AHemlocksLie

@AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Human experimentation, one way or the other.⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not talking about people who had a “cure” but about those who shared their experiences openly while being censored and dismissed. People who are not part of a campaign.

  You’re assuming you can tell when a stranger on the internet is part of a campaign or mistakenly parroting something from a campaign. The internet is heavily astroturfed, especially social media. Several hugely popular pieces of misinformation have been traced back to just a handful of accounts that look like and pose as regular people but, upon thorough inspection, are very clearly lying either for money or for propaganda. Those accounts lied, not got it wrong, lied, and millions of people parroted it. Many of them lied a bit themselves and framed it as something that totally happened to someone they directly know.

  You assume a lot, and the way you associate everything with anti-vaxxers only shows how much governments have turned this into a political issue.

  …Motherfucker, it’s not a politics issue, it’s a science issue. Antivaxxers have REPEATEDLY shown they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. At best, they’re scared of what they don’t understand and make mistakes. At worst, they’re grifting at the expense of people’s health. Many just want to feel smart, like they’re in on a secret the rest of society can’t recognize, and they’re willing to endanger people’s health and wellbeing to get that feeling. In no case are they overall correct, even if they manage to occasionally brush against truth as they flounder. You wanted examples of why regular people might go on the internet and lie about the vaccines, and antivaxxers are a great example because everything that comes out of their mouths on that topic is either half baked or, relevant to the question at hand, an outright lie. Some of them will just make up random shit on the fly to defend their incorrect beliefs. Shit, some people are just pathological liars, and some portion of them will be antivax or whatever.

  If I say someone close to me had side effects after the vaccine, suddenly I’m assumed to also drink bleach and take dewormers.

  I don’t think anyone with sense and information doubts that people experienced side effects. When I got my COVID vaccines, we had to wait a little while on site in case we had an allergic reaction or any other sort of adverse reaction. What most of the doubters don’t believe is the people suggesting it’s way more dangerous than anyone thought because the vast majority of the evidence is someone claiming that their cousin’s uncle’s dog’s vet’s new girlfriend he just met totally suffered life altering consequences. The vast majority is bullshit, whether the person saying it knows it or not, and the remainder is such a small portion, it most likely doesn’t make a significant difference from reported results and risks.

  At this point, you’re basically unable to think critically or discuss the negative. Being part of a herd also comes with some dangerous aspects.

  No, I can do that. The problem is that critical thinking leads me to the realization that there’s never any fucking evidence, at all, ever. Some schmuck that may or may not be AI with a username I’ve never seen before can write some words on social media about a thing that totally definitely happened to someone, but that’s it, that’s all it is. There’s never unadulterated pictures or video. No medical records from the hospital visit such a severe reaction surely must have required. No articles from a respected journalist known to thoroughly vet sources. No medical or scientific studies that hold up to thorough scrutiny. Do some people have severe negative reactions? Yeah, the manufacturers literally warn us of them. Is it the huge threat that some people made it out to be? Almost certainly not according to the available legitimate evidence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Human experimentation, one way or the other.⁩ ⁨⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Cue the classic Arthur meme, “do you really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?”

  How about for money? How many grifters pushed their own protective supplements? You think pharma maybe would pay some astroturfers to push the ivermectin that didn’t do dick for anyone that didn’t have worms already because it’s fucking dewormer? How many antivaxxers made up bullshit about it just like they do every other vaccine? How many wealthy people down played everything and helped push lies so their workers would get the fuck back in the office/factory? How many people just said some stupid shit and doubled down to protect their ego when called out?

  Like here’s the real issue. You’ve put no real thought at all into why someone might lie about it, as evidenced by the fact that you can only conceive of it being state actors while I came up with all those people incentivized to lie off the top of my head. And then, after putting no real effort into reflection or anything, you look around at all the people who can come up with reasons you’re wrong and claim it feels like a cult.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Human experimentation, one way or the other.⁩ ⁨⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Probably more to do with the fact that there is, at most, a tiny grain of truth at the core, but it’s wrapped in a mountain of bullshit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Based on this graph, and this graph alone, guess at what time I completely blocked OpenAI crawlers⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Pretty sure I’ve repeatedly heard about the crawlers completely ignoring robots.txt, so does Cloudflare really do that much?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I dunno, I feel like we could pretty cost effectively fill his stomach if we used pennies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, we get it, Bezos. You want us to shove more and more money down your throat.

  I’m prepared to contribute a whole lot of pennies to the cause.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve stress again that there'll be more Steam Machine Verified games than Steam Deck ones, with "fewer constraints" in their testing programme⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not really familiar with those tactics, so I’m open to being convinced if you can provide some examples. I suppose you could argue that forcing its use for their games isn’t great, but I don’t see that as exceedingly terrible even if it’s not great.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fallout: London hasn't developed into a Fallout 4-esque hub of new quest and expansion mods so far, and its lead has theories why⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, and I didn’t mean that FO4 is terrible or has no staying power. I haven’t played it, so I can’t judge. I just meant that player count isn’t necessarily a good metric for whether it will develop a thriving modding community.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve stress again that there'll be more Steam Machine Verified games than Steam Deck ones, with "fewer constraints" in their testing programme⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think Steam got where it is by trying to monopolize, though. They just have a long history of genuinely trying to not suck, and nobody else is willing to try at all, so they just… Win by default. It’s basically a meme now that Valve just has to do nothing and win these days.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fallout: London hasn't developed into a Fallout 4-esque hub of new quest and expansion mods so far, and its lead has theories why⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think that’s really the best metric. Call of Duty from 2022 has 30k current players and 39k peak 24 hours. steamcharts.com/app/1938090

  I think a whole lot of people would agree that CoD games are not great and are generally mass produced, mass appeal crap. But they sure do rack up the sales and players. Just having a large player base does not necessarily mean a game is genuinely good with cultural staying power.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, I see what you mean. Yes and no. The receiver does need to somehow communicate the destination to the sender, I believe typically through an invoice of some sort. Been a long time since I kept up, so the details are getting hazy. Anyway, there are only two times that lightning network usage requires a publicly visible blockchain transaction: when you want to put coins on the lightning network and when you want to take them back off to the blockchain. You open a channel with a node basically saying “I’ll put X amount in this channel in if you’ll put in Y amount (one of them can be zero, i.e. send or receive only), and here’s a signed transaction you can publish on the blockchain to get your money back at any time.” Any time you make a transaction over the lightning network, you rewrite that cashout transaction so the balance shifts by however much you’re sending plus any fees you agree to pay, but you do it in such a way that you only really give them the signed transaction if they prove they’re gonna pass on what you want to send to the next node, and this process repeats with every node in the chain until everyone agrees to move the money.

  All that to say there’s really no record of any transaction ever happening outside of however your balance changes between putting it on the network and taking it back off. There’s no record of who sent what, how many transactions it took, what path any transaction took to get there, nothing at all except initial and final balance. Now, this does mean that if the money is withdrawn, there’s evidence you’ve been paid, but not for what, by who, by how many people, over how many transactions, or a anything else but the final total amount from all transactions. If they just spent everything they received back over the lightning network, there’s effectively no real evidence that any real transactions ever occurred.

  Of course, this hypothetical nonprofit is almost certainly going to be paying a company that wants US dollars. They’ll probably have to cash out in a highly traceable way, and actually buying the ICE data will require a highly traceable bank transfer or other conventional payment method. In that sense, you’re right, the nonprofit gets left exposed. But they could completely mask who sent money.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The receiver ends up hanging a bit in the wind.

  Actually, the way the payments are structured, no money moves AT ALL if ANYONE in the chain tries to back out. It maintains the trustless nature of crypto. I don’t recall the specifics of how it’s done, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a good point, they’d definitely just subpoena your bank records. If crypto is used properly, it can be nigh impossible to trace, though. Bitcoin isn’t very private at all on the blockchain, but if you send over lightning network, my understanding is that it becomes effectively impossible to track, unless your adversary controls enough lightning network nodes to track the payment as it bounces between nodes. They wouldn’t need to control the whole path, but they would need to control nodes VERY close to origin and destination, ideally the adjacent nodes, and enough of those in the middle to be reasonably sure they can accurately follow the money. The lightning network doesn’t leave a detailed ledger behind, so only way to trace a payment is to be involved in its processing, which means controlling the nodes the money passes through on its way to the recipient.

  Of course, that’s way too obscure and unknown for the vast majority of people, so I don’t see a nonprofit succeeding that way these days. Maybe if crypto actually does get mainstream, but that’s still a pretty big if.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Are nonprofits required to track who they receive donations from? I could be wrong, but I don’t think they are. They have to have financial records, but I don’t think that means maintaining a donor list.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If they want to target more technologically capable users, they’ll just hard code the IP addresses so it doesn’t need DNS and make any IP changes in routine updates.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I bet a nonprofit would have a reasonable chance of raising the funds to buy the data and publicly publish it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valves first title with a 3 in it⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, that’s too obvious, could have just been a coincidence. This, though…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's OK to just like lemon water.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s only after your mouth and esophagus. Those aren’t really geared to tolerate exposure to strong acids or bases. Even foods that aren’t acidic enough to immediately damage these regions can still contribute to tooth enamel being worn away, for example. It’s either strong enough to at least consider the impact on those, or it’s weak enough that adding lemon is a questionable move.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's OK to just like lemon water.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  True, but your body will not enjoy water that’s very alkaline, so there’s a chance it’s sufficient since lemon is pretty acidic.

  Plus, if the whole point of it is to be alkaline, why directly counter that with what you add?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US | Titan sub imploded due to engineering flaws — NTSB report⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  One dude brought his son, and I don’t think the son was super enthusiastic, so not quite

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Someone finally made a "Sonarr for YouTube"⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If I remember correctly, you don’t really need Prowlarr. It’s useful if you’re using multiple *arr services, but Prowlarr manages your indexers, the place *are services look for content, and syncs them to your other *arr services so THEY can do the search. I don’t think Prowlarr itself ever looks for content automatically, only if you manually search through Prowlarr.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you got in a time machine⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’ve got a spare PC or one that’s always online, you can host something like Jellyfin for yourself. Make your own streaming service. With blackjack and hookers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame. States feel pressure to act⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It saves them money in the same sense it saves every other information source money, it reduces traffic. But just like other sites can’t serve ads without traffic, Wikipedia can’t prove its worth and ask for donations without traffic. Eventually, people will start asking themselves why they need to support Wikipedia when Google’s AI tells them everything they need to know, unaware that Google’s AI can only do so because it scrapes Wikipedia without paying for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame. States feel pressure to act⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And in return, they drive traffic away from the sites that collect the information in the first place, causing the sources to lose revenue.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Financially rewarding and you will always have a job⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t forget that loans are probably deferred through the PhD, so that’s like 4+ years of accumulated interest on top.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oh Kurt Gödel, you lovable logician freak.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think they ever publicly stated what the flaw was. Would love to know, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let’s Encrypt Begins Supporting IP Address Certificates⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe kinda, but it’s also a third party whose certificates are almost if not entirely universally trusted. Self-signed certs cause software to complain unless you also spread a root certificate to be trusted to any machine that might use one of your self-signed certs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft has never been good at running game studios, which is a problem when it owns them all⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, it did eliminate competition. They’re no longer competition once Microsoft buys them. They’re employees, possibly if a subsidiary, who contribute to Microsoft’s profits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Asus and Lenovo’s handhelds get price hike as Valve pauses some Steam Deck sales⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And on Switch, it’s forbidden typically. Which is part of why people advocate for the Steam Deck instead. From Nintendo’s perspective, this very much is a vulnerability. It’s just not leading to custom firmware or ROM dumps from what I understand, so it’s not even close to the most significant vulnerability.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unfortunately, this is science too.⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not just valid, I’d argue important. It doesn’t make the most exciting headlines and doesn’t get funding very well, though, so it’s not done nearly as often as it should be. A big part of science is not taking things at face value and verifying that there is sufficient proof for claims.

  Plus, if both results agree, it statistically tightens the probability of a coincidence. The chances of a 5% chance event happening twice in a row is 0.25%, and three times in a row is 0.0125% so repetition can make the results more certain.