lennivelkant
@lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation. 1 day ago:
Most cases of “we can’t find anyone good for this job” can be solved with better pay. Make your opening more attractive, then you’ll get more applicants and can afford to be picky.
Getting the money is a different question, unless you’re willing to touch the sacred corporate profits…
- Comment on Are Dairy Robots the Secret to Happier Cows and More Efficient Farms? 1 day ago:
My milk ranking:
Almond < Dairy < Soy < Oat
I rarely drink any milk at all, but when I do, it’s gotta be oat.
(Also not a vegan, but that doesn’t have anything to do with my taste here)
- Comment on Are Dairy Robots the Secret to Happier Cows and More Efficient Farms? 1 day ago:
Your wife is right to hate it. It’s rather shallow and narrow-minded.
That aside, if calories-to-price is your metric, are you growing your own food?
- Comment on Are Dairy Robots the Secret to Happier Cows and More Efficient Farms? 3 days ago:
Oat is GOAT
(The acronym, not the animal)
- Comment on Microsoft tells Windows 10 users to just trade in their PC for a newer one, because how hard can it be? 2 weeks ago:
I can’t recall ever trying it with peanut butter, that sounds interesting
- Comment on Chinese EV maker BYD says new fast-charging system could be as quick as filling up a tank 2 weeks ago:
If the insulation doesn’t insulate, that is a risk indeed. There would probably have to be some detection mechanism for damaged insulation on top of regular maintenance checks. I don’t know if some wiring in the insulation could measure the integrity. Maybe if the voltage would oscillate regularly, picking up on the induction of those changes might allow detecting if the shielding is inconsistent before it actually becomes threat? I only have half-remembered bits of an intro course on electrical engineering years ago, so maybe I’m way off.
- Comment on Chinese EV maker BYD says new fast-charging system could be as quick as filling up a tank 2 weeks ago:
Well, you’d need to standardise battery formats and legally mandate that they have to be easily switchable. I imagine that would get pushback from the car lobby - they do so love to make proprietary branded parts if you let them. If they can’t force you to only use original parts for repairs because some part is generic by law, they’ll lose out on precious markups.
That said, the car lobby can go take a hike for all I care.
The other issue is that it would have to be easily reachable, even if your trunk is loaded up. The underside is difficult to get at with any kind of setup you’d let amateurs touch. Maybe something on the side could work like you’ve already got for gas, depending on the weight of the battery. I’m sure it’s a solvable problem, if there is some will to see it done.
I’m all for the idea, mind you. This isn’t me arguing against it, but rather trying to consider what’s stopping us (and the answer is probably “rich people that don’t like sharing” as usual).
- Comment on AI ‘wingmen’ bots to write profiles and flirt on dating apps 3 weeks ago:
And if “yourself” is just not likeable, working on that is also hard in a number of ways, from first realising and acknowledging the things you can improve to actually committing to self-improvement. But for the same reason, someone will appreciate it at some point. If being yourself is respectable, being a better version of yourself is even more so.
- Comment on Gaming chat platform Discord in early talks with banks about public listing 4 weeks ago:
I mean, I get it. If I’m working on something and hit a snag, posting in a forum where the response time may be measured in days or more until someone replies with further questions, to which I then reply at my earliest convenience and wait another day for a response, then have to see when I next have time to try the advice and hope that settles it…
Well, I’d certainly prefer to get input right when I’m working on it, while I have the time and mindspace for it. In that light, maybe forums simply aren’t the best solution anymore, or at least not by themselves. But integrated chats have been tried before, haven’t they? What was wrong with them?
- Comment on Gaming chat platform Discord in early talks with banks about public listing 4 weeks ago:
Oh but there’s a shit ton of documentation that’s only available on discord and that’s not searchable anywhere and that will just be wiped out of discord ever dies.
I absolutely agree. That’s part of the point I’m trying to make: The death of Discord might well cause those things to be lost. Hoping for it to crash and burn is counterproductive because thay will only do damage.
Instead, we should figure out why people moved to Discord in the first place, because…
Forums are the best for knowledge accumulation via user interactions
…clearly, whatever makes forums “the best” isn’t enough. Then what is it that Discord does better? How can forums work to match it and entice people back?
I don’t know. I’m not one of the people that preferred Discord and I can’t speak for them. But maybe we should listen first instead of wishing ill on them and hoping their favourite places die.
- Comment on Gaming chat platform Discord in early talks with banks about public listing 4 weeks ago:
Well, you have one part right: it won’t disappear magically. If it does, it will do so quite naturally, unless someone actively preserves it, e.g. by archiving the chat histories.
Of course, you might mean the people with the knowledge that wrote those histories in the first place. You know, the people that used Discord instead of forums. The people that left forums. The people that apparently didn’t want to use forums.
Why would you assume they’d move to forums? Clearly there was some reason they chose to use Discord, so why wouldn’t they just find a replacement?
Discord isn’t the issue. I mean, Discord has plenty of issues, but this particular one is a cultural one. Unless we find a way to entice people back to forums (or some other publically indexable platform), they’ll just keep going elsewhere.
So maybe instead of condemning Discord we should ask “Why do people prefer it?” Then we can figure out how to address that and actually do something about the root of the issue.
- Comment on Gaming chat platform Discord in early talks with banks about public listing 4 weeks ago:
They probably don’t intentionally use it to store information so much as quickly and conveniently exchange answers and questions. Forums have evidently proven inadequate for that purpose, so unless people find a better solution and make it stick, the lesson sure won’t.
- Comment on Gaming chat platform Discord in early talks with banks about public listing 4 weeks ago:
assuming Discord wouldn’t be replaced by something equally closed off from easy public access
That’s what I mean by issue of culture. I don’t think the habit of gathering on discord-like services to quickly exchange info will change, and if the explosion of bsky is anything to go by, people will just find the next shiny, pretty and well-funded platform that totally definitely won’t enshittify somewhere down the line to pay back their venture capital investors.
We’d be cutting the weed without pulling the root.
- Comment on Gaming chat platform Discord in early talks with banks about public listing 4 weeks ago:
It’s still information. I agree that it should be available publically, but information available to few is still more than information available to none. I agree that you shouldn’t have to join a Discord server to get that information, but eliminating it entirely so that not even those who do join can access it doesn’t help anybody. It would only hurt a few, but a few is still more than zero.
It’s an issue of culture, so simply eliminating one repository doesn’t fix anything. They’d find some other messaging service to congregate on.
That’s not to say Discord are saints and there is nothing wrong with either their business or their platform. That is a separate issue I think we all agree on.
My point is strictly about the hypothetical deletion of Discord over the drift towards opaque information silos: It won’t help.
- Comment on Gaming chat platform Discord in early talks with banks about public listing 4 weeks ago:
It also has plenty of utility for non-information-storing purposes. It’s more of a cultural issue than an issue with the tool.
Besides, wouldn’t it take all the information there to its grave as well, making its death a net information loss? After all, information confined it is still information stored somewhere, just not as easily accessible directly from the Web.
- Comment on Why I am not impressed by A.I. 1 month ago:
Just don’t expect them to always tell the truth, or to actually be human-like
I think the point of the post is to call out exactly that: people preaching AI as replacing humans
- Comment on Reddit temporarily bans r/WhitePeopleTwitter after Elon Musk claimed it had ‘broken the law’ 1 month ago:
In theory, asking isn’t illegal and truth is a defense against charges of slander and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn his desire for domination extends to children. In practice, you’re probably a few billion short of laws to apply.
- Comment on No one takes time to parse which germans in germany between 1933-1945 supported the NAZIs and which didn't. 1 month ago:
There were resistance movements, some of which got quite famous. Most well-known to me would be Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian who was quite vocal about his opposition to the Nazi regime and eventually participated in plans to assassinate Hitler. It failed, as we know, and he was sentenced to death for his role. He very much grappled with the question of whether murdering a tyrant was a sin, but eventually came to the conclusion that it had to be done either way.
He also petitioned the allies to differentiate between Germans and Nazis once the war was over, pertinent to your post.
- Comment on Psst, the Americans are asleep, post some eggs 1 month ago:
Feed him enough of it and it will work
- Comment on HDMI 2.2 cranks the bandwidth to 96Gbps and aims to eliminate audio sync issues forever 2 months ago:
I’m not the smart person you replied to and I don’t know for sure, but given many modern circuits have become very fine and compact, I’m not optimistic about your chances to repair it. It would depend on the nature and extent of the damage, of course, but if you’re an amateur, I think you’re better off replacing (though you might get away with replacing just a part instead of the whole device).
- Comment on Self-Driving Waymo Cab Smashes Into Delivery Robot 2 months ago:
There should be an open communication standard that all robots use to communicate with each other.
Yes!
And it will only be used for good and nothing nefarious.
Oh no
- Comment on I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone 2 months ago:
Ads is from advertisement, not adds
- Comment on Garter snakes 4 months ago:
That is a very sweet compliment, thank you very much!
I always aspire to be better than my teachers, who were as competent in their subjects as they were boring and hard to listen to. I may not have the same depth of knowledge, but I try to make it more approachable at least.
- Comment on Garter snakes 4 months ago:
Isn’t that why we’re all here? I assume the average layperson wouldn’t concern themselves enough with the different definitions of “venomous” to make a meme about it or respond with an apt explanation and commentary for how that could be communicated.
- Comment on Garter snakes 4 months ago:
Specialists in a specific subfield being pedantic about their subfield? Inconceivable!
Technically, both assertions are true - under the respective definitions of their field.
Formally, if the question is ambiguous as to which definition it’s aimed at, either answer without clarification is incorrect* because it assumes a premise that isn’t specified.
Practically, which answer is right for the question’s purpose is a coin toss between coincidentally useful and accidentally misleading.So really, both of them should respond that way.
* Note the difference between “(contextually) right”, “(factually) true” and “(formally) correct”:
I can make formally correct statements based on factually wrong premises like “All cats are blue. My dog is a cat. Thus, my dog is blue.”
Conversely, I can make factually true statements that happen to be right despite being formally incorrect: “Some cats are black. My dog is not a cat. Thus, my dog is not black.”Both of these assume the common context of the culture and vocabulary I am accustomed to: While some cats are blue and some are black, my dog is not a cat, falsifying both the second premise and the conclusion of the first example. The second example is formally incorrect, because the negative association of the minor term (my dog) with the middle term (cats) doesn’t imply any connection with the major term (black, meaning the category of black things).
However, a different context can alter the facts of the premises: Suppose I’m doing an exercise where I assign animals to groups, visually coded with colors, and cats belong in the blue group. Further, suppose I have only one pet, a cat I nicknamed “dog” (for example because it acts like a dog). That would alter the contextual premises: “blue” and “black” would refer to the respectively color-coded animal groups, while “My dog” would unambiguously refer to the cat of that nickname, since there is only one animal I own that fits that label. In that context, the first conclusion would be both formally and factually correct, while the second would be neither.
Take away the second premise of each example, however, and the implication becomes formally incorrect, no matter which definition I use for the first premise, because there is no established relationship between my dog and the category of colors it does or doesn’t belong to. The respective conclusion might still be factually true, but that would be a coincidence of context rather than a formally deducable result.
That has nothing to do with the topic at hand, I just felt like rambling about formal logic and its relation to reality and communication.
- Comment on EU disease agency considers quitting Elon Musk’s X over disinfo 4 months ago:
The (ideal) most reasonable approach for public information organs, in my opinion, would be to use all the channels that are available - Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, but also X for the share of people that can’t be arsed to move (or don’t want to, because the people and communities they care about haven’t). I’d even count Facebook, Instagram, Reddit among those channels, as much as I resent those companies, as well as Lemmy and the other fediverse services (I’m not super informed here), a blog, RSS feeds, maybe an email subscription service too, just to be sure.
In fact, I think diversifying your presence would be a great thing in general - platform exclusivity is turning out to be a quite toxic and disadvantageous concept. Well, it has been for a while, but it’s starting to become more visible.
The real restriction is of course the technical infrastructure and personell to maintain all these presences. You could use of a content distribution system that takes a picture, a long text and a short summary to generate appropriate posts for all these platforms, but you’d still need people monitoring and responding on the various platforms, ideally people sufficiently familiar with the respective culture to communicate effectively.
- Comment on Frog's Gift 4 months ago:
Nah, there was another contender, but he was a fuckin nerd with big, scary words and headachy sentences and got bullied out of the race.
(The nerd is a general analogy to reasonable people, not any specific person or group)
- Comment on Frog's Gift 4 months ago:
Or the server move
- Comment on On bugs... 4 months ago:
The only cats I’ve got are con-cats, unfortunately, but they do put things in a row.
I’d love to work more with animals - pythons, anacondas, pandas, cats… Alas, I am stuck with SQL and Power BI, for better or for worse.
- Comment on On bugs... 4 months ago:
Data Analyst: So what do you want to measure? What question do you want to answer?
Customer: Can you do a column chart, where I can see how many Orders we have?
Data Analyst: Column chart? What’s the Axis? Per day?
Customer: No, per month.
Data Analyst: Right, so new Orders per month?
Customer: No, how many we have in general, new and old.
Data Analyst: Do you mean the old ones still open at the start of the month?
Customer: That’s a good idea, yeah. Actually, can you add the ones we complete in that month too?
Data Analyst: The amount of completed orders? That would double-count them.*shared moment of confusion*
Customer: Don’t make it so complicated, I just want to see how many orders we had.
Data Analyst: Let me ask again, what question do you want to answer?
Customer: I want to know how much our teams are working.
Data Analyst: As in, how many orders they’re completing?
Customer: I also want to see if we need more people.
Data Analyst: Like, if they can’t complete all their orders? So basically, the rate of completed versus new ones?
Customer: Ooooh, good idea, can you put that rate as a line over our chart of new, old and completed orders?Customer: Oh, and the warranty returns too! They need to be processed as well, that’s also work.
Customer: Actually, we have this task tracking for who does which work for the order or warranty return.
Data Analyst: Shouldn’t we use that to track how much work the teams are doing?
Customer: Yes, put it in the chart too.
Epilogue: The Customer got a separate chart for the tasks - turns out I’m not charging by the chart, so you don’t need to cram as much as possible into a single chart. They also were persuaded to stick with “Old” and “New” to show the total workload, with the “Old” bars providing an indicator for how much stayed open and whether the backlog was growing.