TheTechnician27

@TheTechnician27@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Star Trek: Starfleet Academy actor Kareem Diané decides to do their AMA on Lemmy!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago⁩:

  And floss!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Global powers see Wikipedia as fundamental target for manipulation— The Times says Wikipedia was "hacked" and calls it an "important victory" for Jeffrey Epstein⁩ ⁨⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t want to distract from the article itself, but on a generic level, The Signpost is worth reading for anyone interested in the “behind-the-scenes” of the project. They published another article about this a couple weeks ago.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Spanish Court Orders ProtonVPN and NordVPN to Block Pirate Football Streams⁩ ⁨⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I wouldn’t use Mullvad when it’s openly hostile to peer-to-peer torrenting. Even outside of the obvious – piracy is one of the besf and most unique use cases for a VPN – I use torrents wherever the option is available on for legal downloads because that’s normally faster, spares a load on the server, and strengthens the download’s resiliency. That Mullvad wants to restrict that is their (reasonable) call, but it’s not one that’s going to get my money.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ɘkil ɘd ꙅdɘɘw⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The text is also larger and the speech bubble closer to her mouth and in a more visually interesting part of the frame. Additionally, the second bubble starts with an ellipsis, indicating even subconsciously that you shouldn’t start there.

  The height, of course, is the main factor.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Uhhhh sure?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, shit. I’m sorry. I’ve heard some wild takes on Lemmy lately, but I still shouldn’t have assumed.

  But now I still have to disagree; this is part of a worldwide psychological experiment on Google’s part.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Uhhhh sure?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I use and routinely contribute to OSM, and I hate Google Maps both ethically and because the actual underlying map is just half-baked.

  This is a ridiculous explanation for why GMaps suggests nominally slower routes alongside the main one. What’s happening in the OP image is clearly a bug, not Google begging you to pretty please do 8 superfluous minutes of data collection for them.

  • Some people have areas they’re more comfortable with. For example, some people are afraid of driving on a bustling highway or through a claustrophobic downtown. Alternative routes make it more likely that this person can forego a few minutes in favor of something more comfortable.
  • The router isn’t omniscient. Sometimes the human using the router knows more about local conditions than the router itself does, e.g. that a road it’s taking you through has a problem. Alternative routes again make it more likely that you give the person a satisfactory route.

  This comment is just fucking stupid and based on nothing when a much more cogent explanation exists. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that you travel farther, but seriously?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Walmart And Pepsico Rigged Prices And Supercharged Food Inflation⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  FritoLay is the top snack brand nationally and holds more than 50% snack market share in dozens of metro areas.

  Which I just have to say is astounding considering how trash Frito-Lay’s snack products are besides Doritos and Fritos.

  • Tostitos are the most inferior fucking tortilla chips I’ve ever had; they’re bland despite being salty as hell, and they’re so fragile that they somehow constantly break under the salsa. The salsa, meanwhile, is trash for the price point (and mediocre regardless with zero variety). At over 4 USD per jar, you’re getting into “actually decent salsa” range.
  • Lay’s regular chips are so thin it’s like you’re biting into air, and the taste is as generic as they come. Baked chips are fine but not special. And the kettle chips are solid enough, but the price point is insane; they aren’t nearly good enough when competing kettle chips are much better at that price.
  • Ruffles are so greasy that they make me nauseous after not very many, and I have a strong tolerance for oil. I can down an entire family-sized bag of chips in half an hour like it’s nothing, and somehow I’d probably turn down a bowl of Ruffles.
  • Rold Gold are pretzels. They exist. They sure do taste like pretzels. Good job, Rold Gold. Anyone else could do what you do.
  • Base cheetos are fine I guess. The puffs are just… Why would you ever buy these other than brand recognition? They’re not even close to the top for this. Herr’s, Jax. And they’ve been riding the flamin’ hot high for years – so much so that PepsiCo shamelessly put it in Mountain Dew at one point. They don’t have real flavor; it’s just heat for the sake of heat. It’s such a middle school snack food.
  • I have to give Fritos props for just being a solid, if basic, snack food. Your dad loves them, and he’s got a good point.
  • Doritos I recognize are absolute trash, but they do taste really good, they don’t have a lot of direct competition, and they’re clearly the crown jewel in Frito-Lay’s lineup. I still think they can’t justify their absurdly inflated price point, but I can understand craving some. These days, since these are majorly overpriced anyway, I’ve decided I prefer to get snacks less frequently but get something nicer like Zack’s Mighty Rolled Tortilla Chips. It feels nicer in the long run. Helps too that I think every Doritos flavor but one is non-vegan.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit chess⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Twitter user discovers Cunningham’s law. More at 11.

  (This, by the way, is one of the main engines behind massive collaborations like Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, etc.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rate my setup guys⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re going to the bathroom, you’re not playin’ Battlefield.

  You’re shittin’ in a bucket, *you’re playin’ Battlefield."

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rage for the machine?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Rage Against the Rage Against the Machine

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When a Weather Forecaster Needs a Fruit to Prove It’s Him: Another Signal of Ambient Trust Collapse in Tech⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Wow, thanks! Let’s switch topics. I’m trying to start a business where I sell fruit to weathermen. Can you help me with that?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When a Weather Forecaster Needs a Fruit to Prove It’s Him: Another Signal of Ambient Trust Collapse in Tech⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not even the style on its own*; it’s that you wrote a frankly bloviating short essay about an obvious concept that can be summarized as “most people who watch the weather don’t know what a public key is or how to use one”. I’m disgustingly long-winded, and even I wouldn’t expend that much effort. The style is what escalates that from “padding a high school essay” to “Oh, yup, a GPT wrote this.”

  * “It’s not X, it’s Y” yeah, yeah, I know.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When a Weather Forecaster Needs a Fruit to Prove It’s Him: Another Signal of Ambient Trust Collapse in Tech⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Dude, I’m sorry for saying this because I get this a lot for often overly formal writing, but…

  Your writing reads like it’s LLM-generated. Like, really heavily reads like an LLM wrote it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Me an intenactually:⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I want to roll a marble down it.

• And if I seem overamorous, lady, what can I do?lemmy.world ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩ | ⁨0⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google criticizes Europe's plan to adopt free software⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I wasn’t necessarily suggesting apt in the CLI; just the APT repository generally, which ZorinOS’ built-in package manager has. If sudo apt install hardinfo will find it, I have to imagine the GUI frontend will. Granted I don’t use Ubuntu because it and its derivatives are terrible, so I can’t say for sure, but this sure doesn’t seem like their fault.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The UN Voted to Make Food A Human Right, Only Two Countries Voted No: Israel and USA⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  HR News is a ragebait blog which seems to be LLM-generated and which nobody should be reading.

  I’ll keep citing this example: a few weeks ago, one of their articles posted to Lemmy had a headline to the effect of “Study finds 15% of Reddit content is AI-generated.” They stated the year and journal but no titles, identifier, URL, issue, or even authors. After an exhaustive search, I found that the study didn’t exist; the article made it up.

  HR News should be banned outright from any community that values truth (or even just content not hallucinated by an LLM trying to get angry clicks).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jikipedia turns Epstein’s emails into an encyclopedia of the his powerful friends⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
  • Highly approve as a long-time Wikipedia editor.
  • “Jiki” sounds like an ethnic slur, and I have no idea why.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google criticizes Europe's plan to adopt free software⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Okay, so:

  I tried installing a program called “hardinfo”. My ZorinOS software store didn’t find it through flathub.

  That’s fair. Fragmentation is a real thing on Linux, and it seems like Ultimate Systems didn’ put their software on Flathub.

  So I googled it, found a .deb file, which my Zorin store loaded up to install.

  So instead of just using apt – like every introductory tutorial to Ubuntu and its derivatives leads off with – you chose to do it (effectively) the Windows way that you’re familiar with where you go hunt and peck around the Internet for an install file. It’s an understandable mistake, but the blame from this point on lies squarely on you.

  Then I hit install, and it spits out a message like “Software was not installed. Requires these three dependancies, which will not be installed”. Didn’t tell me why they didn’t install. Just said "Hardinfo needs these programs. Good luck figuring it out asshole.

  You didn’t have the dependencies, and it told you which ones to install. Why does it need to tell you why it needs them? Nice to have, I guess, but if it’s mandatory, it’s mandatory. No amount of explanation is going to get you around the fact that this software will not function without them. Dependencies aren’t a Linux thing; they’re a reality of modern programming. And I imagine apt would’ve automatically resolved this and asked you to also install the deps.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A succulent meal⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Probably hard to from their hospital bed, but I don’t see what this feast fit for a squire has to do with that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Truly identical twins as actors would present really interesting opportunities for a stage play⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not that it requires two (did you mean twin?) actors; that’s what I meant about “not fully writing the play around them”. The example here has someone wake up in a different place than they just were a split second ago, and the effect is really convincing because they’re twins. You could make this work without twins, but it’s a neat bit of trickery that’s easy and seamless because there are twins.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Truly identical twins as actors would present really interesting opportunities for a stage play⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I have seen The Prestige a long time ago! I totally forgot.

• Truly identical twins as actors would present really interesting opportunities for a stage play
  Submitted ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨showerthoughts@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨24⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS; Wikipedia considers banning site⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s not true.

  Okay, then you’ll need to explain the annual emails I’ve gotten saying “Your application to the Wikipedia Library has been approved” after I apparently tripped and fell and filled out a manual form applying to the library every year.

  It doesn’t seem selective if at all once you meet the four aforementioned criteria, but you do need to manually apply.

  The idea you’re talking about, meanwhile, is nonsensical and doesn’t address basically anything about the massive structural problems blacklisting archive.today imposes. I wholly support expanding out the Wikipedia Library, but even this pie-in-the-sky version of it falls too far short of what archive.today provides – and that’s just going forward in an ideal world where you can snap your fingers and make this fantasyland version of the WML happen as soon as archive.today is blacklisted.

  The “backcatalogue”, so to speak, is what’s going to be the most catastrophic part of this by far.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS; Wikipedia considers banning site⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you have a very severe misunderstanding of the Wikipedia Library, which I have access to and frequently use. The WML allows active editors in good standing to access paywalled sources.

  • You must have an account which is 6+ months old, has made 500 edits, has 10+ edits in the last month, and is not blocked.
  • You must first apply to gain access.
  • For publications with limited subscriptions, you must individually apply on top of your WML access.
  • Critically: the WML does not host any of these publications. You are taken to them via a portal and given an access token.

  I can’t emphasize enough how absurd this comparison is. “Solar farms exist; building a Dyson sphere would be basically the same thing. Let’s get to work.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨a very tasty snack⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  some mf really threw an entire hog carcass into a blender and said “yea let’s sell that as food. Great.”

  “Dead animal in my dead animal? Revolting.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS; Wikipedia considers banning site⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So my suggestion, brainstorm ideas that would make you independent:

  Editors have been doing this for years.

  Make agreements with IA to improve retention,

  The IA already lives on a razor’s edge in terms of copyright and is doing everything it thinks it can to push that. Many websites leave the IA be because having free, independent archives can benefit them, but it doesn’t take a lot for a copyright holder to say: “Hey, you’re hosting my IP verbatim, I sent you a takedown request, you didn’t comply, and I’m taking you to court.”

  You can’t just “make agreements” for the IA to violate copyright law (more than it arguably already is). They’re already doing the best they can, and pushing them to do more would endanger Wikipedia even worse. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the IA dying would be a project-wide apocalypse.

  roll your own archiver,

  I’d bet it could be done if the IA went down, triggering a project-wide crisis, but among other things, I’m sure the Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t want to paint a target on its backs. We’re very cautious when it comes to copyrighted material hosted on Wikimedia projects, and this would be dropping a fork into a blender for us.

  make a deal with news orgs to show their articles as citations (this last one I actually like most the more I think about it. A good negotiator can call it advertising for the news org and you’ll at the same time not infringe on copyright like archive[.]today is).

  I don’t think I understand one. The Wikimedia project gets to host verbatim third-party news articles? This is creative but completely unrealistic; you’d be asking news organizations to place their work under a copyleft license for citing on Wikipedia (that’s what we host except for minimal, explicitly labeled fair use material that has robust justification). It’d be a technical nightmare any way you slice it, and logistically it’d be a clusterfuck.

  Even if you magically overcame those problems, Wikipedia exists to be neutral and independent, and this “*wink wink nudge nudge * ;)” quasi-advertising deal would look corrupt as fuck – us showing preferential treatment for certain sources not based on their quality but on their willingness to do us favors.

  If you wait until point of no return, the choice has already been made for you whether you like it or not. And worst part is that you’d scramble to find a solution instead of the best solution.

  Here’s the thing: we know. This RfC is full of highly experienced editors deciding if Wikipedia is going to amputate. Option A means immediate, catastrophic, irreversible, mostly unfixable damage to Wikipedia. That is something that needs to be thought through, and your suggestions – which are appreciated for showing you’re giving it real thought – reflect that people who don’t regularly edit can’t really, viscerally understand how completely screwed Wikipedia is by this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS; Wikipedia considers banning site⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t really see it as a complicated issue.

  That makes sense from (what I think is) an outsider’s perspective. From an insider’s perspective, here’s the problem:

  • Wikipedia has a strict verifiability policy.
    • This policy states that “Each fact or claim in an article must [correspond to reliable sources]”.
    • This policy is the bedrock of Wikipedia. The project is fundamentally unsustainable without it, and we’re still undoing damage from decades ago when the policy either didn’t exist or was too loosely enforced.
    • I’m making a third bullet point because I cannot emphasize enough how much “just ignore it lol” cannot work.
  • Hundreds of thousands of articles have citations sourced to archive.today.
    • This is despite the fact that the Internet Archive is prioritized whenever possible. We even have a prolific Internet Archive bot that (when possible) automatically recovers citations.
    • The Interrnet Archive complies with blanket takedown requests of a domain very easily. Even if we ignore the ones going forward because now both resources are unreliable, archive.today would have untold millions of webpages archived which the IA does not – many of which are used on Wikipedia.
    • Archive.today will archive material that the Internet Archive will simply fail to archive because, on a technical level, it’s just better at capturing a static snap of an article (which is what we want). It’s especially true for paywalled articles, which the Wayback Machine is often stymied by.
  • This would also make the Internet Archive the only remaining avenue for archiving URLs, meaning Wikipedia effectively collapses if something happens to the IA (granted that’d already be catastrophic with archive.today, much moreso than archive.today’s hypothetical removal).
  • Archiving URLs isn’t just some incidental thing.
    • Citations are the backbone of Wikipedia. Casual readers might find them comforting to have. Researchers will rely on them. But editors cannot operate without them. We might actually use them more than readers do, because they help us a) check what’s already there, b) better understand the subject ourselves, and c) expand out the article.
    • Link rot is so much more pervasive than I think people fully grasp. When I’m writing an article, if possible, I archive every single source I use at the Wayback Machine and archive.today, because relying on the link staying up is objectively a mistake.
    • The security archives offer generally just incalculably reduces the workload and mental load for editors.

  If you’ve ever tried to add a citation on Wikipedia to a sentence that says “citation needed”, you’ve rubbed up against Brandolini’s law. A corollary is that it’s much, much harder to cite an uncited statement than it is to create one. If you remove archive.today, you flood Wikipedia with hundreds of thousands of these. It’s dampened a bit by the fact that the citation metadata is still there and that some URLs will still be live, but I cannot emphasize – as an editor of nearly 10 years, with over 25,000 contributions, and who’s authored two featured articles – that you’d introduce a workload that could never be done, whose repurcussions would be felt for decades.

  Even if you somehow poofed away all that work, there are bound to be tens of thousands of statements in articles you have to get rid of because they simply cannot be reasonably sourced anywhere else. For many, many statements, this is not incidental information independent from the rest of the article; many of these removals would require you to fundamentally restructure the surrounding prose or even the entire article.

  It’s hard for me to explain that you just have to “trust me bro” that those people voting “Option C” take what archive.today did very seriously and recognize that either option is going to mean major, irreparable damage to the project. Wikipedia is a lot different from the editing side than it is on the reading one; sometimes it’s liberating, sometimes it’s horrifying, and this case it’s “I could use a hug”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS; Wikipedia considers banning site⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As a longtime editor who makes heavy use of archive.today (it’s often much more effective than the Wayback Machine), I’m deeply conflicted about this, and this is disgusting behavior on the part of archive.today; I hope they see prison time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨outlawing pedestrians⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  No, it’s not a lie. You literally cannot walk from where this sign is posted to MetLife stadium while obeying New Jersey traffic laws. And I don’t mean some ad hoc one either; I mean e.g. ones about not playing Frogger across 10 lanes of highway traffic.