cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@piefed.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FreeCAD 1.1 is out⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I really struggled to try to get into FreeCAD, but I don’t totally blame FreeCAD because I’ve also struggled with “real” CAD programs, my brain just doesn’t really seem to work that way.

  OpenSCAD and other programmatic CAD on the other hand makes me feel like a goddamn wizard magically combining shapes in the ether to create the most absurd objects.

  I explained this to my engineer brother and he laughed and said he had already thought about OpenSCAD being right up my alley and wasn’t surprised, but he finds it extremely difficult and counterintuitive for him. It’s funny how we must have totally different mental models of working with 3d shapes I guess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky — for everyone on Earth⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes. They are technically reflected sunlight, so they are as bright as the sun, just very small. It makes sense you can see them during sunlight, since they are reflections of sunlight. You will typically only see them on the side of the sky opposite the sun, but the exact angle depends on the location and orientation of the satellite and the surface that is actually doing the reflection.

  Generally speaking, they are dots that fade in somewhat gradually, moving at a consistent pace (typically slower than a shooting star, but faster than an airplane at cruising altitude) in a straight line direction for awhile at full brightness, then fading away.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What Phone do you guys use?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m a scrub using stock Android also. Well, technically stock Samsung, whatever flavor of Android they call that nowadays. In my defense, saying that I “use” my phone at all is generous. I avoid the digital ball-and-chain like the plague, only touch it when I have to (like when some foolish family member calls me). None of my important data, passwords, or accounts will ever touch it unless they give me literally no other choice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's going on with the Systemd age verification stuff?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  A bunch of US states are passing laws saying operating systems must implement “age verification” or the companies that make the Linux distros will be liable for infringement. This, naturally, makes many of the companies involved (many of which are backed and funded by large, powerful tech companies) that make Linux distros really eager to implement age verification. Meanwhile, the users and maintainers of Linux itself, the systems that make up Linux, and even the maintainers and contributors to many Linux distros, who are real human people and not faceless corporations that think following unjustified laws is justified, think this is fucking garbage, and are telling the corpo scum to go fuck themselves with rusty knives. This is entirely appropriate and reasonable in this case.

  Hope that helps explain what’s going on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are your favorite low-footprint self-hosted services?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s literally the core foundation of my entire self-hosting configuration. I could not live without Forgejo. I can’t imagine being shackled to Github or some other hosted provider anymore for something as important as my git repositories.

  Gitea’s okay too in every practical respect, but Forgejo is the more community-led fork and in my opinion less likely to be corporatized and enshittified far in the future, so I’ve hitched my wagon there and couldn’t be happier. The fork is starting to diverge slowly, but migration is pretty painless and largely automatic, but there’s no guarantee you can go back. Though I don’t know why you’d want to.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Subnautica 2's early access release date was "self-servingly" leaked by Krafton, "further damaging the game", claim lawyers for reinstated Unknown Worlds CEO⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This sort of thing used to bother me a lot, now I appreciate the sign that a real live human actually touched this at some point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google gives Android users a way to install unverified apps if they prove they really, really want to⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  They don’t even respect us enough to bother with trying to make their lies convincing anymore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did we win?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Because they incentivize it. Some banks are better at incentivizing it than others. My bank for example, allows the highest daily limit (by a factor of 5x) if you use the app. Online banking has a lower limit, and cards lower still. I don’t appreciate them holding my own money hostage, but the sad reality we live in precludes me from having enough remaining mental bandwidth and effort reserve to commit it to fighting against it in such an empty and unwinnable battle. Money is a scam anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google gives Android users a way to install unverified apps if they prove they really, really want to⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This very much feels like they just needed to come up with a new justification for this process

  It feels that way because that’s exactly what happened.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So what's your take on Pokopia?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Cobbleverse Minecraft is where it’s at. There’s also All The Mons, which is “Cobblemon” AND “All The Mods” which is pretty much peak modded Minecraft as far as I’m concerned. I don’t see how anything could be better than this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inside the fiery, deadly crashes involving the Tesla Cybertruck: Cybertrucks have locked passengers inside and burned so hot they’ve disintegrated drivers’ bones.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The biggest issue with the Pinto was not the Pinto itself, it was how Ford discussed the potential issues with it internally. It was their very well documented preference for money over protecting human life that caused the controversy.

  We know this really happens all the time, at all companies and in all industries, but Ford was punished for saying the quiet part out loud (amongst themselves) and getting caught doing it. We are all supposed to at least put on a show of human lives being more important than money, and Ford failed to put on the show, and for that they were punished.

  We still don’t care about human life, but at least we all felt better about it afterwards.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it possible to have a usable domain without a VPS or a static IP address?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t have any great options but you do have some options. You’ll need dynamic DNS, which you can get for free by various providers. This will manage a “dynamic” DNS entry for your occasionally changing, non-static IP at home. The dynamic DNS entry won’t be on your own domain name, it will be on the provider’s domain name. But wait! That’s just step one.

  You can still get your own, fully-functional domain name, and you can have all the domains and subdomains you want, and set them up however you want, with one important restriction: You can’t use IP addresses (because yours is dynamic, and changes all the time and you would have to be constantly updating your domain every time it does, and there would be delays and downtime while everything gets updated).

  Instead, your personal domains have to use CNAME records. This substitutes the IP from a different domain INTO your domain. So you CNAME every entry on your own fancy domains to point at your dynamic DNS provider, which manages the dynamic part of the problem for you and always gives the real IP you need. Nobody sees the dynamic DNS name, it’s there, but it’s happening behind the scenes, they still see your fancy personalized domain names.

  It’s still not going to be perfect, it won’t work well or at all for certain services like email hosting (self-hosting this is not for the faint of heart anyway) that are very strict about how their DNS and IP addresses need to be set up, but it will likely be good enough for 99% of the stuff you want to self-host.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sam Altman Thanks Programmers for Their Effort, Says Their Time Is Over⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey Sam, just so you know, if I do get laid off, I am going to charge at LEAST double when some of these assholes need to hire me back to fix the AI generated disaster they’re struggling to keep running while bleeding money. So thanks you in advance, I guess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Flappy Bird a good game?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not a bad game in the same way pong is not a bad game and checkers is not a bad game. They are simple, shallow games. That’s fine. Most people prefer deeper and more complex games most of the time, but sometimes, some people might feel like playing a simple game like flappy bird. That’s fine. There is nothing specifically wrong with it. It is playable. It’s not broken. It’s a perfectly fine game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jensen Huang says gamers are 'completely wrong' about DLSS 5 — Nvidia CEO responds to DLSS 5 backlash⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Calling it now: Jensen Huang’s mind has been emptied and replaced with AI chips. That’s why he just spouts AI generated nonsense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m always open to somebody’s redemption arc, even if I dislike them. The great thing about people is that we are capable of growth, even if not all of us always grow in the right direction, we always can.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Considering self hosting my own git repositories. What are some options?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I love Forgejo, I’m glad you are happy with it too. Their upgrade process is pretty minimal/straightforward (at least it has been so far) and their runner configuration is a bit heavy to set up initially (I maybe took the security recommendations a bit too intensively despite the fact that I’m running a completely private site, but allowing systems that run arbitrary commands automatically is legitimately a bit intimidating) but has been really nice and reliable now that it’s working.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨From millions of dollars to under a grand: The dramatic fall of the NFT⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it was even easier to say in 2021, because more people knew about it and the scam was even more obvious. Now, in 2026, most people’s hindsight doesn’t go back that far, it was quickly forgotten as it should be, and people are like “huh? NFT?”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stardock announce an expansion into indie game publishing⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m very conflicted about Stardock. Brad Wardell has some very… uncomfortable and problematic issues around things he’s done and said and his games have often failed in one way or another. On the other hand, he does seem to genuinely have empathy for his customers in a way that most businessmen generally don’t, especially nowadays. I mean, I got this email too and over the years I’ve been given several gifts of free games and expansions other things and just given a general feeling of accountability and generosity from this company that are just… unheard of. I don’t want to give them a pass for the things they’ve done wrong but… like damn, their apologies are pretty convincing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to Talk to Someone Experiencing 'AI Psychosis'⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s the old-school term for the “Reddit hug of death”. In other words, huge popular site links to tiny unpopular site, and tiny unpopular site is overwhelmed by extreme levels of traffic it never expected to see and is completely unprepared for, server hosting it melts into a puddle of goo and website becomes inaccessible. (Realistically, server hosting it goes to 100% CPU or memory or both and the website just crashes and doesn’t restart or only functions intermittently and extremely slowly)

  Server admin, seeing their server turning to a puddle of molten goo, decides to quickly throw emergency barricades in front of it to try to block enough of the traffic that the server can continue to function, often in vain.

  Slashdot.org was the precursor to Reddit for old techies. It still kind of is, but it’s a shadow of what it once was.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  its a corp it cant just make claims and not follow on them

  oh, my sweet summer child… the winter is coming, and you will quickly find out exactly what corporations can “not” do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New ntfy.sh v2.18.0 was written by AI⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think there’s room for a little bit of nuance that page doesn’t do a great job of describing. In my opinion there’s a huge difference between volunteer maintainers using AI PR checks as a screening measure to ease their review burden and focusing their actual reviews on PRs that pass the AI checks, and AI-deranged lone developers flooding the code with “AI features” and slopping out 10kloc PRs for no obvious reason.

  Just because a project is using AI code reviews or has an AGENTS.md is not necessarily a red flag. A yellow flag, maybe, but the evidence that the Linux Kernel itself is on that list should serve as an example of why you can’t just kneejerk anti-AI here. If you know anything about Linus Torvalds you know he has zero tolerance for bad code, and the use of AI is not going to change that despite everyone’s fears. If it doesn’t work out, Linus will be the first one to throw it under the bus.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨System76 on Age Verification Laws⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It can be bad, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s not bad if you’re just using it as a tool and understand that it’s not your only tool. Heavy equipment operators use their machines like extensions of their body. It doesn’t mean it’s bad or that they forget how to use their arms and legs or that they don’t still exercise their arms and legs sometimes. Use tools when it’s appropriate to and don’t when it isn’t, and always make sure you can use a variety of different tools including the ones you were born with and you’ll be fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NVIDIA could enter the desktop CPU market with performance equal to AMD and Intel⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe they should start making RAM /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Forced age verification is comming sooner than we thought.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  When they make it law to have age verification in your operating system, only outlaws will have operating systems without age verification.

  I guess I’m an outlaw then. Enjoy your visit to the wild west, we will always have illegal operating systems aplenty.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey, I Shrunk The Vids - a Windows transcoding frontend for FFMPEG⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I have actively and deliberately chosen not to be the kind of person who just “gives up” anymore so I’m not really sure what it is you’re trying to convince me of, but I don’t think it’s going to change the direction of my efforts. The steering must continue, and even if the ship goes down anyway, it will go down with me still at the helm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey, I Shrunk The Vids - a Windows transcoding frontend for FFMPEG⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s being built inch by inch. You won’t even know it’s there until you realize you can’t squeeze through it anymore. The trend is extremely obvious: TPM, Secure boot, Windows Store UWP applications, forced updates without consent, or intentional opt-outs that conveniently get ignored or forgotten when it’s convenient for Microsoft to force something. They are intent on taking full control of PCs and locking them down exactly the same way Android phones are locked down, they will follow a few footsteps behind what Android is doing now by preventing third-party apps and app stores, but it’s obviously coming, because they are on exactly the same path for exactly the same reasons.

  I don’t imagine we can save everybody either. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. The more they tighten their grip, the more will slip through their fingers, and all I care about is that the rebellion against Windows grows large enough to survive indefinitely, if not thrive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey, I Shrunk The Vids - a Windows transcoding frontend for FFMPEG⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Good luck, although I’d caution you with the general principle of “Don’t let perfect become the enemy of good”. Sometimes good enough is good enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey, I Shrunk The Vids - a Windows transcoding frontend for FFMPEG⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s good in principle, and it’s good you’re learning to build and control your own software, but Windows is a dead end at this point. Start planning your escape to Linux before the cage door starts closing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Data centers are now hoarding SSDs as hard drive supplies dry up⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s more like expectations have been deliberately lowered in those fields to meet exactly what AI can deliver. Unpredictable, arbitrary, non-negotiable decisions are the point, and the goal. It’s not about enforcing any laws or achieving any actual outcome other than making innocent people fear for their lives. And it’s doing a fine job at that.