squaresinger

@squaresinger@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People who say 'the rich get richer, the lazy live for free, and the middle class pays for it all' don't realize how expensive it is to be rich and how close middle class is to being below the poverty line.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The fun thing is that everyone thinks they are middle class. When I was making €45k a year I thought I was middle class because I had an university degree and a leadership position. At the same time my boss, who had just spent €5mio acquiring a 50% share in a second company and owned three houses (two of which he rented out) also considered himself middle class because he wasn’t a billionaire.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Devs gripe about having AI shoved down their throats⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  This, so much this.

  When I think about what limited my performance in the last year it was mostly:

  • Having to get 5 signatures before I am allowed the budget to install some FOSS software on my work PC that the corporation has already approved for use on work PCs
  • Spending 8 months working on a huge feature that was scrapped after 8 months of development
  • Being told that no, we cannot work on another large feature request (of which there are many in the pipeline) because our team said we can only fit that scrapped feature into this year and we are not allowed to replan based on the fact that the feature we were supposed to work on got scrapped by business

  And then they tell us to return to office and use AI for increasing efficiency.

  It’s all an elaborate play performed by upper management to feign being in control and being busy with something. Nobody is actually interested in producing a product, they all just want to further their own position.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Maybe most of society doesn't have much critical thinking because those who get those "critical thinking" genes go crazy from overthinking things and therefore fail to pass on the genes.⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  And also remember “keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out”

  Love that, I’m gonna steal that ;)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Screw it, I’m installing Linux⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s exactly it though. For most people using an OS isn’t about using the OS but about getting stuff done.

  I don’t run an OS because I love writing config files and running obscure CLI commands. I run an OS because I want a working browser, text editor, development setup and games. The OS is nothing but a means to an end.

  If I want to tinker, I got dozens of more fun projects in my life than trying to setup an OS.

  And if there’s a good GUI way to do what I need, that’s a win, not a downside.

  To put it differently: Do you want a hackable microwave that you can tweak and modify, where you can swap out the guts at any time, or do you want a microwave that heats your food? Most people are in the second camp, and PCs are just like microwaves a tool to get things done.

  Not being forced to know your way around the terminal is an absolute win. Don’t be afraid, nobody’s going to take your CLI from you. It will always still exist. But dumping on people who don’t want to tinker but want their stuff to work without having to google and read through manuals is just elitism and nothing to be proud of.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Maybe most of society doesn't have much critical thinking because those who get those "critical thinking" genes go crazy from overthinking things and therefore fail to pass on the genes.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Remember, critical thinking and trusting nobody are two very different things that don’t really have anything to do with one another.

  Critical thinking means that you learn to figure out who (and what information) you can trust. If you are a critical thinker, you know how to vet sources, lean what marketing/political lingo actually means beyond the apparently obvious meaning of the words. You know how to find discrepancies between different bits of information and how to balance them and figure out what’s behind them.

  It certainly doesn’t mean to not trust anything, because that means you are discarding actual information in favour of hallucinations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  And it’s not just stupid people either. Even smart and educated people get lulled into a false sense of security by a few correct answers to easy questions.

  In a way this has happened before (people trusting stuff on social media, trusting bad headlines from bad newspapers, …), but AI is this on steroids.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it normal to be able to shut your nose from within?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Strange. Ok, can you make a snorting sound at the front of your nose? If you can, try to make a knocking sound with your nose. For that, build up pressure inside your nose using your tongue and release the sound by opening your nose.

  It’s similar to what you do when you have to sneeze and try to suppress it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it normal to be able to shut your nose from within?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Basically what happens when you look at your nose. But it’s also possible to e.g. only move one inwards while keeping the other straight. It’s not difficult, but there are people who can’t do it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve's new hardware will NOT be loss leaders⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This happens so often. The new version of the framework our frontend developers use has massive performance problems, which meant that our FE devs couldn’t test their changes locally, they had to upload a release to the cloud to test every single change. That reduces productivity to close to 0. A developer isn’t cheap, so you’d think the company would be quick to issue macbooks that we are also allowed to have so that they can work again.

  Nope, it took 3 months for our manager to convince the helpdesk that they can get macbooks. Helpdesk originally said they’d have to wait for 2 years for the scheduled replacement of the laptops.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it normal to be able to shut your nose from within?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Might be, but all of these are things I was not able to do at some point and that I conciously learned. So while having the “wrong” genetics might preclude you from doing them, you still need to learn these things if you have the “right” genetics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it normal to be able to shut your nose from within?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  At least not in my case. If I blow out a candle, my nose passage closes.

  Maybe try the following:

  • Start with the motion of blowing out a candle.
  • While doing so, close your mouth, so that no air escapes through your mouth or nose, still holding the pressure of blowing.
  • Release your nose and feel the air popping out right at your nose.

  It’s not the bottom end of the nose, but the top end of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it normal to be able to shut your nose from within?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Try blowing out a candle. Feel how your nose feels while doing that. Try to replicate the same movement in your nose without blowing.

  There’s a ton of face muscles that you can learn to control with a bit of practice:

  • Wiggling your ears
  • Moving your eyes inwards
  • Clicking your ear channels (like the click you hear when swallowing)
  • Creating a humming noise in your ears by flexing a muscle inside your ear channels
  • Plugging your nose from the inside
  • Rolling your tounge
  • Individual motion of your brows
  • "Vibrating" your eyes super fast left and right

  Probably a few more that I didn’t think of right now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Major Bitcoin mining firm pivoting to AI, plans to fully abandon crypto mining by 2027 as miners convert to AI en masse — Bitfarm to leverage 341 megawatt capacity for AI following $46 million Q3 loss⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Mining hardware is shortlived. These things get outdated real fast and need to be replaced frequently. So what they do is when a mining rig is up for replacement, they just swap it out for an AI rig.

  The real asset for mining is the infrastructure: rack space, access to cheap electricity, data centers. All of that is very useful for AI as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve's new hardware will NOT be loss leaders⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There are quite a few office jobs that benefit from a decent CPU. Anything to do with images/photos/video/rendering for example.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve's new hardware will NOT be loss leaders⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It can’t be a loss leader.

  The steam machine is, hardware-wise, just a regular Mini-PC. Valve even lets you put whatever OS you want on there. So if this was a loss leader, that would mean that non-gamers and even small businesses would buy these, would install Windows on them and use them as office PCs, with Steam probably not even installed on the PC.

  With the Steam Deck, the form factor made it impractical or at least really weird to use them as office PCs. The steam machine doesn’t have that issue.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If we ever find a planet with life in it, we could never set foot on it, because the interaction of the two biologies can have unpredictable consequences⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh no, a HFY story… They are kinda entertaining but filled with so much weird pathos and self-dirision. That “btw, religions suck” section was just so out of place.

  Imagine that: Getting abducted by aliens, fighting and winning against some of the most dangerous aliens of the whole universe and when being interviewed about it, one of the first things he chooses to say about humanity is “btw, we have religion and it sucks”.

  And these stories go on for all eternity. 97 long chapters.

  That’s what you get when people on the level of fanfiction writers write original stories without any oversight by an editor.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Exclusive: Here's How Much OpenAI Spends On Inference and Its Revenue Share With Microsoft⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Easy: Altman used ChatGPT to come up with his numbers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Artist sneaks AI-generated print into National Museum Cardiff gallery⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  And, tbh, it doesn’t even matter in this case that this was AI generated. If anyone snuck any worthless piece of crap painting into a into a museum without permission it would be removed. AI only contributed to this by making it even more low-effort.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I've heard New Yorkers are devastated⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The one thing that communism and dictatorship have in common is that the one pretty much requires a revolution and the other often appears after a revolution.

  They have similar origin stories.

  The problem with revolutions is that revolutions need a strong man to rally around who can quickly make decisions without compromise and who is in close to complete power. A democratic revolution would not happen, since it’s not fast and decisive enough. But when the revolution is done and that same strongman is still in power, and he gets to decide how the new government is run, only very few of them are capable of handing the power over to a democratic government. And if you run a government like a revolution we tend to call that dictatorship.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I've heard New Yorkers are devastated⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If Mamdani is a communist, he’s clearly the least ambitious communist that I’ve ever heard of. What he’s asking for is just basic services of a city to work and be affordable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Looking to buy a cheap but best first 3d printer. Ender3 V3, CR-10 SE, or something else?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Tbh, no Idea. I haven’t heard anything about the Flashforge one, so I can’t say anything about it. Maybe look for some reviews.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Economist on using phrenology for hiring and lending decisions: "Some might argue that face-based analysis is more meritocratic" […] "For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s the thing with science communication. It barely exists.

  There is a bogus theory. Nobody tries replicating it for decades because there’s no fame in replication. Then someone finally does and disproves the theory. If the author is lucky, it gets published on the last pages of some low-level journal, because there’s even less fame in failed replication. But the general public doesn’t read journals. They don’t even read science journalism. They might read a short note in a daily newspaper that was twisted into unrecognizability by an underpaid, overworked journalist who didn’t understand a word in the article they read in some pop science magazine.

  Science doesn’t reach the general public, and if it does against all odds, it’s so twisted and corrupted that it frequently says the opposite of what the original paper said.

  People do their general education in school, and once they leave they stop learning general topics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Looking to buy a cheap but best first 3d printer. Ender3 V3, CR-10 SE, or something else?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  “refurbished” is a word that might not mean anything either.

  When buying your first printer you should first choose what you want: Do you want to print or do you want to tinker?

  If you want to print, get a printer like the Bambulab a1 mini. If you want to tinker, an Ender 3 is ok.

  If you want to really tinker a lot, get an used one.

  But I really wouldn’t recommend getting an used printer for your first one since you don’t know how they have been treated and messed up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Looking to buy a cheap but best first 3d printer. Ender3 V3, CR-10 SE, or something else?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If its your first printer I would not go for a second-hand one. There are so many ways you can subtly mess up a printer and if you don’t know your way around printers yet, then it’s quite hard to fix all that.

  Considering you can get a Bambulab A1 mini which does everything out of the box and works better out of the box than an Ender 3 after months of upgrades.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rate my printer gore⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Could be an artifact of the lighting but it looks like a lot of stringing inside the infill.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨3D design software for 3d printing?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I already knew my way around blender before I got into 3D printing, so I used that ever since. It’s ok. It’s certainly no CAD tool. Parameterization would be great and if you use a fair bit of boolean modifiers without applying them (so you can edit parts later on) it does get laggy.

  If you already know Blender it’s a decent choice to cut down on learning time, but if not I would not recommend it.

  I used OpenSCAD quite a bit as well, which is the polar opposite of Blender. It’s perfect for parametrization and editing stuff later into the project is super easy, but the handling is really bad, even as a software developer.

  The language has some evil quirks, like e.g. that the resolution of curved shapes isn’t a parameter of the function used to create the shape, but instead it uses a global variable. It clearly looks like a language designed by mathematicians.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rate my printer gore⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Massive layer shift, but also the part before isn’t exactly great quality. I’d say crap or wet filament.

  I’ve seen worse, but it ain’t exactly great either.

  3/10.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Some meetings don't even need to be e-mails.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It sure is. But as a backend dev I have no part of my code that has anything to do with accessibility. It doesn’t touch my work in any way. Nothing I do will make the app that I don’t work on more or less accessible.

  Office supplies are also pretty important and I personally also do benefit from them. But still it would not be very helpful to me or anyone else if I, as a software developer, attend a daily meeting on restocking office supplies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨U.S. Tech Layoffs Hit Two-Decade High in October⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Revenue and profit are different things. In times of low interest it’s growth at all costs. Investors love market share and growth, because they expect to make money when they sell their shares. That’s risky, but with low, no, or even negative interest it’s still worth the risk.

  When interest goes up, parking money in safe, interest-based forms of investment becomes more interesting, so to compete companies also need to lower the risk. In a climate like that investors want to make money via dividends, so companies need to maximize dividends and to do so they need to maximize profits. Growth, market share and future plans become less relevant.

  That’s what we are seeing right now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨U.S. Tech Layoffs Hit Two-Decade High in October⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Tech is a field where there’s always infinite work to do, and it’s always only limited by the budget.

  We had very low interest rates for over a decade, which made investments more profitable and thus there was always a ton of money to go around. The current financial downturn is the main reason of all the tech layoffs with no budget there are no jobs.

  The upside of that: Even with all the talk of AI and stuff, once the interest rate goes down and investments go up, all the jobs will be back.