sp3ctr4l
@sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on 'We're done with Teams': German state hits uninstall on Microsoft 3 hours ago:
I’ve been calling for degoogling, the need to get rid of Microsoft and supporting FOSS and the need for open protocols in everything for quite some time, I don’t even know how long… and people would use the word “paranoid” or synonyms of it. Now? “You had a point” or “You were right.” - but I tell them that I don’t care about being right.
Yep, same here, exactly.
The Cambridge Analytica nonsense was the last straw for me.
These goons have been knowingly making people angier, more stupid, misinformed and emotionally supercharged for over a decade now, and it has literally destroyed society.
I too got called paranoid and overreacting for years, a decade… and now its more or less common knowledge everything I was worried was or could be happening… in fact was, and in fact did.
No apologies though from anyone who was demonstrably wrong and misinformed about all this for a decade though.
Now all the bigger problems enabled by their acquiescence to ‘the algorithm’ are here, and those are more pressing matters.
People do not understand that you can’t unscramble an egg.
It has been wild to watch sci fi dystopia from movies and books of the last 50 ish years just become reality, watch the vast majority of people just sleep walk into it.
- Comment on Nexus Mods' new owners promise they won't monetise the site to death as users panic at the whiff of venture capital 9 hours ago:
Sorry, I probably should have included that.
I’ve been modding games and making mods for games since before Nexus or SteamWorkshop or anything even existed… I guess people just genuinely have never even heard of moddb these days, like how gamefaqs is an ‘ancient relic’ or w/e.
- Comment on It's that time of the decade where we can bring out this meme 1 day ago:
Classified Halo style drop pod test gone wrong?
… probably they just set up a trampoline and had a competent photographer.
- Comment on Nexus Mods' new owners promise they won't monetise the site to death as users panic at the whiff of venture capital 1 day ago:
Reminder that ModDB still exists, and works.
- Comment on It will 2 days ago:
She just does have uncommonly large eyes.
… I wonder if they’ll work in an entire eugenics/gene manipulation plot thread just to make a joke about sliders in character creators…
- Comment on WhatsApp is officially getting ads 2 days ago:
I forgot WhatsApp existed.
Guess its shittier now.
Mhm. Yup.
- Comment on A game you "didn't know it was bad 'til people told you so"? 3 days ago:
So, I’m an ardent ‘New Vegas is the best 3D Fallout game’ person.
But… Fallout 3 is not a bad game.
It is fun, it is enjoyable. It has solid game mechanics, it has a good number of well written characters and questlines, it is fun to just explore and find crazy shit.
It has flaws, yes.
But it is far from bad.
It just isn’t as good as New Vegas, which imo, basically just did everything FO3 did, but better, had a better overall storyline, refined and improved on all the gameplay mechanics, added in new gameplay features/elements.
- Comment on Crossover episode 3 days ago:
Ahem.
I believe you mean ‘mothie talkie’.
- Comment on Crossover episode 3 days ago:
Moths also arguably do not even have ‘hearts’, at least nothing like most mammal or reptile hearts.
They aren’t multi-chambered.
Its basically just an aorta with a bit of muscle wrapped around a section of it that rhythmically squeezes.
- Comment on Oh no 3 days ago:
This is the car you buy a ‘No soup for you!’ bumper sticker for, and then “vandalize” it over the other two bumperstickers.
I imagine they’d appreciate it as a joke.
- Comment on this thing fucking sucks 4 days ago:
If your body temp is any negative number of Kelvin, your existence is theoretical at best, potentially moving backwards through time, or instantly causing a chain reaction that would obliterate the fabric of reality, at worst.
- Comment on 'We're done with Teams': German state hits uninstall on Microsoft 5 days ago:
I’ve been posting roughly the same response to articles similar to this for over a year now:
‘Hahahahha! People still use MSFT software?’
… I get a lot less downvotes the more time progresses.
- Comment on Home cooking 5 days ago:
Yeah that chicken is absolutely not cooked.
- Comment on Massive internet outage reported: Google services, Cloudflare, Character.AI among dozens of services impacted 6 days ago:
Yeah, a great part of Lemmy’s fundamental design is that it gives the user so much ability to block specific toxic users and communities and even entire instances from being seen by that user.
A user who is interested in self regulating or limiting that potential adrenaline overload … is aided by Lemmy in doing so.
This is significantly different from its nearest equivalent, reddit, operated untill about 2 years ago, when they finally added an actual block user ability.
Still don’t think you can block the entire user group of subreddit communities, the way you can block an an entire Lemmy instance, if you want to.
Also, moderation and admin logs are significantly less opague than on reddit.
To the best of my knowledge, on lemmy, you can’t admin edit the post of someone you are arguing with to frame them, basically, and then turn them into a strawman of themselves, and then win that argument with them, and then ban them… as has happened on reddit.
Also Also, … lemmy at least not yet does not appear to have a problem with a massive flood of ai bots posting god knows what % of the actual content.
…
Not saying Lemmy is perfect.
I’m saying its better.
And I guess I’m also saying there’s a difference between being an alcoholic and enjoying an occasional drink from time to time.
Generally: Yes, of course, approach any online messsge board or social media with caution and skepticism… but different platforms can be significantly more conducive to generating negative mental health outcomes than others…
… short form video platforms collapse your attention span, anything that allows advertisements or ‘influencers’ who are basically just walking talking brand ambassadors lie to you to sell you all kinds of bs…
Thats not present on lemmy, at least not that I’ve seen… so in those ways, lemmy is the marijuana to say Tiktok’s fentanyl.
- Comment on Massive internet outage reported: Google services, Cloudflare, Character.AI among dozens of services impacted 6 days ago:
Speaking as someone who managed to quit smoking, but still uses a vape, who is focusing on doing daily PT from being maimed a while back…
A step in the right direction is a step in the right direction.
Lemmy ain’t corporate like Reddit, it ain’t parasocial, only a very small number of users actually directly link their real identity to their psuedonym, and it doesn’t have a worldclass algo perfecting what content to feed to specifically you.
- Comment on Massive internet outage reported: Google services, Cloudflare, Character.AI among dozens of services impacted 6 days ago:
Holy shit, goddamn near everything is down, nearly everywhere.
Fucking Tracer Tong ending from Deus Ex, hope somebody has a save file they can reload from soon, otherwise… yeah…
- Comment on Massive internet outage reported: Google services, Cloudflare, Character.AI among dozens of services impacted 6 days ago:
Oh no, not Cloudflare!
Oh right I use NextDNS, so anyway…
Oh, its also Google, Twitch, Discord and Etsy?
Ah dang, sucks for those users I guess.
Ahem, annnyyyywaaaayyyy…
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 6 days ago:
Friendly fire incidents are still fairly common even in the modern era…
… ask any Brits deployed to Iraq how they feel about the A-10…
… Pat Tillman was hyped up in the media as an early Iraq War 2 US casualty who died valiantly… when the truth was he was actually killed by friendly fire from his own unit, oh and he actually thought the entire operation in Afghanistan was “fucking illegal”… because Congress is supposed to declare war, not the President…
Even in the RussoUkranian war, right now, in the past few years, there have been tons of incidents of Russians accidentally shooting their own at fairly close range, due to poor coordination, and I’m sure its happened with the Ukranians as well… and thats to say nothing of accidentally drone or arty striking a friendly infantry squad or tank or IFV or what not.
Just go play any modern semi-realistic war game (Squad, Arma 3/Reforger, etc) that doesn’t have a pop up HUD with blue for friend and red for foe, and has friendly fire enabled, and you should be able to see that friendly fire happens all the time with noobs.
…
As for fragging… that term, as it originated in Vietnam, specifically refferred to tossing a frag grenade into an area (often their bunk) where an officer or NCO was.
It was a form of mutiny, essentially, against officers that kept sending men into meat-grinders…
…chewing them out for not maintaining their early M16s which were unreliable as fuck due to being rammed through the production pipeline by McNamara, shoddy quality control from Colt, and everyone just pretending swapping to a new kind of powder in the rounds wouldn’t blow past the designed tolerances of the weapon…
… or just, you know, fuck being drafted into this bullshit war.
In the modern day, ‘frag’ is mostly a gamer term that basically just means ‘killed a guy’, and the origin of that term has been obscured, forgotten.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 6 days ago:
Have you ever been to a very dense jungle or forest… at midnight?
Ok, now, drop mortar and naval artillery shells all over it.
For weeks, or months.
The holes this creates are commonly used by both sides as cover and concealment.
Also, its often raining, sometimes quite heavily, such that these holes will up with water, and you are thus soaking wet.
Ok, now, add in pillboxes and bunkers, as well as a few spiderwebs of underground tunnel networks, many of which have concealed entrances.
You do not have a phone. GPS does not exist.
You might have a map, which is out of date, and you might have a compass, if you didn’t drop or break it.
A radio is either something stationary, or is the size and weight of approximately,.slightly less than a miniature refrigerator, and one bullet or good piece of shrapnel will take it out of commission.
Ok, now, you and all your buddies are either half starving or actually starving, beyond exhausted, getting maybe an average of 2 to 4 hours of sleep, and you, and the enemy, are covered in dirt, blood and grime.
Also, you and everyone else may or may not have malaria, or some other fun disease.
Ok! Enjoy your 2 to 8 week long camping trip from hell, in these conditions.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Also, for what its worth, the OLED Decks literally sold out today, as in, Valve doesn’t currently have any more to sell in the US.
gamingonlinux.com/…/supply-chain-issues-are-makin…
Also also… I realize this is a silly comparison, but the Switch 2 has not outsold all variants of the Deck, yet.
Its at about 3.5 million, Steam Deck is at about 4.5 million since 2022.
Also, the Switch 2 is apparently already sold out as well, as in no more units available at US retailers.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 1 week ago:
I wonder if any if the Axis even bothered to have such a system to check for Americans.
"Bawn-jer-no
- Comment on Eating shit is for alphas, am I rite guise 1 week ago:
… he said, with a shit-eating grin…
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 1 week ago:
weamwork is my new favorite word, ahahah!
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 1 week ago:
=D
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 1 week ago:
I was gonna say something similar, I have heard a LOT of people pronounce Mississippi as if it does have an R in it.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 1 week ago:
Obligatory ‘lore dump’ on the word lollapalooza:
That word was a common term in the 1930s/40s American lingo that meant… essentially a very raucous, lively party.
Note/Rant on the meaning of this term
The current merriam webster and dictionary.com definitions of this term meaning ‘an outstanding or exceptional or extreme thing’ are wrong, they are too broad. While historical usage varied, it almost always appeared as a noun describing a gathering of many people, one that was so lively or spectacular that you would be exhausted after attending it. When it did not appear as a noun describing a lively party, it appeared as a term for some kind of action that would cause you to be bamboozled, discombobulated… similar to ‘that was a real humdinger of a blahblah’ or ‘that blahblah was a real doozy’
So… in WW2, in the Pacific theatre… many US Marines were often engaged in brutal, jungle combat, and they adopted a system of basically verbal identification challenge checks if they noticed someone creeping up on their foxholes at night.
An example of this system used in the European theatre, I believe by the 101st and 82nd airborne, was the challenge ‘Thunder!’ to which the correct response was ‘Flash!’.
In the Pacific theatre… the Marines adopted a challenge / response system… where the correct response was ‘Lolapalooza’…
Because native born Japanese speakers are taught a phoneme that is roughly in between and ‘r’ and an ‘l’ … and they very often struggle to say ‘Lolapalooza’ without a very noticable accent, unless they’ve also spent a good deal of time learning spoken English (or some other language with distinct ‘l’ and ‘r’ phonemes), which very few Japanese did in the 1940s.
::: racist and nsfw historical example of this
www.ep.tc/howtospotajap/howto06.html
:::
Now, some people will say this is a total myth, others will say it is not.
My Grandpa who served in the Pacific Theatre during WW2 told me it did happen, though he was Navy and not a Marine… but the stories about this I’ve always heard that say it did happen, they all say it happened with the Marines.
My Grandpa is also another source for what ‘lolapalooza’ actually means.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Well said, eloquently said!
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
I disagree that ignorance can be bliss in this case.
Look up the Carrington Event.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing that would prevent that from happening again at literally any time.
And if the Carrington Event happened now, it would most likely knock out the vast majority of the world’s power systems and telecommunication systems… possibly for a very long time, depending on how much chaos ensued.
Even without a one in a million even like that… the world is literally on fire. Climate change is out of control, and it is consistently worse that consensus projections from 5 or 10 years ago.
Disasters will intensify, infrastructure will be knocked out, the food supply system will buckle, governments will become more authoritarian, and be more likely to go to war with each other.
It will be a very rude wakeup call for the totally smart device dependent people when their region goes offline… they will have as much of a mental breakdown from not having access to tech and the web as they will from ‘how will i eat, where will i live?’
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
I agree with most of the points you are making, but I think the main point the person you are replying to… their point was that … younger generations simply are not able to remember things they have read, either online, or in a book.
It used to be the case that you could not just pull up literally any information, out of your pocket, on demand.
That knowledge had to exist in your brain.
Historically, it gets even worse.
Many cultures had dedicated members of their society who had memorized an ancient tale that would take one hundred pages to write out on paper.
Of course, they did not remember them 100% accurately each time… but humans do seem to be losing a capability for mass information storage in our own brains as technology enables us to… not need to develop that capability.
The GPS navigation example is maybe easier to grasp: Before everyone had a GPS homing beacon and navigation telling them where to go, how to navigate through a city or country…
People knew how to read road signs. People knew how to read maps. People knew how to avoid high traffic areas and take shortcuts… all on their own.
Now, if you take GPS away from literally those same people, 20 or 30 years later, they would end up lost even in places they’ve lived in for decades.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
I mean, imo, you got it correct with many of your descriptions:
Fear, Anxiety, Panic, caused by the lack of access to the internet.
Now, I thought I was going to have to coin a term here, but something pretty close already exists:
Nomophobia, fear of not having your your smartphone.
Other proposed terms from other people over the years:
discomgoogolation
abinterretephobia
macriapodiadictuophobia
These have all been proposed as words to mean, basically, fear of not having access to the internet.
Now, you are describing more specifically a fear of an entire, past world without widespread internet access, which is a bit different… as it isn’t just you personally not having your internet device, but the total lack of them, the lack of societal norms built around them, etc.
I would point out that there are still roughly 3 billion of people on Earth, right now, who live without consistent and reliable access to the internet, who cannot afford a smart phone or any kind of internet device.
But yeah, as others have said… before the internet was widespread… we used libraries, we read books and articles and physical newspapers… sometimes, you would have to hunt down a particular rare book, or ask a library to get it loaned from another library, you could wait weeks or months.
I remember an actual physical voicemail machine, an actual physical caller ID device, I remember having to commit my friend’s and family’s 10 digit phone numbers to memory, or carry a small personal contact list with me.
I remember when getting a cordless phone, that would let you go sit down on the couch instead of having to stand or sit within 3 feet of the wall mounted phone… was a completely mind blowing innovation.
And I was born in the tail end of the 80s, before the Berlin Wall fell.
I remember being forced into typing lessons, on an actual keyboard, as one of the very few things my dad forced me into that was actually a good call, and now that the vast majority of younger folks use touchscreens… an increasing number of them have no idea how to actually type, which blows my mind because for the vast majority of my life, not knowing how to type was an extremely stereotypical Boomer attribute.
And now its getting far worse, with an absolute epidemic of students of all manner of subjects who just do not know anything, because they are reliant on some kind of AI to answer all their questions and generate all their answers.
It has been argued before that a human with a smartphone, which they have at all times, is functionally a kind of ‘soft’ cyborg, as the smartphone is a part of so much of their thinking, their culture, their way of life.
So, I suppose its understandable that a ‘soft’ cyborg is terrified by the idea of having part of their brain ripped out, and cannot comprehend how a society could function with everyone not having their portable thinking and communication augmentation.
