SirEDCaLot
@SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 1 day ago:
I hate this. I think it should be illegal. Or make a building code that there has to be a real extractor hood above the stove in all cases.
- Comment on OpenAI whistleblower’s deemed suicide 2 weeks ago:
How many times did he shoot himself?
I mean there is a pattern to these things.
If Putin doesn’t like you, you shoot yourself and then jump out of a building.
If the Clintons don’t like you, you shoot yourself twice in the back of the head before driving your car off a cliff.
If you have dirt on powerful people, you hang yourself in prison. - Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 2 weeks ago:
That practice was halted and now the vehicle video is under MUCH stricter control with an option to not share any of it at all.
Given the choice, I’d rather have some Tesla employee joking about what I park next to than Tesla Inc selling my driving data to insurance companies like most other automakers do… - Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 2 weeks ago:
That was from years ago.
Tesla used to sell cars rated by pack capacity. For example the ‘P85D’ was the performance model, 85 kWh pack, dual motor.
There was also a 40 kWh (cheaper) and 60 kWh version.
After a while they stopped building 40 kWh packs and just software-locked the 60 kWh pack to only have 40 kWh of usable capacity. I think for a while they offered an upgrade where you could pay to unlock the extra capacity.I don’t think they’ve done that in some time. I know when I bought my car (model y long range) they didn’t even advertise the pack capacity nor was any upgrade offered. The only paywall thing I’ve seen with Tesla is FSD and they’re pretty transparent about that. I don’t think they’re awful for paywalling it, because if they build the car without the FSD hardware it won’t have other safety systems like lane departure notification.
- Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 2 weeks ago:
I’ve done it. What do you think happens?
- Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 2 weeks ago:
Something to consider…
Elon may be going down a conservative rabbit hole these days, but this is the sort of thing Tesla would never ever ever do. And things like using the telematic system to sell your location and speed to insurance companies. Never happened on a Tesla. You may not like the guy, but the cars are fucking solid.
- Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 2 weeks ago:
This, exactly this. The fact that they would even consider this rules them out for me forever.
- Comment on Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3? 3 weeks ago:
Still care about MP3- it’s the bog standard, the thing EVERYthing supports. Like the shitty SBC codec on Bluetooth. I’ve still got tons of MP3s and they aren’t going away anytime soon.
Everything I get new though is high-res FLAC.
- Comment on Tesla pulls out all the stops as Cybertruck sales grind to a halt 3 weeks ago:
Then you are serving the needs of people like Trump, Murdoch, and other billionaires / CEOs / shareholders who’d rather have us fighting each other than working together to restore the American dream.
- Comment on Tesla pulls out all the stops as Cybertruck sales grind to a halt 3 weeks ago:
There are a lot of moneyed interests who want us all fighting each other. They want that so they can continue to extract the wealth of the nation for themselves. So while you explain why you’ve no need to listen to anybody, you are helping them.
Ever see a magic show? The magician sets up the trick and the cute bikini clad assistant jumps around and flashes her hands to capture your attention so you don’t notice the magician has just palmed your card instead of shuffling it. Elon is the assistant here. Everybody is focused on him and his stupid salute and all of the crazy things people like him say and do, and people are not focused on the real question of how to stop the fact that Americacs people are being bled dry.
I would encourage you to read the story of Daryl Davis, he is a black musician, most famous for becoming friends with a number of KKK members. Those people were used to being hated by black people and vice versa. All Daryl did was talk to them, listen to them, find elements of commonality. I think like 40 or 50 KKK members have left the organization because of him.
- Comment on Tesla pulls out all the stops as Cybertruck sales grind to a halt 3 weeks ago:
I realize the American educational system has gone downhill, but surely at some point somebody taught you the concept of nuance? That not everything is black or white, good or evil? That sometimes things are shades of gray? Sometimes good people do bad things, bad people do good things, etc? And that not everything is as it first appears at face value, you have to look deeper to understand?
I for one am very much a student of nuance.
I think we would both agree that of late, Elon has somewhat gone off the rails. But that doesn’t mean everything he has ever done or ever will do is automatically bad. I can dislike his current politics and the way he is approaching this efficiency project, without having to shit on everything he’s ever done.
Thus, I remain a fan of SpaceX and Tesla, for the simple reason that they both lead their respective fields technology-wise. As someone who has owned a Tesla for years (going back to the days when everybody loved Elon), I can confidently say from personal first-hand experience that it is a fantastic car. The fact that I now disagree with many of its founder’s politics doesn’t change the car in my driveway. It was a fantastic car when I bought it and it’s an even more fantastic car now as FSD gets further refined.
I ask, for the good of our nation, please avoid black and white thinking. A population unable to grasp nuance and uninterested in looking deeper for motivations and questions below the surface is easily manipulated with range bait news. Republicans have been doing this for decades. Democrats have just started in the last 4 or 5 years.
- Comment on Tesla pulls out all the stops as Cybertruck sales grind to a halt 3 weeks ago:
Tesla fan here, this is kind of accurate. I wouldn’t call it terrible, but the aluminum chassis means it has towing limitations, the small battery doesn’t have nearly as much range as most other Tesla’s and it gets worse if you’re towing, plus not everybody wants to drive the Halo truck. Double the range or cut the price by 30% and you have an interesting car, as it is now I look at it as a first generation attempt.
- Comment on There’s No Dancing Around It: Apple’s Vision Pro Was An Ugly Dud 1 month ago:
I tried one in the store. It’s an amazing experience, the augmented reality is done very well.
The problem is I don’t think there’s any content for it. If it could play 3D movies or games or something, that might be a reason to buy it. But for right now as far as I can tell the main reason to have one is to view 3D photos from an iPhone in actual 3D. And I’m sorry but that’s just not worth $3,500.The other issue is the competition. Quest 3 is very close in terms of technology, not quite as good but close, and it’s 7x cheaper with a hell of a lot more content available.
Make it $1500 and release enough content that there’s a reason to buy it, and it’ll sell.
- Comment on UPS and servers : simulated sine wave good? 1 month ago:
I would return that UPS and for about the same price or not too much more you could get a cyberpower unit that puts out a real sine wave. Obviously your server does not like Riello’s fake sine wave, so why not feed it the good stuff rather than trying to force it to eat garbage?
- Comment on Will pilots-less airplanes happens first, or driver-less cars? Why? 1 month ago:
Lol Just because the automation exists doesn’t mean it’s always used. In big planes, the system is called cat III autoland and it only works at some airports. It also produces a notoriously rough landing. In little planes, it’s an emergency assistance feature that gives you a ‘emergency land’ button in the cockpit. Not something that you use everyday.
You can still get a private pilot license if you have 20/40 vision or your eyes can be corrected to 20/40 with glasses or whatever. Even without that, if you can drive you can fly a light sport aircraft. That’s a different category that has more limitations. But those limitations are rapidly going away, FAA is working on something called MOSAIC which will expand the definition of light sport to cover an awful lot of single engine airplanes. And with that you only need a driver’s license.
- Comment on Will pilots-less airplanes happens first, or driver-less cars? Why? 1 month ago:
Pilot here.
There’s already a huge amount of automation available for airplanes large and small. The current top of the line will allow the airplane to connect every phase of flight except for the takeoff, coming all the way down to landing on the runway. In your average airline flight, probably 80 to 95% of the flight is flown by computer. The pilots are managing the aircraft, talking to ATC, etc. So you could argue that that is already there.If you mean the ability to conduct a trip without an operator, IE little girl jumps in the back of the car and says ‘Tessie take me to school!’ and the car drives her to school, that will absolutely happen in cars before airplanes. The simple reason is edge cases and emergencies. In a car, if something goes wrong, you simply pull over. Or, worst case scenario, just slow down and stop. It’s not great but it’s not terrible. If something goes wrong in an airplane, you need to keep operating the airplane for anywhere between 10 minutes and 4 hours including a landing. A lot of what pilots do in emergencies is figure out exactly how their airplane has been damaged and strategize around that. A lot of that is intuition, the rest is deduction based on understanding of how the airplane works. Since the computer can’t see out the window or feel things like buffets and sound, a computer won’t necessarily be as good at that. So the pilots aren’t going anywhere.
- Comment on Mastodon sees a boost from the 'X exodus,' too, founder says 3 months ago:
Quantity isn’t everything
That right there hits the nail on the head. There is a certain critical mass, an activity level that makes satisfy most discussion needs for most users. It’s a tiny fraction of the total traffic of a place like Reddit or Twitter.
But if we have that, and keep the quality level up, we can succeed.Success to me doesn’t mean killing Reddit and Twitter. It means creating a place where smart people can come and find enough content and discussion that they don’t need Reddit and Twitter.
- Comment on 'My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers' 3 months ago:
I. Do. Not. Care. About. The. Tech.
Exactly. The tech doesn’t matter. Tech only exists in service of the gameplay, and (introduced with HL1), the story (previous to HL1 the ‘story’ of most games was just a quick blurb on why there’s monsters and why you have to shoot them).
Gamers DGAF about new tech. Gamers wanted to be told a story. We LOVED the story.
Valve could’ve used the existing engine, built NOTHING AT ALL NEW, and just finished the story with existing assets and we’d all have been over the moon happy.
- Comment on Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands 3 months ago:
I mean full respect when I say this- but if you advocate for a law or policy, don’t shy away from the hard questions about it. Think them through BEFORE you advocate for the policy, as part of your thought process of whether that’s a good policy or not.
In this case, those hard questions are exactly why I’m NOT in favor of such a policy.
If you make it illegal to recommend suicide, you create a situation where anyone who says anything even vaguely pro-suicidal is open to both criminal prosecution and civil liability. So that guy who (without any desire to see the poster suicide) said take a long walk off a short pier now is facing criminal charges, will have a criminal record, may go to jail, and then he’ll be sued by the family of the deceased and probably lose his life savings (or whatever he’s not already spent on lawyers).
Or, what if it’s not the disturbed guy from the scenario who suicides, but some other random person a month later and they see that the ‘long walk off a short pier’ post was in that person’s browser history? Do we blame that person for every single person who suicides who might have read that thread?
That in turn has a chilling effect on any online discourse and you’ll get a lot more people using proxies and VPNs and anonymizer systems just for basic online discussion lest something they say be taken badly and the same happen to them.And then in the wake of some publicized suicide, some politician will say it’s time to clean up the Internet to keep our kids safe, and they’ll task an investigative agency with proactively seeking out such things. Suddenly online message boards are crawling with cops, and if you say anything even vaguely pro-suicidal your info gets subpoena’d from the platform and you get cops knocking on your door with a court summons.
Is this ‘better’? I don’t think it is.
To be clear-- I have great value for the sanctity of human life. I don’t want to see anyone dead, including from suicide. I think encouraging anyone to suicide is abhorrent and inhuman and I would personally remove such posts and/or ban such users from any platform I moderate.
But that’s my personal standards, and I don’t think it right or practical to throw people in jail or ruin their lives because they don’t agree.I also think one part of free speech is if someone else wants to create a toxic cesspool community, I don’t have the right to order them not to. I’m okay with requiring a warning label on such a space though.
- Comment on Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands 3 months ago:
I think I might be okay with encouragement of homicide or murder or terrorism being at least somewhat illegal.
Question for you though, let’s say you have a person with numerous documented mental health problems, who has been suicidal for quite some time, they post some awful shit on a forum one day when upset. One of the responses is to go take a long walk off a short pier. Only they go and do that, with a bunch of rocks in a backpack, and they drown.
What punishment would you prescribe for the person who told them to take a long walk off a short pier?
Making things illegal is easy, but all the law does at the end of the day is a list of if you do X your punishment will be Y.
So for the dude that told him to take a long walk off a short pier, what is the punishment? - Comment on Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands 4 months ago:
there are always some restrictions on speech.
There may be a few, but they should be as minimal as is humanly possible. Restrictions on any civil right should be seen as an absolute last resort, to be tried only when all other options have failed and there is an overwhelming need to fix some desperate problem.
but on the other hand, if you have people committing suicide because they were encouraged to do so, then maybe it makes sense to make pro-suicide speech illegal
No it doesn’t.
You are focusing on the symptom rather than the disease. The problem isn’t that there is pro suicide content, the problem is that people are listening to it. If your society is so gullible and fragile that they will kill themselves because some asshole online says to, you have a much much bigger problem than online speech. You have an education problem and that is what you should fix. You are not teaching your kids critical thinking skills and you need to start. Getting rid of the pro suicide content is just starting a game of whack-a-mole because the next guy will post something else equally damaging that gullible people will fall for.
Birds aren’t real, climate change is a hoax, the Earth is flat, vaccines react with 5G cell phone towers to cause autism, and forward this message to 50 people or you’ll die tomorrow. Even if you get rid of the more harmful ones, your society is still collectively prey to any intellectual abuse and/or memetic virus.The solution to disinformation isn’t to block disinformation, it’s to harden your society against it. Do that and the problem will solve itself, because people simply won’t listen to the crap so there will be a lot less reason to post it and even fewer people spreading it.
Train your people to employ critical thinking skills, and when they don’t, blame them and not whatever moron they were listening to.
- Comment on I'll share a troubling fact with you if you share one with me 4 months ago:
The chlorine does its job, and whatever shit it kills becomes chloramine. Chlorine does have a smaller smell of its own so maybe they just put a shit ton of it in also.
- Comment on I'll share a troubling fact with you if you share one with me 4 months ago:
Here’s a fun one
You know how you go to the public pool and you smell the chlorine keeping the water clean? That’s not chlorine you’re smelling.
Chlorine is a great sanitizer but when dissolved in water it has almost no smell. However, chlorine binds to organic substances like dead skin cells and especially strongly to urea (aka pee), forming chloramine. Chloramine has significantly less sanitizing capability than chlorine, but it has a very strong chloriney smell.
You can get rid of chloramine by ‘shocking’ the pool- adding an oxidizer or increasing the chlorine level very high to what’s called breakpoint chlorination. Shock powder is expensive though so it’s not always used as often as it should be.
So when you go to the public pool and you get that strong chlorine smell, all that means is either the pool water is dirty and hasn’t been shocked in a while, or someone peed in the pool recently.
Enjoy your swim!
- Comment on Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands 4 months ago:
Disclaimer- in this reply I may use some offensive words as examples, none of which I agree with. To summarize my views- I believe the married gay couple should have guns to protect their pot farm and legally adopted children from harm, knowing that single payer healthcare will prevent them from going bankrupt if one gets hurt.
In that case, what is the line between “simply” hate speech and actual radicalization to terroristic acts and/or conspiracy to terroristic acts and/or incitement to terroristic acts?
There’s two lines. The line I’m more concerned with (and you should be too), is where’s the line between ‘simply’ a controversial opinion, and ‘actual’ hate speech. If platforms are required by law to ban ‘hate speech’ then where does that line get drawn and by whom? And how do you differentiate between a controversial but honest opinion, and a prejudiced and hateful statement, when the two share the same position?
For example, is ‘gay people freak me out’ an opinion or hate speech? What about ‘I don’t think gay people should be allowed to adopt children because it could harm the children’? What about ‘I don’t think gay people should be allowed to marry because marriage is supposed to be a man and a woman’? Are those opinions or hate speech? Is there a difference between ‘I don’t think gay people should be allowed to adopt children because it might harm the children’ and ‘I don’t think gay people should be allowed to adopt children because fuck the gays’?
Depending on how you define ‘hate speech’, it might require platforms to themselves remove anything even vaguely anti-gay.
I have no problem with any private platform choosing to adopt whatever rules they want. I have a BIG problem with government-mandated censorship of controversial opinions (and I think you should also).
As for the two lines, let’s do a spectrum— again, this is presented as an example, I do not agree with any of the following statements.
- I don’t like gay people.
- I don’t think gay people should be allowed to adopt children because it would harm the children.
- I don’t think gay people should be allowed to marry because it’s bad for society.
- I don’t think gay people should be allowed to marry or adopt because I hate gay people.
- I don’t think gay people should have the same rights as straight people.
- I don’t think gay people should have traditional civil rights.
- I don’t think we should tolerate gay people in our society.
- I think we should send a message to gay people that they’re not welcome.
- I think we should round up the gay people and kick them out of town.
- I think gay people are a cancer on society that should be excised.
- I can understand why someone would want to get rid of gay people.
- I think it’s reasonable to want to get rid of gay people.
- I want to hurt gay people and you should too.
- I want to help get rid of gay people by any means necessary.
- It’s time to take up arms against the gay people infiltrating our society.
- I’m going to get my gun and go shoot some gay people.
- You all should get your guns and go shoot some gay people.
- We’re meeting at 8pm at (place) to pass out guns, then we’re going to (gay nightclub) to shoot gay people. Come join us!
Where do YOU draw the line in there?
For me I’d say the line between opinion and hatred is between 3 and 4, and the line between hate speech and criminal incitement is between 12 and 13.The problem though is if ‘ban hate speech’ is codified into law, if platforms are REQUIRED to police it, then ALL of this becomes essentially illegal to say, essentially starting with #1. And while it’s sad that anyone would say any of this, that basically makes it illegal to express ANY dislike of gay people because of the murkiness of the line between unfortunate opinion and hate speech.
- Comment on Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands 4 months ago:
Perhaps it’s not easy to decide where the line of legality should go though, which is why this topic is controversial.
It’s not easy. Especially when you need to determine what’s a controversial opinion and what’s hate speech.
For example (and this is NOT anything I agree with)-- if one said ‘I don’t believe gay people should be allowed to adopt children, because science shows both male and female influences are more helpful when applied together for a child’s development’ what is that? Is that hate speech because it advocates taking rights away from gay people? Is it an opinion stated with the goal of protecting children?
Does it become illegal to express almost any position that isn’t pro-gay?
It’s a VERY slippery slope.
Certain speech is criminal like inciting violence. If someone said ‘I’m going to buy a gun and kill gay people, and you all should kill gay people too’ that is a specific statement of criminal intent and also inciting violence. That will get you cops knocking on your door (and rightly so).
You can apply a ‘test’ to that- does it show specific intent to commit a crime? Does it encourage others to commit crimes? Yes on both.But how do you ‘test’ someone saying they don’t think gay people should be allowed to adopt? How do you tell from a few words if they have a hate-filled heart, or if they legitimately think gay people can’t provide a loving home? You can’t.
For the record- I’m using LGBT as an example. I personally liberal-libertarian— I believe married gay couples should have guns to defend their adopted children and pot farms from criminals, with single payer healthcare to keep them alive if they get hurt. I’m against almost any effort to take away anyone’s rights.
So I’ll fight for the asshat’s right to say ‘fuck the gays’ just as hard as I’ll fight for the LGBT person’s right to marry, adopt, and use whatever bathroom they want (provided they wash their hands).
- Comment on Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands 4 months ago:
A better question is where is the line between ‘simply’ a controversial opinion and actual hate speech?
Because if a platform is required by law to ban hate speech, that’s going to sweep up a lot of controversial opinions along with it.Is it ‘hate speech’ to express any negative opinion about an oppressed group? And if not, where do you draw THAT line?
(if you want an answer to your original question I wrote one out but it’s somewhat long…)
- Comment on Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands 4 months ago:
For the record, I personally thing everything you said is truly repugnant. Although I’d point out the first one I’ve seen applied to Trump voters, frequently, in mainstream discussions on ‘civilized’ platforms, with little or no moderator response. So apparently it’s okay to be prejudiced and discriminatory as long as it’s against someone others don’t like.
That said, my problem is not the banning of these statements. Most platforms quite reasonably would ban such things, and I have no problem with that.
What I have a problem with is the government REQUIRING a platform ban certain speech. I don’t care if it’s the most vile horrible hate filled shit. It should be up to the platform, not the government, to decide what speech is acceptable or not.
Because if government gets to decide what private citizens are allowed to discuss on privately-owned forums, that’s a very slippery slope.
- Comment on Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands 4 months ago:
That’s absolutely the one! Truly great American. We could all learn a thing or two from him.
- Comment on Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands 4 months ago:
On the censorship thing, maybe it is okay if an online messaging website bans certain content, like pro-suicide content, or pro-terrorism content, etc. You could call that censorship but you could also call it safety.
I think that should go either way and I have no problem if a platform decides to ban that kind of stuff. I certainly have no desire to consume such material.
I have a BIG problem when the government decides that platforms are required to ban things. Even if they’re things I don’t myself want to read.
It’s a slippery slope.
- Comment on Large Boeing Satellite Suddenly Explodes Into Pieces 4 months ago:
This is actually a real problem more so in this case than most. There’s an awful lot of satellites in low Earth orbit, altitude of a few hundred to several hundred kilometers. Atmospheric drag still exists here a little bit, and thus space junk will reenter and burn up in years or decades.
This satellite was in geostationary orbit, at an altitude of about 36,000 km. Debris up there can take hundreds of years to come down. Geostationary is a special altitude where the satellite orbits at exactly the same rate as the Earth spins. That means that a fixed dish on Earth will always point at the satellite without needing to move or track. So there’s just one narrow orbital ring around the equator for that. That ring is not a place we want space junk to be, because if it gets too hazardous for satellites in GEO that basically removes our capability as a species to use fixed satellite dishes for anything. And that problem won’t go away for centuries.