ViatorOmnium
@ViatorOmnium@piefed.social
- Comment on People espousing that unions don't work should have a look at police unions. 14 hours ago:
These things are subject to cycles. Things are shit, people unionize, things become a bit less shitty, people stop unionizing, things start getting shitty again, rinse and repeat. Most of Europe is ending the part of the cycle where people thought they didn’t a union anymore.
- Comment on How did "ancient humans" got the idea to pierce their ears/body ? 3 days ago:
You are joking, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the first people to use any form of body piercing did to look tough to impress women.
- Comment on How did "ancient humans" got the idea to pierce their ears/body ? 3 days ago:
There are archeological objects that are most likely piercings or earrings that are over 10 thousand years old. By the time writing was invented they were already very old news.
- Comment on It's barely a science. 1 week ago:
They don’t even disguise it, praxeology is effectively theology without the metaphysics.
- Comment on Truth hurts! 1 week ago:
Yeah, geese are terrifying and already come with “teeth”.
- Comment on Truth hurts! 1 week ago:
Ok, imagine a pack of very fast small cassowaries with very sharp teeth.
- Comment on Truth hurts! 1 week ago:
Everyone that disagrees should have a little face to face time with and enraged Cassowary and then visualise a Cassowary the size of a large truck.
- Comment on The Bork Boundary 1 week ago:
And Laika wasn’t a Laika
Both in breed and name.
- Comment on What if male elves are just female tall elves with a flat chest that just accepted being called male while the male ones stay at home and do the household or something and look like orcs 1 week ago:
The male elf’s look like garden gnomes. That’s why Tolkien said the Noldor were also called gnomes in the first edition of The Hobbit.
- Comment on Do babies learn languages at different rates depending on how hard the language is? 1 week ago:
English is easy to get started but insanely hard to master. There are tons of irregular verbs, orthography is all over the place, plurals have more than a few pitfalls.
- Comment on Do babies learn languages at different rates depending on how hard the language is? 1 week ago:
Spanish is easier in the sense it’s more regular. Genders don’t had that much complexity if they are applied consistently, especially when you stack them against all the irregularities in English. That being said, and without claiming to be an expert, I think the consensus is that language acquisition time is similar across languages, but the time to master the language is related to how predictable/regular it’s grammar and vocabulary formation is.
- Comment on Microsoft CEO warns that we must 'do something useful' with AI or they'll lose 'social permission' to burn electricity on it 1 week ago:
menial tasks that are important such as unit test coverage
This is one of the cases where AI is worse. LLMs will generate the tests based on how the code works and not how it is supposed to work. Granted lots of mediocre engineers also use the “freeze the results” method for meaningless test coverage, but at least human beings have ability to reflect on what the hell they are doing at some point.
- Comment on Microsoft CEO warns that we must 'do something useful' with AI or they'll lose 'social permission' to burn electricity on it 1 week ago:
What does Capitalism™ say about “innovations” that can’t deliver results? Filtering out crap that only works on some bullshit paper is the one thing capitalism is supposed to be good at.
- Comment on YSK: Europe Can Wreak HAVOC On America Without Firing a Bullet. 1 week ago:
There’s no way to compel them to sell them.
On paper no. In practice, when you consider how much economy at that level is driven by quid pro quo, that statement sounds almost silly. It’s not a matter of whether governments can trigger a mass disinvestment, it’s a matter of the cost.
- Comment on Opera: A Legacy Browser Lost | Why the modern hollow shell of Opera has made it impossible for me to recommend a former favorite. 1 week ago:
Gecko is kind of PITA to integrate on anything, unless you are just writing a glorified Firefox skin. That’s why Apple forked khtml to make webkit, despite khtml being less compatible with websites back then. It doesn’t help most Firefox forks come into almost-unusable-paranoia-driven flavour (like Librewolf) and maintainers-are-in-way-over-their-heads flavour (like Zen), and they all lack enough maintainers to keep up with upstream.
Servo could be a serious Blink/Webkit competitor, but unfortunately Mozilla dropped the ball there, and Samsung is still not taking it seriously enough.
- Comment on Captain, masking is highly illogical 1 week ago:
Which Spock? A big part of Spock’s character development post TOS was starting to be more himself and less what others expected him to be.
- Comment on Instead of everyone leaving NATO, could everyone else just kick the US out? 3 weeks ago:
That wouldn’t solve the immediate problem, which is adversarial officers being infiltrated at all levels of our defense structures.
NATO is much more than government meetings, it has permanent structures that serve as the foundation of European security.
If our leaders were not complete idiots there would be a second foundation built around the EU, but the Common Security and Defence Policy is nowhere near ready to replace NATO yet. - Comment on Met Police recruited serial sex offenders to boost numbers 3 weeks ago:
They ran out of domestic abusers.
- Comment on LG Update Installs Unremovable Microsoft Copilot on Smart TVs, Ignites Backlash 1 month ago:
People that buy commercial displays won’t tolerate adware on their monitors. Can you imagine having a screen in a store and it suddenly displaying ads that are not for what the store sells itself? This ensures there will always be an healthy demand for ad free displays.
- Comment on LG Update Installs Unremovable Microsoft Copilot on Smart TVs, Ignites Backlash 1 month ago:
Some premium brands like Bang & Olufsen sell TVs without adware, I think Panasonic TVs are mostly ad-free for now.
Outside of that, most big brands will have “professional” or “commercial” product lines that also don’t have ads. But in all cases you’ll have to pay extra over the TVs subsidized by ads. - Comment on How feasible would it be to host Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy, Friendica, or Matrix over Tor/I2P? 1 month ago:
https://www.w3.org/wiki/ActivityPub/Primer/Authentication_Authorization mentions HTTP signatures since the very first version of the document in 2017. The current efforts seem more in the direction of describing standardizing the existing usage.
- Comment on How feasible would it be to host Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy, Friendica, or Matrix over Tor/I2P? 1 month ago:
One example is HTTP signatures. Servers sign their payloads and receiving servers should validate not just the hash but ensure the payload is not too old. Mastodon allows for a twelve hour difference (https://docs.joinmastodon.org/spec/security/#http-signatures) but other software might be stricter for security reasons. The a bunch of things like webfinger were designed around public dns and public key chains A mastodon server running on the open internet and/or expecting public keychain HTTPs will not be able to federate with something running in tor.
You could cut enough corners to make something that federates inside tor, but at that point it’s better to design something around tor’s features.
- Comment on How feasible would it be to host Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy, Friendica, or Matrix over Tor/I2P? 1 month ago:
That’s just a frontend issue. You can have clients that don’t try to do regular polling.
Having reliable activitypub federation is going to be a much harder challenge. The server to server protocol has a bunch of assumptions that are not true for tor and i2p.
And unless you want the entire network to become a CSAM and Nazi cespool, you would also need a reliable way of identifying servers, which defeats the purpose.
- Comment on Asking the right questions... 1 month ago:
Regarding what Bernie calls the risks “robot soldiers”, I think the Star Trek episode A Taste of Armageddon should be mandatory viewing.
War is not always avoidable, but it becomes less so if the costs of fighting it are perceived as small.
- Comment on Asking the right questions... 1 month ago:
That goes back to the original Luddites. They weren’t anti technology per-se, they were were anti oligarchy.
- Comment on Windows drive letters are not limited to A-Z 2 months ago:
Maybe you have more than 26 storage devices, but don’t know how to use folder mounts on windows, or are weirdly attached to bad design decision from the 1980s.
- 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" 2 months ago:
Does it predict people that allegedly finished university not knowing the difference between correlation and causality?
This reminds me of a fraud risk classification model I once heard about, which ended up being an excellent income-by-postal-code classifier.
- Comment on Microsoft Teams can record office presence from December 3 months ago:
Those are all thing that can all be controlled by the direct lead on any well run company.
I know from my own work that some mediocre middle managers wanted a rigid technological enforcement of the hybrid work framework and are probably dreaming about rolling out a “feature” like this.
- Comment on Double standards from FIFA, as Infantino says it cannot suspend Israel's membership 3 months ago:
This was already clarified. FIFA cannot ban Israel for the same reason they weren’t the ones banning Russia. UEFA suspended Russia, and as a side effect Russia was also prevented from participating in FIFA competitions, and only UEFA can suspend Israel.
- Comment on Should you copy a person's accent when pronouncing their name? 4 months ago:
To add to this, accept when people tell you it’s fine to pronounce their name wrong. My name is very hard to pronounce if you don’t speak my native language, and I prefer that people mispronounce it the “obvious” way, instead of trying to approximate it because then I have people calling me by 20 different variations, and sometimes I’ve no idea they are referring to me.
