lvxferre

@lvxferre@mander.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo omits original Donkey Kong Country Returns team from the remaster’s credits⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s less vague than it looks like - they’re restricting credits to people actively involved in the development process of the specific game, with no regards to the others, even if without those others the game wouldn’t exist. It’s feigned politeness at its finest.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Zimbabwe abolishes the death penalty⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s great news.

  Don’t get me wrong; I know that some people would make the world better if they were killed. However it’s irreversible, and making sure that you’re condemning only the right people is bound to be expensive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Magnus Carlsen: Chess champion quits FIDE tournament after being told to change jeans⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Note: since I don’t watch basketball or baseball, I had to dig for further info. As such take what I say with a grain of salt.

  …they sound equally as silly and arbitrary as FIDE’s dress code. In special, apparently the NBA dress code (outside the game) was created to target hip hop clothing, associating it with crime; this is clearly prejudice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Magnus Carlsen: Chess champion quits FIDE tournament after being told to change jeans⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Relevant links:

  • FIDE statement regarding Magnus Carlsen’s dress code breach
  • Statement by FIDE President on dress-code rules for Rapid and Blitz Championships
  • FIDE dress code

  Emphasis on the third link, on what’s not allowed: sneakers, jeans, t-shirts. Under the claim that it’s “to maintain the high standards of the FIDE World Rapid & Blitz Championships”… yeah, nah, non sequitur.

  And more importantly it shows that the dress code in question is NOT about decency, or preventing cheating, or not distracting other players; it’s all about “if you dress casually we’re going to be assumptive trash and assume that you don’t take the competition seriously.” No wonders Carlsen walked away from it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Copyright Industry Wants To Apply Automated Blocking To The Internet’s Core Routers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If Anatel is granted this “right” you can be bloody sure that it’d abuse it, because it’s basically a mafia branch of the government created to defend the interests of local large telecommunication businesses - the same ones that got wrecked by the internet itself making them compete with media from the whole world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Zelensky condemns Russian 'inhumane' Christmas attack on energy grid⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Transliteration is always a mess. Specially when it’s the romanisation of vowels and semivowels - as Latin used the same ⟨V⟩ for /w ʊ u:/, and ⟨I⟩ for /j ɪ i:/, but then a lot of languages using the Latin alphabet solved the issue in different ways.

  There is also some debate as to whether using the double “y” is an act of defiance against the Russians by Zelensky.

  I’d say that it’s less about defiance and more about highlighting Ukrainian identity.

  The trick here is that you can transliterate ⟨-ий⟩ as ⟨-yy⟩, but only if it’s from Ukrainian. In Russian that ⟨и⟩ is typically transliterated as ⟨i⟩, so you’d end with ⟨-iy⟩.

  Additionally it seems customary to clip some East Slavic names using ⟨-ий⟩ to be transliterated by just ⟨-y⟩; you see this for example for Trotsky (Троцкий).

  [In the meantime the scientific transliteration - prescribing ⟨j⟩ - cries in a corner.]

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Little Rocket Lab is a Factorio and Stardew Valley mashup about building a rocketship in a cute town⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Factorio and Stardew Valley mashup

  Okay. Sign me up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pokémon Go Players Have Unwittingly Trained AI to Navigate the World⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll copypaste an interesting comment here:

  [Stephen Smith] This article is a great example of a trend I don’t think companies realize they’ve started yet: They have killed the golden goose of user-generated content for short-term profit. // Who would willingly contribute to a modern-day YouTube, Reddit, StackOverflow, or Twitter knowing that they are just feeding the robots that will one day replace them?

  You don’t even need robots replacing humans, or people believing so. All you need is people feeling that you’re profiting at their expense.

  ---

  Also obligatory “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do the majority of women still take their partner's last name?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  At least for my ex-fiancée it was about the link between husband and wife, plus tradition. It was basically “I’m married, you see?”. Just like a ring.

  (We talked a fair bit about this stuff, as back then I was planning to add my maternal surname to my legal name. She was OK taking either surname.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon Says App Downloads Up 47% on iOS Amid Twitter Exodus⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s good news. Odds are that some of those people will rebound back to closed media platforms; but the ones who stay help Mastodon and the Fediverse to grow.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky, the Fediverse, and the future of social media⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m almost sure.

  Your typical instance only defeds another as a last case scenario, due to deep divergences or because of blatantly shitty admin or user behaviour. But, past that, they’re still willing to let some shit to go through - because if you defederate too many other instances, with no good reason, you’re only hurting yourself.

  That’s simply not enough to create those “corners”. Specially when all this “nerds vs. normies*” thing is all about depth - for example the normie wants some privacy, but the nerd goes all in, but they still care about the same resources.

  *I hate this word but it’s convenient here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky, the Fediverse, and the future of social media⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I get what you say, and I agree; but when it comes to the average user I wonder if they’ll even get it. They don’t think on the grounds of a “protocol” or a “platform”, it used to be “site” and now “app”. They do it even with email, of all things, even if it’s one of the oldest cross-platform protocols out there!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky, the Fediverse, and the future of social media⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They tolerate each other enough to get each into a corner and not interact much.

  And yet that is not what we see in the Fediverse. Those “corners” don’t exist here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky, the Fediverse, and the future of social media⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The people here and their attitude towards people who don’t agree with them are the problem.

  And that’s a structural problem. The ActivityPub was supposed to allow both the “average person” and the “nerd” to coexist in the same platform, without one getting too much in the way of the other; it doesn’t.

  I’m not sure on a good solution for that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky, the Fediverse, and the future of social media⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s all fun and games until venture capital kicks in, and exploit that central user data store to further centralise the rest of the network. Even then yes, I think that Mastodon has a lot to learn with Bluesky, on how to make user experience smoother.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨City-building on a massive creature, The Wandering Village - Research & Economy update is live⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Stray Fawn Studio is the same studio that developed Niche; Niche is a good teaching tool, but it’s about as entertaining as a game as mopping the floor.

  Based on that I’d advise caution against buying this game while it’s still in early access, unless you’re satisfied with its current gameplay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Final update on my pineapple plant journey. Time to eat this little guy and replant the top to do it all over again hopefully!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Dude, that’s some amazing job, specially given the conditions.

  Don’t feel discouraged by the size - the next generation will be probably larger, since you got a really large crown. I think that they try to reduce crown size for commercially grown ones, dunno, but the second gen is typically better.

  Fertilisation also plays a huge role on fruit size - as the plant is young you want to give it lots of nitrogen, but as it starts blooming shift the focus to potassium and phosphor. (I do this all the time with peppers.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I got tired of killing my cactus so now I plant mint⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  it is a wonderful adventure to start gathering all the plastic that has a minimum depth and make holes with a wire and get intoxicated by the smell of burning plastic

  This is one of those joys of gardening that books and online tutorials definitively do not talk about.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I got tired of killing my cactus so now I plant mint⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a damn great choice if you killed a cactus. You probably overwatered it, but mint loves water. Water 2~4 times a week and you should be good.

  It will quickly overgrow your pot, but resist the temptation to plant it on the ground. It isn’t like mint doesn’t thrive on soil, it does a bit too well… killing everything in its path.

  I used the peanut butter pot, support the extreme cheapskates.

  I know that feeling. Apple trees in margarine pot:
  Image

  Mandarin oranges in coke bottle:
  Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do you think objectivity is, and what do you think of it?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The volume of a mixture cannot be described by a simple sum of the volume of its components. As such, this does not make the statement “1+1=2” false in this situation; it’s still true but irrelevant, there’s no “+” here on first place.

  Additionally, let us suppose for a moment that the reasoning above is invalid. Even then, it’s still an objective matter - because then the truth value of “1+1=2” would vary depending on the object (are we dealing with apples, or liquid mixtures?), not on the subject (who’s mixing the liquids - you or me?).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do you think objectivity is, and what do you think of it?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I disagree that this is subjective. Even if someone hypothetically doesn’t accept the ZF[C], the statement still accurately describes reality, in a way that doesn’t depend on the subject. For example, you can’t start with two apples and two oranges and have five or tree fruits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do you think objectivity is, and what do you think of it?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My definition of “objectivity” is “the approach towards a philosophical matter that seeks to minimise the role of the subject in said matter”.

  For example:

  • If I say “two plus two equals four”, I’m being objective. My statement should be true regardless of who is saying it, who’s doing the maths, etc.
  • If I say “In my opinion, green apples are great”, I’m not being objective. I’m being subjective: I’m acknowledging that the statement “green apples are great” is true for one subject (me), but it might not be true for other subjects (perhaps you don’t like green apples).

  what do you think of it?

  Truth is objective and should be handled objectively. Gravity doesn’t stop working because you’re in a bad mood; 2+2 doesn’t fluctuate between 3 and 5 depending on the observer; either a past event happened, or it didn’t.

  Other philosophical matters are better handled subjectively. For example, morality; something can be good or bad depending on the subject, and there’s no way to handle this objectively.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Zuckerberg: The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For real. Companies being extra pushy with their product always makes me picture their decision makers saying:

  “What do you mean, «we’re being too pushy»? Those are customers! They are not human beings, nor deserve to be treated as such! This filth is stupid and un-human-like, it can’t even follow simple orders like «consume our product»! Here we don’t appeal to its reason, we smear advertisement on its snout until it needs to open the mouth to breath, and then we shove the product down its throat!”

  Is this accurate? Probably not. But it does feel like this, specially when they’re trying to force a product with limited use cases into everyone’s throats. Such as machine text and image generation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Typing monkey would be unable to produce 'Hamlet' within the lifetime of the universe, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The insertion of an all knowing checker who could have written it himself anyway

  The checker does make all the difference, but he doesn’t need to be able to write it by himself. It could be even a brainless process, such as natural selection.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Typing monkey would be unable to produce 'Hamlet' within the lifetime of the universe, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the point is less about any kind of route to Hamlet, and more about the absurdity of infinite tries in a finite space(time).

  I know. It’s just that creationists misuse that metaphor so often that I couldn’t help but share my brainfart here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Indiana Jones doesn't "endorse" Nazis, Bethesda assure, just in case you were confused by him repeatedly murdering them⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not. We’re talking about different things.

  Backtrack to Miles O’Brien’s comment. They’re clearly talking about individual depictions, and my comment focuses on that. To assume that people with shitty worldviews must be necessarily incompetent is wishful thinking.

  The reason why the Nazi worldview is invalid has jack shit to do with efficiency or competence, it’s as simple as “that worldview oppresses the lives of innocent people into living hells”.

  In the meantime you’re talking about the social impact of continuous, somewhat consistent-ish depictions of the Nazi in media, not individual depictions. What you’re saying is valid but another can of worms.

  Even just repeating things like “At least Mussolini made the trains run on time” plays into it, especially when it’s a lie, just like the Wunderwaffe programs or the Nazi “miraculous economic recovery” which was just making people work longer hours and deficit spending.

  Note that, if people are less eager to play along that fallacy, this sort of argument doesn’t roll any more. Suddenly if Merdolini made the trains run on time or not doesn’t matter, and can be safely called out as a distraction. Just like the Nazi economic recovery.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Typing monkey would be unable to produce 'Hamlet' within the lifetime of the universe, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Perhaps even worse: Wobblesticke, Jiggleweapone, stuff like this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Typing monkey would be unable to produce 'Hamlet' within the lifetime of the universe, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have a way to make it work.

  Have the monkey write down a single character. Just one. 29/30 of the time, it won’t be the same character as the first one in Shakespeare’s complete works; discard that sheet of paper, then try again. 1/30 of the time the monkey will type out the right character; when they do it, keep that sheet of paper and make copies out of it.

  Now, instead of giving a completely blank sheet to the monkey, give them one of those copies. And let them type the second character. If different from the actual second character in Shakespeare’s works, discard that sheet and give him a new copy (with the right 1st char still there - the monkey did type it out!). Do this until the monkey types the correct second character. Keep that sheet with 2 correct chars, make copies out of it, and repeat the process for the third character.

  And then the fourth, the fifth, so goes on.

  Since swapping sheets all the time takes more time than letting the monkey go wild, let’s increase the time per typed character (right or wrong), from 1 second to… let’s say, 60 times more. A whole minute. And since the monkey will type junk 29/30 of the time, it’ll take around 30min to type the right character.

  …not really. Shakespeare’s complete works have around 5 million characters, so the process should take 5*10⁶ * 30min = 2.5 million hours, or 285 years.

  But we could do it even better. This approach has a single monkey doing all the work; the paper has 200k of them. We could split Shakespeare’s complete works into 200k strings of 25 chars each, and assign each string to a monkey. Each monkey would complete their assignment, on average, after 12h30min; some will take a bit longer, but now we aren’t talking about the thermal death of the universe or even centuries, it’ll take at most a few days.

  ---

  Why am I sharing this? I’m not invalidating the paper, mind you, it’s cool maths.

  I’ve found this metaphor of monkeys typing Shakespeare quite a bit in my teen years, when I still arsed myself to discuss with creationists. You know, the sort of people who thinks that complex life can’t appear due to random mutations, just like a monkey can’t type the full works of Shakespeare.

  Complex life is not the result of a single “big” mutation, like a monkey typing the full thing out of the blue; it involves selection and inheritance, as the sheets of paper being copied or discarded.

  And just like assigning tasks to different monkeys, multiple mutations can pop up independently and get recombined. Not just among sexual beings; even bacteria can transmit genes horizontally.

  Already back then (inb4 yes, I was a weird teen…) I developed the skeleton of this reasoning. Now I just plopped the numbers that the paper uses, and here we go.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Typing monkey would be unable to produce 'Hamlet' within the lifetime of the universe, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And we need more of them!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do you like/dislike about lemmy?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I know, the maturity standard isn’t too high, but I still think that Lemmy is going rather well given where the userbase is from.

  By “witch hunting” I mean “to claim that someone, a group, or a piece of content belongs to a socially undesirable group, without rational grounds to do so.”

  Here’s a made up example. Let’s say that Bob uses a picture of Richard Stallman as his avatar. Alice sees it, and…

  • [Alice] Bob! Why do you use that sick fuck as your avatar? You must be a paedophile!
  • [Bob] Nah. I use this avatar because I agree with Stallman’s views on software freedom, and nothing else. I don’t agree with his opinions on sex and sexuality, specially not about children.
  • [Alice] That’s bullshit, I bet that you abuse little children! MOOOODS!
  • [Bob] No, Alice, I don’t. Stop lying.
  • [Charlie] Alice, please, stop making shit up. Pleeeease.
  • [Alice] CHARLIE YOU DISGUSTING PIECE OF SHIT WHY ARE YOU DEFENDING A PEDO???

  Alice here is witch hunting. Alice has no grounds to claim that Bob is a paedophile, but she’s still doing it.

  The “witches” often do exist, mind you - they’re racists, bigots, sexual offenders, paedophiles, incels, transphobes, fascists, so goes on. They are socially undesirable, and need to be kicked out. Even then, witch hunting should not be tolerated in online communities: what they do is intrinsically unjust, it makes their target feel like shit, it makes the whole community walk on eggs (because anything that they say or do might get distorted into “witch behaviour”), and it numbs people against the issue with the actual witches (just like the boy who cried wolves unwillingly protected the wolves, witch hunters unwillingly protect the actual “witches”).

  I saw this plenty, plenty times in Reddit. But here in Lemmy it’s surprisingly more common, given the smaller userbase.

  But I would argue that it is as true now as it was then: people don’t enjoy being on the receiving end of intolerance, hence tend to be intolerant right back, and yet that is as it should be.

  Fighting back is good. Punching random people isn’t. Witch hunters do the later, not the former.