tiramichu
@tiramichu@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on A drill technically becomes a screwdriver when you insert a drill bit into it 1 hour ago:
If the attachment is what makes it a screwdriver, then the attachment is also what makes it a drill.
An electric kitchen mixer is not a drill. At least, it wasn’t designed to be one. But I could weld a drill bit on there and turn it into something which can maybe drill - if terribly.
Similarly, the ‘device’ part of what we call an electric drill can’t drill anything, not until you put the drill bit in. It’s not a drill in its base form - just a useless handheld spinny thing waiting for a purpose.
But I could add a whisk and turn it into a kitchen mixer…
- Comment on Xbox Co-founder Says Microsoft is Quietly Sunsetting the Platform 13 hours ago:
The PS5 version of GTA6 is going yo sell pretty well then
- Comment on me btw 16 hours ago:
For sure yeah.
I still end up having to use ffmpeg directly (in combination with other CLI tools) because there’s always something the GUIs haven’t caught up with yet. Most recently for me it was converting animated webp’s into something I could actually work with
- Comment on me btw 1 day ago:
I find it wild there are countless “convert videos online for free!” sites on the Internet full of bonus malware which are all just thin wrappers around ffmpeg. And yet they persist because people want googleable answers to their problem which don’t need a command line or downloading anything.
Personally I’ve got a Python script which provides a slightly friendlier wrapper around ffmpeg for my common use-cases.
But honestly ffmpeg is such a beast, so much of what we use daily depends on it under the hood.
- Comment on 3 days ago:
This.
You shouldn’t set off with snow or frozen chunks still left on your car. If you brake and it slides forward it can obscure your view, or when you get up to highway speeds it can fly off and damage whoever is behind you.
Please be consideate of others and don’t do it :)
- Comment on Microsoft gaming head Phil Spencer is retiring, replaced by an AI exec who promises no "soulless AI slop" 6 days ago:
The one thing I trust Microsoft to do is anything they claim they won’t
- Comment on Movies characters always make it through the craziest plot and somehow not get forever traumatized by it. I wish I could be like that, but instead I stuggle to even make/keep therapy appointments. 1 week ago:
And as a result typically end up with a trail of bodies in their wake, yet no police, no investigation, just go home.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Blocks shorts.
uBlock filters use a modified form of CSS selectors to determine what parts of a page to hide.
If you know vaguely how CSS selectors work you can infer that the filter definition is matching on
youtube.comand is finding an element whose title property isshorts- so it seems to be doing an appropriate thing.The important part is that uBlock filters are not executable; you can’t inject a malicious executable through one, as they are simply patterns which describe what parts of a page should be hidden, and hiding content is all they can do.
The worst that a filter could do is hide something that shouldn’t be hidden.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Because they want you to watch shorts. They know that people who watch shorts are the most brainrotted on the platform, and the ones who will keep scrolling and watching video after video, and seeing ad after ad, and those are the users YouTube wants all other users to be like.
And so they will push shorts in your face again and again no matter how much you say no, because they think eventually they’ll break you.
The close button is just a temporary placebo to make it feel like you’re the one in control.
You’re not the one in control.
- Comment on Gemini lies to user about health info, says it wanted to make him feel better— Though commonly reported, Google doesn't consider it a security problem when models make things up 1 week ago:
Exactly.
LLMs are fundamentally hallucination machines, but this truth utterly conflicts with almost every purpose that AI is being marketed and pushed and sold for, which depends on them being able to analyse data ‘truthfully’ and accurately.
So it’s no wonder that none of the big tech companies have decided to consider or accept hallucinations as a problem, because accepting that truth means also admitting that LLMs are fundamentally unfit for purpose - which is the one thing they simply can’t and won’t do with so much money riding on it.
- Comment on Sony-led program offers PS5 rentals starting at $13.50 a month in the UK across 12, 24, or 36-month leases — console has to be returned at the end of the contract 1 week ago:
It’s viable again because well… gestures vaguely at everything
HP just launched a laptop ‘subscription’ service too. It’s a rather disgusting sign of the times. Companies would love for this to become the norm, because renting is a highly profitable game. Get that sweet money coming in month after month. And you are right; we must not encourage them.
I’d rather save up and go to the second-hand marketplace than line a corpo’s pocket by renting.
- Comment on This one was invented, by a writer 1 week ago:
No, not this time
- Comment on Is it a good idea to use an Android phone as an external SSD for backing up my home folder? 1 week ago:
Not the original commenter, but possibly because SSDs are eventually volatile.
SSDs store data by trapping electrons in cells to represent your ones and zeroes, and when the disk is unpowered those electrons can eventually escape, causing data loss.
This may take years to happen though, so if you use the disk frequently you are unlikely to experience it.
That said, the time to unpowered data loss gets worse the more cumulative data you have written to the disk over its life. SSDs that are extremely badly worn out could lose data in months, not years.
Traditional spinning disks don’t have this issue as the magnetic storage doesn’t depend on power to stay magnetised, so it’s a better choice for archival storage.
- Comment on "This is the best case scenario": Microsoft withdraw DMCA takedown notice on voxel sandbox Allumeria 2 weeks ago:
Exactly why corporations love it so much.
Make all the claims you like, no evidence required, and no consequences at all for making false claims.
- Comment on What launcher should I replace Nova with? 2 weeks ago:
I just got a new phone and I’m trying Kvaesitso to move away from Nova, but I just can’t get used to it.
I think I just really like the paradigm of having a ‘desktop’ where I can freely arrange my most used apps in a specific layout, and Kvaesitso - by intentional deaign choice - doesn’t allow it.
Which is really a shame for me because I love the ethos, I love the open-source approach, and I love that it’s a wholly original launcher rather than a fork of the stock or anything else.
A great launcher for some I’m sure, but to me it’s like even after I unlock the device I’m still stuck in something that feels like a lock screen to me, and I feel weirdly trapped and claustrophobic.
Not sure why it makes me feel that way, but it does!
- Comment on How do you communicate "sorry, my bad" when you make a mistake while driving? 2 weeks ago:
Same here in UK honestly - it’s that or the hazards, they both sebd the same message :)
Probably down to whichever is easiest. I’ve personally observed that drivers of big trucks tend to do the indicator thing, while most people in cars do the hazards. Not sure if there’s a specific trucker reason for that divide!
- Comment on How do you communicate "sorry, my bad" when you make a mistake while driving? 2 weeks ago:
Weird. You’d think Canadians at least would have a way to say sorry ;P
- Comment on How do you communicate "sorry, my bad" when you make a mistake while driving? 2 weeks ago:
Here in the UK, turning on your hazards for a couple of flashes means either “Thank you” or “sorry” to the car following, depending on context.
Someone let you merge in? "Thank you!*
You cut someone off? “Sorry!”
- Comment on Valve’s Steam Machine has been delayed, and the RAM crisis will impact pricing 3 weeks ago:
The other possibility is that Valve made a public announcement only very shortly after confirming that memory price surges would affect final pricing.
Which would actually be very transparent of them.
- Comment on Valve’s Steam Machine has been delayed, and the RAM crisis will impact pricing 3 weeks ago:
Such bad timing for Valve. They seemed to be doing everything right with the Steam Machine and Frame, and now memory is going to price that hardware right out of the range it was surely hoping to make a splash in.
- Comment on Valve’s Steam Machine has been delayed, and the RAM crisis will impact pricing 3 weeks ago:
Your mindless distractions are only authorized to be subscription-based from now on, citizen.
- Comment on You won: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift 3 weeks ago:
Sadly, yes.
What it comes down to is that any product or service with a profit incentive will inevitably betray you, no matter how good or how well-intentioned it started out.
Our only saviour is open source, self hosting, and federation.
It’s why ownership rather than rental is the model we should all individually be pursuing.
- Comment on You won: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift 3 weeks ago:
Sadly, yes.
What it comes down to is that any product or service with a profit motive will inevitably betray you, no matter how good or how well-intentioned it starts out.
Our only saviour is open source, self hosting, and federation.
- Comment on You won: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift 3 weeks ago:
Absolutely.
This just means “We pushed our crap too fast and people noticed, so we’re letting things cool off slightly to quiet down the critics, and next time we’ll boil the frog more slowly.”
- Comment on Do people eat this? 4 weeks ago:
Seriously though!
Textural variation makes food interesting for the mouth. That’s why fresh, crisp lettuce is so good in a sandwich - not because lettuce tastes of anything, but because it gives that satisfying crunch.
Texture is why we put croutons in soup, and why we sprinkle crispy onions on a hot-dog.
I’ve never eaten a toast sandwich, but if all I had left in the house was bread and butter, it might be quite fun to try.
- Comment on That's a tight sandwich 4 weeks ago:
Sandussy
- Comment on Check mate, Libertarians 4 weeks ago:
Doctor: “Let’s check your reactions”
Me: dodges the little hammer “How was that?”
- Comment on aspirations 5 weeks ago:
Gooning is a more specific subtype of masturbation.
Masturbating is the act of physically stimulating one’s happy parts, solo. It may involve porn, or it may just depend purely on the physical sensation to lead to orgasm.
Gooning has a much closer association with visual stimulation because one would generally goon at something or to something. It also has a strong implication that it usually lasts for a long while; that the point of gooning is to stretch out the pleasure as much as possible and to push away all thoughts until you are nothing but a drooling mess of ecstacy.
So it really is quite different.
If young people have a tendency to always say “gooning” for any kind of masturbation (which I think is probably true) then that’s likely because:
- It’s a generational neologism and people like owning and using words that belong to their age group
- It sounds less formal and more fun
- A lot of the masturbation that young people are doing probably is actually gooning anyway, because that’s just what happens when you have an unlimited and infinitely varied supply of free Internet porn
- Comment on aspirations 5 weeks ago:
I made a helpful table
Activity Type Visual Stimulation Duration Gooning Mental Required (Typically porn) Long Masturbating Physical Optional Long OR Short - Comment on To independently invent the concept of writing in which sounds are encoded into symbols from which an infinite number of words can be assembled, you must be a genius 5 weeks ago:
Writing from language.
A lot of other animals besides humans use vocalisations, and those vocalisations can have quite specific meanings. This makes them a form of communication and demonstrates that encoding meaning in sound is a phenomenon that develops quite readily in nature.
We can also see then that the history of language in humans is those vocalisations becoming increasingly complex and able to represent more numerous concepts and thoughts until they eventually evolve into something we recognise as a language.
Written language is a mechanism to encode spoken language, but it’s spoken language which came first.