squaresinger
@squaresinger@lemmy.world
- Comment on Switch from American tech companies !? 46 minutes ago:
Jollaphone would be an alternative. Not a good one though.
- Comment on Can’t wait for the head(amame) package to arrive 2 hours ago:
Would be cool if you dropped a line or two to tell us what we are looking at.
- Comment on Ubisoft target audience when they play a good game 2 days ago:
Tbh, that’s just the difference between someone who has nostalgia for a game and someone who doesn’t.
I played Pokemon Red as a kid. I replayed it dozens of times since and it’s always really fun. Just feels good.
I didn’t play Pokemon Gold as a kid. I tried to play it quite a few times and never got throught it. Objectively, Gold is a much better game than Red in every regard. But I don’t have nostalgia for it, so it’s just an old game with bad UX, outdated gameplay and weak graphics to me. Can’t get through it without getting bored and quitting.
HL2 was revolutionary, 22 years ago. Nowadays it’s just woefully outdated in every respect including gameplay.
As OOP says e.g. about physics: That stuff was amazing in 2004, but it really isn’t in 2026. Almost every shooter includes physics and in many cases better physics than HL2 did. In part because game designers have learned from HL2 and other games and improved upon it.
- Comment on Ending a relationship during the dating phase is a positive outcome. 3 days ago:
Well, that’s my age group. I wish I understood that before I got into my first long-term relationship in my early 20s, where I felt like I couldn’t get out because she goaded me into proposing and thus I had to follow through even though I really didn’t want to.
- Comment on Ending a relationship during the dating phase is a positive outcome. 3 days ago:
Tbh, I’d much prefer to throw out a carton of sour milk than to keep it in the fridge for years or even drinking it because I am afraid of feeling like a failure for throwing out the milk.
- Comment on ChatGPT Gave Teen Advice to Get Higher on Drugs Until He Died | Futurism 3 days ago:
Depending on the circumstances, yes, that would totally be illegal.
It’s called “aiding and abetting”. In most countries it’s illegal to convince someone to do something illegal.
If you are someone the victim sees as an authority figure (especially if the victim is a minor), a bunch of other other charges can be added too.
In Canada, the UK or the USA, for example, someone who “aided or abetted” someone to commit a crime can be punished exactly as if they had committed the crime themselves.
- Comment on Ed Zitron on big tech, backlash, boom and bust: ‘AI has taught us that people are excited to replace human beings’ 3 days ago:
Hmm, kinda? A lot of industrialization went hand-in-hand with losing customizability and things made to fit.
A while ago I talked with a woman in her 90s and she said that when she was young, no serious TV moderator would have worn an ill-fitting off-the-shelf clothing.
The same holds true for all sorts of articles: custom-made shoes, custom-made furniture, custom-made houses, for example. All that is relegated to the luxurity sector and most people just go with ill-fitting off-the-shelf industrial goods instead.
AI kinda fits into that department for many tasks. Low-quality translations, low-quality texts, low-quality work, all off-the-shelf and ill-fitting but cheap and mass-produced.
- Comment on Ending a relationship during the dating phase is a positive outcome. 3 days ago:
That’s fair, yes.
I think this might both be caused by media portraying relationships weirdly. On the one hand difficulty in long term relationships is displayed as a reason to end the relationship, while difficulty in new relationships is portrayed as something that warrants going to crazy lengths with huge romantic gestures to save the relationship.
In reality it’s just the other way round. If you start your relationship and there’s stuff where the partners are seriously incompatible, that’s a good reason to end it while investment and commitment is still low and there’s not a lot of cost to ending the relationship. On the other hand, if you have a long-term high-commitment relationship, investing more effort in saving it totally makes sense.
- Comment on Ending a relationship during the dating phase is a positive outcome. 4 days ago:
Relationships taking work wasn’t my point.
My point was staying in a relationship that you really hate to be in because you feel committed even before commitment happened.
I’m specifically talking about the dating phase, not about having been together for 10 years.
I’ve seen it quite a few times that people were like “I really don’t want to marry that man/woman, but I said yes so now I have to.”
- Comment on Ending a relationship during the dating phase is a positive outcome. 4 days ago:
For the point of the argument it doesn’t really matter if the goal is marriage or some other type of long-term relationship.
And if you are going with a low-commitment casual relationship (which is totally fine, of course, no judgement here), then you do that because you don’t exactly expect the relationship to last to the grave. In which case not ending a non-functional relationship purely out of feelings of obligation, commitment or shame should be even less appropriate.
I mean, isn’t the point of low-commitment relationships to have low commitment? If the relationship sours, why feel shame for ending it?
- Comment on Ending a relationship during the dating phase is a positive outcome. 4 days ago:
If you figured out that it’s not meant to be at a point where ending the relationship is easy/cheap, that’s successful. A failure would be pushing it through at the easy/cheap part and having it blow up when you have kids and a mortgage.
A friend of mine was in a relationship that his girlfriend ended after 7 years. Turns out, she decided that it wasn’t going to happen after the first year and kept stringing him along for … reasons? Mostly because she feared that she’d be seen as a failure if she ended it at an earlier time.
- Submitted 4 days ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 26 comments
- Comment on Never-before-seen Linux malware is “far more advanced than typical” 1 week ago:
I fear there is no such system where this applies. The tech stack on any old netbook is so advanced and complex that there is nobody on this planet who fully understands it.
Being theoretically able to read the code is certainly better than not being able to, but it’s not the same as having actually read and understood all the relevant code to the point where you can be somewhat confident that there’s no backdoor in it.
(And even if someone had the time and mental capacity to do that, at some point when going through the stack you always hit a proprietary layer. Be that drivers, the bootloader, component firmware or the hardware itself.)
- Comment on Never-before-seen Linux malware is “far more advanced than typical” 1 week ago:
*insert obligatory xz utils reference*
- Comment on we need more users 1 week ago:
No-one cares what Russia or China thinks here. Germany? I mean, sure, but this is also a complication for any regulatory bodies trying to police social media sites. As “Lemmy” or “Piefed”, as you know, are not singular entities.
People living in Russia or China might care.
UK might be much more difficult, btw. They now ban all porn without identity checks. So if you host a lemmy/piefed instance that’s accessible in the UK you will need to delete all adult content that makes it to your instance, if you don’t want to violate UK law.
People would just clone the communities on other instances and rebuild.
Cloning communities isn’t quite that easy. Were you present when feddit.de went down? Their communities didn’t vanish. The replications are still up on all other instances, and you can still post there. There’s no indication to a casual user that the instance hosting the communities is down and thus federation doesn’t work. To the users it just looks like participation dropped like a rock with no obvious reason.
The communities were cloned onto a new instance (IIRC feddit.org) but even up to now, people keep posting to the old now-unfederated communities.
- Comment on we need more users 1 week ago:
Sure, you’re right there - but an instance that kept having problems with removing CSAM would find itself defederated.
Depends… Imagine it also contains some of the most relevant communities and defederating would mean you lose users. That’s not such an easy decision any more. Also, at that point hosting would likely be so expensive that for-profit instances would emerge, and for those defederating an important community wouldn’t be such an easy choice either.
But it’s not only CSAM. For example, there’s illegal speech in quite a few parts of the world. In Germany, for example, a lot of nazi-related stuff is illegal. In russia or china some regime-critical speech is illegal. I wouldn’t be too surprised if the US also joins this club sometime in the near future.
Actually, if you are a non US citizen and you and you want to travel to the USA, it’s already troublesome if you are hosting a website with anti-Trump content.
That kind of stuff is unlikely to be deleted on the original instance if that instance isn’t hosted in the same country.
Yes, so not financial. You seemed to be implying it was financial.
Sorry if that came across. I said lemm.ee was shutdown because of the scaling issue. I could have been more clear with that I meant the moderation scaling issues.
- Comment on MFW I wake up to find Lemmy feeds full of USA stuff 1 week ago:
I’d be fine with “no US politics”. It’s so annoying that !politcs@lemmy.world is specifically and only about US politics. Because apparently, US politics are the only politics relevant for the world.
- Comment on We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages 1 week ago:
Yeah, that’s totally true. If you speak Serbian and you move to the Netherlands, nobody would (or could) switch to Serbian for you.
- Comment on we need more users 1 week ago:
Wasn’t trying to convince anyone of anything. Just offering a reality check.
Lemmy vs Reddit is like this meme where the one side says “I hate you” and the other side says “Who are you?” (or was it “I don’t even think of you”, can’t remember).
Lemmy is cool. It being small has benefits and I like the political direction here much more than on Reddit. I like that most people I interact with on Lemmy genuinely are humans. On Reddit, that’s much more difficult to be certain of.
But Lemmy is not Reddit, it’s not a Reddit alternative, it’s not even a Reddit competitor. It’s a nice little niche forum, a little anti-capitalist experiment, that kinda copied the UI and UX of old Reddit. That’s totally fine and it’s got it’s value. Otherwise I wouldn’t have >3000 comments on this platform.
But it’s a factor of 100 000x off of being on the radar of Spez and his crew.
- Comment on we need more users 1 week ago:
Eh, if the original instance removes the CSAM - the ban and removal federates out to everywhere else, so this isn’t always true.
But if it doesn’t, then other instances removing the content on their side doesn’t federate. So you can either trust every instance that you federate with with your legal security, or you will have to moderate everything yourself as well, just in case someone missed something.
Down the line, the answer here would be for the federative structure to change so that an instance only hosts its own local content, and doesn’t need duplicate content viewed from external instances.
This would be extremely important, but I don’t know if such a low level conceptual change can still be performed with a reasonable amount of work. Remember, for such a change you need to get every instance on board. That would be difficult now, and only more difficult later.
Tbh, it would have been much smarter if the setup would be basically a bunch of independent phpBB-like boards with federated single-sign-on and an app that transparently connects you to whatever instance hosts the content you are looking at.
That’s not why lemm.ee closed down. It wasn’t financial.
No, it was specifically because of the moderation issue: lemmy.ca/post/45390962
- Comment on we need more users 1 week ago:
Because Lemmy, to this day, doesn’t do what Reddit does. Yes, the UI is similar, but there’s two big downsides to Reddit. One that’s important now, and one that’s important later.
- Lemmy is tiny. Like, really small. The Linus Tech Tips form and the Crackberry forum each have more users and more activity than all of Lemmy combined. That means, you can talk about general things of Lemmy, like e.g. US politics, but there aren’t a lot of niche communities. On Reddit I can post a photo with some weird electronics component from the 60s and within minutes someone will post an answer identifying the component and telling me where to buy a replacement. On Lemmy, a corresponding community doesn’t even exist.
- Lemmy scales terribly. Every instance holds a copy of all data that was ever posted in any community that any user on that instance ever subscribed to. That has two very negative effects: – Storage requirements are insane. Since most traffic is in big communities and most users will subscribe to the big communities, most instances need to store a copy of almost all of Lemmy. If Lemmy were to ever get to the size of Reddit, every instance would have to store data in the order of magnitude of all of Reddit. Imagine small hobby admins having to host data in the region of Petabytes or Exabytes. Nobody can afford that. – Admin work is insane. Since every instance holds a full, independent copy and doesn’t only cache, they are legally responsible for the content and have to moderate it. So if someone posts e.g. illegal pornography on one instance and it’s federated to another instance, the admin of the second instance needs to delete it or face legal consequences. That means, instead of the mods or admins of the original community/instance being solely responsible for keeping their stuff clean, everyone is responsible for everything and the same work needs to be done hundreds of times, once per instance.
This horrible scalability means that right now instances are getting close to their limits (see e.g. lemm.ee closing down exactly due to these reasons).
Lemmy has 40-50k monthly active users. Reddit has 5.16 billion monthly active users, so about 100 000x. If everyone on Reddit were to move over to Lemmy, Lemmy would be done. Just one day of Reddit-level traffic would be enough to jam up the history of Lemmy content so much that nobody could ever afford hosting a Lemmy instance again.
- Comment on We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages 1 week ago:
That’s why I said, everyone needs (or has incentive to) learn the global lingua franca, the regional lingua franca, the language of the country they live in and their mother tongue.
As someone from the UK living in the Netherlands, these four languages are English, English, Dutch and English, so you’ll likely learn (at least to some degree) two languages.
If you are from the UK and stay in the UK, all four languages are English and thus you likely won’t have a need to ever get to fluency in a second language.
(Of course, there are some special circumstances, e.g. if you are from the UK and live in the UK but work as a French teacher, you do have a need to know French, but I’m talking about the general case.)
- Comment on We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages 1 week ago:
Speaking multiple languages is a thing because you need it.
Everyone needs to know English, because its the global Lingua Franca. Not only to speak with native English speakers but to speak with everyone. If as an Austrian I speak to someone from China, I will do so in English.
Everyone needs to know the local Lingua Franca, because it’s a massive career help and you will need it quite commonly. That’s why most people in Hungary learn German. They need that all the time, since the economies are tied so closely together.
Everyone needs to learn the language of the country they live in, because only if you know the language you can access the job market and all services without barrier.
Lastly, everyone needs to learn their mother tongue to be able to speak with their family.
If you are from Serbia and move to the Czech Republic, you will learn and frequently use four languages.
If you are from Germany and stay there, you will learn and frequently use two languages.
If you are from the US and stay there, English is the global Lingua Franca, the local Lingua Franca, the language of the country you live in and your mother tongue, and thus you will likely never learn a second language to fluency levels.
- Comment on We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages 1 week ago:
I can speak English quite well.
- Comment on We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages 1 week ago:
That’s because of the “language tiers”.
People don’t usually learn languages for fun, at least not to a point where they can actually speak it fluently. They learn it because they have an use for it. If you learn a language without having an use for it, you lose it quite quickly.
The highest tier language is the worldwide lingua franca: English. You learn English to talk to anyone, not to talk to English native speakers. For example, my company (a central European one) uses English as the work language. We don’t have a single English native speaker on the team. But if I want to talk to a colleague from Rumania, Egypt, Spain or the Netherlands I will talk English with them.
The next tier is the regional lingua franca. That’s e.g. Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Russian or Arabic (and likely a few others, I don’t know the whole world). These languages are spoken in certain regions and can be used to communicate with people from neighbouring countries. You can get around with e.g. German in Hungary, because most Hungarians learn German. It’s also sometimes necessary since TV, books or other media might not be available in the local language. For example, a lot of Albanians speak Italian, because TV shows and movies are rarely translated into Albanian and instead broadcast in Italian. (Also, since Italy was so close, many people watched Italian TV while Albania had communism.)
The lowest tier are local languages. These are languages that are only spoken in their own country. For example: Rumanian, Serbian, Hungarian, Welsh, Gaelic, Dutch and so on. People speak these languages because they live in that country. For someone who doesn’t live in that country, there’s rarely any major benefit to learning these languages.
In general, people only really learn to speak languages that are on the same tier or higher.
If you live in Albania, you learn Albanian as a child, then probably add Italian to understand TV. In school you will learn English and once you go online you will use it. You might also learn Russian to be able to communicate with people in nearby countries and if you are from the muslim part of Albania you might also learn Arabic.
If you live in Germany, you’d just learn German and English. No need for any other languages. If you spend some significant time in France, Spain or Italy, you might pick up one of these languages.
If you live in the US or GB, you start with English, and there’s hardly any point to learn anything else. By default you can already communicate with everyone, read everything on the internet and watch all TV shows and movies (pretty much everything is translated into English, if it isn’t even refilmed in English). If you try to learn another language and try to use it with native speakers of said language, chances are pretty high they just switch over to English.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Oh, Grimreaper’s alt account.
Or a comparable idiot.
- Comment on Reviews should all contain brand-unfriendly language 1 week ago:
Hey, at least Hitler did kill Hitler. That was pretty good.
- Comment on Reviews should all contain brand-unfriendly language 1 week ago:
During Trumps first regime, German-speaking newspapers (and probably a few others around the world) had a quite intense discussion on how to translate Trumps meandering garbage.
They could either translate him more loosely, making him sound like a actual human, but then people wouldn’t know what a baboon he is. Or they could translate him more literally, keeping his “style” of talking and then everyone would believe that the translator messed up royally, because no human being that’s halfway in their right mind would speak like that.
- Comment on I felt so betrayed when I found out Germany isn't called Germany in Germany 1 week ago:
The v is an f in the beginning of the word and a v in the middle of a word.
- Comment on I felt so betrayed when I found out Germany isn't called Germany in Germany 1 week ago:
But the Americans seem to think you are Duits.