intend to use duct tape to build a house. The appropriate and acceptable uses of AI chatbots are similarly limited.
- Comment on Dear Big Tech, Stop Shoving AI Into Operating Systems 2 weeks ago:
Android: It’s based on Linux, except it replaces any and all of the things that make Linux worth using, with Google, and runs it on hardware so proprietary, closed, encrypted and nefarious nothing the OS does can be plausibly trusted anyway.
- Comment on aight... i'm out.. 2 weeks ago:
AI is just a search engine you can talk to that summarizes everything it finds into a small nugget for you to consume, and in the process sometimes lies to you and makes up answers. I have no idea how people think it is an effective research tool. None of the “knowledge” it is sharing is actually created by it, it’s just automated plagiarism. We still need humans writing books (and websites) or the AI won’t know what to talk about.
- Comment on Eight years on, Mastodon stubbornly survives 2 weeks ago:
I’m glad I read the article, the dripping irony and mockery in the title for some reason didn’t trigger for me until I actually started reading. The idea that someone who considered Google Plus the “next big thing” has any ability to predict the success or failure of social media platforms is indeed pretty comical.
- Comment on The US Secretary of Education referred to AI as ‘A1,’ like the steak sauce 2 weeks ago:
Yeah that’s fair, but for some reason discussion of AI combined with Linda McMahon being the secretary of education robs me of any ability for intelligent thought and simply fills my head with thoughts of wrestling.
- Comment on The US Secretary of Education referred to AI as ‘A1,’ like the steak sauce 2 weeks ago:
Don’t let A1 distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.
- Comment on I don’t know what to do with this coworker. 2 weeks ago:
Coworker is in her early 60s on the fatter and smaller side, walks slowly, bouncing her whole body to left and right,
This stuff being the first thing that comes to your mind when you start talking about this coworker I think tells us more about you than it does about the coworker.
I’m also a bit curious how spry you imagine you’re going to be when you’re nearing retirement, I know a few nurses and former nurses, and one thing they all agree on is that it’s a tough job and can be harder on the body than most people give it credit for. She’s been in the trenches too, she’s been doing what you’re doing, probably longer than you have. She deserves some credit, some respect, and some empathy – you’re going to be there too, someday.
I don’t know how the system works where you are, but in the systems I’m familiar with senior nurses, even ones who aren’t RN, tend to have significant amounts of paperwork responsibilities and can be carrying serious consequences with what they put on that paperwork. I bet she does more paperwork than you do, and and that’s a lot because I bet you have a lot too. Work is work, even if not all of it is physical. You say she’s “pretending to be busy” but that’s a common accusation against knowledge workers in fields that require a lot of critical thinking and organization. You have no idea what is going on in her brain at that moment, what responsibilities she’s juggling and mentally organizing. That vacant stare may be trying to plan the right way to make sure a patient gets the right care they desperately need despite the mountains of bureaucracy and administration trying to prevent it, and she may have the mental tools and experience to do that in a way that none of the rest of you do. And that’s why it takes her longer.
Go ahead and judge her if it makes it easier for you to get through your day. But don’t you dare go and accuse her and file a complaint without a lot more substantial evidence than you shared here. Because from everything you said, I can only come to the conclusion that YTA.
- Comment on AI Is Evolving — And Changing Our Understanding Of Intelligence. 2 weeks ago:
At least 1% of the money being poured into “AI research” nowadays seems to be spent on spewing these breathless puff pieces everywhere. The other 99% is spent on datacenter costs, probably. I am so excited for the day this bubble will finally pop. Just imagine the firesales on GPUs and rack space. It’ll be glorious.
- Comment on The rise of ‘Frankenstein’ laptops in New Delhi’s repair markets 2 weeks ago:
If we’re actually trying to achieve sustainability, we have to stop being consumers. “consume” means to use up and destroy leaving nothing useful behind. This is what consumers do. Think about this the next time someone says the “additional price is passed on to the consumer” and phrases like that. Want to stop paying those prices? Stop consuming!
Instead of sending your money to some evil dictatorship on the other side of the world to “consume” something else, we should be building a system and a society where we can give that money, probably a little more more money even, to somebody in your local community to do actual productive work that doesn’t destroy the environment.
Right to repair is a huge project that we need to force down the throats of the large corporations who want to keep us being consumers forever no matter how much it destroys the planet. But India can still do things like this even without having the “right” to repair, they just figure out a solution and do it anyway, and we can too if we learn from them. We throw away so much perfectly useful stuff. Not just electronics but everything in our modern world from clothes to cars, because economics has told us that it’s expensive to repair or repurpose or salvage, and cheaper to buy a new one, buy more, buy in bulk, buy and dispose. And it often is, but that’s false economics. It’s the economics of throwing more shit in landfill and digging up more tons of rock and burning coal to turn it into something new. It’s the economics with all the costs externalized onto the environment and onto the future. It’s the economics of us destroying ourselves.
- Comment on How do I pronounce "slava Ukraini"? 2 weeks ago:
In my experience, Ukrainians don’t really mind how non-native speakers pronounce it, they understand the intention and appreciate the feeling behind it.
- Comment on Developing a self-hosted alternative to Google Keep 3 weeks ago:
Nextcloud Notes or Joplin (nevermind all the other features Nextcloud provides) tick most of your boxes. They’re more productivity focused than privacy focused, it doesn’t do “zero knowledge” encryption the way you’re describing, but I don’t really understand the point of that when you’re self-hosting and the server host belongs to you anyway. The federation may leave you wanting more and the collaboration might not be “real time” enough for you either, though. If you can build something better by all means go for it.
- Comment on "It's Silencing" - Albania Shuts Down TikTok. 3 weeks ago:
When it comes to TikTok it is less clear to me what a good decision would be
the fact a foreign and potentially hostile state can influence the people is a serious threat.
That seems pretty clear to me.
- Comment on How to harden against SSH brute-forcing? 3 weeks ago:
fail2ban is mandatory equipment for any ssh server accessible to the public especially on its default port. It’s highly configurable, but the default settings will do fine at making it statistically impossible for any user or password to be brute forced.
- Comment on What are some countries you’ve visited that shocked you with unexpected friendliness? 3 weeks ago:
China. The people are super nice, sweet, helpful, lovely people. It’s just their government I hate. I don’t know if they hate it too or not since they’re not free to say but I think they’re nice people and they deserve better.
- Comment on Replit CEO Amjad Masad says learning to code is a waste of time, citing Dario Amodei's prediction that AI may generate essentially all code by next year. 4 weeks ago:
Yeah when I first started there was one guy whose code reviews I dreaded, he would nitpick every detail and he would stand by it, he would tell me to do it a completely different way that was 10x more work. It felt like I would never get my stories done because I had drawn “that asshole” in the code review lottery.
Years later, I came to realize that he was actually the best, he taught me so much about the way I should be thinking of things and structuring things, that have saved so much time and trouble later on, I now specifically reach out to him for a review when I am trying to do something complex because I know he’s going to give me an honest, thorough and useful review. Nobody’s doing anyone any favours in the long run by rubber stamping things, it may help you keep your sprint velocity up, but it’s not going to result in high quality code, and the bad quality code will inevitably bite you.
- Comment on Replit CEO Amjad Masad says learning to code is a waste of time, citing Dario Amodei's prediction that AI may generate essentially all code by next year. 4 weeks ago:
I actually dare them to try. I’m really looking forward to the massive paychecks I’m going to get when companies are panicking to try to untangle all the absolute nonsense bullshit these AI companies are about to unleash into corporate codebases. The AI-slop bugfest will make the Y2K issue seem trivial. I’m so excited, the future looks very bright for human software developers.
My advice: Practice going over other people’s code with a fine-tooth comb looking for bad architecture, flaws and inefficiencies. You won’t always be right, you won’t find them all, but you’ll learn lots of skills you’ll need in the future. Whatever you do, don’t undersell yourselves, remember that your experience is valuable, and AI has no experience, it just has a huge library it can shotgun “solutions” out of. Half the time they don’t even compile.
- Comment on Logitech is dropping support for its oldest Harmony remotes 4 weeks ago:
I feel like 99% of the time that’s just a lazy or misleading excuse. I’ve worked in proprietary software development for 25 years and I’ve never worked for a company that didn’t avoid restricted third-party code like the plague at all times. In the few, rare cases when we did have to use some proprietary third-party licensed library, it was usually kept very compartmentalized and easy to drop out of the code specifically because we were always afraid the other proprietary code vendor could fuck us and jack up their prices or find some nasty way to make our lives difficult.
The excuse that there is some secret but legitimate third-party code they’re not allowed to share simply doesn’t hold water in the vast majority of cases.
More likely answers are that some beancounter somewhere still imagines that the proprietary source code could possibly be valuable in some hypothetical future acquisition (nonsense of course) even though it has no real commercial value, or fears that it could expose the company to liability if some security flaw or licensing violation is found (more plausible).
Ironically, perhaps the most likely reality for this resistance is that the software actually includes code that dictates they were actually always obligated to publish the source but never did. ie, GPL-based code. GPL violations are all too common in proprietary software and very few organizations have codebase governance effective enough to keep the situation under control with developers copy-pasting from anything they can find on Google. Releasing their plagiarized GPL source code would reveal to the world that they were not in compliance all along. Let it quietly die, and nobody ever finds out and they get away with it. It’s not simply that they’re embarrassed by bad code, it’s that their bad code will potentially incriminate them. Not worth the risk, and sometimes it’s not just a risk it’s a certainty.
The proprietary software industry relies on open source so much and rarely gives much of anything back. I’m fortunate that the company I’m working for now actually takes licensing seriously and does contribute to open source projects to some degree, although I keep insisting they need to do better.
- Comment on History is rewritten by victors. How can I find books about actual history? 4 weeks ago:
There is always going to be some level of interpretation. You are looking for an absolute truth that, while it may theoretically exist, cannot be reliably perceived through a human lens, which you are guaranteed to have at least 1 of (yourself), and almost certainly 2 (the source), and maybe many, many, many more in between.
Imagine you had a time machine that could bring you back into whatever time you’re interested so you can watch it unfold first-hand. Ok, great. But do you trust your eyes? Did you see everything that happened? Even if you can invisibly go and explore the aftermath. Even if you can go back to the same point 100 times, 1000 times, and meticulously detail everything you find. Do you now have the perfect and unambiguous truth? Of course not. You can make mistakes, you can misunderstand. Even our eyes lie to us. Even our brain misremembers things. Different people using the same time machine to travel to the exact same point in time may see what happens in an entirely different way, may see things that you did not see. Who’s right?
I know you think you’re looking for the absolute unvarnished truth, but you are chasing a phantom. Your goal is not realistic. At some point you have to arbitrarily accept and define what errors and limitations the sources you’re drawing your understanding from might have, and attempt to make your own interpretation of what the facts actually are. You will never know what really happened with absolute certainty. Absolute certainty is its own kind of myth and there’s some very fundamental metaphysical reasons for that. You’re not going to find a magic textbook of trustworthy history that solves that problem.
Understanding history is a process that requires connecting many different pieces of variously flawed contexts and information to paint your own, interpreted but hopefully relatively accurate picture. No matter what book you read, you cannot guarantee its accuracy and it is a fool’s errand to try, but you can continue to try to collect more evidence, more pieces of context, more clues to add more details to your picture. Perhaps you will never be satisfied with the detail of the picture you’ve created, sometimes you will have to throw your whole picture away and start to create a new and different picture on the basis of some details you find that don’t fit. You’re never going to have a perfect picture, but I think a lot of people have managed to create really pretty good ones based on a whole lot of research of many different sources and pieces of detail, not just written records alone but cultural references, archaeological artifacts, scientific analysis, and sometimes just assumptions about basic human behavior. You just have to learn who and what you can trust and how far you can trust them. Both as sources, and as interpreters. And you are always welcome to argue you own interpretation.
- Comment on Were these accounts hacked? How does one prevent it from happening? 4 weeks ago:
Basic rules: Have a strong password. Don’t reuse that password on other sites because it’s more likely one of those sites will get hacked than your account will get hacked. For sites that support it, enable 2FA/MFA codes or email verification. Keep your email accounts locked down like Fort Knox, since Email can be used to password reset just about anything you have, usually with little difficulty.
That said, if the accounts had no activity for 2 years, they were probably created intentionally for the purpose of spamming/selling. They may have been saving them to see if the value goes up. They might have just recently been sold to a spammer and activated in their spambots.
- Comment on What are some old games that are hard to revisit, because a more modern and superior version exists? 4 weeks ago:
OpenXcom is a fantastic reimplementation of the original, and has some even more fantastic mods. I agree if you’ve never played it before and aren’t too familiar with old school “Nintendo-hard” games, it can be extremely challenging even on the lowest difficulty. Fun fact, the original had a broken difficulty selection and reset to the “easiest” difficulty after reloading any save game, so most people never truly experienced a full run at any difficulty above “easiest”, so that’s just naturally perceived as the way the game was meant to be balanced. Don’t be ashamed of playing on the easiest difficulty or using “cheat” mods if that’s what makes it playable for you. There’s nobody to judge you but yourself and what matters is that you’re having fun. And it is a ridiculously fun and replayable game, to me at least.
- Comment on Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT’s false claim that he murdered his kids 5 weeks ago:
They may seem like nerf when they first come out of the AI, but they turn into real bullets once they start filling people’s heads with convincing enough lies and falsehoods, and those people start wielding their own weapons against minorities, democracy, and the government. If the election of Trump 2.0 has not convinced you of the immense danger of disinformation and misinformation, I have literally no idea how anything could ever possibly get through to you.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
That was unconfirmed but Louis Rossmann blew it up into a big thing. Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy, he’ll be the first one to admit he’s not perfect, but that was not his finest work and nothing about it was convincing. Brother isn’t perfect either, but as far as printer manufacturers go, they’re pretty okay.
- Comment on Sanity check: am I crazy for wanting to wipe everything and do/learn from scratch? 5 weeks ago:
Back in the old days, a lot of people went through the “Linux From Scratch” process to literally build up the OS from absolute scratch. No distro, no packages, no precompiled kernel, nothing but the raw ingredients. It is a good way to really understand the fundamentals not just of Linux but of the whole computing paradigm our systems are built on. It is not as hard as it probably sounds, but it’s an investment. It takes some time and you need to put your brain in gear to actually learn.