melmi

@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Framework supporting far-right racists?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s weird to me that people have started claiming it has anything to do with AI poisoning because the thorn phenomenon started before this latest LLM craze.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Star Trek Discovery that bad?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I suppose I’m confused what your issue with the trans characters is then. I thought at first you wished there were more, but now you’re saying you don’t understand why it comes up so often?

  I understand the difficulty getting used to new pronouns. It’s great that you’re doing your best to understand despite not having much experience with it. I was just trying to point out that the portrayal in Trek is already showing a world that accepts trans and nonbinary people far more naturally than IRL, even if there could be more representation of actual queer folks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Star Trek Discovery that bad?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I just don’t understand this “Vulcan powers” criticism. She was a prodigy, sure, and pretty good at doing anything she wants, but that’s a broader issue. I don’t recall any point where she showed any Vulcan abilities that would be implausible for a human to learn from being raised in that culture. Even if you could argue it contributes to her being good at too many things, that has nothing to do with Vulcans specifically.

  And I find it very ironic that you’re complaining about the portrayal of trans characters not being progressive enough while misgendering Adira. Adira is non binary. They are not a girl, and they explicitly make it clear in the show they use they/them pronouns. Girl refers to gender, not sex, and furthermore sex isn’t relevant to 99% of conversations so you don’t need to disambiguate by finding a replacement word.

  Frankly, I think Adira and Gray’s transness was handled quite well. I’m not sure what makes them tokens to you. Adira has more lines than most of the bridge crew, and the little queer family unit of Stamets/Culber/Adira gets quite a bit of development and screen time. Gray gets his time in the spotlight too, and gets a bit of character development of his own.

  Both Gray and Adira are immediately accepted and never questioned by anyone on the crew. That’s a far cry from presenting it as if it were still our time. No one trips up on either of their pronouns once. You yourself refer to Adira with she/her in your comment.

  The main difference between Adira and Gray is that Gray already came out and transitioned off-screen, while Adira comes out on-screen. I think their transition is well done and realistic; even in the Trek future people will have to come out to some extent because people clearly default to binary pronouns. They aren’t mind readers, and they haven’t replaced all pronouns with they/them, so it’s only natural that one would have to explicitly tell people their pronouns.

  Stamets immediately accepts Adira, with zero questions about nonbinary identity or pronouns, and then seemingly informs the rest of the crew off-screen. I don’t know what you think coming out nowadays is like, but that’s not the reaction most of the time. Adira comes off as kind of nervous in the scene, but they’re talking to someone they barely know at this point who arrived from hundreds of years ago. Plus they’re just a nervous person in general. I think it works well.

  And Gray doesn’t have to come out at all, he’s accepted as male from day one. His transness only ever comes up as vague references to transitioning. Seems pretty accepted to me!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Star Trek Discovery that bad?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think Adira is a nonbinary girl, I think they’re just nonbinary. Their boyfriend was also trans for what it’s worth.

  Georgiou is also pansexual, though that’s not particularly progressive (classic depraved bisexual trope), and Jett Reno was married to a woman.

  So you’re right, most of the major cast is cishet. Even so, I think there’s more people who hate it for being “woke” than for being not progressive enough, as I haven’t heard the latter much but the former is annoyingly common from the usual suspects.

  Also, as for “Vulcan powers”: we’ve always known that Vulcan logic is learned and not innate. Vulcans are naturally wildly emotional, their logic is basically just advanced meditation techniques, so it makes sense that a human raised by Vulcans could learn them. We’ve also seen non-Vulcans use the iconic nerve pinch before, it’s essentially just a Vulcan martial art and nothing to do with Vulcan biology. Picard and Data could both do it.

  The only “Vulcan power” tied to their biology really is the mind meld, and that’s because Vulcans are mildly telepathic. Non-Vulcan telepaths could learn it too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Star Trek Discovery that bad?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think Picard was worse than Discovery. Discovery had major flaws but there were moments when it really shined. It had some interesting ideas too. It just wasn’t an ensemble show.

  Picard is just awful. Mediocre S1-2 that doesn’t know what it’s trying to achieve, and then S3 abandons every plot thread that they bothered to build up in favor of nostalgia baiting and bringing back the Borg, which was very tonally confusing after S2.

  The tone is also just bizarrely dire throughout. People complain about Discovery not feeling like Trek, but I had that problem way moreso with Picard. And now it’s this minefield in the canon of the early 25th century that every show that comes after will have to figure out what to do with. At least Discovery going immediately jumping to the far future means it wasn’t able to fuck up the timeline much, and what it did do was cheekily classified.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Plants looking at people looking at people looking at fungi⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I reworded my comment a few times to try to hedge for that, without making any claims about fungi experiences because I couldn’t know anything about that.

  It’s certainly possible fungi experience some form of social life, but I think it’s unlikely they have an experience of gender at all analogous to ours.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Plants looking at people looking at people looking at fungi⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If we’re being pedantic fungi have neither gender nor sex, they have “mating types”. But yeah, mating types are more analogous to sexes than genders. Fungi would have to have some level of social experience to have gender.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, games for it are written in a high level language (Lua) which makes it significantly easier to get into than actual old hardware.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3126: Disclaimer⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel like this is more likely to lead you astray than anything. An LLM bot will immediately know the alt code, while a real person will only know it if they use Windows. Lots of people use Linux, or mobile keyboards.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Itch.io Re-indexes free NSFW content, are in ongoing discussions with payment processors to re-introduce paid content⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t help but wonder if Itch is intentionally going for a malicious compliance route. As you say, it’s tougher to defend rape and incest content, so if they’d opened with that they likely wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much media attention. But by doing it this way, half the internet is talking about payment processors forcing itch to delist NSFW games, even giving juicy headlines like LGBTQ games being disproportionately affected. Then Collective Shout of all groups was forced onto the back foot and forced to say “wait no we just wanted the rape and incest games gone” but now that the story is out there it has a life of its own.

  Even if they didn’t do it on purpose, it seems like it’s created a much more effective movement than if they had done it “properly”, regardless of the reason for why it worked out this way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RPGs that are optionally pacifist?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you’re mixing multiple endings. Far Cry 4-6 all have quick endings like that but none of them I know of fit your description? In Far Cry 5 you go in to arrest the BBEG, not the other way around, and the way you get out early is by not arresting him and leaving. If you do your job and arrest him, then you get attacked.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨USA 🇺🇸 USA 🇺🇸 USA⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Tbf it’s a comedy show, it being informative is mostly a bonus. This one is rare for being factual and not about why we should nuke the moon or which cartoon characters are invited to the cookout or something like that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let’s Encrypt Begins Supporting IP Address Certificates⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t see how? Normal HTTP verification would still apply so you’d need port forwarding. You can’t host anything on the CGNAT IP so you can’t pass verification and they won’t issue you a cert.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think this is less a problem of “nefarious bad actors” and more a problem of expectations. Honestly, I agree with the quoted comment: I think they should be visible all the time, like they already are on Mbin. I think it would help change the way people think about votes so that they don’t expect Reddit-style anonymous votes and instead it’s a more public Facebook/Twitter-style like system.

  If you really want private votes, Piefed has feature that lets you anonymize your votes, but a determined bad actor could still deanonymize you. I think it’s better to change expectations than to try to massage a fundamentally public platform into having private votes, but it’s good there’s an option for people since it’s so highly requested.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The American Dream is inherently capitalist, it being a myth doesn’t change that.

  The crux of the American Dream is that you have to suffer on the bottom of the totem pole, but eventually you’ll get the chance to be on top and exploit the others on the bottom. The American Dream is very useful to the capitalist class because it gives people motivation to stay in the rat race, to believe that they have a stake in capitalism as a system, because one day their hard work will be rewarded and they will be a capitalist as well.

  Outside of the context of capitalism, the American Dream doesn’t really make sense. If realizing that it’s a lie helps push people to the left, that’s good and should be encouraged, but I don’t think that makes the Dream itself anticapitalist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon updates terms of service to ban AI model training on user data⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is interesting! I’ve been exploring this and it seems like a neat little license.

  I’m not a lawyer, but one funny edge case I noticed is that the Extractive Industries module seems like it makes it a breach of license for crystal shops to use your software since you’re involved in the sale of minerals.

  I would tend to agree with FSF that it’s not FOSS, though. There are so many restrictions on this license and who can use it, based on fairly arbitrary things like “if CBP claims you’re doing forced labor” or “you do business in this specific region”. It might be more moral, but it’s a different approach than FOSS, which is less restrictive than more and prioritizes “Freedom” above everything else. Maybe it’s time for a different approach, though?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Friendly reminder that Tailscale is VC-funded and driving towards IPO⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  CGNAT is for IPv4, the IPv6 network is separate. But if you have IPv6 connectivity on both ends setting up WG is the same as with IPv4.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨IPv6 for self hosters⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Going to other planets would require a total re-architecting of our communications infrastructure anyway. There’s such distance too it’s not really viable to have a shared internet. Even Mars would have up to 22 minute latency at peak. So I don’t think it makes sense to plan our current internet around potential future space colonization.

  Even so, IPv6 is truly massive. We could give a /64 to every square centimeter of the Earth’s surface and still have IPs to spare. Frankly, I think the protocol itself will be obsolete before we run out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thoughts on the recent Swiss law that might require ProtonVPN to start blocking certain domains?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  All of your temporary privacy addresses will be coming out of the same subnet, so it’s clear they all belong to the same people.

  Ultimately the privacy extensions are just bringing IPv6’s privacy back in line with IPv4, because without the privacy extensions every single device has a separate IPv6 address based on its MAC address whereas in IPv4 most consumer networks have every device sharing a single IP.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TIL blocking users on Lemmy is nothing but a placebo⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the utility of blocking people on a public platform is kind of fake anyway. If someone is harassing you, and you block them, they’ll just log out and suddenly they can see your posts again. Accounts are trivial to make on the fediverse too so they can always just spin up a new one to harass you.

  I think silent filtering is better for that reason because they can’t tell that you did it so they won’t just immediately switch to a new account and keep going.

  Active blocking like you’re talking about only makes sense if there’s such a thing as “follower-only” posts imo. Otherwise it’s a false sense of security because they can see everything anyway just by logging out or switching to another account.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT does not fuck around⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The free version of ChatGPT is 4o or 4.1-mini at this point. You can’t even access 3.5 without paying, ironically, since it’s legacy now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ever heard of Bitmoji? Or Apple’s Genmoji thing? People do create stickers of themselves doing gestures or facial expressions, it’s fairly popular… And most of Instagram is people posting thirst traps and selfies. Not sure why you’re singling out furries here…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨That's all folks, Plex is starting to charge for sharing⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Be that as it may, the Plex official guide for setting up “remote streaming” walks you through port forwarding. That implies that when they say remote streaming, they mean port forwarding by default. I then had to go digging to find mention of the Relay service which seems to be a fallback. (Apparently it isn’t even supported by all clients)

  Surely if they meant they’d start charging for Relays they’d mention that explicitly, and not use the term “remote streaming”?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨That's all folks, Plex is starting to charge for sharing⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s the confusing mess of subscriptions and seemingly locking basic functionality behind a paywall that’s skeevy, not paying for software itself. I have happily paid for software before and would again. Plex has never appealed to me though, and they’re certainly doing nothing to make themselves more appealing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨That's all folks, Plex is starting to charge for sharing⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you have a source for this claim that the new pricing scheme only applies to the Plex Relays? As far as I can tell it applies to anything they consider “remote access”, regardless of whether it goes through their servers or not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨That's all folks, Plex is starting to charge for sharing⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It seems deeply opposed to the spirit of selfhosting to have to pay for the privilege of accessing one’s own server. If the software itself cost money, that would be one thing, but this whole monetization scheme is skeevy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨That's all folks, Plex is starting to charge for sharing⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It seems like multiple things are being conflated here and I’m not sure what the reality is because I’ve never used Plex.

  Some people claim this has something to do with Plex needing to pay for NAT traversal infrastructure. Okay, that seems sort of silly but at least there’s the excuse that their servers are involved in the streaming somehow.

  But their wording is very broad, just calling it “remote streaming.” That led me to this article on the Plex support website, which walks people through setting up port forwarding in order to enable “remote streaming”! So that excuse doesn’t really seem to hold water. What exactly is being paid for here then? How do they define what “local streaming” is?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Everyone uses 4d chess as the example of more intense gambits when 3d chess should suffice because chess is a 2d game⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you think this is annoying to play, try simulating 4D chess by lining up four of these 3D chess sets

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reminder if you're leaving Discord for this Revolt server ( Linux + Steam Deck devs / creators)⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Classic

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AceCoding.social - Vibe coding on the social web based on the semi-formalic language ACE (Demo)⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The cursed LLM thing uses buttplug.io on the backend, I just wanted to share it because the premise is very funny to me.