Jimmycrackcrack
@Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml
- Comment on What's happened from July to September 2025 that might make people Google "Worst timeline"? 15 hours ago:
There’ve been occassions here on Lemmy when people have responded to questions with AI overviews or chatGPT. They acknowledged that source for the copied text, which I thought was good, and while the answers were generally too vague and hedge betting to really be of massive help they were sometimes at least providing something of an answer to questions for which there could be a definitive or at least actionable answer. The responses were not received well, a lot of downvotes and chiding, there’s a sense that, choosing to do that showed a kind of contempt for the original poster and rest of the forum. Usually the commenter was silent after the downvotes but occasionally would defend on the grounds that they were just trying to be helpful. Assuming good intent, I could empathise, sorta, especially when there were basically no other answers being provided by anyone, though I absolutely have sympathy for the offended in that context too, it really does feel pointless and dismissive more than helpful.
This brings us now to this specific context, on the face of it it could be a question with a definitive answer, like maybe there was an actual specific reason why that particular phrase and not just many similar constructions was being googled at that time, maybe a popular figure said it, or it appeared in some work of narrative fiction and resonated. Had that been the case and had the AI told you that and you copied it here, then providing that answer and even, perhaps to a fault, being so honest as to cite AI just for a simple statement of fact might have been helpful and laudable. However, unsurprisingly it appears to be a much vaguer and more open ended question, or at least it doesn’t seem to have a straightforward answer. That leaves only speculation and discussion, in lieu of hard facts and that’s something for which a forum is well suited. That you got an AI overview on the topic and it had no specific insight only musings makes its inclusion far more aggravating because you’re essentially outsourcing the theoretically enjoyable job of discussion and human connection, for which a forum is ostensibly for, to a machine, for no gain to anyone. I don’t know if you had genuinely good intentions of trying to be helpful, but the sense that, you didn’t have to say anything at all, yet you still felt the need to basically phone it in will inevitably rub people the wrong way. If you didn’t particularly want to engage with this topic or connect with the rest of us and didn’t even have anything useful to say either, what’s this for?
Unlike a lot of Lemmy I don’t think it’s inherently bad to have made use of an AI overview in the initial forming of an opinion or finding information to help you contribute, but since it turned out to be a dead end, that is, it didn’t really know then simply not saying anything here was always an option.
- Comment on If "James Bond" is a codename, would a hypothetical female operative filling the same role receive the same codename? 1 day ago:
Also, in the Bond universe a LOT of people seem to know who he is, it’s not public knowledge per se, but like it seems that all major intelligence services have heard of him and also anybody with power and connections and ill-intent.
He kinda operates like a really weird form of special forces than a spy half the time.
- Comment on Progress 1 week ago:
The thing is, this would just be equivalent to leaving it on at all hours, because who would join such a chat room without the intention of switching it on. Even if you joined such a chat room and had some restraint and decided to wait till the moment you thought would be most amusing, someone else would definitely just decided that it should be on now and basically the only lull would be if the number of users was relatively limited and mostly in the same timezone so everyone is sleeping.
- Comment on Why are people using the "þ" character? 1 week ago:
I think it’s just that one guy and it’s kind of their whole thing.
- Comment on How, and why, are there so many AI-generated videos of incredibly obscure/niche topics? 2 weeks ago:
I guess that’s sort of the whole money making appeal of new AI tools, previously it didn’t make much sense to spend your time and often/usually money to make something if very few would see it, so you focussed on things that get a lot of eyeballs. Now you could more feasibly make something on kind of any topic and not even have to try very hard to do it since it’s pretty well situated. With such low costs, even a tiny return is a positive return and you can just make a lot of stuff.
That said, I would think it still at the moment required someone to directing the tools to generate something on a given topic and it does seem pretty unlikely someone trying to pump out videos with ads on any and every topic for a few cents of revenue hoping it all adds up would be able to have conceived of the topics you’re seeing so I guess my theory falls apart there.
- Comment on How would you quickly describe Lemmy to a non-fediverse person? 2 weeks ago:
It really isn’t, I had no idea what people were on about when they said that and it sidetracked me from figuring actually understanding. The analogy makes sense and seems apt, when you already understand the concept but not when you don’t.
- Comment on How would you quickly describe Lemmy to a non-fediverse person? 2 weeks ago:
Reddit with a slightly more community centred ownership structure so it’s a bit harder to enforce unpopular decisions.
- Comment on Why do so many boomers and even some gen x believe so peristently that if you dressup and show up in person anywhere you will get whatever you went there for? 2 weeks ago:
They probably did have recent success with a variation on the theme. While they’re likely old enough and established enough now that they’re not having to walk around to retail businesses off the street and attempt to get a job like they did when they started out, this approach likely helped in more recent times in their career in the context of promotions or switching to a new job in their same field or at a similar level in a new field. They might have succeeded in getting that new job or promotion in large part due to their social connections and direct interface with the right people just like they’re advising you to do, except in their case it’s now at the higher level, which is probably one of the few places left where showing up at the right time, having the right manner and air about you and dressing nicely actually still makes the difference. The tactics wouldn’t work on their own, they still needed their credentials and connections and experience to get that far in the first place, but it probably helped cinch the position. Now they’re trying to give practical advice to someone just starting out and for them those tactics genuinely are still helping even if they’re not the sole factor in their success and when they cast their minds back to when they started out it helped a lot then too. With this experience in mind, in their shoes, it worked way back when, and it still works now at the higher level and the youngster you’re earnestly trying to help doesn’t have much else going for them since they’re starting out so of course they should at least do this and if everyone else is applying online then this alone will make them a memorable candidate for putting in the extra effort and place them ahead of 90% of the pack.
In reality, it doesn’t really work that way, the processes are centralised, the people physically in the office or location don’t really handle this themselves so they don’t care what you were like to talk to or how you dressed because it’s not their decision and the way the jobs market is, the employers have the leverage and there’s way more people looking for the jobs than there are jobs so it’s not going to be practical to have them all turning up in a suit because they want to be remembered and they prefer to streamline the process rather than deal with people directly.
I totally see why it would seem like sensible advice to someone who started working when these simple steps were a marker of basic competency and motivation and for whom it now continues to matter to this day. They’re just insulated from the way the situation has shifted.
- Comment on Does anyone else notice an up tick in hostility on Lemmy lately? 2 weeks ago:
That’s exactly the same time I migrated. Personally, no, I haven’t noticed an uptick in that, it’s just as hostile as ever. It just about scratches the itch enough to be a functional replacement for what Reddit used to be for me though so I hang around. There’s solace in that it’s not ALL nasty, it’s just extremely likely to devolve in to that at a hair trigger and however benign or even how mundane the original topic of discussion, someone will try to clumsily make it related fascism or imperialism.
- Comment on Sunlight special 2 weeks ago:
I tend to agree on that more flexible definition with a few core ingredients as baseline but it does seem to me that that core list needs to include at least one regional speciality item specific to the British Isles because I think that’s what the “full” part is really referring to as opposed to just a “fry up” as the other bloke suggested. I think in general in England that’s probably black pudding.
This thinking is because that minimum combination you listed is fairly common in a few places including Australia and while I don’t speak from experience, I think with the exception of the beans if wouldn’t be a totally strange or foreign combination in America either.
- Comment on Why are fruits and berries healthy, even though they are mostly just sugar? 4 weeks ago:
I think that seems to be the gist of the answers here, the sugar is all bundled up with other stuff that makes it both difficult to efficiently digest from the surrounding bulk and filling because of that bulk and also a bunch of water.
- Comment on Why are podcasters/vloggers suddenly holding tiny mics? 4 weeks ago:
I think a good chunk of them know exactly how to correctly use the equipment and are doing it on purpose for aesthetic.
- Comment on Is anyone NOT steaming their Music? 4 weeks ago:
As a teen I used to pirate it and supplement with the very occasional cd purchase. I felt justified at the time given I did still pay at least sometimes and I couldn’t afford to otherwise. These days, it became so ubiquitous on YouTube that I just never felt the need to buy it or torrent it and the filesharing networks all kinda disappeared anyway.
It’s not exactly ethical since I use adblockers but it’s just there, always instantly available and at zero cost. I’d never use a subscription service, I have no idea how much, if any music I would consume over a fixed period so paying a fixed monthly quantity makes no sense at all.
I guess the issue with this is that it’s hard to discover new music. I guess it’s a little sad but really but truth be told the rate of discovery for me has been significantly curtailed since high school, I guess I was never a connoisseur or great appreciator of music so my imagination in the space was pretty limited to just whatever my friends were listening to.
- Comment on Is there a drink with taste of energy drink without caffeine? 4 weeks ago:
I wish that would happen for me. Maybe the length of time one needs to abstain needs to be longer or something. I try to avoid drinking sweet drinks because of how easily it makes you fat but I don’t enjoy them any less and my favourites never feel too sweet and often I find myself really craving a very sweet drink and it’s only by not having it in the house that I manage to avoid it.
I guess I never really went full cold turkey, I figure I should be able to moderate the habit and only consume it on occasion which I think ends up being something like 1 to 2 glasses every 1.5 weeks on average.
- Comment on Cooking 😋 5 weeks ago:
I don’t tend to check individually every time I buy just to make sure, but from what I read and on occasions where source was actually identified so that I could check, almost all the garlic sold here in Australia is from China.
I have not really observed this phenomenon with the roots that you’re describing. Also, it’s kind of hard for me to say what particular characteristics Chinese garlic has because assuming that the garlic I’m buying really is coming from China, then it seems they grow several varieties that all gets sold as just “garlic” because in any given trip to the same supermarket you get noticeably different attributes to the size and appearance and physical characteristics of the garlic sold.
I don’t really notice much difference in cooking with them or eating them though. Occasionally you get some much stronger flavoured ones, but it’s just the same taste but stronger rather than detectably different and often this doesn’t really seem to couple with which type they happened to sell this week. Any attributes of the garlic’s appearance that seem distinct to what’s available this week, don’t seem to reliably signal what it will taste like the next time you see those same attributes again the next time they’re on sale.
- Comment on If you are in the US, and a karen threatens to call ICE on you, what's the best course of action? 5 weeks ago:
Dude are you serious? Attempt to debate with them? I’m not sure you really understand the scenario.
- Comment on If you are in the US, and a karen threatens to call ICE on you, what's the best course of action? 5 weeks ago:
Hopefully this isn’t like, at your place of work or something.
- Comment on How could I order a package without my parents finding it? 5 weeks ago:
How are you going to hide the increase in power consumption? Water too to an extent.
- Comment on FOSS App to Edit videos ? 1 month ago:
Actually I totally forgot about it. I thought I remembered trying a 3rd but since I couldn’t remember what it was I had to exclude it from the list. I remember almost nothing of it. I think I recall liking it slightly more than KDEnlive because I seemed to just plain hate that but everything else has long since left me. I think that probably doesn’t bode well for what I might have thought of it, or maybe it means there fewer notable problems. Nevertheless at the time I definitely decided that I ever had to go FOSS, I’d look to Olive.
Trouble is, with the FOSS offerings, I’m definitely grading on a curve. At the time absolutely nothing available FOSS stood even a chance of being useful form serious work, the lack of professional codec support already crippled most things right out the gate and the number of problems would be too big to overcome. I can’t speak from experience but I suspect that’s probably still the case even now. That said if you literally only have to edit some things together, you’re not dealing with deadlines, you don’t need a particularly collaborative workflow, you don’t have to deal with broadcast or cinema standards and you don’t have many terabyte of footage, probably almost any FOSS app would do the job well enough when you get used to it.
- Comment on FOSS App to Edit videos ? 1 month ago:
Regarding Resolve, that’s actually the only bit of insight I could offer based on recent experiences. Of course nothing said here can be objective. I use the studio version every day for colour grading, it is fantastic for that. I couldn’t get used to fusion, being only a kind of bodge-job amateur in visual FX and motion GFX, it’s very hard to get used to after initially using after effects for that kind of work however I understand it’s very good. The editing side however, I really want it to be good enough, and if I was doing maybe an ad, or a corporate gig or perhaps short YouTube videos or interviews, it’d probably be fine. However, try as I might and try I really really did try, I could not judge it on par on a recent major documentary project where I was forced to use it, compared to Premiere or Avid. It has far more recent, really cool features that I think in time will become indispensible and I love playing with them, but the basic nuts and bolts, while very nearly being there, don’t seem to work as comfortably at scale. Things like multi camera workflows in particular work in frustrating ways that hold you back and become inefficient with enough scale, the lack of auto-patching too gets on my nerves and I also find it extremely frustrating how many things cannot be done keyboard only, even with the crazy expensive full-size editor keyboard. A lot of the problems are quite minor things that would sound like nitpicking to most users but once you find yourself dealing with a big enough pool of footage and timelines the importance of the little things becomes manifest. It’s definitely getting better, at a rapid pace. I’m team Resolve because I just want them to win, especially because despite proclaiming it better, I really dislike using Avid and I also really dislike Adobe as a company even if I generally like their software.
- Comment on FOSS App to Edit videos ? 1 month ago:
I had a go testing out what FOSS had to offer in this space a few years ago. I tried KDEnlive, Olive and Blender (well not really, I read about it).
At the time KDEnlive seemed to be everyone’s favourite in this space. As an editor, I can’t say I loved it, and at the time the interface was just plain awful, I looked at some screenshots just before this comment and it looks like it’s come a very long way.
I really liked Olive. At the time it was for some reason restricted to something like 720p exports and weirder still it would ONLY work with h264 MP4 files. That was enough to make it functionally useless which was a shame because it was the first FOSS app I’d tried or looked at for editing that actually seemed to work like one would expect a video editor to work. Maybe I was just set in my ways but when you train on the commercial offerings which all kind of adhere to a sort of unofficial standard way of doing things that coalesced over decades, you really don’t want to reinvent that wheel. From what I could see before this post it looks like it’s only gone from strength to strength because it based on pictures alone it looks really cool. I guess pictures don’t tell you much about what it’s like to use and apparently it used to be very unstable. Hopefully it’s better now.
Blender, from what I read, was a surprisingly popular choice for editing which is baffling to me because, just because you COULD edit in it, doesn’t mean you should. It’s not built for it at all, it’s 3d modelling and animation software, I reckon you’d have an awful time trying to use it for editing and that’s what people at the time said when I saw forum posts asking if you could use it for this purpose but strangely I came across a few who did nonetheless. I can only assume they had extremely basic needs.
Bonus points: (not FOSS) I also tried LightWorks, which at the time was closed source but said they were about to open source. Nobody believed them and indeed they didn’t and to this day haven’t. It’s uhh… fine. If it was FOSS I’d be impressed but given the competition in the commercial market, it didn’t seem worth bothering. Ironic since I believe they were one of the first computer based editing platforms.
Resolve isn’t FOSS but it has a very good very richly featured free version that would likely beat out anything currently offered in the FOSS world, at least that was the case when I was looking in to this around 2017 or so. Worth a mention because it’s really good. Personal if it’s commercial software and a big project I’d probably still use premiere or avid for the editing part and resolve for the rest but the editing gets better ever day rapidly and they’re by far the least scummy company for this kind of software. It’s a one time purchase too. Own it forever.
- Comment on How often do guys have a haircut? 1 month ago:
6 to 8 weeks. If I allowed it, my vanity would have it closer to every 4 weeks but that’s an expensive indulgence so I just look like a need a haircut a lot of the time.
- Comment on Do you think conservative feel the same need to burn it all down as everyone else felt when trump won again? 1 month ago:
It’s all going to be a bit presumptuous unless someone who genuinely identifies as a conservative and it’s steeped specifically in the subcultures and particular varieties of conservatism Kirk was in to chimes in, but I’m not sure that they have that feeling in the way you’re describing in response to this incident because I guess you kind of can’t really feel that way more so when you’re already at that point that you feel like things are unsalvageable. Reaching that point, or being at that point already seems to be sort of the essence of the MAGA movement and why it was so successful even as people pointed out hypocrisies amongst it’s proponents or how the tenets of conservatism seemed so changeable so long as it’s Trump changing them at any given moment. Their movement basically encapsulated this with phrases like “drain the swamp”. They already long since considered the establishment order a quagmire.
Despite the irony that their saviour is still running for office within that system and contesting in elections within the supposedly beyond-fixing electoral system, they feel, I think, that Trump and his malleable brand of conservatism represents the final “burn everything down” revolution that will eventually result in the phoenix of the “great” America rising from the ashes. In this way it’s fine for Trump to forgo or undermine elections in future, to destroy institutions, even act in apparent defiance of supposedly core conservative ideals at times, because it’s part of the master plan to get rid of all the undesirables and defang opposition to the great new order that will eventually emerge.
To my mind within that framework, the maximal point fatigue and the end of patience and tolerance for the status quo was long since reached and support for Trump isn’t like traditional support for a candidate in the past, it’s more like outsourcing the revolution they’d otherwise take part in themselves, minimising the risk to themselves in the process. Events like the Kirk shooting do seen dangerous though in as much as many of those supporters likely think of themselves as revolutionaries in waiting until either the official word is given or some transcendent event lights the fuse in some way that becomes clear once it happens. This shooting might be viewed in that light. So rather than reacting to it like “that’s it! I’m now fed up with this system, time to burn it down” it could be more like “that’s the signal, I’ve already packed my go-bag and the gun under my pillow was already loaded anyway”.
- Comment on What is it called when you believe the U.S. political parties shouldn’t exist? 1 month ago:
That really does not end up resulting that way.
- Comment on How come butthole scratches doesn't get infected with poop bacteria ? 1 month ago:
I just puckered involuntarily.
- Comment on How long do we have before PCs get locked bootloaders and corporations ban installation of "non-approved" software? (for context: Google is restricting sideloading worldwide on Android ETA 2027) 1 month ago:
!Remindme 4 January 2026
- Comment on XC Running: Does anyone else's parents do this? 2 months ago:
Much of what you describe sounds bad, and reflects poorly upon your parents and especially your mother, in particular the very strange act of texting the coach WTF? But for the sake of a complete perspective I’ll offer you the most charitable defence I can of why she’s acting this way.
One lens through which these years of discouraging behaviour is that early in as you say, you came in with a lot of excitement and confidence that perhaps may have been premature at the time and maybe at the time she was concerned that you were setting yourself up for a fall and in a fairly misguided way was trying to protect you by trying to pull you back a little and keep expectations realistic so if the reality didn’t reach giddying heights you wouldn’t be devastated. If that is why she’s been acting this way, it seems she went all in on this notion and didn’t realise it was doing a lot more harm than good. I think that this probably then accidentally have became a sticking point between the two of you and she lost sight of her original intention and became more focussed on “bursting you’re bubble” and began to take all evidence that there wasn’t really any such bubble and that indeed you really did have realistic ambitions as a need to be even more critical than ever and so the goalposts have moved and moved.
This interpretation doesn’t exactly make her look saintly either but without knowing too much about her outside of your story it’s at least plausible and at least started with arguably good intentions. I’m not saying necessarily this is definitely what’s happening but you’ll probably have plenty of responses already covering how bad this looks so an extra perspective might be helpful to you. Up to you with you proximity to it to assess how realistic this could be.
- Comment on What strategy would you use to estimate the number of hazelnuts 2 months ago:
X
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 2 months ago:
Gee that’s a real removed it ain’t it perplexity?
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago: