CoderKat

@CoderKat@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Programmer tries to explain binary search to the police⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You did 200k years. You need to do seconds. Their math is right.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games with characters you miss most after completion.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Such a choom.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microplastic overdose⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s my favourite for burgers. It lasts way longer without going bad (I find real cheese slices will go moldy before I can use them all), tastes better to me, and is meltier.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The captions suck too. I subscribed to the same deal as you. I did it mostly to support the creators. But I basically never use it. The creator whose affiliate link I used to sign up? Their own captions are amazing on YouTube (human written with colour and positioning) and auto generated garbage on Nebula.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not really a technical problem anymore. Which isn’t to say it’s easy to run such a site, but rather to stress that YouTube is like a social media site. The value is in the users (and the content that they create and consume). You could make a perfect YouTube clone, but good luck getting people to use it when their favourite creators don’t. And good luck getting creators to care when the users aren’t there.

  And Lemmy is misleading. Most people don’t use Firefox. Heck, most people don’t seem to even use ad blockers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. I don’t know what these “just post” types think it’s like. I tried making some relatively niche posts early on, trying to spark discussion in communities for some games I was playing. Got a single digit number of comments at most. Sometimes none. Small communities don’t get seen and niche posts in bigger communities are less likely to get votes.

  Some folks here don’t seem to want to hear it because they badly want Lemmy to be better (and I kinda get that), but where niche communities are concerned, Reddit is unfortunately better.

  Also, the “jUsT PoSt” replies are acting like everyone wants to post. Not everyone does and we shouldn’t be acting like they’re idiots because they don’t want to be the one to make the posts. It’s perfectly valid to want to read other people’s posts. There’s also some stuff you just can’t post and expect it to work. Eg, I read episode discussions on Reddit. Those can really only take off if you post them immediately when the episode airs. It feels like only Star Trek has those here. For every other show, I just go back to Reddit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gen Z Is Leaving Dating Apps Behind⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Find local groups. Two notable ones for me are that I found a discord for my city for people looking for friends (which means stuff like regular board game events and the likes) and the kink community (ie, fetlife) regularly does similar (you don’t treat that one as a dating site, but rather a way to find real life events where you meet people).

  There’s probably various other ways to find real life meetups that aren’t for the explicit purpose of meeting people to date, but will find em anyway. Casual sports leagues, hobby oriented groups, co-workers, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A challenge that most of you will find pretty easy.⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I also really hate the meme of nerds not having sex or relationships. I’m a software dev that works with the nerdiest people I’ve ever met. The vast majority of my coworkers are married or in long term relationships. I’m active in the kink community and have a number of coworkers I see there too. My experience is that nerds are very common in the kink community. I mostly date and fuck fellow nerds and as far as I can tell, they’re mostly doing alright, too.

  The stereotype from the meme is just self deprecation bordering on toxicity and incel-ness. The only place where “nerd” is still an insult or bad thing is in Disney channel movies, which are eternally stuck in 90s stereotypes, where people nerds are supposed to remove their glasses and let their hair down if they want to be found hot (ps: that is a terrible trope, because glasses are extremely hot).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Free returns disappearing from retailers | The era of free returns — an essential part of the rise of online shopping — is ending⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  At least the malls in my city seem thriving. A massive number of clothing stores especially. It’s hard to picture clothing stores having issues since being able to try them on is still more convenient than free returns. And all those clothing stores have survived decades of extreme competition, since any given mall has a dozen to two dozen stores that often feel near identical.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In a U.S. First, a Commercial Plant Starts Pulling Carbon From the Air⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure is a shame there’s so many scams related to that area. In theory, planting or protecting forests is one of the best things we can do. But in practice? A lot of organizations that claim to protect some area from industrialization are actually protecting an area that was never at risk in the first place. That is, if they didn’t exist, the forest would be unchanged. Others are only protected for short periods of time. youtu.be/AW3gaelBypY?si=56uG8zf1iAeJM31H

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It shouldn't matter if people work multiple jobs. The former VP of HR at Microsoft shares how to react to double dippers — 'get over it.'⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But are they? Generally in tech, it’s really hard to gauge people’s performance and most companies are conservative with firing people for performance reasons. So you could coast by on mediocre performance. You team won’t be happy with you, but you probably will keep your job simply because you’re given the benefit of doubt. Tech is one of those areas where someone can actually be 10x as effective as another person, because so much of the job can be spent on stuff like debugging and dealing with weird issues, where one person might spend all day on an issue that another person can resolve in minutes.

  There’s also something to be said about the fact that companies are usually paying for your time, not output. Contractors are the ones who are paid for output, not employees. It’s also straight up expected in tech that you’re looking for ways to automate some tasks so they don’t have to be done anymore. It’s not like some mindless office job where you’re expected to do X reports per day. There’s a never ending list of bugs to fix and features requested. You’re generally paid to find ways to increase productivity, not merely do the same thing over and over.

  At any rate, tech is usually also paid well enough for it. There’s still massive income disparity between regular workers and C-suite, but at least the pay is always well, well above living wages, stock options are commonly given to regular workers, and high performers often are rewarded for doing better than average. IMO, tech jobs aren’t really an area to focus on the kinda mindset you have, since it does so much better than most (not perfect, but still far better). Most jobs don’t get anything close to what tech jobs offer to regular employees.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there any way to reverse degrowth of the niche communities on Lemmy?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The sorting algorithm changes are what I’ve been waiting for forever. A bit disappointed it’s taking so long. I basically never see many communities I’m subbed to. I miss having a local city community. It has me constantly thinking of just dealing with Reddit’s bullshit, cause if it’s not big news or memes, Lemmy ain’t cutting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stop using Fandom⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The video also calls out that one of the challenges in moving off of fandom is SEO. The fandom sites often are above the new sites even when the fandom site becomes a pile of unmaintained, vandalized garbage. This suggests that vandalism actually helps fandom.

  The best thing we can do is not visit the sites and don’t link to them, instead using and linking to their new sites.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft and Alphabet results show Wall Street only cares about AI⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  As a dev, I honestly can’t understand that. I probably use regex a dozen times a day. Basic regex is so easy and useful, but describing exactly what you want is so iffy for an AI. The basics of regex are also so easy. It’s not like most people are trying to, say, parse an email address with regex. Most usage is basic, like “extract this consistent pattern from this text” or “remove this (simple) parameter from this function”. It takes me seconds to come up with a working regex in most cases.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft and Alphabet results show Wall Street only cares about AI⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Especially where image generation is concerned, the infancy part can’t be understated. It’s growing so, so fast. A year ago, people would be dismissing AI art as “you can always tell”, it largely couldn’t do hands, and text was right out. But current cutting edge models can semi-reliably generate imperceptible works, needing only some fairly trivial manual curation to pick the best output. There’s also some models that are now able to do basic text. Just comparing a couple of years worth of progress side by side makes it very clear that it’s advancing rapidly and there’s no signs yet that it’s plateaued.

  The big barrier to image generation, though, is profit. The images that it creates are useful, but current understanding is that they can’t be copyrighted and there’s ongoing legal challenges that make it very murky. I don’t think these companies can stay in business from regular people who’ll pay for some tokens to generate art. They need to be usable by commercial companies, and the legal issues will scare many of those away, at least for now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft and Alphabet results show Wall Street only cares about AI⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I do think there’s some use for AI in its current form (especially AI art as a tool for developing other works, like movies and video games), but I find it bizarre just how much investors value the current form of AI.

  As cool as I find AI art, I’m not yet sure about it’s commercial viability, given the serious legal issues it’s facing. So why do investors, who are supposed to care about commercial viability, value it so much?

  And for generative text, I have an even more negative stance. My understanding is that the cost to train and run those AIs is ludicrous. Sure, some companies will use it to make blog spam articles or replace their basic support staff with it, but is that really gonna make it profitable?

  And I emphasized “current form” because the current AI is basically just predictive text. It’s severely limited and this is extremely evident if you try to ask even basic math problems. It’s not capable of actual intelligence, which is what has me very skeptical of it on the long term. Maybe these companies will come up with a new, better form of AI. Or maybe they won’t. But it doesn’t seem like “just increase the size of the model” is sustainable nor will frankly get closer to strong(ish?) AI.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨For some reason, I'm doubtful.⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I wonder how much of a discount OP can get when they send their machine back?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When someone corrects your code⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I learn so much from code reviews and they’ve saved me so much time from dumb mistakes I missed. I’ve also caught no shortage of bugs in other people’s code that saved us all a stressful headache. It’s just vastly easier to fix a bug before it merges than once it breaks a bunch of people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #2846: Daylight Saving Choice⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Implying we’d ever get off this planet before wiping ourselves out. :/

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But at the same time, it sucks. I still use Reddit for episode discussions of shows I watch (which don’t exist here on Lemmy, especially for older shows). I don’t want those to go away without some replacement. Even if Lemmy did suddenly start getting lots of active episode discussions, it’s not really possible to backfill them for older shows and the site is still too small and hard to index, it seems.

  Incidentally, google is the only way I access those, since I no longer browse Reddit normally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What were some movies you had to look up explanations of after watching?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  2001 was a movie that made me go “wait, what? People like this?”

  I heard it come up so often and was excited to watch it. Absolutely hated. One of the worst movies I’ve ever watched. I had to look it up a lot after I watched it because I was sure I had to be missing something big. But no, I wasn’t. Really not my kind of movie, I guess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apparently, it's not a gaggle.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I kinda agree with you. In theory, they definitely are. But at the same time, in practice, the already bad reputation of HOAs seems to attract the worst kind of people. It’s a political position and suffers just like any other political position. The kinds of people who’d be best at it often don’t want to do it because it’s toxic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple AirTags stalking led to ruin and murders, lawsuit says⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s a standard case of people suing the one who has money. Stalkers don’t have much (if any) money. Apple has much money. It’s a dumb lawsuit IMO, but there’s generally no penalty for frivolous or misplaced lawsuits (and this is probably on the border where it’s dumb but not frivolous).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What games have you been playing recently⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m doing an evil playthrough now and finding various things I missed from the first playthrough. But oof, I feel really awful about the horrible things the game lets you do. 😅

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LPT: Never get a tattoo in a language that you don't understand⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Same, first 20 years of my life I disliked the idea of tattoos and thought I’d never, ever get any. Turns out all that was just society pushing puritan ideas on me and I just had to get over that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lemmy.ml has been banned in China mainland⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, in colloquial usage, most people understand that China and Taiwan are two different countries and there’s no confusion over which one is which.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Top 20 Richest People On Forbes 400 Are So Rich They Could Buy The Bottom 340 Billionaires — And Still Have Billions Left Over⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  We absolutely could do things if society as a whole agreed to. Billionaires only exist because we let them exist. The only thing stopping us from taxing all money over a certain amount is us.

  Unfortunately, I have little faith in our ability to convince people that we should massively step up our taxation. We can’t even get billionaires to pay the percentage of income tax that they’re theoretically supposed to pay. How are we supposed to convince enough people to go above and beyond?

  A huge number of people somehow have the idea that billionaires deserve this money. Or that just because their wealth isn’t cash means we can’t take it away. Many people seem afraid to make some big changes to our economy no matter how badly we seem to need them. If we want to make changes, it’s every day voters that need to be convinced.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The truth about Canada⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Which half the provinces don’t even recognize (as in, not a stat holiday). Not that it really matters that much. No problem has ever been solved by merely declaring a holiday and there’s no shortage of shitty actions speaking louder than any holiday could.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 12 May Require a Subscription⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, the average consumer doesn’t buy Windows. They buy a computer and it happens to come with Windows most of the time. Those consumers aren’t going to want to pay for a subscription. Especially when you look at the prices of the kinds of computers that most people are buying. They’re budget machines. No way a subscription would go over well. And why would OEMs want to deal with the fallout of people not buying their computers because of subscriptions?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Survey] Can you tell which images are AI generated?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Agree and I sympathize with all the points.

  On the financial point, we, as a society, badly need to stop depending on jobs for survival before it’s too late. But I know that we’re unlikely to change until a lot of people get hurt.

  And on the self-worth point, it feels awful to be replaced, even if the money isn’t an issue. People take pride in their work and want their work to be celebrated. Yet, we’re quickly approaching a point where it’s going to be very difficult for people to create art by hand that can hold a candle to AI art. Sure, there’s still many master artists, but they got where they are through hard work. How many new potential artists will be willing to put in that hard work when any random Joe Blow can generate something better in seconds? Human made art (from scratch) won’t go away, but it is harder to feel good about what you create when it feels like your art has no place anymore.