cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@piefed.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do video game skeletons put themselves back together?⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The same reason ghosts and vampires often similarly reappear soon after being banished or defeated. All are undead, protected or animated by powerful magics, and you generally can’t just “kill” something that’s already supposed to be dead. Death no longer has meaning to it, its mere existence proves that it is beyond what we would normally consider death. At least not without exploiting some kind of specific weakness, using some elaborate ritual or calling ghostbusters.

  Zombies are sometimes considered undead too, and originally they pretty much were, but more recently they’ve mostly been modernized and adopted into a more pseudo-science existence where they’re simply dead-ish, but with bodies still animated by some kind of infection in the nervous system and brain that allows basic biological activity to continue. The biological activity, then, can still be stopped using most or all of our conventional methods of stopping unwanted biological activity.

  True undead are much more difficult to permanently end, and a skeleton is very clearly not using any traditional biological activity to exist, so whatever does allow it to exist isn’t likely to be stopped by our traditional methods of ending life.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨At Davos, NVIDIA, Microsoft CEOs deny AI bubble⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Companies involved in large infrastructure build-outs are notoriously safe investments and never, ever, EVER end up with mountains of unservicable debt and a huge surplus of worthless, underutilized infrastructure that doesn’t fulfill any of its promises that inevitably gets sold off for fractions of a penny on the dollar. Except literally almost every fucking large infrastructure build-out anywhere in the world in all of human history.

  It doesn’t matter what infrastructure or investments you look at: highways, train tracks, communications, real estate, skyscrapers, power generation, power transmission, oil extraction there are countless examples of greed-blinded companies JUST LIKE HIS doing EXACTLY THE SAME THING and eventually getting absolutely destroyed over it. The larger the infrastructure investment is, the worse it gets. There are only a handful of well-known success stories (which are well known because they are notable, not because they are common), and enough failures to pave a road to the moon and back.

  Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and I’m pretty sure Jensen Huang was too busy shopping for new leather jackets during history class to be paying any attention.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's a good entry level printer these days?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  “Cheap?” Depends on your definition, but go for Prusa. Open specs, open ecosystem, open software, open upgrades. Tinkering is still completely possible (in some ways even easier) but unlike Ender 3 it is never actually *necessary*. The damn things just *work*, all the time, every time. They’re workhorses. Best of both worlds, in my opinion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If WWIII broke out tomorrow do you honestly believe america would win?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You might be underestimating just how many nukes there are. As a species, maybe we could survive a full-scale nuclear war, if they all go off under ideal conditions to minimize fallout and radiation spread, and it doesn’t range far enough or last long enough for the radiation to shorten lifespans or sterilize us into a population bottleneck, and the climate effects don’t make the planet uninhabitable so quickly that even with what remaining functional technology our increasingly limited population and damaged infrastructure can continue to cobble together, we simply can’t adapt fast enough (like most of the other life on the planet). These kind of play against each other a bit though, the safest places from radiation are likely to be remote, minor islands and places like Australia, but they have some of the least resilient infrastructure and are also going to be hit very hard by rapidly changing climate conditions.

  It’s not going to be a good situation and I don’t think we can really accurately predict whether human life will survive it, there are way too many variables. We are tough and resilient, but nukes will put the entire planet, nevermind human civilization as we know it, into a really really tough place which there may genuinely be no coming back from.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SK hynix to spend $13 billion on the world's largest HBM memory assembly plant amid the worst shortage on record — South Korea facility to handle packaging and testing for AI memory campus⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll endure a little price gouging now if it leads to cheap memory in the future.

  …but we know it never works like that. Price gouging now, more price gouging in the future while finding creative new ways for shoving overstock down your throat whether you like it or not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Anyone Printing ICE Whistles?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  At the end of the day everyone’s got to do their own risk analysis, but ICE is also pretty reactionary and stupid in their gestapo tactics, and people aren’t regularly shooting ICE with 3d printed guns at this point. The whistles probably (hopefully) irritate them though, and they tend to aggressively lash out at things that irritate them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Anyone Printing ICE Whistles?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Counterpoint: Flock cameras also exist. Surveillance police state dystopia is already here and it’s spreading much faster than I think most people are prepared for, we have to take it seriously.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Anyone Printing ICE Whistles?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Sadly it’s not just a question of expensive anymore, it’s also a question of whether they can track your purchases (they can) and whether those purchase records will eventually have ICE banging down your door in the middle of the night to have you disappeared for your seditious act of buying justice-obstructing terrorist whistles.

  3d printing is not impossible to track either but it’s certainly a lot harder to track when you are using basic internet hygiene and money isn’t changing hands.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Big AI has PC users furious. Nvidia and Micron's weird emotional appeals make it worse⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree it’s not a win-win, it’s more of a win-lose tradeoff, but it will certainly drive customers away from those shitty companies, and towards the indie developers who don’t do microtransactions and unoptimized PC-crushing graphics-fests with 16-billion-K textures and Nvidia’s latest 600x FSXLAA running on every pixel 3 million times per second.

  Indie developers may not prioritize optimization, but if there’s a need to, they will, and most of the time, they simply don’t have to. Balatro and Vampire Survivors are going to be doing just fine on any hardware.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Big AI has PC users furious. Nvidia and Micron's weird emotional appeals make it worse⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There were actually some genuinely great games in those days, with compelling stories and that still hold up today, it wasn’t all Minesweeper and Pong.

  A few highlights: Master Of Orion 2, Deus Ex, SimCity 2000 and 3000, TIE Fighter (or if you’re rebel scum: X-Wing, or X-Wing vs TIE Fighter), Half-Life, Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft II, Ultima VII: The Black Gate and Ultima VII: Serpent Isle, Mechwarrior 2, Age of Empires, Fury^3, Fallout 2, Baldur’s Gate 2.

  Don’t be misled by the fact that some of these games are obviously sequels, or had console versions, or have had other sometimes even more well-known sequels and remakes since then. There are some genuine reasons to play the original specific game versions I’m listing here, to play them exactly as they were originally presented. Many of them have unique features and aspects that haven’t been repeated. It’s not just a Madden 15 vs Madden 16 situation, where you’ve played one you’ve played both. There may be a bit of rose-tinted nostalgia goggles in this list, I would certainly love the chance to go back and play some of these for the first time again, but there are also many genuine outliers even among their own franchises, that are unique and incredible, and genre-defining in many cases.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I spent a year on Linux and forgot to miss Windows⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Haha I just noticed your name, that’s a funny coincidence. But yeah I’m a big fan of Debian in general. The problem, as you noticed, is often it doesn’t have great support for the latest hardware. On the other hand, it often has great support for older hardware, and PikaOS refuses to install at all on some of my older, less capable systems, so those are running Debian right now. So it’s kind of a “right tool for the job” sort of situation. They have their purposes, it’s definitely not one-size-fits-all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that’s a fair and reasonable, but maybe somewhat optimistic point of view. I certainly hope it might be as smooth as a “long hard process” of hardworking participants that takes decades.

  I’m concerned it’s going to be much worse and more dramatic than that. If it’s sufficiently dramatic, it might be even faster than a decade. But we don’t necessarily want the change to be that fast or dramatic, because that has serious costs, and I think that might be the path we’re on. I think there are inevitably going to be a lot of super hostile actions from many different sides, and these will manifest as a collapse or near collapse of human civilization. I don’t see any realistic path forward through traditional or existing systems or models of economics and governance. I think empires are already falling. I think many nation-states are going to topple. I think there will be a massive reorganization of human society in the coming decades, and that will happen largely through widespread war, famine, brutality, and savagery that we had convinced ourselves we had left long in the past. Even though it’s never actually stopped happening at any point in time, it’s just been marginalized and isolated into places we mostly ignore and when we do notice it, we soon have to look away and start to ignore again because it’s so upsetting to us. When we see it happening, we find ways to do something to convince ourselves that it’s been solved, or managed, or improved in some way and then we look away again so we don’t have to think about it when it inevitably gets worse. But even having it marginalized is better than it has been, and there’s no shame in that. But we still will have to confront these realities eventually. And I think eventually is quickly becoming “now”.

  This is what humanity is, this is what any remotely objective view of history tells us. We have often tried to be better as people, and that’s commendable, and I think we have done a good job being at least somewhat better for a long time, and that too is commendable, and it is obviously a worthy pursuit that we should continue, but we cannot completely escape that we have our dark sides, we are capable of great evil, and great evil is being done sometimes directly under our noses, sometimes we do it ourselves without even seeing it, it is part of us, it is part of who we are and who we always have been. And I think we are facing down a serious confrontation with many of our great evils right now. And I don’t think we’re prepared for how bad it’s going to be. For how bad we can be.

  Maybe I’m wrong, I hope I am. I hope there’s some turning point where everyone simultaneously realizes where this is headed and everything changes direction and we address many of our great evils and solve many of our problems peacefully and promptly and continue pursuing our better selves. But I’m finding it increasingly hard to believe that’s realistic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I spent a year on Linux and forgot to miss Windows⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This is a common misconception I think. “Stable” from a development point of view (which is what Debian is) is not the same as “Stable” from a user point of view. It can be, as long as no other variables are changing. But a typical desktop user IS a variable, and they change other variables all the time. “Stable” makes sense on a server, where the server has a defined role and a specific purpose that basically never changes. It’s “stable” and if the OS is also “stable” that gives you assurance that nothing is going to break unexpectedly… ONCE you have it tested and set up properly to be stable in the first place.

  But installing on a fresh system where you’ve never run this OS before is the antithesis of stable. You are initially in an “experimental” state, and you may need the latest updates and patches to even be compatible with the hardware you’re running. Then you’re going to use this system daily, downloading stuff, installing new apps and tools regularly, changing configurations when you feel like it. None of this is stable. And that’s fine, it’s not wrong, it’s just the reality of being a user with a desktop system. It’s not stable, it’s not supposed to be. It’s your daily driver.

  To paraphrase George Carlin, a bad driver, driving a safe car doesn’t really make you safe, at all. First, learn to drive THEN get your safe car. A stable distribution like Debian is for people who already know how to find all the compatible-by-default hardware and do the configuration necessary to make things safe and stable and using Debian assures them that once they have got it into that state, Debian isn’t going to undo their work and make unexpected changes.

  For users, especially on the desktop, you often want bleeding edge latest updates to fix these kind of compatibility issues as soon as they’re identified, even without absolutely rigorous testing and validation. You want the opposite of “stable” development, in order to make your own system more stable as quickly and reliably as possible in the circumstances. It will never be as stable as Debian running on a server, but that’s normal, and expected. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

  Debian is a good OS, but as a desktop user, on your main system, it might be counterproductive. For what it’s worth, I run PikaOS, which is a gaming-focused distro derived from Debian (Debian’s stable foundation is a huge asset for people building distros on top of it) but provides prompt access to all the latest updates and patches needed for gaming and includes configurations and drivers for supporting the latest consumer level hardware and all the common tools and things that power users want, that are becoming popular day by day. This is the opposite of “stable development” but it’s perfect for a desktop system in my opinion and they do a great job.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I spent a year on Linux and forgot to miss Windows⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Sometimes I’m able to get around it by tweaking some ublock permissions, but once I was surprised to discover that changing my user-agent with user-agent switcher seemed to do the trick. It’s really strange. Cloudflare’s captcha loops are inscrutable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Misleading title. A “U.S. ban on Bambu Labs 3d printers” is not nearly the same thing as a “U.S. ban on 3d printers”, yes there’s a plausible interpretation where the title makes sense but I guarantee they knew exactly what they were doing with the more obvious misleading clickbait interpretation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not going to get resolved overnight, and it’s not going to be a smooth and direct road without any violence or suffering, we’ve seen plenty of the violence and suffering already. There will be more. But pay careful attention to the resistance that is forming, keep your eyes peeled for opportunities to resist, and until those opportunities present themselves, do what you can to make yourself and your families, loved ones, and communities more resilient and better supported. Give as much as you can, until it is time to take what we are owed.

  There are protests happening. There will be more. There is active resistance. There will be more. There is civil disobedience. There will be more. There are people forming labor unions. There will be more. Labor strikes are planned. There will be more.

  Don’t despair, prepare. It’s almost certainly going to get worse, much worse, before it gets better… but it will get better. Even if it takes years of effort, and maybe even a lot of violence and suffering to get there. The USA is the country that threw a tea party to overthrow a king. They will do so again, sooner or later. And keep in mind that historic event, also, did not happen overnight, it was the culmination of years of public anger, organization and preparation. It doesn’t even have to be a single definitive event. The stuff that is happening in Minneapolis right now, is changing the balance point on the scale. It may not be what tips it over, but it doesn’t have to be. The undercurrent of change is always moving even when it’s not visible. When it becomes visible, it usually gets pretty dramatic pretty quickly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  First we need to trust-bust the government until we get a government that is actually representative of the people, not representative of the wealth.

  It’s not that the government is not capable or as inefficient as they are so often portrayed. They are actually quite capable and frighteningly efficient. They’re just not working for us anymore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there anything like a Beholder monster before 1975?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah it’s pretty clearly Medusa/Gorgon-inspired. Obviously, it has its own unique twist, as it should, and probably includes aspects from some other references as well (Scylla, Cyclops, and the Hydra from classical mythology, and various Lovecraftian and Science-fiction tentacle/blob monsters that were common throughout the 60s and 70s) but the basic imagery and functionality is too similar to a gorgon to ignore that there’s likely some connection, whether conscious and intentional or not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cheapest way to back up a *lot* of data?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah I’m not OP (and I’m not offering this service to the public) but anything I’m ever hosting for anyone else should be zero-knowledge encrypted. I don’t want to be able to know what’s in other people’s data. THAT makes me uncomfortable. As long as it’s encrypted, and I don’t have the key, it’s just random bits as far as I’m concerned.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are there any art programs designed specifically for mouse users?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Krita is always free and open source, supported by donations and the community. It’s not a trial and it’s not time-limited.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Has Canada's government done anything concrete to reduce dependence on the US since Trump took office? Maybe even since the first term?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Voting for fascism is never the right choice. Even in a two-party system, everyone still has the option to not vote for either Kang or Kodos. “Throw your vote away” is always a valid electoral choice, and perhaps in some cases, the only morally defensible one. We even happen to have a still marginally viable third party, and even if all your vote is doing is keeping that third choice barely alive on the margins, that has its own form of validity too.

  Strategic voting is the opposite of strategic. It’s a short-term, single-election tactic that will result in a strategic collapse in the long term. You do not ever have to vote for one party to prevent the other party from getting in. That is not your responsibility, and if you do that, it’s not going to ever get better. You are sacrificing the future for the present, and the present is fleeting but the future is forever. We have to think longer term, or we will have absolutely no recourse when both of the top choices end up being unconscionable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Winnie the Pooh considered "racist" now or are .ml folks using it as an excuse to defend Xi Jin Ping?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you annoy .ml users, then I like you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨With Amino having shut down — could the Fediverse be a good alternative?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is all true, but there’s also an awful lot of overlap between many fandoms and many nerds so it doesn’t seem totally far fetched that this might make a good home for at least a bunch of fandoms eventually. startrek.website is already here for example.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony AI patent will see PlayStation games play themselves when players are stuck⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Because I work in software development and I see first-hand exactly what executives are currently doing with AI. That’s what they’re doing. That’s the reality. What other side is there? That we’re going to get more games at lower prices thanks to AI? Sure, if you believe that I’ve got a real nice bridge to sell you too, get out your wallet and just hand it to me.

  If given all the evidence of the entire fucking economy of the world you think companies aren’t focused exclusively on short-term, short-sighted profits by minimizing costs and maximizing revenue, you’re so delusional you must be smoking capitalism like a drug.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony AI patent will see PlayStation games play themselves when players are stuck⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t need an AI to skip, bypass, or cinematic your way through a difficult section. That’s a game design issue, not a patentable AI issue. This does not support disabled people, this will be used to ignore disabled people during game design and fire people who are actually competent at supporting disabled people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If president abductions are something that can apparently just happen how come Putin or Kim Jong Un aren't in some foreign prison right now?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  But I’m le tired…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hacktivist deletes white supremacist websites live on stage during hacker conference⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It is always morally acceptable to punch a Nazi. No exceptions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should I get the Measles and/or Mpox vaccines if I had them as a child?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know what it’s like in the USA especially in its current dysfunctional state, but in Canada we’ve got public health agencies that support and track vaccination status and recently even pharmacies are getting into the situation. It seems like the US has similar organizations. If you don’t have a doctor, you may be able to find other options for checking your vaccination status through them, and they can probably guide you on whether you need any boosters or updates.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you think Google execs keep a secret un-enshittified version of their search engine and LLM?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No, porn is for poor people. These people can (and do) easily afford the live action version.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is with these videos where it's just someone reaction to shit someone else is doing? ⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree it is generally pretty stupid and difficult to watch, however there are a few situations where it makes some sort of sense.

  1. It is sometimes used as a way to get around certain copyright issues (probably not legally, but it sometimes confounds the horribly stupid copyright bots that major platforms use with lazy impunity)
  2. Sometimes the person “reacting” is themselves entertaining to watch. These reaction videos are generally for pre-existing fans of *that person*, not for fans of the *video being watched*.
  3. Sometimes the person reacting is adding genuine value, for example they might be a legitimate expert (or at least a self-believed one) on the topic the video is discussing. This is in some sense sort of a video review, or a fact-check.
  4. It is pure algorithm-bait, not really intended for any actual human to deliberately enjoy, but it tricks the algorithm into showing it to people who are too low-effort to look up the real video and just watch it because it’s in their “feed”.

  Usually it’s some combination of the above.