cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Have you all not notice there are NO communist countries?⁩ ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Benevolent dictators can happen by accident, but never by design. A system designed to govern fairly will inevitably be abused by people who have no intention of fairness. You can place as many obstacles in their path as you wish, you can’t stop them forever and eventually they will get around them all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  There is nothing serious on Quora, it is a troll zoo. There are only trolls and idiots feeding the trolls.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Was the fall of Rome this stupid?⁩ ⁨⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Our economy is based on magic already anyway so it’s not like it’s a particularly hard pivot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I've recently turned into a blocker.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I block freely. My time and attention and mental and emotional bandwidth are limited resources, and to the extent possible I intend to spend them carefully.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who's your favorite female protagonist in a video game? (Add pic of character in response)⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Nice choice, but personally I always found Terra a bit hard to relate to, very fey and even sort of creepy in her half-Esper form.

  Celes, on the other hand, is a bonafide badass, and her storyline was among the better developed ones and more humanizing than most of the other characters in the game. Although romantically I think she could probably do better than Locke. That boy needs some help.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why aren't there that many forks of VS Code that isn't AI-related?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  What would you want a VSCode fork to do that can’t be easily done with extensions? (which Codium can run)

  It’s more about not reinventing the wheel. A fork needs to have a reason to exist, because it takes significant effort to maintain and develop, and there is significant opportunity cost when that level of development activity is committed to that purpose. If there’s no reason to have a fork, then it’s more efficient to keep all the development energy and momentum focused in one place. And for Codium, that place is the extension repository.

  If Microsoft starts actively making the core software worse, restricting or stopping updates to the open source code, tying telemetry into features in ways difficult to remove, or otherwise sabotaging the functionality or features of the non-Microsoft parts of the code, there may eventually be a need for more, harder forks taking things in potentially different directions to get around Microsoft’s interference. But since that hasn’t happened, the non-Microsoft build process remains quite trivial and VSCode remains a perfectly cromulent editor when building it without the Microsoft crap, there’s really no need for any other forks. Codium does everything it would be reasonably expected to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does the GOP think “ANTIFA” is bad?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah people get nasty about it without any concern whether it makes them look like exactly the kind of dogmatic zealots they think they are fighting against. I am not religious in any way, but I always found it funny how certain vocal athiests will insist only fools would choose to believe in something they cannot see, and claim they know there is no god or anything beyond the natural world they see, because nobody can possibly prove otherwise, while also being unable or unwilling to stand their ground in any philosophical conversations about the nature of our senses and perceptions, or of reality or consciousness itself.

  I am of the opinion that such absolute certainty in something fundamentally unknowable represents a form of faith and belief no more valid or less valid than any religious belief. I’ll also assert there’s absolutely nothing wrong with holding such a belief, it’s even a belief I personally share, but you if you are being intellectually honest you need to admit it is a belief, based on no particular conclusive facts. It’s a belief in a thing that is beyond the reach of any kind of evidence that might be found in our present context, not an automatic default position everyone must assume unless proven otherwise. It’s as much of an assumption as anything else. I fail to see why anyone wouldn’t consider agnosticism is not a more “natural” default position than athiesm.

  If on the other hand they want athiesm to be a religion itself, where potentially unwilling people are told what (not) to believe by people of authority who have written impressive and stern books about it which must not be questioned whether they provide any actually reliable evidence that it is so, instead of just letting people see the (lack of) potential evidence and then make up their own minds to believe whatever they want to believe, then I would be pleased to welcome the Church of Evangelical Athiesm to the already rich and extensive tapestry of various religious organizations convincing themselves they’re trying to do good in the world.

  Beliefs are a choice. You can pick and choose. Most reasonable people, including “athiests” and “Christians” do that already, and I think this is the point that many militant athiests refuse to understand. They immediately assume the worst of every “Christian” based on a predetermined idea of what they believe without ever asking. That’s yet another form of belief.

  You can still believe in a “Christian God” when you understand that the organization of the Church is a system created by humans and the Bible is a book written and interpreted and translated by humans. The whole point of belief is that you still get to believe what you want, and you don’t have to believe what you don’t want. It’s not a monolith, even if the Church tells you it is. It’s personal, and other people don’t get to decide whether a person gets to call themselves a Christian or not. Other Christians might decide you’re not. They might disagree. But there’s nothing in particular that makes them any more right about that, than they are about stoning gays.

  I recommend athiests and Christians alike judge people by their beliefs, actions and attitudes, and how much those align with your own, not by whether they call themselves athiests or Christian or not. Sorry, I know it’s so much more convenient to just judge people by a label. Simple, easy, clean. But you have to look deeper than that, life not a simple thing, and if you think it is, you’re probably oversimplifying it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Long is Too Long for a Reply?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem with “necroposting” in a forum is that it bumps the topic to the top as if its new again, some people think its actually new, and it usually starts the whole discussion over again, stealing attention from topics that are actually new and relevant. That’s why people hate it.

  It doesn’t work like that on the threadiverse. The only person who gets notified is the person whose post you are replying to. It does not get “brought back to the top”. It only exists if someone searches for it, and that doesn’t trigger the same “viral” flood of comments as it does from being bumped to the top of a forum.

  Some people don’t understand the distinction, and have evolved their habits in forums that frown on such things, so they continue to frown on it here without thinking about why they hate it so much. They will still hate it if you do it to their posts, and that’s perfectly valid for them to feel that way, even I feel that way sometimes, but you don’t have to abide by their rules. In summary, fuck the haters, necro everything, at worst you’re simply leaving your wisdom for some future searcher.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, the famous communist fascist. His name is Stalin. You’ve probably heard of him.

  In a world gone mad, you’d have to be insane to be sane.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do boycotts work?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Sometimes they do. Sometimes they are a useful promotional tool for the cause. Sometimes they don’t work at all. How do you know which will be which? You don’t.

  Every person who supports a boycott very slightly improves its effectiveness, either directly or to create more awareness of the cause.

  Avoid black-or-white thinking. it does not have to “win” to be part of a change, it only has to have the chance for change or contribute to change, and we won’t know how much of a contribution it made, if any at all, until and unless the change eventually happens. It may be the butterfly flapping its wings that causes a hurricane, or it may be a butterfly flapping its wings that does absolutely nothing at all. Either way, let the butterfly flap its wings first, and then we’ll see what happens. It is neither guaranteed to succeed, nor guaranteed to fail. That’s the kind of black-or-white thinking you need to avoid. We don’t live in a world of certainty, the world is a complex place full of uncertainty. We try because there’s a chance, not because it’s guaranteed, and the chance to make a change is the worthwhile part you should be pursuing. Seeking absolute certainty from future events is a form of self-sabotage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Deloitte will refund Australian government for AI hallucination-filled report⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that’s overly optimistic. I sure hope the bubble bursts soon so tech giants will stop spending countless billions raping the environment and forcing it down our throats. But the tech is out there now, and it’s a panacea for spammers, scammers, propagandists, and anyone who wants to subtly manipulate people or push an ideology on a massive scale. It’s going to keep being tweaked and adjusted to keep it at least somewhat undetectable on some level, just like spammers have always done, as long as they can still push some of their slop through the filters. The bubble may burst, but the tech is not going away. Even if we outlawed it, that just means only the outlaws will keep using it. And they absolutely will, because the randomness and hallucinations don’t bother them. In fact it’s not even really much different from the tools they have already used to avoid anti-spam and anti-bot filters. Accuracy is not their goal. The barest hint of believability combined with sheer, overwhelming quantity are their goal. And Generative AI is perfect for that goal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Deloitte will refund Australian government for AI hallucination-filled report⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The pearls I am metaphorically referring to in this case refer to examples of genuine human content, whether that is an intelligent thought, a creative flourish, or a call for emotional connection. These still exist, there are still billions of humans on the planet with largely the same minds and the same needs that they have always had. But the way things are going they will be increasingly buried in increasingly harder to distinguish slop, disconnected from each other as the signal to noise ratio becomes progressively lower.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Deloitte will refund Australian government for AI hallucination-filled report⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Almost all distant future hard sci-fi settings have banned or severely limited AGI, sometimes proactively, often making it among the highest universally recognized crimes, sometimes after a war, or sometimes unsuccessfully (in which case the story’s going to be about regretting it). Either way, if fiction authors can reliably figure out the inevitable plot line the technology follows, perhaps we will too, eventually.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Deloitte will refund Australian government for AI hallucination-filled report⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  AI will create jobs, millions of jobs, for intelligent people to sift through the AI slop searching for pearls. It will become harder every year, so they will always need more people to do it. It’s unclear what happens when the AI slop outpaces humanity’s ability to filter it. I guess we can call it “the technological singularity nobody wanted”.

• ⁨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??⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

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