cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are users data protected on the fediverse?⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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...⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨week⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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)?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  well obviously, all this proves is that copper wires are just as bad as wet mud. Every audiophile knows you need gold oxygen nitrogen purified wires blessed by a voodoo witch doctor.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you fell out of love with.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Among several other things, yes, that is indeed one of my bugbears, I could name countless others too.

  But like I implied it’s not just one specific bad decision for me, just the general attitude and direction of the developers. Not that they’ve lost the plot completely, but that they just have a specific plot in mind that diverges pretty significantly from mine and it is never going to satisfy me. Every time it updates the feeling grows that it’s always going to be a struggle to get the game I want to play out of Avorion’s future, that I’m always going to have to be plastering mods over top of the decisions I don’t like, and it’s just… exhausting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Video Games Need to Be Cheaper to Buy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s what indie games are for, instead of these absurd-budget blockbusters that often aren’t even fun, but also, the world just needs to be cheaper to live in. Games are first on the chopping block because disposable income for entertainment is always the first to collapse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Notice: failed container health check for example.org⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The purpose of the health check is to allow docker itself to talk to whatever service is running on the container to make sure it’s always responding happily, connected to everything it needs to be connected to for proper operation, and is not overloaded or stuck somehow.

  Docker does this by pretending to be a web browser, and going to the specified “health check URL”. The key thing I think you’re missing here is that the health check URL is supposed to be a URL that, ideally, runs on your container and does some meaningful checks on the health of your service, or at the very least, proves that when you connect to it, it is able to serve up a working static page or login page or something (which doesn’t actually prove it’s working completely, but is often good enough)

  Now, you’re probably wondering why this isn’t automatic, and the answer is because there’s no standard “health check URL” that fits all services. Not all services even respond to URLs at all, and the ones that do may have different URLs for their health checks, they may need different hostnames to be used, etc.

  By setting health check URL to example.com, basically what you’re doing is constantly testing whether the real-world website example.com way over there somewhere is working, and as long as it is, docker assumes your container is fine. Which it might be, or it might not be, it has no idea and you have no idea, because it’s not even attempting to connect to the container at all, it’s going to the URL you specified, which is way out there on the internet somewhere, and this effectively does nothing useful for you.

  It’s understandable why you probably thought this made sense, that it was testing network connectivity or something, but that is not the purpose of the health check URL, and if you don’t have a meaningful URL to check, you can probably just omit or disable the healthcheck in this case. Docker only uses it to decide if it needs to restart the container or alert you of the failure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you fell out of love with.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Check out the workshop for it too. The ship builder is extremely flexible and people create works of art with it, and it can make the game look truly incredible. Of course, things like battle-bricks and battle-sticks (or battle-bricks WITH battle-sticks) reign supreme at actual combat effectiveness, so it’s sort of a tradeoff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you fell out of love with.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Avorion… like, don’t get me wrong, I’ve got 1,200+ hours in it, and on paper it still features literally everything that is like digital crack cocaine to me… but the updates and changes just keep going in directions that don’t interest me, at all, and even though they’re not explicitly bad per se, I find myself overwhelmed with disappointment about what the updates could’ve been, and I just become less interested, and end up playing less and less, to the point that I never even bothered installing it in 2025 and still don’t have it installed and when I do install it I generally just play it for a little bit and quickly become bored and disillusioned and end up going back to the X series or something to scratch the itch that it’s just not scratching for me anymore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How would you describe that post sneeze smell?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  All-dressed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Element/Matrix Official Docker Install Method?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I deal with kubernetes daily for my job and it manages to melt my brain at least a few times a week. It’s not bad… it’s actually great… it’s just… a lot. Like, a lot a lot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can turkey motion machines be used for producing electricity?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It would theoretically work, but you would probably need dozens, maybe hundreds or even thousands of them to power a single lightbulb. They create almost zero power. They have barely enough energy to move themselves under their own power. There is almost nothing leftover to turn into energy. As soon as you add the resistance of an electric coil, they will just stop, especially if even the merest hint of electrical load is placed on them, like you dropped them into a bucket of glue. If you don’t think adding a mere coil of copper wire can stop such a movement, it absolutely would do so, instantly, like slamming on the brakes. As an experiment, try dropping a magnet down a copper pipe, or look at what this guy does. Moving magnetic fields (which are what you need to turn that motion into energy) are really wild and counterintuitive the way they instantly counteract their own movement.

  The problem with this kind of device is that its physical power output is so limited, even at scale, it would a waste of physical space that would be far more productive with wind turbines, solar panels, or even just batteries storing energy from some other renewable source.

  There is no physical impossibility, it’s just really, really, really, really impractical. It would be like trying to power your farm equipment by growing millions of potatoes to use as batteries for an electric tractor whose only purpose is to farm more potatoes. Okay, great thought, that’s technically renewable energy, except you’d be better off farming something much more energy-dense and turning it into biodiesel or ethanol or something, and suddenly about 99% of the farmland you were going to use for battery-potatoes can now be used to grow actual food or cash crops, and you’re still just as renewable and environmentally friendly so like… why would you want potato batteries, except just to say you can? Same with this idea. It’s nearly impossible to get any useful amount of energy out of it. Yes it’s “free” energy, and sure it’s funny, but… nah.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it wrong that my cat casually uses the N word, in my head when I anthropomorphize her?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You should probably talk to a psychiatrist about it to be honest. I’m not a professional, and I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, but the fact that you seem to be having trouble distinguishing your fantasy from reality, and choose to write that your cat says these things, without taking responsibility for the fact that it is you saying these things in your own head, suggests you may be suffering from some mental illness, in which case you need to see a mental health professional, or you’re trolling, in which case kindly go fuck yourself with a rusty knife.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it wrong that my cat casually uses the N word, in my head when I anthropomorphize her?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Your cat doesn’t do anything. You are doing it. That said, thoughtcrime is not a crime. However, you should probably spend some time having some deep thoughts about why you choose to imagine your pet this way, because it says a lot more about you than it does about your cat, and maybe by continuing this, you’re not reinforcing helpful thoughts, ideas, and behaviors for yourself. Or maybe it’s just a harmless fantasy. I’d be more concerned with outcomes than the actual method you’re getting there in your own head. Do you think this is having a positive impact on your life? Is it relieving stress and giving you joy? If that’s all it is, no judgement, have fun with it. Just make sure it doesn’t start leaking out of your head and into your real life where it doesn’t belong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What else should I selfhost?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Before you even start, consider adopting an ‘infrastructure as code’ approach. It will make your life a lot easier in the future.

  Start with any actual code: If you have any existing source code, get it under git version control immediately, then prioritize getting it into a git hub like forgejo to make your life easier in the future. Make a git repository for your infrastructure documentation, and record (and comment/document too if you’re feeling ambitious) every command you run in a txt file or an md file or a script, and do that as religiously as you can while you’re setting up all this self-hosted stuff. You may want to dig it up later to try and remember exactly what you did or in case stuff goes wrong and you need to back off and try again. It might seem pointless now, but a year from now, you’ll thank me.

  Especially prioritize getting your git stuff moved into a self-hosted forgejo if any of your stuff is hosted on the microsoft technoplague called github.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would the United States actually risk a Tiananmen Square incident?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There is no more United States. They would have to be United for that name to still apply. Now there is only the Disunited, Distracted States of America and the rapidly growing Fourth Reich taking their territory from within.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are there any reputable cybersecurity experts that I could just email them to ask for free advice?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You get what you pay for. Sometimes you get more than you pay for, sometimes you can get lots for free, but you’ll never get a guarantee. If you want anything resembling a guarantee, you have to pay.

  You sound like you want guaranteed advice, but for free. That isn’t going to happen.

  If you want non-guaranteed advice, just ask anywhere on the internet, like here for example. You’ll get lots of answers, none of them guaranteed, but some of them quite possibly very correct. Is that worth the price of “free”? It should be.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Messaging apps - XMPP vs Matrix vs ???⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I ran Matrix for like a year, and pretty much hated every minute. It was fragile, complicated, and incredibly, bafflingly resource intensive. Matrix is an overengineered nightmare in my opinion, and it seems to be quickly distancing itself from self-hosters while pursuing enterprise usage. Neat technology, horrible implementation, misguided company.

  XMPP is a breath of fresh air in comparison. Just like we still use email everywhere (even for authentication nowadays, fun!), XMPP is not obsolete simply because it’s older. It’s a solid foundation, plenty extensible, and does almost everything I can imagine needing to do without unnecessary complexity.

  Matrix’s bridges are its killer feature, and it’s nice… when it works. But it’s simply not worth the headache of dealing with Matrix, in my opinion.