Aceticon
@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on I know. Somehow, I've always known. 10 hours ago:
Luke was a late bloomer whilst Anakin was a child genious.
- Comment on Motorola confirms GrapheneOS support for a future phone, bringing over features 2 days ago:
Well that’s a shame.
I’ve been looking around for a replacement to my aged Samsung A6 (which has been given an extended life by replacing the factory ROM with something with less bloatware, but is still pretty limited in terms of memory) which is not a Surveillance Outpost for just who knows how many nations and just about any companies willing to pay the 3 cents of whatever for the data, and all the Linux and degoogled Android makers only have 10"+ ones, which are too big for my use case which carry a tablet on a coat or trousers back pocket when I’m going to be sitting down somewhere and waiting for something so that I can read books and maybe browse the internet on their free WiFi.
Personally I would LOOOVE a small Linux tablet, but I’m OK with some kind of privacy respecting Android which isn’t riddled with backdoors mandated by governments which have Information Courts issuing Secret Bulk Information Collecting Orders, like the US and the UK.
- Comment on Motorola confirms GrapheneOS support for a future phone, bringing over features 2 days ago:
Guess I know which brand my next smartphone upgrade will be.
If they did some nice 7" tablets too, that would be perfect.
- Comment on California introduces age verification law for all operating systems, including Linux and SteamOS — user age verified during OS account setup 3 days ago:
My point is that forcing age-gates on anything provided via such formal systems incentivizes kids to go around those systems and install themselves an OS that doesn’t do age-gating to evade it, not necessarily at school were they’re unlikely to control the hardware, but at home.
Even before this, MS and Google have used their money to create a situation were very few of the formal systems for kids to access computers, such as schools, put anything other than their OSes in front of kids, so only kids who are naturally geeks/techies might have tried Linux out on their own - those kids would always end up trying Linux out because they’re driven by curiosity and enjoyment from tinkering with Tech.
My point is for the other kids, the ones who wouldn’t try out on their computing devices any OS other than the mainstream stuff that they’ve been taught about at school: with this law California might very well just have created a strong incentive for those kids to go around those formal systems and try Linux out on hardware they control, which not all will, but certainly more will that they would if there wasn’t a law in place to limit what they can do when using a mainstream OS - if there’s one thing that is common in all societies and historical times is that teenagers naturally rebel against outside control and try and find ways around it.
- Comment on Prediction market trader 'Magamyman' made $553,000 on death of Iran's supreme leader 3 days ago:
Yeah, the market predicts jack shit nothing until the insider trader enter it and the “market signal” due to the insider traders happen just before the actual events being “predicted” happen, making them a useless prediction unless you’re algorithmically gambling on a related domain.
- Comment on California introduces age verification law for all operating systems, including Linux and SteamOS — user age verified during OS account setup 3 days ago:
Think about it this way: how do people learn enough about it to program for and admin Linux systems as adults?
Unless things changed a lot since my days (granted it was over 3 decades ago), the path to knowing all about using, administrating and programming software for running under Linux was through being able to play with it for fun as a teenager.
That said, thinking more about it, this might actually push more teenagers to try Linux out to avoid age-gating since they can just download a distro from anywhere in the World and install it in their own PC.
- Comment on California introduces age verification law for all operating systems, including Linux and SteamOS — user age verified during OS account setup 3 days ago:
Ok, that does make sense.
- Comment on China tests world's first megawatt-class flying wind turbine 3 days ago:
If you’re producing electricity in it, you can always bring some water up and use some of that electricity to extract hydrogen from the water to make up for any leaks.
It really depends how bad the leaking is since that dictates how much weight of water is needed to be brought up and electricity must be used for hydrolysis.
- Comment on China tests world's first megawatt-class flying wind turbine 3 days ago:
Wasn’t the way the Hindenburg burned due to both the Hidrogen AND the alumium oxide paint covering it?
- Comment on California introduces age verification law for all operating systems, including Linux and SteamOS — user age verified during OS account setup 3 days ago:
LibreOffice can be used to produce and consume Pornographic Content in the form of of erotic stories, so it makes sense (within the “logic” of this law) that it’s age-gated.
- Comment on California introduces age verification law for all operating systems, including Linux and SteamOS — user age verified during OS account setup 3 days ago:
You’re confusing GenX with Boomers - the explosion in Tech was in the 90s, not the 70s.
Even then, most GenX weren’t involved in Tech since when they learned how to use it, it wasn’t yet normalized and widespread, so only really people who found such things interesting went for it, and generally the personality type of those attracted to power over others is almost the opposite of the personality type of those attracted to strict and complex logical structures as used in programming computers.
- Comment on California introduces age verification law for all operating systems, including Linux and SteamOS — user age verified during OS account setup 3 days ago:
Considering the massive number of servers running Linux used in the industry, this sounds like a good way to kill the Tech Industry in California.
- Comment on The same people who rage against authority love moderating communities where their ideology is the only one allowed 3 days ago:
Anybody who sees Authority as a responsability is naturally averse to having it because they would feel the weight of it and would feel bad if, whilst holding Authority, they made a mistake and others got in some way hurt because of that.
Those who see Authority as power to advance something (be it their own personal upsides or some idea they believe in) with little or no feeling of responsability towards others (be it not all directly or they’ve suppressed it by convincing themselves their actions are somehow “for the greater good” hence any bad they do with the authority has that grand excuse to salve their conscience), have no such aversion to holding authority.
That posture towards authority of people of the second kind applies more broadly to all manner of things which serve to pressure, convince or manipulate others (Authority is generally power force something on others) so of course they also have no aversion to using other such tools, including using ideology to manipulate others, and sometimes that means passing themselves as somebody who holds a certain ideology, and that includes Anarchism.
So yeah, you’re going to find that certain people who parrot Anarchist talk aren’t in fact people whose Principles mean they’re naturally Anarchist but rather people being Performative Anarchists in order to fit-in and manipulate others, drive by entirelly different Principles, and such people are absolutelly pro-Authority as long as they’re in control of it.
In summary: there are two types of people who sound Anarchist
- Those whose personal principles means they are averse to people controlling other people. There are naturally against any form of Authority.
- Those who want to control other people and are in a specific situation where Theatre Of Anarchism can advance their objectives. These are against forms of Authority which hinder their objectives but are in favor of forms of Authority which advance their objectives.
IMHO, the best way to spot the second kind from the first is to look for the often repetition of common slogans and having a superficial level of ideology with no actual tracing back to personal principles since they learned the ideology at an intellectual level rather than being drived by their Principles - i.e. what feels Right and what feels Wrong - to that formal ideology.
By thew way, this method to identify the real ones from the performers also works for all other ideologies and even things like Faith.
- Comment on Name this Paper 3 days ago:
Guess that’s one way to measure the calories of a cracker.
- Comment on Current events dictate that I post this. 5 days ago:
Remember boys and girls, if the bomb falls from the sky either from a plane or ridding the nosecone of a missile or is shot from the barrel of a tank it’s not Terrorism, it’s only Terrorism if it’s otherwise.
- Comment on Fr🤮nch 1 week ago:
Well, to be fair, not having a proper appreciation for terroir is just barbaric.
- Comment on Data centers are now hoarding SSDs as hard drive supplies dry up 1 week ago:
Exactly.
People behaving as “consumers” supports the current system and hence supports the harmful side effects of such system, from the systemic suffering from wealth inequality to ecological destruction.
Whilst very few of us, living within this system, can’t in practice stop living within the system, we can refrain from living in accordance with the rules of the system which are not imposed on us via removing all other choices or force, but which we are “nudged” or manipulated to follow using marketing or even propaganda.
- Comment on Data centers are now hoarding SSDs as hard drive supplies dry up 1 week ago:
So best change your investment strategy, then.
If people persist in riding this bubble out of greed, it’s only fair if they get burned when it blows up.
- Comment on Data centers are now hoarding SSDs as hard drive supplies dry up 1 week ago:
Agreed.
One single potentially good thing in the middle of bad things still adds to something bad.
My point is that this shit is happening either way no matter how shit it all is, so if we can recognize and extract one good thing out of it at least on the other side we’ll have one good thing, whilst if we don’t, we’ll have nothing good at all.
- Comment on Data centers are now hoarding SSDs as hard drive supplies dry up 1 week ago:
The silver lining in all this is that when this bubble explodes we’ll probably have a glut in the supply of HDDs and SSDs, driving prices down.
Just hold any plans to upgrade your hardware for a year or two and you’ll end up better of (for many it will even be a good exercise to wean oneself out of the Consumer Society’s mindless “instant gratification” impulses).
- Comment on Data centers are now hoarding SSDs as hard drive supplies dry up 1 week ago:
I, for one, applaud anything that helps destroy the current Intellectual Property system,
Not the other things, though.
- Comment on he forgor 1 week ago:
Access to entry level positions is pretty fucked up in this because whilst experts will recognized expertise, for anything but smaller companies candidates get filtered out by HR and those people have no fucking clue what expertise outside their domain looks like, so they use proxies for it such as “stamp of approval from higher education institution” so in big companies the candidates without such stamps of approval (or a pre-existing insider contact) never actually get to be evaluated by the domain experts who can recognize that expertise.
That said, if a candidate don’t have at least some domain expertise (so, neither formal study nor having done anything in that area in their free time), sorry but somebody who has actually had the discipline to attend a learning institution and enough capability and domain knowledge to actually passed their exams and graduated is way more likely to be at least decent at it (no guarantee, but the odds are much better) than a random person who never did either. It’s only fair that if you haven’t invested in learning it in some way or other (not necessarily college) you’re not going be seen at the same level as somebody who has actually invested in learning that domain.
It’s only naturally that some kind of expertise validation system for candidates emerges for any kind of domain were some level of expertise is required and as things stand now in most such domains at the entry level that’s colleges (which, IMHO, are better than cronyism-heavy “know somebody who knows somebody” systems), though in many domains something lighter and cheaper (some kind of cheaper test-only option) would probably be better (or, alternativelly, do as it’s done in civilized countries and have higher education be Public, so cheaper or even free).
- Comment on he forgor 1 week ago:
Also having attended college and actually successfully passed its knowledge tests and graduated proves that you have both the discipline and mental capability for certain jobs.
I’m in software development and have been part of the process of hiring people and from the point of view of an employer, for a candidate to an entry level position that college diploma is an indicator that the person in question has the knowledge and capabilities to do that kind of job.
Mind you, in my area fortunatelly there are other ways to indicate that - for example, having participated in Open Source projects or, even better, having your own Open Source project with actual users that you’ve had to support (which in my view can put somebody above somebody else who merelly has a college diploma) - though that’s generally only for smaller companies since large ones will have HR filter candidates before the ever reach the actual domain experts and HR can’t judge skill like that and instead will go for “big formal stamp of approval” shit.
That said, the college diploma stops being important after junior level, unless it’s one from a handful of very prestigious institutions and even then it won’t work on domain experts, only non-expert manager types.
- Comment on We got more games and better games when there was less money being made in the industry. 1 week ago:
That’s just the coding part of the work, which for a modern AAA game (and pretty much all 3D indie games) is the smallest part of the work - modelling, texturing and level design easilly exceed that, and whilst those are the biggest ones, there’s quite a lot more non-coding work, from graphics design to audio engineering.
IMHO modern tools and frameworks have reduced more the works that needs to be done in the coding space than they did in other areas.
Also, in gamedev there’s the exact same problem you see in non-game-related software development: as the tools, libraries and frameworks get better and let devs do more in the same amount of time, the expectations on the capabilities of the software grow, eating up all those gains and more - nowadays you can’t get away with a bunch of lines defining walls on a flat grid space and a handful of sprites with just 2 animation frames each like in Pacman.
- Comment on "Game preservation only works if people care" As GOG doubles down on its commitment to saving old games, it's asking players "who give a s**t" to support its crusade 1 week ago:
Same here.
The whole things has a massive “grift” vibe, especially given that they’re double dipping since supporters of their “Game preservation efforts” still have to pay for those games.
Happy to keep on buying games from them in preference to from Steam, some even from the “Good old game” bucket, just not willing to assume a monthly monetary commitment to some black-box “trust us” which feels a lot like the “Charity as a business” shit from the most sleazy “charities” out there (you know the kind: the ones with CEOs paid massive salaries and were only a small fraction of contributions actually ends up in the charitable objective).
- Comment on The Age Verification Trap... Verifying user’s ages undermines everyone’s data protection 1 week ago:
I thought that was just in the UK…
- Comment on AI contributes to inflating global debt, already approaching $346 trillion or 310% of GDP 1 week ago:
Almost a decade in Investment Banking and I started reading a lot about Economics (from books, not random websites) after the 2008 Crash to try and understand what the fuck had happenned and what was being done about it.
That said, take what I wrote with a large pinch of salt, especially the first part which is an idea that I have of how that part of things work (based on Mathematics and Finance industry knowledge), not a proper peer reviewed theory from Economics.
- Comment on AI contributes to inflating global debt, already approaching $346 trillion or 310% of GDP 1 week ago:
Mainly the poorer owe that to the richer.
Also the richer owe that to each other.
The last part could sorta be unwound in a more or less peaceful way (though very interventionist and the amounts involved are so large that we would see an ever worse explosion of corruption than so far), but the first part would require a Revolution that tore down all existing ownership structures.
- Comment on AI contributes to inflating global debt, already approaching $346 trillion or 310% of GDP 1 week ago:
Just remember that every year the World’s Economy has to grow enough to cover the interest rate payments in all outstanding debt.
There are two ways to offset this:
- Reduce the amount of outstanding debt.
- Lower interest rates (which is what was done after the 2008 Crash, leading to the slowest recovery from a Crash in at least a century) so that for the same amount of debt there is less interest to pay.
Overall debt is increasing as per the article.
Interest rates are below historical average since what was done after 2008 which was supposed to be temporary wasn’t fully wound back, so there’s a lot less room there for central banks to do something about it.
Actually solving the underlying problems behind the 2008 Crash was pushed to the Future with some interest rate engineering, and it looks a lot like The Future Is Today, and this time around rather than just an over-indebtness plus Finance overextension problem, we seem to have over-indebtness, a massive Tech bubble (like in 2000) AND asset price bubbles in all manner of asset classes, from economically peripheral things like crypto to core things like housing.
I’ve been expecting a massive crash since I saw what passed for a “solution” back in 2009-12, but shit is turning up to be way worse than I expected due to all the additional resource malallocation and mispriceing in the Economy.
- Comment on AI Is Destroying Grocery Supply Chains 1 week ago:
“Computer says” is a pretty standard excuse for doing fucked up shit as it adds a complex form of indirection and obfuscation between the will of a human and the actual actions that result from that will.
Doesn’t work as an excuse with people who actually make the software that makes the computer “say” something (because the complexity of what us used is far less for them and thus they know what’s behind it and that the software is just an agent of somebody’s will), but it seems to work with even non-expert (technology fan) techies, more so with non-techies.
With AI the people using the computer as an excuse just doubled down on this because in this case the software wasn’t even explicitly crafted to do what it does, it was trained (though in practice you can sorta guide it in some direction or other by chosing what you train it with) further obscuring the link between the will of a human which has decided what it does (or at least, decided which of the things it ended up doing after training are acceptable and which require changes to training) and the output of a computer system.
Considering that just about the entirety of the Justice System. Legislative System and Regulatory System are technically ignorant, using the “computer says” as an excuse often results in profit enhancing outcomes, incentivising “greed above all” people to use it to confuse, block or manipulate such systems.