rekabis

@rekabis@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would stop you from switching to a flip phone (or dumbphone) in 2025?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Aside from the Rotary Un-Phone, there are pretty much no dumb phones anymore. Those that market themselves as dumb are just reskinned full-fat platforms.

  Even almost all flip phones are smart phones with a dumb skin, as they run either Android or KaiOS.

  The main reason why I would switch is for device security - a true dumb phone OS that operates purely out of the ROM and has no ability to install anything that could survive a reboot.

  And for something that primitive, it would be a flip phone on par with the Motorola StarTac. Simple black-on-green screen, low-res display, with a calendar and address book as the only non-phone functionality.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The school shooting industry is worth billions — and it keeps growing⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Meanwhile, in Canada, we have had less than a dozen school shootings in the last century.

  And that’s including post-secondary institutions.

  And no, plenty of us own guns. We just don’t own guns that can send 60 bullets a second downrange, and easily-concealable handguns are highly restricted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Data Backup Solutions⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I kept reading about people having trouble during the restore process.

  It is Duplicati, and IMHO restores work best if they aren’t restores-in-place. As in, dump the restores in a central location then drag-and-drop the data into place. Most of the issues I have heard of involve restoring data and settings back to where it originally was backed up from, and restoring directly back to those places - other than fully user-controlled directories, such as Documents or Photos - seems to be problematic.

  Other than that, I have been using it for nearly a decade and have done a number of restores - after total drive deaths, so not just accidentally deleted files - to great success.

  The downside is that tweaking backups from within the hidden C:\Users\[username]\AppData\ directory involves many days of whack-a-mole to exclude untouchable normally-in-use files so you don’t get scads of errors in the backup process. Plus, there are a fair number of entries in there that don’t really need backing up. But once you get that to settle down, it’s largely smooth it’s-set-so-forget-it sailing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there no good inexpensive CAD software?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The last free version of Sketchup is from 2017, and ironically you can download it from the official website, you just have to dig for it. It isn’t immediately available, and they try their best to sell you the latest version.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Good news. :)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Looks like the future country of Cascadia is finally starting to make some moves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Good news. :)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The agreed-upon future name is Cascadia.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Something we all can agree on⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Before you reuse it, please crack open an image editor and correct the last word in the title by removing the apostrophe. Anyone who took English classes past Elementary school will thank you for that correction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Something we all can agree on⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Apostrophe is possessive. The facts do not possess themselves.

  When there are a number of them, however, they are just facts, without an apostrophe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube is now flagging accounts on Premium family plans that aren't in the same household⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, it takes a bit of effort. But if you replace your routers with ones that have open-source firmware or actual workstations acting as gateway routers and running business-class open-source software, you can create a personal VPN between everyone involved that shows only one exit point to world+dog.

  The trick is with ensuring that all YouTube stuff gets properly and comprehensively funnelled through this exit node - VPNs can easily leak data if not configured properly, and sometimes do so despite good configs - and implementing this even on other devices that require individual VPN connectivity (roaming, like phones).

  Plus, having a mobile device’s VPN auto-recognize when it’s connected to a known good network, and have it automatically disable itself in favour of the VPN on that network, is not something that’s easy to do.

  Finally, doing so without a high-quality, high-speed ISP plan can easily lead to an unusably slow VPN. The “mothership” exit node, in particular, would have to be gigabit or better because it has both the node and connections to other homes and devices. If everyone started suckling the YouTube teat at the same time, things would likely slow down pretty fast on anything significantly less than gigabit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨berk⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  …And? Elephants are terrified of bees. My dog is terrified of beetles. I’ve known horses who were terrified of mice, and nearly killed themselves panicking in their stables.

  Just because it’s small doesn’t mean it can’t do significant damage on a psychological scale.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LPT: Go get a shot, now.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  But getting vaccinated doesn’t really prevent you from spreading it, it just prevents you from not dying from it.

  LOLWUT is this antivaxxer shit? Go back to your anti-reality, anti-evidence, anti-facts hellhole, bud.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LPT: Go get a shot, now.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They key point is density. The denser the population, the more people need to be immunized for herd immunity to be effective, because the more people the average person comes in close contact with even only in passing.

  It’s like the difference in walking six blocks in a sleepy town vs six blocks in downtown Manhattan. Even in “rush hour”, with the sidewalks at maximum typical capacity, the former might net you a dozen close encounters while the latter could easily net you 1,200 close encounters. If you are immunocompromised, the same level of herd immunity in the general population makes the former a much safer environment than the latter.

  Statistics can be wild.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨80s Nostalgia AI Slop Is Boomerfying the Masses for a Past That Never Existed⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Abandon your monetarist goldbug worldview, the gold decoupling and subsequent floating of the international exchange rates are downstream of the actual policy decision that have emiserated the population.

  I never said they were directly related, I just wanted to point out that they both occurred in the same year.

  This needs to be exactly reversed, the poorer you are, the easier it should be to acquire but the more you have the harder it gets. Up until a point where it becomes nearly impossible to go beyond the “capital horizon” some kind of equilibrium state where wealth can lo longer be acquired faster than you lose it.

  👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

  Absolutely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨80s Nostalgia AI Slop Is Boomerfying the Masses for a Past That Never Existed⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The 80s were already the second decade of the decline after the gold standard was revoked in 1971 and wages became decoupled from productivity. Everything was on a slowly accelerating slide downhill from there, although it took until the 90s for the first people to truly notice things were going sideways.

  You want a real economic golden era? Try the 50s and the 60s, where a single wage earner could work a low-end service-level job (selling shoes, for example), and make enough to own a detached SFH, a car in the garage, support a SAH spouse and several children, go on modest vacations every year with at least one more ambitious one every few years, and still have enough left over to save generously for retirement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨95% of Companies See ‘Zero Return’ on $30 Billion Generative AI Spend, MIT Report Finds⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
  • Your code will be significantly more insecure. Expect anything exposed to world+dog to be hacked far quicker than your own work.
  • You will code even slower than if you just did the work yourself.
  • You will fail to grow as a coder, and will even see your existing skills erode.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨95% of Companies See ‘Zero Return’ on $30 Billion Generative AI Spend, MIT Report Finds⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Once again we see the Parasite Class playing unethically with the labour/wealth they have stolen from their employees.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Microsoft Excel is testing a new AI-powered function that can automatically fill cells in your spreadsheets.”

  Every year, Microsoft gives me more reasons to permanently leave their products.

  Unfortunately, due to compatibility with financial and other Windows-only software I still need to run Windows, but I am down to two rigs and it might go down to one in the new year.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This CEO laid off nearly 80% of his staff because they refused to adopt AI fast enough. 2 years later, he says he’d do it again⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  CEOs are invariably the parasites in virtually any company where they earn more than 10× than their median employee.

  Nothing that can be done inside the business can justify compensation like that. Ergo: parasitism of the profits, of siphoning away more and more value that the workers produce just for themselves and those of their fellow parasites.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Leaving religious people speechless⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are a lot of reasonable people who can get behind that statement…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tried naming the states from memory as a European⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Desert Racists”
  “Swamp Racists”

  ROTFLMAO 🤣🤣🤣

  Bloody accurate, you are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Going to waste: two years after REDcycle’s collapse, Australia’s soft plastics are hitting the environment hard⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  When you really look at it, only type 1 & 2 plastics are recycled with any real frequency (80+%). And even then, there is a subset of plastics marked with those two types which cannot be easily recycled.

  Meanwhile, while types 3 through 7 are “recyclable”, in reality these are actually recycled in the very low single-digit percentages. Most of the rest are incinerated or shipped off to third-world countries for “processing”.

  As such, most any plastic that are not marked type 1 or 2 should be binned with the trash, especially if said trash is going to be effectively and correctly entombed in a landfill.

  Not only does it contain said plastics so they don’t contaminate the wider environment (especially if the landfill is correctly designed with a liner), but it also puts them all in one spot for when technology unlocks effective ways of recycling these types - there are emerging companies that foresee a time when we will “mine” our landfills for resources, and our best current strategy is to contain and concentrate our waste in as convenient a manner as possible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Japan sets new internet speed world record — 4 million times faster than average US speeds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  IME it is more devs and managers going wild on the “golly gee wiz” features that are meant to dazzle site visitors, rather than on actual content (or to obscure a lack of actual material content).

  Sure, what you mentioned is a problem, and a serious one at that. But your issue arises more from marketers and bean counters and C-Suite execs than devs and managers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Japan sets new internet speed world record — 4 million times faster than average US speeds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  And yet, developers still build sites that load 500kb of JS just to display 5kb of text.

  We don’t need faster speeds, we need more reasonable and thoughtful site design. Most sites are ridiculously overengineered, and don’t need a lot of what has been stuffed into them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta Takes Hard Line Against Europe's AI Rules⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I would love to see Europe ban/block the API endpoints that AI communicates over.

  Then ban all Meta endpoints if/when meta moves AI communication onto the same endpoints as non-AI communication.

  European laws are not perfect, but they at least make an effort to put the needs of the people ahead of corporations and the Parasite Class.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dik Piks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I would gladly send a dik pic of my own, provided she appreciates diminutive mammalian ruminants.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox is fine. The people running it are not⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Markup pro tip: to have multiple separate lines appear as a single block quote, have the separating new lines have a quote signifier as well.

  so this

  is one giant

  block quote

  despite the newlines.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox is fine. The people running it are not⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have been using the same web browser, in terms of ideology, codebase and heritage, since the release of NCSA Mosaic.

  That was 32 years ago. And holy f**ck, that dates me.

  Sure, I dabbled around with others. There was the original Opera, back when Netscape cratered and the only other real option was IE. Opera’s tab behaviours made me install Tab Mix Plus for FF, and I still find that extension to be the second-most critical extension FF has, right after UBlock Origin.

  And lately I took a shine to Vivaldi, but I have been weaning myself off of it once I realized that the Manifest v2 shutdown was unavoidable for it as well.

  And the only reason why I even have Chromium is as a sandbox for any Google services I access and as a “naked” web browser for those websites who implement malware and spyware in the name of “website security”.

  And of course, I also run forks, such as Librewolf and others, also with the appropriate anti-malware and anti-spyware add-ins. It can be useful having multiple web browsers up at once.

  But my main will always be Firefox.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What sort of grill needs a firmware update lol⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Read the comment more carefully… while IT was most certainly not at their posts, this implementation team was actively monitoring the rollout and witnessing the carnage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What sort of grill needs a firmware update lol⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Never said it had to be you.

  But a threat to do exactly that would have likely called IT’s bluff long before the four-month mark.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What sort of grill needs a firmware update lol⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And in those four months, did no-one think of firing up WireShark to see what was floating across that network during that time period?

  Seems like someone dropped the debug/analysis ball…