skisnow
@skisnow@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Who did this 😂😂😂 9 hours ago:
CHAIN “SNAPPER” - Comment on Most American headline 10 hours ago:
Earlier this week Bernie Sanders called for an end to “school lunch debt”. The senator, and one of the Democrat candidates for president, tweeted that it “should not exist in the wealthiest country in the history of the world” and pledged to “provide year-round, free universal school meals” if he won the White House.
LOL, imagine thinking Democrats would nominate someone standing on a “let’s feed poor people’s kids” platform. Was never going to happen.
- Comment on Your help needed: PhD research on why people choose to self-host 1 week ago:
Sure, I’m just bemoaning the fact that you’ve taken cloud hosting to be the default. It’s as much a complaint about the world in general as anything specific to you. Good luck with it all.
- Comment on Your help needed: PhD research on why people choose to self-host 1 week ago:
I’m old enough to consider the framing of the question to be weirdly loaded.
It does not feel that long ago where people would be asked to justify entrusting their product’s functions and data to a bunch of strangers who can make unilateral decisions about your service with zero comeback. Now we’re being asked to justify not doing that.
- Comment on German court sends Volkswagen execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal 1 week ago:
Yeah, the second one. It’s the ones prepared to do shit like that who get promoted in the first place.
- Comment on Techno feudalism, here we come 1 week ago:
Having spend some small time in the information theory and signal processing world, it infuriates me how often people champion LLMs for writing things like data dictionaries and documentation.
Information is measured in information theory as “the difference between what you expected and what you got”, ergo, any documentation generated automatically by an LLM is by definition free of Information.
- Comment on Techno feudalism, here we come 1 week ago:
What’s currently pickling my noggin is how I’ve been seeing “new model smashes benchmarks by an unexpectedly huge factor” headlines every month for the last two years, and yet somehow no matter how many models suddenly score 99% on tasks that they used to score 20% for, I’ve not actually found the damn thing any more helpful or reliable than it was in 2023 for anything real-world. I’m starting to think all these supposed breakthroughs they keep having are being hugely overstated.
- Comment on U.S. inks bill to force geo-tracking tech for high-end gaming and AI GPUs 1 week ago:
The image of China as an uncreative, uneducated backwards nation of drones good only for assembling phones, hasn’t been the reality for at least a decade.
A lot of people in the West don’t realize this because to this day there’s a vicious cycle of people only import cheap Chinese crap because China has a reputation for only making cheap crap because people only import the cheap crap. They don’t realize that China is also making top tier products, because nobody’s trying to import top tier Chinese products.
- Comment on Common British L 1 week ago:
The British national dish is curry.
- Comment on Speak American 2 weeks ago:
There is a set of ISO codes for each language, but it’s not catchy used as an icon, and are also implicitly Western-centric by virtue of using the Latin alphabet.
- Comment on Speak American 2 weeks ago:
I wish there were some internationally recognized symbols to represent languages as distinct entities from their countries of origin, but the idea of trying to make some seems really unpopular for some reason.
There’s other languages that have far more politically contentious flags representing them - at least all the English-speaking countries are broadly allies. Spare a thought for the Taiwanese who have to select a People’s Republic of China flag, even though the language is as much theirs as it is the PRC’s, or the large number of Russian-speaking native Ukrainians who have to select the flag of the country who’s bombing them and their families.
The notion of a country owning a language is fraught with toxicity (indeed, Russia’s claim to vast swathes of Ukraine leans heavily on it), and if languages had their own flags we could sidestep the whole issue.
- Comment on Stack overflow is almost dead 2 weeks ago:
Same, it’s largely doing pretty much as the article implies, replacing StackOverflow for when I need the correct runes to do something specific.
- Comment on Stack overflow is almost dead 2 weeks ago:
For real. You can tell how good a programmer someone is, by how good they think an LLM is at programming.
- Comment on Stack overflow is almost dead 2 weeks ago:
Yup. I once decided to spend an afternoon answering questions on a framework I was expert in, as a kind of profile-building exercise to help with job hunting, and after around the third smug self-satisfied comment picking me up on some piece of irrelevant bullshit I deleted my account.
- Comment on YSK that in 16 States in the USA has banned Ranked-Choice voting, including 5 that has just banned it in 2025, and 6 of those bans happened in 2024. 2 weeks ago:
It’s even worse than that - they don’t just “do absolutely nothing to change that”, they actively whip each other into line by loudly blaming third party voters for not giving them the votes that they somehow owe to their big money party.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Western expats in Japan are notorious for hating every other Western expat in Japan. It’s even got a name, “My Japan Syndrome”.
- Comment on Apple executives ban Fortnight from the App store 2 weeks ago:
What’s more, Windows S Mode proved perfectly that you could offer the “safe” functionality that Apple claim they need to protect their customers, without fucking things up for people who wanted to take responsibility for vetting applications themselves.
- Comment on Microsoft shuts down email account of International Criminal Court chief prosecutor 2 weeks ago:
I’m currently in the long tedious process of replacing all my details for every website and service with an email address at a domain I actually own, before some AI bot at Google decides that some random shit violates their TOC and deletes my Gmail.
- Comment on ‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’ 2 weeks ago:
Having your home valued at $4,400,000 is what most of us would call a nice problem to have.
- Comment on “This script is fantastic. Let’s get Julia Roberts to play Harriet Tubman.” 3 weeks ago:
It’s such an insane story that I wonder what the other side of it is. It’s easy to imagine the guy just having got out of a meeting ten minutes earlier with “if you don’t get Julia Roberts into a movie by the end of the week, I’ll see you never work in this town again!” ringing in his ears.
- Comment on Netflix will show generative AI ads midway through streams in 2026 3 weeks ago:
Yes. This is basically the core of why capitalism eats itself.
You don’t have to be evil or short-sighted to be a CEO, but if you don’t do evil and short-sighted shit to pump the share price there’s a high probability the board will replace you with someone who will.
This is why I believe the government should hold stock and sit on the boards of any company that gets publicly listed. Much easier than tying yourself in knots with an adversarial system of complex regulations.
- Comment on Netflix will show generative AI ads midway through streams in 2026 3 weeks ago:
Sure, but they have a crazy large amount of data and an army of Data Science PhDs who sat down and calculated they’d make more money increasing their margins on people who’ll put up with it, than they’d lose pissing the rest of their customers off.
All the rest of us can do is leave our Torrents running and keep our ratios up…
- Comment on “No Apple tax means we will lower prices” - Proton announces lower prices for users by up to 30% after US ruling against Apple fees 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, having only just switched from GMail to Proton last week my heart sank when I saw “Proton are MAGA”.
Then I spent three minutes reading up on it and it’s like, the CEO said one thing about policy on regulation of big tech that was critical of the Democrats for not doing enough, and the internet has decided that means he’s MAGA.
- Comment on I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down. I just didn’t expect them to be such losers 4 weeks ago:
It sounds ridiculous now with everything that’s happened in social media in the meantime, but I can see that being a thing in 2006 when the vibe of social media was very different to what it’s become now. Back then it was just a tidy little PHP site for you to chat and share photos with friends and family on. Literally nothing appeared in your feed that wasn’t a post from a Friend. It was basically a Whatsapp group with a photo gallery feature.
Since Facebook didn’t have the baggage it has now, it’s much easier to read refusing to join your girlfriend’s circle of friends and family back then as a wider rejection of her as a person, same as if you refused to join her family Whatsapp group chat.
I’m not taking her side here, but I wanted to give a bit of perspective for people looking at it through the lens of 2025.
- Comment on Why is nobody mad about TGI Fridays taking the lords name in vain? 4 weeks ago:
It’s not uncommon for some sects to write G-d instead of God as a handy workaround, and even then “God” is already a euphemism for the Tetragrammaton rather than His actual name. So in that vein using “G” on its own is probably safe.
- Comment on Liquid Trees 4 weeks ago:
I think the problem is putting them in those dumb tanks where a tree would be, as if to say “do this instead”. The principle would be fine if they got a bit more creative with it and played to its strengths, e.g. if you make a train platform out of it, or the railings of an overpass, or the external wall panels of buildings etc.
Ofc OOP didn’t actually provide a source so we’ve no idea what the creators were actually thinking…
- Comment on ‘The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen’ | The most persuasive “people” on a popular subreddit turned out to be a front for a secret AI experiment. 4 weeks ago:
Russia are every bit as active in leftist groups whipping them up into a frenzy too. There was even a case during BLM where the same Russian troll farm organised both a protest and its counter-protest. Don’t think you’re immune to being manipulated to serve Russia’s long-term interests just because you’re not a conservative.
They don’t care about promoting right-wing views, they care about sowing division. They support Trump because Trump sows division. Their long-term goal is to break American hegemony.
- Comment on ‘The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen’ | The most persuasive “people” on a popular subreddit turned out to be a front for a secret AI experiment. 4 weeks ago:
Yeah I was thinking exactly this.
It’s easy to point to reasons why this study was unethical, but the ugly truth is that bad actors all over the world are performing trials exactly like this all the time - do we really want the only people who know how this kind of manipulation works to be state psyop agencies, SEO bros, and astroturfing agencies working for oil/arms/religion lobbyists?
Seems like it’s much better long term to have all these tricks out in the open so we know what we’re dealing with, because they’re happening whether it gets published or not.
- Comment on List of Alternatives to Adobe Programs 5 weeks ago:
Like maybe a GIMP 3.0?
- Comment on That's all folks, Plex is starting to charge for sharing 5 weeks ago:
You posted almost verbatim what I was about to write. It’s a proper “don’t shit on my pie and tell me it’s a blueberry” moment. That’s not what friends are.