pulsewidth
@pulsewidth@lemmy.world
- Comment on Do you care about up/down votes? 12 hours ago:
I’m onto you’re plan
- Comment on Why is Jordan Peterson both a Christian and not a Christian? 1 day ago:
Fair enough. I don’t see Mormons or Jehovah’s as ‘not Christians’ though, nor do they as they believe in Christ as the son of their God - which is really all it takes to be a Christian fundamentally. However I do agree that the practices of the Mormon and JW church are very manipulative and controlling to their followers in the way cults often are, and overall a negative impact to the lives of most of their followers (except those at the top).
When people brand certain Christians as not Christian because they don’t follow Christs teachings the way they believe they should be followed or by some other personal metric then it quickly becomes a ‘No True Scotsman’ situation.
- Comment on What's going on with Borderlands 2? Steam is giving it for free, but the game has 23% positive recent reviews. 2 days ago:
Would it shock you to know that ALL of these are in the Steam terms of service also?
The only really sus one to me is the forced arbitration clause, and Steam also had that til they were pressured to remove it by multiple legal cases, including a class action brought to them by Steam user just last September. It is only sus because it’s outdated - companies are generally removing them now rather than adding them. legal.io/…/Valve-Removes-Mandatory-Arbitration-fr…
RE: remaining top 5 bullet points, 3 of the remaining 4 bullet points are uncontroversial bullet points about anticheat. The fourth is banning modding, which is also just a heavy handed anticheat attempt, and not uncommon for online games to add to their ToS to allow banning at their discretion. Either way its clumsy at the least as some mods can be harmless eg HUD mods for colourblind people and deserves some negativity - but not to this level, given everything else is just so boilerplate.
Collected data types: these are all for if you buy stuff with a credit card / paypal / etc off 2k/parent company Take 2. Remember, they sell games with in-game purchases. They also have an app which has location permissions option which is what the precise location is about.
So yes - again, as OP said, this is nothing controversial if you have paid attention to ToS meaning and content over the past 20 years.
Aside from the forced arbitration crap - which Steam, Microsoft, Amazon, Lyft, Uber, Google, AT&T - and hundreds of other major companies all snuck into their ToS over the years, and many have now been legally pressured to remove by consumer rights group. That is stupid because it shows their legal team is behind the times, companies are mostly removing their forced arbitration clauses nowadays because it has been the cause of many lost class actions.
- Comment on Why is Jordan Peterson both a Christian and not a Christian? 2 days ago:
I can completely believe you - but this man is a certified psychologist and has lectured and even written psychology textbooks, right? When I watched a few videos in the past (circa 2017) to find out who this guy the alt right was falling in love with was, I took away from it that broadly he was a grifter selling himself & books, but as for his discussions on psychology I’m a layman so couldn’t digest some of it. He sure does seem to think the world starts and ends with Carl Jung though, almost every problem had a solution that came back to a Jungian archetype.
- Comment on The AI girlfriend guy - The Paranoia Of The AI Era 3 days ago:
Lol that this has a downvote already.
“Don’t be mean about my AI gf! She’s real to me!”
- Comment on Why is Jordan Peterson both a Christian and not a Christian? 3 days ago:
He literally wanted to open a church and deliver servons every Sunday. He is not an atheist, he is just a charlatan.
Highly recommend anyone interested in him read this article / open letter written by an (ex) close friend and colleague, back in 2018.
- Comment on Why is Jordan Peterson both a Christian and not a Christian? 3 days ago:
He is 100% a Christian - a rather devout and conservative one at that, he just doesn’t like to admit it in public as he doesn’t like to agree to any premise on anything he believes in, or really any statement he’s made - as he’d then have trouble linguistically dancing around it when it was no longer convenient for whatever argument he was in.
If you’ve not read this open letter / article written by a colleague and (ex) close friend of Jordan’s way back in 2018 I highly recommend it to everyone researching him. Though it is long it gives a lot of insight into who he is behind closed doors, and his aspirations.
- Comment on Why is Jordan Peterson both a Christian and not a Christian? 3 days ago:
Succinctly put. In retrospect his behavior is classical grifting, but because he’s so well educated in psychology and has spent decades lecturing students he’s well armed to win over the 16-30yo disenfranchised/semi-intellectual male audience without them realizing.
- Comment on Java at 30: How a language designed for a failed gadget became a global powerhouse 1 week ago:
👍
- Comment on The plan for nationwide fiber internet might be upended for Starlink 1 week ago:
Pros of fibre:
- cheaper: much cheaper than copper or satellites.
- faster: latency is faster than copper and wireless (to satellite).
- very high bandwidth: theoretically unlimited. In practice a commercial fibre optic multicore run for domestic use at street/town level will be pushing ~800Gb/a, and this number generally doubles every few years as tech advances. The new spec being finalised is 1.6Pb/s.
- high stability: does not give a crap if it’s cloudy, foggy, or rainy, or if the trees have wet leaves, or if it’s just a very humid day, unlike all forms of outdoor wireless comms. Does not care about lightning strikes, as copper does.
- long life: 25 to 30 years life quoted for most industrial in-ground fibre, but real life span is expected to be much longer based on health checks on deployed cable in countries with large fibre rollouts. Upgradable without replacing the medium throughout that lifecycle.
- lowest power usage: fibre optic uses far less power and energy than 4G 5G and satellite infrastructure.
Cons of nationwide fibre:
- billionaires who launched thousands of satellites make less money.
- monopoly Internet Service Providers won’t be able to fleece their cable internet customers some of the highest charges for net access in the world.
- people will tell you “uhm acktually wireless internet is the speed of light also as it communicates via photons”, but will usually leave out all of the interference it experiences.
There’s nothing better than fibre optic infrastructure for general public Internet connectivity. Wireless/satellite should only be a last resort for remote users.
- Comment on Microsoft wants Windows Update to handle all apps 1 week ago:
As any current or former Windows admin will know - they can barely handle Windows OS updates without breaking something major every other month.
I mean on the one hand it would be good to do away with all the duplicated efforts of in-app automatic updaters and app ‘agents’ that tie up background resources. But colour me jaded, i think this will just be a walled garden that app developers have to pay to opt into, and will mean users lose control over which apps they trust to update without thinking, and which they selectively update after a ‘hmm i better just check they didnt cause any major bugs’ search. A new revenue stream for MS is the primary goal.
- Comment on talon voice, self hosted voice control of your computer 1 week ago:
Neat, but like others have mentioned, it’s proprietary.
If you want an open source alternative, I believe the best option currently is Open Voice OS - which arose from the ashes of Mycroft.
- Comment on Google Shared My Phone Number! 1 week ago:
You can use YouTube without an account. And without even using their website, bypassing their ads and their tracking.
Android has Grayjay, Newpipe, Pipepipe, Vanced. Windows has Grayjay, Newpipe, Freetube, yt-dl and others. Linux has Red, Utube, Freetube… You get the point.
You do still need a login for age-locked videos, but those are a small subset of YouTube.
- Comment on VCs are starting to partner with private equity to buy up call centers, accounting firms and other "mature companies" to replace their operations with AI 1 week ago:
No, most people do not seek out competitor businesses (or even businesses in other sectors like in this case) so they can fire all the human workers in the hope of making more money.
Non-tax-deductable donations are a voluntary waiver of salary. Most people have ethics and a conscience, its just the greedy minority that fuck it up for the community-minded majority.
- Comment on The Copilot Delusion 2 weeks ago:
“AI is the first realistic means of bypassing [laws and bureaucracy]”
Huge disagreement on all fronts.
The AI companies state in their Terms of Service broadly that users have commercial rights to their prompt outputs, and can even copyright them - while also keeping the output for their own data naturally. It doesn’t bypass laws or bureaucracy… At all. Rather its the billionaires trying to steal all creative arts, coding, and any other industry works they can manage - and package into their “same but slightly different” slop that outcompetes the original creators - with no protection given to those creators whose original has been copied without any kind of compensation or agreement. Its another wealth transfer.
One of many problems the article points out - they don’t invent anything, it’s all just regurgitations of past work. This is the path of stagnation, not innovation.
- Comment on We poisoned the whole planet so our eggs wouldn't stick to the pan 🙃 3 weeks ago:
God fucking damnit I hate how much people on the internet are so focused on bring right they won’t even read what you write properly just so they can find things to pick a fight over. Fuck off lol
You mean like someone going uhmm acktually it’s not technically a poison, I wish people wouldn’t complain about a substance poisoning people when there’s no evidence it’s poison attempting to make a fairly pointless pedandic statement, while also being confidently incorrect?
- Comment on The world was a nicer place before the advent of leaf blowers 3 weeks ago:
The massive jacaranda mimosifolia (native to Brazil) which is dominating my front garden, laughs at your suggestion that it does not leave much mess on the ground.
It regularly carpets the area below it in purple flowers, tens of thousands of small leaves, hundreds of twigs/seed pods and a few larger dried branches. Not just one season either - it flowers multiple times a year with how weird the weather is nowadays. The birds and bees like it though so we’re cool.
- Comment on Experts Alarmed as ChatGPT Users Developing Bizarre Delusions 3 weeks ago:
Ehhh… Your whole point made no sense, and not just the conspiracy theory comment.
“Dismissing the power of this tool is exactly what the owners want you to do”? Really? The tool these same owners are spruiking as the ‘biggest development in computing in the last 20 years’ is something they are trying to downplay? The thing the silicon valley elites are all clamouring to buy stock in and won’t stop cramming into their products as the headline feature is intended to be dismissed? What?
AI isn’t needed for your example of keeping up with news and connecting dots of larger stories - that’s what good journalism is for. Your bunker example has been in the news repeatedly for a long time. It is hard for everyone to be informed of news as it comes though, personally I use a variety of reputable news outlets and still miss stuff. As others said though AI is not the best choice for keeping abreast of news because it can straight make stuff up, and that includes inventing sources for its claims so that they sound more believable - which is really bad if your aim is to be better informed. They also have inbuilt biases and topics that they won’t broach or will have canned responses for, set by their billionaire owners - much like legacy media, so they’re not a secret shortcut to the truth.
- Comment on Experts Alarmed as ChatGPT Users Developing Bizarre Delusions 3 weeks ago:
Just grab a dictionary or crack open the Wikipedia article to see what a ‘conspiracy theory’ is, because what you’re talking about isn’t one.
Billionaires have been building doomsday prepper fantasy islands/compounds/bunkers/silos for themselves ever since the mega-rich existed. New Zealand has been the locale of choice for quite some time, it’s not a theory (it’s fact), nor a conspiracy (multiple rich people buying private jets isn’t a conspiracy either), nor is it a secret (multiple major news articles have covered it for nearly a decade).
- Comment on We poisoned the whole planet so our eggs wouldn't stick to the pan 🙃 3 weeks ago:
Your comment cherry picks the weakest language of the Wikipedia article and studies and ignores the rest. You’ll struggle to find any reputable study anywhere that says “our study proves that X does Y” like you’re asking, because thats not how studies language is conveyed and would be incorrect language to use in a medical study. When 20 studies all say “we have shown a strong correlation between cigarette consumption and cancer of the throat, mouth, and lungs” then you will hear scientists say “the link between cancer and cigarettes is known, and well studied” and news articles will say “cigarettes cause cancer”.
Your suggestion that the only way we’d know for sure is human trials of intentional PFOA exposure is… I’m gonna be generous and say… naieve. Scientists are perfectly fine with using lab, mouse, and emprical cross-sectional studies - that’s all valid scientific evidence. They don’t actually need to take the final Dr Mengele step of subjecting people directly to suspected toxins before they can already draw highly accurate conclusions, especially for something like PFOA that has large sections of the population with high dosages that they can compare against those with low dosages already.
It’s borderline impossible to actually separate out PFAS levels from these other entangled variables, people who are heavily exposed to 1 type of pollution will also be exposed to many others, and theres a heavy association between living situation and PFAS exposure.
Not true. Just one example, we have many population groups that live in areas where groundwater is used for drinking that also live near a firefighting training base/station that has released huge amounts of PFOAs into the aquifers. These populations are otherwise quite normally distributed for age/weight/health/occupation and exposure to other chemicals and perfect for study of PFOAs and have been shown in studies to have much higher levels in their blood serum.
It’s fine though - if you wanna sprikle PFOA on your cereal or something until 100 more studies are done, I can’t stop you. But just know that your tendency to cherry pick data and your unconventional assessment methods of studies is giving you a very poorly informed choice.
- Comment on There is significant evidence that Grok actually inserted information about “white genocide” in South Africa into prompts that didn't appear to be related to this topic. 3 weeks ago:
It is so weird that the AI running on the global new media platform owned by the white billionaire tech idiot known for sharing his hot takes without one second of prior thought, that happens to have come from a prominent white emerald mining family on South Africa, and has professed statements regarding white genocide and ‘the great replacement’ is spreading information about this.
So very, very unexpected.
- Comment on We poisoned the whole planet so our eggs wouldn't stick to the pan 🙃 3 weeks ago:
“To poison” just means to make people ill by ingesting it. PFOAs are quite well studied and are known carcinogens, and definitely toxic according to multiple studies, this is trivial to find on Wikipedia, etc so… I dunno - seems like a contrarian take?
PFOA studies linking exposure to a number of health conditions, including thyroid disorders, chronic kidney disease, liver disease, testicular cancer, infertility and low birth weight. The list goes on, those are just some.
- Comment on Palantir CEO Alex Karp praises Saudi engineers and takes a swipe at Europe, saying it has 'given up' on AI 3 weeks ago:
Your customers have noticed the decline in quality, guarantee it.
- Comment on Experts Alarmed as ChatGPT Users Developing Bizarre Delusions 3 weeks ago:
Lol no, the ‘owners’ of AI want you to think it’s the next leap forward of human evolution to pump their stock prices.
Can you give us some example of the conspiracy theories that you believe are ‘quite true’?
- Comment on Netflix will show generative AI ads midway through streams in 2026 3 weeks ago:
I think you underestimate people’s drive for a bargain.
This was a decade back, but the satellite paytv system here was not cheap. $50/m for base, up to $150/m for full. A technical crew worked out how to pirate it by hooking the verification card up to a dongle on a PC and sending the verification requests from each set-top box over a VPN back to their master device. They sold access to the system for about $100 (for the dongle & setup) and then $10-20/month for full access to the Fox-based service. Went on for years before loose lips sunk the ship, and their were thousands of users when it got busted. No marketing, no Internet presense, just word of mouth “I know a guy”.
The modern Internet-based streaming pirate services that people can buy cheap devices for on ebay preconfigured, and pay $5-10/m for access to all movies and TV? Cheaper and faster access, all online, nobody has to visit your home. Everything is easier and the barrier of entry is lower.
If Netflix and others don’t stop being so greedy, they’ll be reminded that people only play by the rules when the terms are reasonable.
- Comment on China sees the U.S. trade deal as a huge win for Beijing 3 weeks ago:
The US didnt fail to invest in their own industries, its more that most of the US’ industries decided to hand all their manufacturing to China - and not just the primary industries but the secondary and a large part of the tertiary too, all because labour was somewhat cheaper for the corporations, and the health/environmental costs could be ‘externalized’. A lot of side-impacts too - they took all the IP they were given, and stole any more they desired: counterfeit products have never been more rampant.
As the US traded away its blue collar industries, and left blue collar workers in unsteady times, it found that the only things China wanted in return were high quality US food imports and raw materials - relatively inexpensive exports. So a fairly large trade deficit built, and with all the excess capital, China purchased US treasury bonds and property, etc. The largest foreign owner of US debt in the world is China and has been for some years.
Even as economic power ceded, for a long while the US could still exert power through its 50-100 years banked institutional power and goodwill, and US controlled organizations that operate throughout the world, but Trump and Elon have been sabotaging them openly intentionally as fast as they can. The soft power is now all but gone too with world leaders now leaving the US out of major geopolitical discussions - unthinkable just a year ago.
There is no turning the clock back on globalization, but perhaps the first big step for America is getting money out of politics with strong legislation and harsh penalties for those that break it - overturn Citizens United, no more SuperPACs - prise the power away from corporations to dictate law and pick leaders, because they have crafted every issue you speak to. I’m not sure what hope the US has with that in the short term though, you’re living through the second Trump presidency - and he just accepted a $400million
bribegift from the Saudi govt, which his been A-OK’d by his mentally vacant Attourney General. Who knows though, even MAGAs are starting to get pissy with the outward corruption. - Comment on Kids are short-circuiting their school-issued Chromebooks for TikTok clout 4 weeks ago:
The ones that are dumb enough to do this won’t be getting jobs to be replaced anyway.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Most school curriculums nowadays have critical thinking interwoven as important parts of the STEM classes, in both primary and high school. Its not exclusive to college graduates, however if you do a philosophy course then you will have learned the highest level of it - and I’m sure many school systems around the world have varying degrees of quality of education.
But agreed it is absolutely something that people are not born with and must (and should) be taught.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Sorry but that is wrong. You are using the textbook definition of confirmation bias.
Critical thinking “is the process of analyzing available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments to make sound conclusions or informed choices. It involves recognizing underlying assumptions, providing justifications for ideas and actions, evaluating these justifications through comparisons with varying perspectives, and assessing their rationality and potential consequences.”
- Comment on 8BitDo no longer shipping to US from China due to Trump tariffs 5 weeks ago:
Am I wrong or do the 8BitDo controllers almost all have inbuilt batteries of unusual capacities? They could just build them to use standard AAA or AA rechargeables, but instead they do proprietary batteries which 8BitDo happily sell replacements for - sure seems like a path to more e-waste.