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SkyNTP,

LLM’s are basically just really good bullshit generators (telling you what you want to hear).

Turns out that’s part of the job description of tech support agents, and some low brow art.

For all the other jobs people claimed AI could replace, bullshitting is antithetical to the job description

Why is everything in consumer / American life so fucking shitty now - and companies literally just say 'oh bc profit margins' and we're now expected to swallow that and sympathize?

like I went to taco bell and they didn’t even have napkins out. they had the other stuff just no napkins, I assume because some fucking ghoul noticed people liked taking them for their cars so now we just don’t get napkins! so they can save $100 per quarter rather than provide the barest minimum quality of life features.

SkyNTP,

Capitalism: a short story.

SkyNTP,

Can’t tell who this is making fun of. I guess the answer is: everyone.

SkyNTP,

This article replaces the “Google is cracking down on ad blockers” mantra with “Google is consolidating control by restricting general purpose computing as the model of security”.

Honestly, I’m not sure this is a better look. It’s true that this is “more secure”, in the sense that it limits the power afforded to malicious extensions, but it completely ignores the collateral damage. It strips the power individuals have to enact their own policies, instead having to go through Google to accomplish the same thing.

Honestly, this is just another step in the direction of WebDRM and centralized control. This is more erosion of what made the Internet great. It’s just one more step of turning the Internet into a TV set.

Fuck. This. Shit. Give me back web 1.0.

SkyNTP,

Depends on the instance.

Full text: bin Laden's 'letter to America' (deleted in The Guardian because of TikTok) (web.archive.org)

I just found out that Osama Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” has been doing its rounds on TikTok but I haven’t seen anything about it been posted here on Lemmy about it. Perhaps people already know about it, I’m not sure. This is a link to the wayback machine. The original in the guardian has just been deleted after...

SkyNTP,

A legal technicality in no way invalidates the critical role that the media is assumed to play in informing the public in a democracy.

SkyNTP,

Phone unlock. Is unlocking a phone unethical? Categorical no.

Facial recognition is a tool. And like with any other tool there are always ways in which it can be used for good and for bad. In fact I can’t think of a single tool, guns and nuclear bombs included, that don’t have some potential uses for good, in addition to bad. In fact, you might say that the very definition of a tool is that it has a desirable application, and a good use is merely a desirable application where the collateral damage of it’s use is contained or offset by the benefit.

Perhaps what you mean to say is corruptible? That is to say that use of the tool tends to devolve into other unethical uses and consequences? I might be in agreement with you on that one.

SkyNTP,

There’s power in organizing and voting with your wallet collectively. Reject companies that trample your customer needs and convince others to do the same.

SkyNTP,

Engineers and doctors are a restricted profession because those professions can kill people when exercised outside the norms and regulations we are accustomed to in Canada. Being an “engineer” in another country doesn’t automatically grant you the right to call yourself an engineer in Canada. There’s more to it than just education on paper. Engineers and Doctors receive training that is specific to the practices, codes and regulations and expected in the Canadian market they are expected to practice in.

Retraining those professional qualifications for an immigrant is really complicated. We would basically need a dedicated school or two specialized in skills transfer And recertification for hundreds of different countries across dozens of different diplomas. Plus the immigrants would need to be willing. And who’s going to pay for that? I think our educational funding should be prioritized to Canadian students first.

SkyNTP,

DLC has come to mean Payed DownLoadable Content.

SkyNTP,

Just admit that you stole something and that you don’t care, it’s not that hard.

You are not wrong, but maybe just a bit of perspective:

In my city, you can go to the public library, borrow a DVD, take it home, watch it. 100% legal. 100% free. No library membership fees. And they have multiple copies of most DVDs, so it’s not like it’s some lottery to use the service.

It feels a lot like downloading a movie without paying anyone to watch it. The only difference is you gotta go outside. Oh, and no guilt tripping.

Anyway, what’s my point? Well piracy is only illegal because some people (not everyone) decided that everyone is going to pay an equal, but not necessarily an equitable, share to fund the development of said IP (unless you have a library in your area to counter this, partially). Worse, that everyone will keep paying a very small group of people money we’ll after the development of said IP has been paid off. Even worse, that small group of people will use their profits to corrupt the legal system to ensure that that protectionism continues to serve their benefit, not others… Point being, you can pirate, and care… care a lot.

Victims are created when piracy affects small production houses struggling to make ends meet. Victims are created of everyone else when the law is abused beyond it’s original purpose to squeeze consumers.

So you too should be honest and not call it theft. Piracy is piracy, good or bad. To compare it to the crime of theft is to perpetuate the marketing of those to stand from a black and white view on the matter.

SkyNTP,

This isn’t really the issue.

The real issue is that people have become so soft, so INCREDIBLY dependant on convenience, that they have given up all control. Having autonomy/privacy/ownership over your own environment is just too much work. It’s easier to just let someone else handle the surveillance system for you. What could go wrong?

This issue of complacency plagues just about everything, from cloud computing and banking to transportation and housing.

SkyNTP,

It took me a looooooooong time to realize that trying to minimize waste in “clever” ways (i.e. “why do people do X, it’s so wastefull!”) actually ended up being more wastefull in the long run because by doing so I was impacting other things I didn’t understand.

My suggestion: don’t try to be clever, or original. Do some serious research and talk to people before embarking on these journeys.

Housing for example is built making a ton of expectations, such as the expectation that the space will be heated. When it is not, you risk problems, starting with freezing pipes, sure, but also expansion/contraction and humidity issues (too much, too little), which can lead to all kinds of problems, including mold growth, cracks in walls, buckling floors, shifting structure, and many other things I don’t understand.

You should talk with an HVAC expert before experimenting on your house.

SkyNTP,

PSA: Features are never prioritized for users. Features are prioritized for the paying customer.

This is such a naive mistake to make. This is why the freemium business model is doomed to shitty products, and explains pretty much why the Internet economy is in the sorry state that it is. If you don’t pay for the service (regardless of your preferred economic stance, either directly or through taxes) you have absolutely no right to complain.

SkyNTP,

“the hot water isn’t working” could be understood to mean “the water in the hot water tap is not hot”, but it could also be understood to mean “the water is not flowing out of the hot water tap”.

The picture helps clarify the original statement. OP, this interaction is not nearly as bizarre as you make it out to be. It’s pretty typical of virtually all support requests. It’s incredibly common, when asking for support, that the requester assumes information is obvious when it is in fact not.

SkyNTP,

Sometimes asking for a picture is just the easiest way, instead of going back and forth describing something in words, especially if it requires technical detail or nuance Remember, not all tents and landlords have 100% mastery of the language.

Neither are dumb. Just limited by assumptions and possibly jaded by past, frustrating experiences.

SkyNTP,

As far as electrification goes, Toyota is virtually at the bottom of the list of car manufacturer . I’ll see it when I believe it.

SkyNTP,

Realistically, probably the same thing as what happens at self-checkout lines with idiotic anti-theft checks:

A beacon above the kiosk turns on, an attendant walks over and, without a word, flashes a badge at the machine to override the system lockout as they roll their eyes: this is only the hundredth time today someone accidentally pressed the wrong button, because what kind of terrorist would voluntarily press “yes”.

SkyNTP,

Constitutions form the foundation on which everything else–laws, the economy, public services, politics, culture, national security–is built.

It’s one thing to look at how a new constitution might solve our current social ills, or to demonstrate how the old one is imperfect, it’s another thing to really consider the side effects of a change in constitution. What things we would lose that we take for granted, and to do so honestly, and critically?

Would America still be an imperialistic hegemony with a swedish constitution? If no, are Americans really truly ready to give up the benefits they enjoy that come with being a global hegemony?

We won’t really find answers to these questions in a tweet.

SkyNTP,

The things you mentioned should absolutely happen in the areas that have the population density to make these solutions practical. Let’s also remember that this is not 100% of the planet.

SkyNTP, (edited )

Software dev is full of obscure keywords that describe otherwise pretty simple or basic concepts you stumble upon in practice naturally and that you probably already understand.

  • singleton: a class/object that is designed to be single use, i.e. only ever instantiated with a single instance. Typically used when you use class/objects more for flow control or to represent the state of the program itself, rather than using it to represent data
  • immutable: read-only, i.e. unchangeable
  • dependency injection: basically when you pass a function or object into another function object, thereby extending their effective functionality, typically for modular code and to separate concerns.

Here’s one more of my favourite examples of such a keyword: memoization

SkyNTP,

In theory, yes. In practice, not necessarily.

I found that the images were not very representative of typical AI art styles I’ve seen in the wild. So not only would that render preexisting learned queues incorrect, it could actually turn them into obstacles to guessing correctly pushing the score down lower than random guessing (especially if the images in this test are not randomly chosen, but are instead actively chosen to dissimulate typical AI images).

Atheists of lemmy, what is your coping strategy when things goes downhill?

I am at an accepting stage that not everything that happens in your life is in your control. When things goes really bad and you dont have much control on it, I would assume a person who believes in god or religious figures has their belief system as a coping mechanism. For example praying to the god and so on....

SkyNTP, (edited )

some gray areas where science can’t provide a logical explanation so as to why this is happening to some of the life events.

Not really sure about this one. Science doesn’t have answers for really big questions, like why does the universe exist. But for stuff smaller than that, like “why do I have some disease”, or “why did I lose a loved one” … or just “why did I lose 200$ dollars at the casino” well science tells us a lot about how it’s all one giant lottery we have been playing involuntarily, and we are all really bad at it.

We take chances just by existing. It’s literally called a genetic lottery. We take a chance by getting in a car or stepping out onto the street to go to the market. Just by loving people we take the chance that something could take them away. Life deals you a hand. You win some, you lose some. You don’t get to decide what your odds are. The best you can do is play the hand you’ve got. Which to be honest, is a lot less control than we tend to think we have. And even then, most of us don’t play our hand all that great, cause we are thrust into the game of life without a practice round. And we are often too young and arrogant to listen to those who have come before us who already learned the hard way. Worse yet, we see few of our peer’s mistakes, so we have a poor sense of what success and failure really looks like.

Science tells us about the gambler’s fallacy, the human bias towards falsely thinking that the universe tends towards some kind of fairness or equilibrium which is patently false (consider how little the gambler expects “good luck” to turn bad, therefore why gamble at all if it always equalizes?). Karma doesn’t mean the universe owes you exactly what you put in. Life doesn’t hand out exact change.

Science also tells us about how we (humans) don’t truly understand randomness. In nature, successive repetitions of some outcome of luck are vastly more common than we tend to think they are. We see a series of bad luck outcomes and say “that’s not natural, this can’t be real” when in fact it is often the natural laws of the universe on full display.

Despite it all, even if the game of life makes no promises to you at all, it sure as hell is better than not playing the game at all. Regarding karma, the only thing you can be sure of–and forgive me for using a dead meme but it is apt–is that you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Edit for the pedants: gambler’s fallacy actually means that past results of independent events do not predict future outcomes, but that’s basically what I just said.

SkyNTP,

When I was growing up, you’d hear the saying “TV will rot your brain” go around a lot. I kinda rolled my eyes.

These days, I see a lot of truth in the idea that modern convenience and luxury is creating a generation of apathetic people who will seek validating information, and avoid being challenged, which is the real way that people learn and make good long term decisions.

To be clear I’m not saying people have changed. People have always sought the easy answers. What’s different now is the expectation of convenience, and the ease of immersing yourself in an echo chamber is higher than ever.

People really are becoming soft, with rotten brains, unwilling to think critically and adapt. Not because of who they are but because of the environment we’ve created for ourselves

SkyNTP,

Would you be opposed to paying to use Lemmy? Someone’s gotta pay them bills. Currently it seems to be donation focused, but that might not scale. So what’s it going to be [email protected], ads, or a “premium Lemmy subscription”/tax/due/contribution?

SkyNTP, (edited )

There’s always room for improvement, and it’s entirely possible that you are at fault, given that you are the common denominator of these failed relationships as you claim.

But do consider this: there is a possibility that the issue doesn’t revolve around how you behave, but perhaps the issue is in who (and maybe when) you are choosing to date. Maybe your expectations need to be adjusted?

SkyNTP,

School and university especially give a student access to more than just material to absorb, they teach a student how to learn. Without that framework, a person is not equipped to think critically. Not to mention, the real value of a teacher is not to dictate information to be memorized, it is to identify mistakes and issue corrections. No type of non-interactive medium can accomplish this.

SkyNTP,

Backdoors make it “technically feasible” to scan “e2ee”. See, it’s all a matter of perspective.

SkyNTP, (edited )

Debatable, and largely depends on a person’s diet and some other factors like how much travel is getting done. If someone is fueling their biking (or walking) by flying in beef from the other side of the world, I think it is pretty safe to say that their carbon footprint is worse than a typical gas car, (because air travel and beef are just that bad) or if not that at least an electric car from renewables and ethically sourced materials. For everything else in between, we’d just be speculating and we’d have to factor in source and type of car fuel, and the source and type of additional food consumed by a cyclist where that “additional food” line lies exactly.

Controlling for diet, distance and purpose of travel, I think cycling virtually always wins over walking.

SkyNTP,

Pretty much everyone would say “du hast”, it’s so iconic. I think that’s the joke? If not, this comic really doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

SkyNTP,

The right example is poorly executed. The left example is fine, but has one crucial deficiency: it’s not very modular, which makes it difficult to test and scale. Big problems need to be broken down and managed in discrete steps, and this is also true of computer code.

The left example is like running a pizza shop where you explain all the steps to everyone and then let everyone loose at the same time to make a pizza. The right example is like creating stations and delegating specific responsabilities to one person at a time.

The former creates redundancy and is manageable at small scale. But as you grow, you find that the added redundancy is of no additional value, while you end up with chaos, as people argue and fight over the process.

Can you imagine five developers working on the monolithic pizza code all at the same time? Total chaos. Better to have one developper assigned to baking, another assigned to prep, etc.

SkyNTP,

Discuit seems to offer nothing new but more promises of not falling down the same buisness practice pitfalls as reddit. I am sure they are well intentioned. But intentions are not enough.

I am on Lemmy for one simple reason. I am done trusting corporations to run projects for any extended poeriod of time without succumbing to corruption, greed, or missmanagement.

SkyNTP,

Hard disagree. For no other reason that it’s impossibly difficult to find/sort missions by proximity. You got one blue blip on the map or hud, maybe a white blip if it’s not active, but no options to make it active or to even find the mission in your mission list.

Not to mention, all travel is menu based. In space when you target a planet as your next destination, all it does is bring up the menu to fast travel to a location on that planet instead of… giving you the option to fly there yourself at warp speed.

Sure, you could do it one planet at a time instead of skipping systems… but it’s all the same experience You never truly experience the part of exploration involved in experiencing the space between origin and destination. So it might as well all just be exploration by menu, even if you pretend you aren’t.

SkyNTP,

Back to the reviewers primary issue that in a traditional Bethesda game you experience the journey of going from one place to another, at least for the first time. Starfield has none of that. You never experience the journey of traveling to a new location, you just teleport. So effectively you are constantly disoriented, with no Tru sense of scale or journey.

SkyNTP,

A great point. Learning math doesn’t automatically make you equipped to deal with other things that have math in it. At least no more so than learning a language equips you to do poetry.

Taxes are a whole different system that needs to be learned, on top of learning math. At best you can say that learning math equips you to take a tax course.

SkyNTP,

The reason we shrink heating devices down but not cooling devices is a combined consequence of economics and the laws of thermodynamics.

First an analogy: Making a boat that moves downstream a river is easy. Take any buoyant material like a log or a branch and drop it in water. Presto, you’ve got a mode of transportation of any size. Want to go upstream? Now you need motors to fight the current. Putting a motor on a large piece of wood, (a boat) is economically viable. Putting one on thousands of sticks? Ain’t nobody got time for that.

As a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics, the the universe naturally converts all potential energy (fuel, electricity) into heat. The universe will do this basically on its own, over time, constantly. This is called entropy.

Doing the reverse, taking heat and putting it back into potential energy, i.e. cooling, is difficult. You basically have to pay a price to the universe in some other way, kind of like how a motorboat has to push more water downstream than the current would have naturally moved on it’s own. This is what heat pumps (AC, fridge) do. Heat pumps put some of that heat back into potential energy, in exchange for also releasing potential energy into heat… The trick here is to do these two things in different places. The fridge’s motor converts some electrical energy into heat in exchange for being able to move some of the heat in the fridge outside of the fridge. The consequence of this is that the room the fridge is in is now hotter. Mostly because you took the heat in the fridge and moved it into the room, but also because the fridge’s motor also added some MORE heat to the room in the process in order to fight entropy. So to actually make this useful, you need to insulate what you are cooling (or it will just get warm again, warmer than it was before, because you added heat to the room), and you also want to dispose of the heat in the room. So you pump that out into the atmosphere…

Anyway, long story short, you need insulation, refrigerant, motors, heat changers, lots of power to fight the universe’s tendency to spread heat everywhere. Technically you could miniaturize these things, but they become less efficient as you shrink them down, to the point where things smaller than a fridge are just not practical to make compared to the benefit you get from having them.

Making small heating devices is easy. You don’t need to fight the universe. You just need an apparatus that will “go with the flow”.

SkyNTP,

To be fair, the game is so massive, any review (positive or negative) done on less than 60 hours probably won’t do the game justice. It’s entirely possible to hold hope for redeeming qualities only to be a bit disappointed in the end.

SkyNTP,

Cycling has carbon emissions if you factor the additional calorie intake needed to power your bike. :| Which will vary widely depending on your size, diet, and food source. Is it still a more sustainable form of transportation? Probably, but maybe not in extreme cases (like a 300-lb person eating beef daily flown in from the other side of the planet, versus, a tiny two seater electric car power off of solar energy, using batteries sourced from recycled materials) and it certainly isn’t 0 impact.

Also, for extra pedantism, carbon emission are not pollution (in the sense that it doesn’t poison the life forms directly), but it is a GHG which causes harm to the environment too.

SkyNTP,

“By clicking here you agree to the terms of service [which expressly state that in exchange for receiving the service without charge or at discount rate, you wave any rights to royalties on any personal information collected]” or something to that effect.

As long as users willingly participate, the only way to solve this problem is to educate users about the dangers. It’s a very similar situation as cigarettes. Banning cigarettes doesn’t work because then users will just willingly circumvent the ban, possibly turning to black or grey markets.

SkyNTP,

Pretty sure most Republicans are just openly fascist now.

SkyNTP,

Depends on your home instance I guess. Lemmy.ml has an outright ban, so some only slips through once in a blue moon.

SkyNTP, (edited )

Starfield has fantastic art direction and ambience. The gunplay is really good, perhaps the best gunplay of any RPG, and a surprise coming from Bethesda. Story hits some good beats, and exploration is rewarding, though repetitive about 50% of the time in the typical Bethesda fashion (remember Draugr crypts?).

That being said, the game has some shortfalls, primarily in the roleplay aspect. The ship building and crew management is good, but it doesn’t feel great, and is sometimes just frustrating, so you never feel truly immersed in your own ship. Lack of low earth orbital and terrestrial flight is immersion breaking (even if players might opt to skip it if it were present) along with the fact that the ship is relegated to being a flying mule and most transportation is basically instant teleportation via menus, which IMO hurts the isolation and exploration RP and challenge. Ship combat is straight up mediocre for a space game in 2023. Gun selection and modding is decent, but far from top tier. I would describe the apparel as a bit on the bland side, few of the clothes and armor pickups made me go: I want to put this on, I’ll look badass (Cyberpunk 2077 syndrome).

In fact I think starfield shares a lot with Cyberpunk 2077: massive budget, AAA art direction with gameplay spread across so many systems and features that a lot of them leave you wanting more.

Are Internet boards and Forums dead

i started using the internet in the late 2000’s and still remember when you search for something most of the times it would return with a forum post … now its just random websites … if you ever need real and concise answer you have to add site:reddit.com at every search and since discord or twitter are not crawlable by...

SkyNTP,

“Join our discord”.

No I don’t think I will. I don’t want to chat. I want to RTFM.

SkyNTP,

Except websites that will tell you “Use a modern browser, switch to Chrome to view this page”.

This sort of thing is becoming more and more pervasive. I’m genuinely worried that between this and web DRM, there will be no where to hide from corporate America ducking everyone over with their greed.

SkyNTP,

This line of thinking only works if you live as a hermit at the edge of the forest. Living in a society means dealing with consequences of the choices of others.

As far as browsers are concerned, having Firefox is pointless if 95% of websites will refuse to serve you content because you don’t have some cryptographically signed chrome web DRM enabled.

SkyNTP,

These laws exist to protect existing renters against exploitation of the cost of moving as a negotiation tactic (since the consumer cannot easily shop between renegotiations, it is not a free market).

These laws do not exist to implement fixed housing price policy. What you may be looking for is public housing.

In my experience, a lot of existing rental law tends to be a pretty fair balance between rights of renters and very small property owners, which we should totally encourage. The problems arise with medium and large (institutional) property owners, that don’t need the same degree of protection as small renters, and who leverage their size to bully. The laws should be updated to be stricter for large blocks of ownership. But defining that can be a challenge.

SkyNTP, (edited )

In at least some parts of Canada, for example, there are tuition credits which you can claim against income taxes later on.

I am required to have a degree to earn money

Not really true. You are required to have a degree to have a particular job of your choice. It’s up to your government to decide if having that choice is something it wants to encourage, with income tax breaks equivalent to the cost of tuition (the loan principle) or if that is a luxury that is taxed like any other luxury.

The interest on loans is not a tax. It’s the expense of accessing capital immediatly. Again, it’s up to your government to decide if accessing capital immediatly is a necessity eligible for tax breaks, or a luxury that comes out of your after tax income.

Also don’t forget consumption tax which may or may not apply (usually not on loan interest).

Income tax is a tax on everything, basically.

SkyNTP,

At some point, you have to ask yourself if “being a world leader in ai” is worth everything you are sacrificing for it.

AFAIK, trading human creativity for AI art and ai poems is a shit trade. For a lot of reasons. But primarily because AI art is kind of boring.

As for military use of ai… You don’t need grama’s cookie recipe or violating people’s humanity to build it.

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