blind3rdeye

@blind3rdeye@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky now has 30 million users.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  which is less than bsky, but more than lemmy.

  I think a lot of people get sucked into the idea that more is better. But that isn’t necessarily the case. I don’t think any of us really want to talk to a million different people anyway. We just want to talk to a suitable subset.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The one drawback to walking at night⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sorry it bothers you like that.

  I personally don’t feel alienated or attacked at all by the kinds of comments you are describing. When I see a comment like “men murder women”, I think of it in the same kind of way comments like “humans are horrible” or “Australians are racist” or “young people have no attention span”… That is to say it describes a trend or someone’s perception of a tendency but does not refer to any specific individual.

  People aren’t saying these things to attack you. They are saying them to communicate their own feelings of being unsafe. And to be frank, feeling that you shouldn’t go for a walk at night because it is too dangerous is a pretty serious thing which has obvious negative effects - and the concern is based in reality. It isn’t just a perception problem. So we should take these comments seriously - not just complain about the people saying them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LegalEagle Suing PayPal's Honey⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I use to have a PayPal account. I used it to receive donations from some open-source projects that I was working on. And I passed most of the money on by re-donating it to other people who were also sharing high quality work that I liked. It was never very much money (like maybe a few hundred dollars in total over years); but I kind of enjoyed that.

  But around 10 years ago, that PayPal account was blocked, because of who I’d sent money to. They didn’t tell me specifically what the problem was, they just told me that it was ‘suspicious’ - and they (PayPal) demanded personal info from my to prove my identity before they would unlock the account. They wanted photos of drivers license and stuff like that.

  Long story short, I eventually did get them to unblock the account (and I did not send them personal info); but that experience destroyed my confidence and trust in PayPal. So I drained the account, and haven’t used them ever since. I very much don’t like the idea that a company can just take my account (and money) hostage for totally arbitrary reasons and make demands based on that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I never realized this⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  if you are getting “punched down” (aka offended) by a joke posted on lemmy, by a random guy, you should realize that it is simply not that deep

  I think you’ve misunderstood what punching down means. It has nothing to do with being offended. It’s about the relationship between the person telling the joke and the subject of the joke. For example, it’s generally fine for anyone to make jokes mocking rich people; but its not ok to make jokes mocking poor people unless you yourself are very obviously a poor person.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I never realized this⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Probably anyone who ever gotten any pressure about handling last-names after marriage might care. It’s definitely something that some people care about, and some people cop flack for their decision.

  The joke is just a joke, but the problem is that this joke punches down. That’s generally poor form.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Choosing pink is chaotic evil?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  shit

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Le Reddit Army is Here⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d suggest “nothing” for the time being.

  There are a lot of different people around here, and different people get angry about different things. So there’s always going to be a lot of different bad things said about a large instance like lemmy.world. But whether or not those things are actually a real problem is for you to decide.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨flouride⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  By that reasoning, we should start putting all of our waste products in our water supply - since we weren’t able to sell them otherwise.

  … Or perhaps there are other reasons to consider?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨flouride⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pretty much anything you can think of is recommended by someone, because different people have conflicting views. The key is to choose whose recommendations are based on the best reasoning & evidence aligning with your goals.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon sees a boost from the 'X exodus,' too, founder says⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It will outlast bs. Mastodon has been around for many years now. It already outlasted Google+, which was bigger and had more funding. And since it has a broad base of support it’s unlikely that it will all just fall apart. Unlike the commercial social networks, no single person can pull the plug the fediverse. (Lemmy is younger, but it also seems very strong right now. I just hope lemmy still gets some exposure on the outside now that the major drama at reddit has died down.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"What Is Your Dream for Mozilla" - Mozilla is doing a survey, questions include "What is most important to you right now about technology and the internet?"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Fair enough. Thanks for the additional context.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"What Is Your Dream for Mozilla" - Mozilla is doing a survey, questions include "What is most important to you right now about technology and the internet?"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So you got this survey in an email. Was the link intended to be shared like this? Can I find the survey link somewhere on Mozilla’s own websites?

  I guess I’m not totally convinced that this is an official Mozilla survey, or even if it is - I’m not sure who their target survey audience is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The cost of constructing and decommissioning power plants is important for sure; but it has nothing to do with energy density - which is what we were talking about before. It’s true that building solar panels takes energy and resources, and the panels don’t last indefinitely. So there is a lifecycle cost to using them. But the same is true for all forms of power generation.

  A common way to compare these costs is to look at the ‘payback time’ of each form of power generation. The payback time is the amount of time it would take for the power plant to produce enough energy to pay back the lifecycle costs required to build, operate, and decommission that type of plant. It’s basically how long it takes for the construction to have been ‘worth it’.

  In terms of payback time, wind power is by far the best; typically taking less than 1 year to pay itself off. Solar is pretty good too, but is highly dependent on where it is used. And nuclear… is not good on this measure. It takes decades for a nuclear power plant to pay itself off, because the plants are very expensive to build and decommission.

  Obviously there are other things to consider in terms of the strengths and weaknesses of different forms of power generation. But you’ve been talking about the cost of materials and construction as though it is a weakness of renewables, and it really really isn’t. That’s in fact one of their strengths, and a major weakness of nuclear. Its strange that you say nuclear is ‘insanity powerful for its cost’, because its cost is the greatest weakness of nuclear power. Its much cleaner than coal, but much more expensive, even though it uses so little fuel. And it is not cleaner than solar or wind, but it is still more expensive.

  Your point about land usage is a stronger point in favour of nuclear power… except that depending on what country you are talking about, that could easily swing the other way. Solar and wind do take up more space than nuclear, that’s for sure. But nuclear requires certain geological conditions for the safe operation of the plant, and the storage of waste. So depending on where you live, finding unused land suitable for renewables can be much easier than finding a suitable location for a nuclear power plant and waste containment facility.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Half-Life 2 peaks at 52,000 concurrent players, 20 years after its release⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I was totally fine playing HL1, and HL2, and HL2 episode 1… but I never finished episode 2 because of motion sickness. The problem isn’t really with episode 2 though. The problem is just that I got old, and now I get motion sickness from FPS games that didn’t affect me before.

  But I do know that not every FPS makes me sick. I think mouse-look smoothing helps. I’m not certain what else, but I’d try messing with the field-of-view angle and stuff like that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What are you trying to say here? Are we still talking about fuel types here?

  Again, let me point out that solar power does not consume any fuel. The materials used to construct the solar panels are not having any power extracted from them. And secondly, nuclear power plants require construction materials too. … So I really don’t know what kind of comparison you are asking for here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  only antimatter could provide more energy density, it’s insanely powerful.

  Nuclear energy indeed has very high energy per mass of fuel. But so what? Solar and wind power doesn’t even use fuel. So the energy density thing is a bit of a distraction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft has a big Windows 10 problem, and only one year to solve it⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  By default there is a shortcut to the terminal shortcut on task bar. From memory it is one of three default shortcuts. (File browser, Terminal, Firefox.) You can also find it by pressing the menu button (the ‘start menu’). From there the terminal has a prominent special position where it is always accessible. And if you don’t notice it there, you can always start typing to search for it - as with any other installed app. I find that if I type ‘t’, then “Terminal” is the top result; and obviously I can kept typing to eliminate the other results if I want.

  So if your difficulty in finding the terminal is your main complaint about about Mint… I’m not sure what to tell you. Do you want it to auto-launch or something?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨X's idiocy is doing wonders for Bluesky.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Mastodon isn’t a person. So I don’t know who you are talking about when you say ‘mastodon was attacking people’. I certainly didn’t see anything like that. Perhaps you have an example link for context?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it normal to feel tired of technological progress?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  When I was young, I really valued the idea of technological progress. It was almost axiomatically the goal of humanity. Getting greater abilities to do more things more easily… it seemed like the ultimate goal.

  But now that I’m older, I’ve seen what happens with technological power like that, and it isn’t great. Yes, we can do more things more easily than before. And what is the result? The main result seems to be increase consolation of wealth and power, and increasing the rate at which the world’s resources are depleted.

  • People can now connect instantly and effortlessly with anyone anywhere in the world - and the result is that enormous numbers of people shun their local peers and instead have shallow parasocial relationships with strangers who’s job it is to advertise products to them.
  • Clothes are cheap and easy to create - and the result is mountains of waste created by fast-fashion low-quality throw-away clothes largely made from slave labour. Similarly for many products, in particular plastic products are now choking the world in waste.
  • Cars are more efficient, and production quality is high - and the result is massively oversized monsters, completely negating the efficiency benefit and instead increasing the amount of space and maintenance required to handle the increased size and weight of the machines. The streets are basically filled with cars and spaces for cars, with less and less space for people to do people things.
  • Half-decent AI has finally been created. It’s a long-held dream come true… except that the outcome isn’t quite what we hoped. There’s a lot to say on this topic, but just to keep it snappy, I’ll oversimplify it by saying that people are not using it to do better. They are instead outsourcing their own thoughts and imagination.

  Our silky-smooth hyper-connected ultra-convenient world is not leading people to be happier, or smarter, or kinder. And it certainly isn’t helping humanity survive longer. We’re burning out fast.

  A lot of what we have superficially looks like ‘progress’, but in full description it looks more like a dystopia. Things are easier, but perhaps the good things were already easy enough; and so the main effect is that exploitation and manipulation got easier. Even when we agree that we’re going in the wrong direction, the messages are still muddied enough that we accelerate rather than change course.

  Anyway… I don’t agree with my younger self. I no longer think that technological advances are intrinsically good. I think taking things a bit more slowly might have been more wise. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think a core part of it is that money corrupts. Unfortunately, money is very tightly intertwined with most of what we do - so that’s a pretty difficult problem to fix. So I won’t go into more detail about that now!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨X's idiocy is doing wonders for Bluesky.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d say mastodon is a better choice, mostly so that you’re not beholden to yet another profit-focused tech corporation. I’m sure Bluesky is fine right now, but once they have their userbase they will shift to monetization - and you may regret letting yourself become entrenched in the world they control. They’re not doing it for your benefit.

  That said, I’ve come to understand that a lot of people kind of like having their content feed controlled by others. When they only see what they ask for, they get bored. So I’m expecting Bluesky to always be bigger than Mastodon.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI is now valued at $157 billion⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The name use to be closer to the truth, but then money corrupted it - as it always does.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨End nuclear fusion!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Privatization seems like a really bad idea to me. Helium is non-renewable resource. Privatization is about being ‘efficient’ at maximising profits. Do you think the people / companies that own the helium reserves are going to be interested in keeping helium available for centuries in the future? I’d say probably not.

  For a profit based company, the only motivation to preserve the helium for future use is that maybe it will be worth a lot more money in the future. But there are two big problems with that. Firstly, the timescale is likely to be too long for the profit to be of interest. And secondly, the main reason the price would go up is scarcity; and that scarcity will come sooner if the helium is wasted in the short term. (Unless one company actually has a monopoly on helium, in which case they can create artificial scarcity by just not selling it. But that would obviously be bad for other reasons.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨reDUcTIon iS gAIn⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure why you’re saying its clocks that are wrong rather than the other stuff. Currently we have x = r cos(𝜃) and y = r sin(𝜃), and that’s what makes anti-clockwise rotations mathematically natural. But if we instead just used x = r sin(𝜃) and y = r cos(𝜃) then clockwise would be the natural positive rotation. And in that case, the unit circle would start at the top and go around clockwise… like we do for compass bearing (and clocks of course). So perhaps that would be better than changing what clocks do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cancer Memes⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I wouldn’t say ‘outperform’… Cell death is a deliberate and desirable feature. Without it, we’d be unable to repair damage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brazilian court orders suspension of Elon Musk’s X after it missed deadline⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There is some misleading information in there. Probably better to just get straight to the point with the ‘standard’ joinmastodon.org link.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Climate scientists flee Twitter as hostility surges⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m mean life on Earth, obviously. No one is saying that the planet is going to explode or disappear or anything like that. We’re talking about the climate, and life that depends on that climate.

  And before you start coming at me with some “but but such and such life will still…” I’ll clarify again that there is a matter of scale here. A very large number of species that have been around for a very long time will soon be extinct (many have been lost already). So although we might still have mosquitos and jelly-fish for a long time to come, a lot of the complex life that is currently enjoying a comfortable and otherwise-sustainable life on Earth will no longer be able to do so; because of us. That’s what I’m referring to.

  Yes, humans have does this to ‘ourselves’, but we are nowhere near the worst effected life in this situation. In fact, most of the ill effects on humans are just knock-on effects from other life failing. (In particular, reduced capacity to grow food is likely to be a problem for humans.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Climate scientists flee Twitter as hostility surges⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. I’ve been mourning the loss of Earth’s future for some time now. It’s very sad.

  That said, we are not in a simple binary fucked vs fine situation. It’s a sliding scale. So even though things are very bad, we can always still take action to make them less bad. That is never not an option.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Regarding this picture, where do you think quantum computers lie and why?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are a few different physical systems that people are trying to build quantum computers with. Superconducting loops are one of the most promising ones, because of a halfway decent decoherence rate. And yeah, superconducts needing near 0K temperature to operate is a problem. It’s just hard to scale up while everything needs to be so cold. Room-temp superconductivity would be a huge advantage.

  But even then, the decoherence rates are still too high for any long quantum computation. Last I heard, the best qubits are maybe barely getting to good enough errors rates that quantum error correction would be possible - which is great, but ‘possible’ and ‘practical’ still have a significant gap between them.

  So in short, basically everything about the hardware needs to be better; and its just very very hard. Probably too hard to ever achieve the dream of having arbitrary quantum computation. (But there is always the possibility of some big new idea that makes everything work better.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  We aren’t talking about security though. We’re talking about what information should be presented on lemmy.

  Let me put it this way: have you personally ever tried to see who upvoted or downvoted a particular lemmy post? And if you did, did you talk about what you saw?

  My point is that currently basically no one sees the data. The expectation is that no one is looking. And it is not socially acceptable to discuss who is voting for what. But if the votes were changed to public then everyone would see it, the expectation would be that it is common knowledge, and so obviously it will be discussed. Is that what we want on lemmy?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m seeing lots of comments here saying that server admins can already see vote data, and therefore it is not private.

  But from my point of view, having a handful of people able to extract voting data using their position of trust on the lemmy network is very different from broadcasting voting data to everyone on lemmy. And although you can argue that it is possible to create a new server and federate and blah-blah-blah to create votes; that argument sounds to me like “don’t bother locking your front door, because that type of lock can be defeated by a lock-picking tools.”

  And even aside from all that discussion about who can access what; there is another key point that I think is overlooked: Making voter information public makes it ‘normal’ thing to monitor and discuss. Currently there is an expectation that people won’t look at or discuss that information (even if they hypothetically could get access). But by making it public, the expectation then is that everyone will look at that information. That would create a change in tone and meaning of votes and discussion around votes.