Aceticon
@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Are Cars Just Becoming Giant Smartphones on Wheels? 2 days ago:
In Europe, not having a car generally is perfectly fine
In cities.
For those living in the countryside, not really, as distances are huge and public transport is rare (think a single bus that stops at a bus station a km or two away and passes maybe once every 2h) or non-existent.
That said, over 70% of people in Europe live in urban areas.
- Comment on GOG shares their thoughts on preservation in the face of payment processor crackdowns 2 days ago:
Here in Europe, GOG support pretty much all the local payment systems (they’ll make available as selection the ones for your country on checkout) most of which are pretty straightforward to use nowadays an even come integrated with the banking phone apps.
Personally I switched from Paypal to one of those on my GOG purchases due to the whole censorship debacle.
- Comment on User "threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works" is banning users for downvoting his posts. 3 days ago:
Thinking out loud, one way hashes would work as a way to keep the id of user votes secret whilst avoiding vote duplication.
- Comment on User "threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works" is banning users for downvoting his posts. 3 days ago:
People with a very high sense of responsability towards others generally avoid taking on responsabilities were their own mistakes might cause problems to others - it’s a “weight on the shoulders”.
People who seek power, on the other hand, generally tend to do it because of perceived social prestige or what they can do with that power.
This is a well known phenomenon: for example there are tons of sayings about how (political) power should give to those who don’t want it, and there’s actually a Harvard Business Review article from over a decade ago about how they investigated this in companies and found that companies where the CEO unexpectedly got the position rather than seek it, in average outperformed the rest of their industry.
- Comment on User "threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works" is banning users for downvoting his posts. 3 days ago:
You get similar “petty dictator” behaviors in other areas such as bouncers and police officers.
Some people are little more than bitches of their own subconscious inferiority complexes.
The other kind of will also calously fuck other up, Sociopaths (who seem to be present day society’s natural winners), unlike these types don’t do it because they feel the need to somehow prove their superiority over others, it’s just because others stand in the way of their personal upside maximization and they simply don’t care if other are hurt as long as they themselves gain from it, so they’re actually very different from these petty dictator types.
- Comment on Microsoft still can't convince folks to upgrade to Windows 11 6 days ago:
Proton is integrated with the Steam app in Linux, so usually you just install the game and then run it from Steam and it just works in Linux even though it’s a Windows game, without you having to know anything about Proton.
Similarly with you can use something like Lutris or Heroic which does the same for Wine and game stores like GOG (it even integrated with the store and downloads the game for you, same as the Steam app).
For some games you might have to end up to know enough to tweek settings, though for Steam and Proton that’s often just changing the Proton version you’re using for a game in its game launch setting in Steam, which is hardly complicated.
The need to really understand what’s under the hood is generally only when leaving these standard paths: for example if you’re trying to run a pirated version of a game (which might even be for perfectly legit reasons: for example one of my Steam games won’t run in Linux no matter what I do, but the pirated version works fine, probably because of the DRM in the official version) or some old obscure game CD you have around, as the scripts in Steam, Lutris or Heroic that silently configure Proton/Wine correctly for a game might not at all exist for those unofficial or older installers.
- Comment on Exactly Six Months Ago, the CEO of Anthropic Said That in Six Months AI Would Be Writing 90 Percent of Code 6 days ago:
It’s almost as if they shamelessly lie…
- Comment on If a country needs to employ state-sponsored patriotism, it's usually because there's nothing to be proud of about the country. 6 days ago:
It’s actually a general rule for humans:
“I’m beautiful”
“I’m confident”
“I’m strong”
“I’m intelligent”
“No you’re not, if you were you wouldn’t feel the need to tell it to others because they would find it out themselves.”
When people or organisations unprompted harp about their “qualities” it’s safer to assume until proven otherwise that they lack those qualities.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
It’s not the AIs which are crap, its what they’ve been sold as capable of doing and the reliability of their results that’s massivelly disconnected from reality.
The crap is what a most of the Tech Investor class has pushed to the public about AI.
It’s thus not at all surprising that many who work or manage work in areas were precision and correctness is essential have been deceived into thinking AI can do much of the work for them and it turns out AI can’t really do it because of those precision and correctness requirement.
This will hit more people who are not Tech experts, such as Lawyers, but even some supposedly Tech experts (such as programmers) have been swindled in this way.
There are a ton of great uses for AI, especially stuff other than LLMs, in areas where false positives or false negatives are no big deal, but that’s not were the Make Money Fast push for them is.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
“This is the technology worth trillions of dollars”
You can make anything fly high in the sky with enough helium, just not for long. (Welcome to the present day Tech Stock Market)
- Comment on The UK just took a harder stance on Banksy than genocide 1 week ago:
It’s even more interesting: the people currently in charge in the party in Government got the leadership following a campaign of slandering as anti-semited the previous leader of that Party until he left, which was done mainly with the help of Israeli-linked Jewish groups in Britain.
Given that Britain has FPTP like the US it was pretty much guaranteed that getting the leadership of that party would put them in Government sooner or later.
They de facto were bought by Israel in this way.
The only good thing that can be said about these people is that they stay bought.
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 1 week ago:
Port Royale 3 from GOG on my Linux machine (I do not run Arch, BTW).
Mind you, I think Port Royale 2 is a better ballanced with less fancy graphics version.
- Comment on Aged like milk 1 week ago:
Live by the sword …
- Comment on Time to bash Americans again 1 week ago:
Well, in my experience it’s the immigrants themselves doing it and never the locals.
Further, even in a poorer European country like Portugal I’ve never heard say, Germans or French calling themselves “expats” even though those are much more wealthy nations - it’s pretty much only Brits and Americans living there who speak of themselves as “expats”.
- Comment on AI adoption rate is declining among large companies — US Census Bureau claims fewer businesses are using AI tools 1 week ago:
I had to do this myself at one point and it can be very frustrating.
It’s basically the “tech makes lots of money” effect, which attracts lots of people who don’t really have any skill at programming and would never have gone into it if it weren’t for the money.
We saw this back in earlier tech booms and see it now in poorer countries to were lots of IT work has been outsourced - they still have the same fraction of natural techies as the rest but the demand is so large that people with no real tech skill join the profession and get given actual work to do.
Also beware of cultural expectations and quirks - the team I had to manage were based in India and during group meetings on the phone would never admit if they did not understood something of a task they were given or if there was something missing, so ended up often doing the wrong things or filling in the blanks with wrong assumptions. I solved this by, after any such group meeting, talking to each member of that outsourced team, individually after any such meetings, and in a very non-judgemental way (pretty much had to pass it as “me, being unsure if I explained things correctly”) to tease from them any questions or doubts.
That said, even their shit code (compare to us on the other side, who were all senior developers or above) actually had a consistent underlying logic throughout the whole thing, with even the bugs being consistent (humans tend to be consistent in the kind of mistakes they make), all of which helps with figuring out what is wrong. LLMs aren’t as consistent as even incompetent humans.
- Comment on Foolproof advice 1 week ago:
The stinkier the cheese, the more the fascination!
- Comment on Foolproof advice 1 week ago:
… not forgetting to add a term of endearement, such as “sweetie”, “honey” or “babe”.
- Comment on Time to bash Americans again 1 week ago:
In my experience people will use “immigrant” to talk about were they’re from by referring their nationality (i.e. “I’m a Portuguese immigrant”) or explicitly adding a “from” and then using the country name (i.e. “I’m an immigrant from Portugal”).
If talking about where they’re an immigrant in, they will explicitly use “in” (i.e. “I’m an immigrant in The Netherlands”).
Even though “emmigrant” is about where you were born and aren’t living in anymore and “immigrant” is about were you went to, in my experience emmigrant is only ever used when physically in one’s country of original and talking about living elsewhere (i.e. when in Portugal I would say “I’m an emigrant” whilst when in The Netherlands I would say “I’m an immigrant”).
It’s funny since as I’m writting this I remembered that when I first left my country of birth to go live abroad it actually took me a while to figure out the proper usage of the whole immigrant/emmigrant thing.
As I said, I was an immigrant in The Netherlands and worked often with other immigrants from all over there (mainly because until I learned Dutch I could only work in English-speaking environments and in my area - software engineering - those attracted immigrants), and most people would use “immigrant” when talking about were they came from (i.e. “I’m a French immigrant”) and I only ever heard expat used instead of immigrant by people from Anglo-Saxon nations, overwhelmingly Brits and Americans.
That said, “expat” was used as a single word combining both “immigrant” and “emigrant” - in other words, unlike with the immigrant/emmigrant pair, the single word expat is valid both when one is physically on one’s country of origin and when one is physically in one’s host country: when I lived in Britain I did hear Britons saying that they were “expats” and meaning it as “living elsewhere than Britain”.
And yeah, 2nd generation don’t call themselves expats, but they also don’t call themselves immigrants. It’s only people from outside talking in general about people who are the direct descendants of immigrants in a country who will use “2nd generation immigrants” for the groups as a whole. Calling somebody who is a national of that country and has immigrant parents “an immigrant” in that country is only ever used as an insult by Far-Right extremists.
- Comment on Time to bash Americans again 1 week ago:
From my own experience as an immigrant in The Netherlands, “expat” is generally used by Americans and Brits and nobody else. I mean, I’ve seen on or two Ozzies using it but it’s way rarer with them and I’ve never seen, for example, other Europeans immigrants there refereing to themselves as “expats”.
I think “expat” is more a thing of people who thing they come from a “great country”, as if somehow it’s a priviledge for the other country to have them there.
- Comment on Time to bash Americans again 1 week ago:
From my observation when living in The Netherlands as an immigrant (from Portugal) sometimes working in companies with lots of foreigners, most of us said of ourselves as being “immigrants”, except Americans and Brits who often said they were “expats”.
Curiously, generally the other people from different nations, including the Dutch, would use immigrant rather than expat when refering to the status of the self-proclaimed “expats” in that country - “expat” was very much their label for themselves.
The Americans and Brits were there in average for just a long as the rest.
I don’t think it’s really length of stay, at least not directly, I think it’s about the immigrant believing or not that their country of origin is a “greater country” than the country they’re living in. You can see this for example in places like Spain where British retirees have retired to and live the rest of their lives in their own Little Britain communities calling themselves “expats”.
This also matched to how some of the British immigrants most pissed of about their homeland (for example, a gay guy who had to move to The Netherlands to marry his partner, as back then that was not allowed in Britain) made a point of using “immigrant” for themselves instead of “expat”.
It’s about national delusions of grandeur, IMHO.
- Comment on The USA prided itself on a nation of immigrant, heck even the Statue of Liberty says it. When did immigrants (US citizens from the old world) become anti immigrant and why? 1 week ago:
There are two ways to deal with one’s position in the Social Ladder: one can either concentrate one’s efforts in climbing up or one can concentrate one’s efforts into keeping the ones below down.
IMHO, the US used to have mainly the former, but not anymore, whilst the UK (at least by the time I got there, in the 00s) has mostly the latter (and judging by this traditional idea that “people should know their place”, it has been so for a long time).
- Comment on The USA prided itself on a nation of immigrant, heck even the Statue of Liberty says it. When did immigrants (US citizens from the old world) become anti immigrant and why? 1 week ago:
I keenly remember this Polish immigrant in Britain interviewed on TV who was in favor of Brexit very overtly so than no more people came.
- Comment on The USA prided itself on a nation of immigrant, heck even the Statue of Liberty says it. When did immigrants (US citizens from the old world) become anti immigrant and why? 1 week ago:
More broadly, it’s all Tribalism.
You’ll see it at many levels, not only towards the “outsiders” in nation terms (and examples are not only the anti-immigrant discourse but also in the discourse mainly blaming a country’s problems on some “foreign power” or other, in both cases as insiders didn’t have vastly more power than such outsiders) but also at various other tribal levels (race, political party, region, city and even town in so-called “small town” environments).
The human tendency from Tribalism will turn even otherwise “good people” (but not very competent when it comes to introspection or having a strong keen sense of what is Just) into mindless “us vs them” drones who are easy to manipulate into blaming outsiders for the outcomes of the actions of insiders.
- Comment on Everyone wants a turn 2 weeks ago:
Free Wheely!
- Comment on Leaked emails link NHS data privatiser Palantir to Jeffrey Epstein 2 weeks ago:
Somebody is going to be getting a Non-executive board membership or millionaire consulting “gig” from one of Tiel’s companys or one from one of his friends…
By this point in time in Britain that kind of I thing has been going on long enough to almost be tradition.
- Comment on ‘Scan your face’ laws for the web are having unexpected consequences 2 weeks ago:
I think the current bunch and their idiot flunkies are already the kind of people one would not want to have access to any information that could be used to blackmail or harass a person.
People who have old ladies arrested for demonstrating against mass murder of children due to their ethnicity, are NOT morally upright people who when in power would never abuse information about who watches what porn.
- Comment on Still no EU action on Israel, despite Gaza famine 2 weeks ago:
Well, Holocausts naturaly end once the untermenschen ethnicity has been wiped out.
- Comment on Still no EU action on Israel, despite Gaza famine 2 weeks ago:
If you claim to represent the entirety of the Jewish People you get a “Free Holocaust Pass Valid For Executing One Holocaust ONLY”.
- Comment on 7 years later, Valve's Proton has been an incredible game-changer for Linux 4 weeks ago:
Well, credit to Steam then.
I didn’t know one way or the other if Proton development ended up in Wine or not, much less if Steam was or not directly participating in Wine development, all I knew is that Proton was forked from Wine in the beginning.
- Comment on 7 years later, Valve's Proton has been an incredible game-changer for Linux 4 weeks ago:
I’ve tried switching to Linux on my home desktop several times over the last 3 decades, but because I always use that machine also for gaming it always had some Windows in a dual boot configuration and I always found myself not really booting Linux more than once in a while.
Since my last switch, maybe a year ago, even though Windows is still there in duat boot, I’ve only ever booted it once and that only to move some data files which were in the main windows partition over to a data partition I have in a seperated drive (were most of my data files already resided but a few were still elsewhere) so that I can cleanly share it between both OSes.
Whilst I know more than enough to muck around with Linux and Wine configuration (and for example had to do the latter to get a pirated version working of a game I have in Steam whose official version won’t run in Linux no matter what I do), it’s very seldom that I actually have to do it (and I don’t just use Steam with Proton but also Lutris with Wine for GOG games), whilst in my previous try maybe 5 years ago getting anything but DOS games to run under Linux was a major PITA.