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- Comment on We poisoned the whole planet so our eggs wouldn't stick to the pan 🙃 18 hours 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 1 day 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 1 day 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 2 days 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 🙃 2 days 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. 2 days 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 days 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 days ago:
Your customers have noticed the decline in quality, guarantee it.
- Comment on Experts Alarmed as ChatGPT Users Developing Bizarre Delusions 4 days 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 4 days 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 6 days 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 1 week ago:
The ones that are dumb enough to do this won’t be getting jobs to be replaced anyway.
- Comment on Does the average person have no critical thinking? 2 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 Does the average person have no critical thinking? 2 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 2 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.
- Comment on YKK’s Self-Propelled Zipper: Less Crazy Than It Seems 3 weeks ago:
Playing Smooth Jazz Funeral by Collapsed Lung
- Comment on Discord co-founder and CEO Jason Citron is stepping down 3 weeks ago:
Discord is just another social media site that has a whole lot of people fooled into thinking it’s not creating profiles on them for advertising. Gonna get real obvious real soon though.
I guess thats OK for community dev teams and stuff - like it works well, users can come and accesa the faq or support and leave. But it can leave a walled garden of data in there if they want to move elsewhere later though.
Larger issue is the people that share their whole lives there as a quasi-Facebook. That’s all getting hoovered up and sold to the highest bidder - alongside data like exactly what activity you do on your PC (processes running when and where for how long etc - Discord monitors a lot)
- Comment on Discord co-founder and CEO Jason Citron is stepping down 3 weeks ago:
Better though because you don’t need an account, and can gain a lot of anonymity via an eggdrop or vpshell etc.
- Comment on This is real 4 weeks ago:
You’re not alone. I see this shit and I say aloud “woww” and pass my phone to my partner. I’ve never seen such unhinged shit from the official white house communications team.
This is stuff any self-respecting 15yo would be embarrassed to post. I know they have been posting other cringey memes recently too. Seems like the person managing the account came straight from 4chan.
- Comment on The box that Doom comes in will play Doom 5 weeks ago:
The most gen-x/millenial throwback thing about this set is the random card pack that has a chance to include a “signed cacodaemon rookie card”. Genuinely funny that you’d have to buy multiples of this set to try and collect the whole set of cards.
I don’t mind this stuff, I mean people spend stacks of cash on far more worthless and non-functional collectactables.
- Comment on How likely is it that Trump will be the first President assassinated since Kennedy? 5 weeks ago:
A bullet never went through his ear. The FBI amended their statement to say he was ‘grazed’ by a bullet or a bullet fragment, after initially questioning if he had been hit at all (because his medical team withheld all information from them during the investigation - which was unusual and suspicious). I mean you could see plain as day just a few weeks later when he removed the bandage his ear was almost completely undamaged.
- Comment on How likely is it that Trump will be the first President assassinated since Kennedy? 5 weeks ago:
They like this one though - he’s very easy to manipulate. Why get rid of him when they can just get everything they want from him.
- Comment on Testing vs Prod 5 weeks ago:
Most importantly - the time and people = money.
My last job had a dev, UAT, and prod environments because they knew it was important enough to the business to pay for them.
I dont pay me anything for running my home environment - so, there is only production. And lots of backups.
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 1 month ago:
For Shure maybe, but what about for other audio products companies?
P. S. I unironically believe 2025 may be looked back on as the year of the Linux desktop. May have finally got through the trough, we’ll see though.
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 1 month ago:
Upgraded to Linux or Windows 11?
Because nobody is claiming you’ll lose functionality with Windows 11, so your post seems to imply Linux but I’m unsure.
- Comment on EU: These are scary times – let's backdoor encryption! 1 month ago:
Yeah, means Signal would just not have a presence eg an office or local routing/CDN servers in the countries that demand backdoors.
It would mean slower service for anyone in such countries, but the service would not stop working or become less secure.
It’s negative either way, as it chips away at the legitimacy of private E2E chat, and legislators the world over seemed determined not to learn that there’s no such think as “backdoors, but just for the good guys”. You either have a resilient end-to-end zero trust encrypted system or you don’t.
- Comment on China plans world’s first fusion-fission power plant 1 month ago:
Not sure if you’re being sarcastic but boats splitting in half is not uncommon, as far as boat structural failures go it’s a relatively common one.
Stats on such a thing are unavailable but there are many news articles regarding boats splitting in half. I’d hope the safety factor on a fission reactor is several orders of magnitude higher than a seafaring vessel.
- Comment on AI crawlers cause Wikimedia Commons bandwidth demands to surge 50%. 1 month ago:
So, uh. What about Lemmy?
They can also crawl this publically-accessible social media source for their data sets.
I’m on board with abandoning mainstream social media, but my point is that your suggestion would not solve the problem just relocate it. A better solution to the AI conglomerates stealing everyone’s data from the open Internet is legislation and regulations - ie tackling the whole ‘stealing data’ component, along with stronger privacy regulations for everyone to make it harder for them to do the same in the future. It’s nice seeing the EU taking some positive steps, but we will not see the US take any steps in that direction anytime soon, due to corporate capture of their politicians and the AI companies all being in the top 10 most wealthy companies in the US.
- Comment on Logitech is dropping support for its oldest Harmony remotes 1 month ago:
I’m bummed about this, but it’s not a shock given they retired the brand back in 2021. So much for “we will support these devices for as long as they continue to be used” however. This will generate a lot of e-waste.
I have an 880 that my family use regularly with the TV/AV/etc. I don’t mind so much navigating the three remotes and several buttons to get movies or TV running, but it’ll be annoying having all the extra remotes out on coffee tables all the time now, and repeated instructions to the rest of the fam on how to use them 🥲
- Comment on Logitech is dropping support for its oldest Harmony remotes 1 month ago:
Their app is predominantly a web front end. You could previously program your remote entirely via their website years back iirc. They had to program this component as you say for getting new remote profiles.
To be fair, why would they bother programming a ‘local only offline mode’ for your specific use-case when Internet connectivity was ubiquitous long before these devices were released?
Like yeah in retrospect it would be helpful now, but as a business decision it would have made very little sense to Logitech.