kattfisk

@kattfisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Geologists doubt Earth has the amount of copper needed to develop the entire world⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Aluminium smelting is so energy intensive that Iceland, a country with a population of less than 400 000, is the world’s 12th largest producer of it, even though the raw materials aren’t mined there. Iceland just has cheap geothermal and hydroelectric power.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Helldivers 2 and Palworld devs wish players understood that 'easy' additions and updates are sometimes really hard: 'That's half a year's work. That takes six months'⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In the real world there is no entirely reasonable code base. There’s always going to be some aspects of it that are kind of shit, because you intended to do X but then had to change to doing Y, and you have not had time or sufficient reason to properly rewrite everything to reflect that.

  We tend to underestimate how long things will take, precisely because when we imagine someone doing them we think of the ideal case, where everything is reasonable and goes well. Which is pretty much guaranteed to not be the case whenever you do anything complex.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨i broke⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  One common misconception about meditation is that meditation is and end goal, not a practice. That to meditate is to sit down and have your brain be quiet, and if you can’t do that, your session was a failure.

  But that’s like saying weight lifting is about deadlifting your body weight, and any session you don’t manage do that was a failure. That is something you might be able to do after years of training. But you start with the smaller weights, learning form and technique, setting reasonable goals, and find a practice that you can make a habit out of. Because a five minute walk every day beats a day at the gym/retreat once a year.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨i broke⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You are stuck with yourself for the rest of your life. So just like when you have a coworker or classmate that you don’t like but must work with, you just have to get a working relationship going where you can get stuff done and not fight.

  Try to not get annoyed at yourself, reward good behavior, be kind even when you don’t deserve it, be the bigger person etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨i broke⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  More generally, feelings do not care about facts. We must accept how we feel, even if those feelings don’t “make sense”. Trying to reason with feelings is a fools errand.

  That doesn’t mean we can’t change how we feel. It just doesn’t happen by denying reality.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3087: Pascal's Law⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A simple experiment to get an intuitive understanding of pulleys:

  Take a piece of string and hold one end in your right hand, then hold your left hand higher and let the string run over it and hang down.

  Now as you move your right hand up or down, the free end will move the same distance. But if you move your left hand up or down, the free end must move twice the distance, because you have string on either side of the hand that must both move that distance. So you are amplifying the movement, getting twice the movement at half the force.

  If instead you wanted to amplify the force, as in a pulley, then stand on the free end of the string (so it’s no longer free) and pull down with your right hand. You are now amplifying the force exerted on your left hand, because it moves only half the distance of the right, so you get double the force. And this is exactly how a pulley works. Add more loops to get even more force at the cost of even more movement.

  I figured this out while playing with the cats, and it made pulleys just make sense. Hopefully it can do the same for someone else :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apex Legends writer gets laid off 24 hours after the character she wrote is revealed, because that's what the games industry in 2025 looks like⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The French trade union Solidaires Informatique has pursued both criminal and civil charges. Not sure how much that accomplished, but at the very least a bunch of assholes were fired or resigned, so they weren’t completely ineffective.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apex Legends writer gets laid off 24 hours after the character she wrote is revealed, because that's what the games industry in 2025 looks like⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, like the music or movie industry, it’s rife with abuse because there are so many young people who dream of working in it that there’s always fresh meat for the grinder.

  And selection pressure means the industry veterans in charge are people who somehow thrived in this environment, so they’re unlikely to change things.

  I have a friend who worked in vfx on some very high-profile movies and shows, stuff you have definitely seen. And that industry actually seems even worse! Everyone is a contractor, so you work on one project, and then you don’t have a job anymore, and you better make the bosses happy if you want to get another contract ever again. Everything is stunningly poorly planned, with deadlines that are impossible to meet without working all night, constant last-minute changes from fickle directors and incredible amounts of nitpicking and demands of perfectionism.

  This is likely exactly the type of industry they are turning game development into. Because it’s maximum profit with minimum responsibility. Hire the best in the world, squeeze the most work in the shortest time you can out of them, and then toss them to the wind when they’re spent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apex Legends writer gets laid off 24 hours after the character she wrote is revealed, because that's what the games industry in 2025 looks like⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Many years ago. But as you said, it’s a big industry, and the US is not an easy place to unionize in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'An Insult To Life Itself': Hayao Miyazaki’s AI Criticism Resurfaces As OpenAI’s Ghibli-Style Image Trend Takes Over Social Media⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Just shifting the tax burden from salaries toward capital should make it less of a problem. When capital income is taxed less than salaries wealth concentration gets worse as workers are replaced.

  But hey, GDP line goes up, so it must be good right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Great Engineering Orgs Thrive on "Normal" Engineers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Moving fast doesn’t have to mean poor workmanship.

  To make an analogy, if you want to be able to make a cup of coffee fast, you need to make sure that the coffee beans, the water, and the brewer are all near each other, that there is electricity and that the water is running. These are all things that enable you to move fast, but they don’t decrease quality, if anything they increase quality because you aren’t wasting time and effort tackling obstacles unrelated to brewing.

  Which is in fact the point of the article. That you should make sure you have a good development environment, with support systems and processes, so that you can work effectively even if your developers are not savants. Rather than trying to hire people who are good enough to do a decent job even in the worst environments.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google’s ‘Secret’ Update Scans All Your Photos⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, that wouldn’t make much difference. I don’t think I’ve seen a real world attack via SMS that even bothered to “forge” the from-field. People are used to getting texts from unknown numbers.

  And how would you possibly implement this supposed “caller-id” for a field that doesn’t even have to be set to a number?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google’s ‘Secret’ Update Scans All Your Photos⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Blaming the victim solves nothing.

  Scamming is a rapidly growing industry that is becoming more professional and specialized all the time. Anyone can be scammed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google’s ‘Secret’ Update Scans All Your Photos⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To quote the most salient post

  The app doesn’t provide client-side scanning used to report things to Google or anyone else. It provides on-device machine learning models usable by applications to classify content as being spam, scams, malware, etc. This allows apps to check content locally without sharing it with a service and mark it with warnings for users.

  Which is a sorely needed feature to tackle problems like SMS scams

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do you think of anarchism?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Perhaps it was a poor choice of words, when I said “organizing” I meant everything required to run an event (with thousands attending). From planning and programming to picking trash and cleaning toilets.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do you think of anarchism?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I assumed it was just a very dirty, tough job requiring some specialized equipment and skills. Are you saying it’s somehow fundamentally different from other human activities?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do you think of anarchism?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My experience organizing non-profit events have shown that most people actually have no problem doing dirty jobs for no material compensation. If the following things are true:

  1. They understand why the job is important
  2. They feel responsible for the job (usually comes from being given autonomy and trust)
  3. They get recognition for doing it (social rewards are actually very powerful)
  4. No one else is getting compensated either.

  I understand that this seems foreign to a lot of people, because this is not how work is generally motivated in capitalist society. You are used to your job being rather unimportant, with little autonomy, little trust, not much recognition from society and some people definitely profiting more than others. Your primary motivator is the threat of violence (via homelessness, starvation etc.), so it’s hard to imagine what would happen if that was removed.

  That to me is the core idea of Anarchism, to base your organization on volontary cooperation rather than coercion.

  An interesting side-note is that the people who do the dirty jobs in these circumstances often take great pride in it, forming an identify around doing what others are not willing to and calling attention to it as a way to get more recognition.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨As AI and megaplatforms take over, the hyperlinks that built the web may face extinction⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s essentially just a bunch of pre-made css classes that do a specific thing that you mix and match from.

  AFAIK the programmatic part is so your served CSS file will only include the classes you actually use, rather than all available ones. You could always just not do that.

  It always seemed to me like one of the least overengineered front end tools.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Would U.S. tech workers join a union?" survey average: 67% likely⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah the tech labor market has really proven that the idea of employment contracts being negotiated between equal parties isn’t true even in the best of circumstances.

  Even when companies are desperate for talent, and willing to spend ridiculous amounts of money on salaries and perks, they are not willing to negotiate on anything outside of that. They still have terrifying contracts with non-compete and damages clauses they could use to wreck your life, no workplace democracy, unpaid overtime and whatever other shit is legal.

  But hey! You get free snacks and enough money to buy the dinners you don’t time to cook and save up to survive your inevitable burn out!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Would U.S. tech workers join a union?" survey average: 67% likely⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Unless unions work differently where you live, they are a democracy that will pursue whatever issues its members vote on. If members don’t think pay is a problem, why would they try to change it?