SnotFlickerman

SnotFlickerman , 11 days ago

Full Self-Driving: For sure next year… maybe.

“Artificial Intelligence”: CEO’s create a copy of themselves in a computer, creating an expert bullshitter program.

Customer Service: Most pre-recorded phone loops are actually built to try to frustrate people into giving up and not getting their issue resolved. Further, they record calls not because they care about your experience, but so they can collate tons of data to further exploit you and their workers. CEOs have purposefully insulated themselves from ever directly having to deal with a customer and hide behind “well we didn’t tell employees to break the law!” while demanding employees hit numbers that… aren’t… possibe… without… breaking… the… law.

If it’s from a corporation and the PR says its to “benefit consumers” it’s fucking Snake Oil, by default.

SnotFlickerman , 11 days ago

The American Dream… because you have to be asleep to believe it.

SnotFlickerman , 11 days ago

which, incidentally, means they use up significantly more data/storage space and cost more money

All of this is very true, but this is the only issue I really disagree with here.

I am in an era where a good quality rip of a movie can be almost 50 gigabytes by itself. That means for every terabyte of storage, I can store just 20 of movies of this size.

Don’t even get my started on television series and how big those can balloon to with the same kind of encoding.

An entire collection of FLACs, thousands of albums worth, is still less than 500 gigabytes total, in other words half a terabyte. (My personal collection anyway)

I mean, the average size of one of my FLAC albums is around 200-300 megabytes. Even with the larger “hi-res” FLAC files you’re still not getting as obscenely big as movie and television files.

Sure, it takes up more space than an MP3 or a FLAC properly encoded to CD standards (my preferred choice, for the reasons outlined above), but realistically, the amount of space it takes up compared to those is negligible when compared to other types of media.

Storage and energy to operate storage has become incredibly cheap, especially when you’re dealing with smaller files like this.

SnotFlickerman , 12 days ago

So only the people who refuse to take precautions should be impacted.

Only if transmission between those people doesn’t result in a mutation that turns it airborne. That’s not an “if” I’d personally like to risk. To assume it will only affect those who don’t take precaution is foolish at best and cruelly disingenuous at worst.

SnotFlickerman , 13 days ago

Cloudflare can still go bad, but its usually for high-capacity users who are using way more than the average. I haven’t seen any homeserver users get hit with any trouble, but I’ve seen a couple small businesses have bad situations with Cloudflare, although it honestly seems like the minority.

Cloudflare has issues but for most its probably fine.

SnotFlickerman , 13 days ago

i always have good success with libgen.is

SnotFlickerman , 14 days ago

People like this are jerks who only share their library with people who already have ultra rare shit. They want to trade rare for rare.

They think they are special for their collections and their actions are anti-thetical to the entire piracy ethos.

I would ignore them and keep searching for another source because its unlikely you have anything they will willingly trade for.

It’s dumb and I can’t stand those people.

But it makes me laugh when they have their collections locked up but other people are freely sharing what they have locked up.

The stuff I don’t want to share… I just don’t share at all. No reason to make it frustrating.

SnotFlickerman , 15 days ago

get a hole drilled in your tailpipe

SnotFlickerman , 15 days ago (edited 15 days ago)

It’s the end of things being easy, that’s for sure. But maybe that’s okay.

Humanity is in for a wild ride with climate change coming. It will upend entire food chains, let alone nations.

Sure, there’s definitely been worse and more unstable periods in history before, but what’s coming is very likely going to make those look tame in comparison.

I fully expect Eco-Fascism to take hold at some and the very people who denied the existence of climate change will demand full control of the last vestiges of the planets resources because in their minds only they are smart and capable enough to dole out what’s left to the plebeians.

In other words, things have been a hell of a lot worse and could get a hell of a lot worse. Instead of waiting in anticipation for the worst that may inevitably happen, do your best to lead a good, kind, and loving life with the people close to you. Things feel like they’re getting worse all the time, and hell, maybe they really are…

But well better to count your blessings now than to waste your life acting like it’s all already as bad as it can be or that the badness is just around the corner. Maybe it is just around the corner. Even more reason to savor the little joys of life while you still have them and to build connections in your community while there’s still time to build Mutual Aid networks. Those things alone can make a dark future easier to suffer, community and fond memories.

SnotFlickerman , 15 days ago

ghostarchive.org/archive/28DTX

SnotFlickerman , 15 days ago

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/f54bc1b4-5235-4d42-bf24-3d3d65ba4f22.jpeg

“Ramirez has caught the parking lot frog” sums it up so succinctly.

SnotFlickerman , 16 days ago

In related news, US consumers were reported to have been hoarding Samyang instant Spicy & Hot ramen while watching episodes of Hot Ones.

SnotFlickerman , 16 days ago

Musk is only second to Trump in never having learned to shut his stupid fucking mouth.

SnotFlickerman , 16 days ago

No, everything goes in the square hole.

SnotFlickerman , 16 days ago (edited 16 days ago)

Now do all of Metallica’s bassists since Cliff Burton.

---

Now that my throwaway joke is out of the way, it’s interesting to me how much judgment and hate there is for those with mental health issues that people are positively angry that they might be confused for someone with (or maybe even actually have) mental health issues.

Devil’s Advocate incoming:

Let’s be real, the members of the Four Tops are fucking old. It could literally be fucking dementia. This guy could genuinely have mental health problems.

Why is he so scared of being admitted to a mental health facility? Because deep down everyone knows exactly how fucked up those facilities are and exactly how much agency they take away from you when you’re in one.

The reason the fear of getting put in one is so visceral is because everyone knows it becomes really difficult to get back out when you’re in an endless quest to prove your own sanity and everyone thinks you’re insane (and maybe you really are!). The reality is that the systems and how we handle mental illness need to change as well as the judgments of the people who need help. Like, maybe taking away all their personal agency isn’t the answer.

People won’t seek out help if the response is to sue over the very idea that maybe we might actually need help. He’s fucking ancient, he very well could be experiencing dementia, and that could have been an honest fucking mistake on the part of the hospital staff because he’s literally an old man exhibiting dementia symptoms but because of who he is instead we’re running with the story that his mind is a steel trap and never wavers? Fuck me, get out of here with that nonsense. Old people get old and their minds get frail, its totally fucking possible. (I can’t find his exact age, but his personal Facebook shows he’s got a full head of gray hair and miles of wrinkles. Black don’t crack so this guy is fucking old.)

No, it would be way healthier if people could be open to the possibility (especially in advanced old age!) that maybe, just maybe, they could be susceptible to mental health issues instead of freaking out and fucking suing people.

Two things can be true at once: He can be a member of the Four Tops and he also could have been exhibiting dementia symptoms in front of mental health professionals.

SnotFlickerman , 16 days ago

Then he says he’s famous too so the doctor was like oh ok, grandiose delusional.

I’m more convinced that they had no fucking clue who the Four Tops even were. It’s 2024 and this guy is all “you don’t know who I am!” and they’re like “you’re too fucking right we don’t” because what fucking nurse just out of medical school is listening to or even knows of the existence of the fucking Four Tops.

They probably thought he was just spouting geriatric fucking nonsense.

“I don’t know, something about four tops? He’s only wearing one top, no undershirt.”

SnotFlickerman , 16 days ago

bcbs.com/…/early-onset-dementia-alzheimers-diseas…

My post is literally addressing the “it can’t happen to me” canard. People can and really do have mental health issues. It can literally happen to anyone. I understand he joined in 2019, I’ve been to his Facebook page. I appreciate you adding his birth year, because I was unable to find it.

I’m pointing out that angry responses to the idea that maybe you have a mental health issue speaks to how bad our current mental health services are, why they need change, and why we need to get rid of the stigma against mental illness.

Anyway, as you can see, Early Onset Dementia (along with so many other diseases, especially autoimmune) is on the rise in youth. Pretending it’s not a possibility at all and getting angry at the possibility because you view people with mental health issues as “lesser” somehow is a problem, because it can happen to anyone. Pretending it won’t and trying to strongman your way out of mental health issues literally does not work.

Also, as a black man, he historically has a reason to distrust American medical and pharmaceutical industries. I’m sure he’s likely aware of such gross examples as the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments. However, choosing not to trust medical science entirely is also a losing game, so we have to fix that trust in people by building better systems.

Once again, this speaks to a system that needs to be fixed, not one that needs to have people antagonizing others over the idea that maybe they need mental health help. The system for mental health help in the USA is currently broken and hurts people and takes away their human agency. It can help a lot of people, but it hurts and fails a lot of others. There’s a reason why people are scared of it.

I’m not saying anything is wrong with him, but I am saying his angry response to the idea that something might be speaks volumes about the issue.

SnotFlickerman , 17 days ago

40% self reported.

SnotFlickerman , 17 days ago

Follow. But! Follow only if ye be men of valour, for the entrance to this cave is guarded by a creature so foul, so cruel that no man yet has fought with it and lived! Bones of full fifty men lie strewn about its lair. So, brave knights, if you do doubt your courage or your strength, come no further, for death awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth.

SnotFlickerman , 17 days ago (edited 17 days ago)

My narcissist father never had any choice for his first (and only) son other than to name me after himself.

“I know I’m a con-man of a used car salesman wannabe-Yuppie, but I think I’m so fucking special that I need to create a legacy with my name.”

Who the fuck thinks like that?

SnotFlickerman , 18 days ago

Because easy dopamine hits are also easy to gain unhealthy addictions to. Because it’s literally right there, easily accessible, at all times.

Couple this with how incredibly unhealthy the social relationships portrayed in most pornography are, and you’re gearing up for a lot of young men addicted to wanking and having unrealistic expectations of sex. The porn young women read isn’t necessarily much better, in the regard of healthy social sexual relationships.

Now, I’m not one of those weird “you shouldn’t jerk it at all” folks because that’s just extremism in the other direction.

Temperance and moderation are key in all things.

SnotFlickerman , 18 days ago (edited 18 days ago)

I actually agree. What’s addicting is the hit of dopamine from sexual release, not the porn itself. I see porn as more like how people who quit smoking often still find something to fiddle with in their hands and mouth. Biting on pencils, straws, etc. because part of their ritual of using the substance involved taking out a cigarette and putting it up to their mouth. The act of viewing porn itself isn’t the addiction, but it’s associated with it.

Like I said, moderation is key, because there’s a wide difference between masturbating a healthy amount and filling various cumjugs with figurines in them. Like if you can go out and live a normal life after jerking it, awesome, fuck yeah, that’s great. If you can’t make it through a workday without going to the bathroom to crank it, maybe you’ve got a fucking problem. I shouldn’t have to deal with some fucking weirdo breathing heavily and shaking the whole stall next to me in the bathroom because they can’t wait until they get home.

The porn is rather a social knock-on effect because people often seek out porn to make the pathway to dopamine release easier. The seeking of the orgasm has almost nothing to do with the societal implications of porn and its impact on relationships. However, the social impact is that people begin to associate unhealthy aspects of porn with a sex life and achieving orgasm in a sex life.

There are unfortunately deep layers of exploitation, unhealthy power dynamics, and control in porn that can be healthy between consenting adults who have achieved trust but some people really start digesting this porn before they’re mature enough to know how to healthily navigate those issues (especially in a society that sure as fuck isn’t teaching them, because of the aforementioned religious demonization of sex). This leads to further unhealthy experiences with sex, and I don’t think the gay (and LGBTQ+ community as a whole for that matter) community is free from that exploitation or people being exposed to it before they’ve had to education to navigate it healthily either. In fact, as a minority group, I would rather think they’re more likely to be exploited by the same people who hate their very existence… which further ingrains and exacerbates the very problems I’m speaking to, because the exploitation aspect of pornography is normalized. The areas that consume the most LGBT themed porn tend to be the most religiously restricted, and their viewpoint of that porn is almost 100% exploitative. To me it’s a hard sell that that’s not somehow a net negative for the LGBT community and that they’re mostly being exploited in pornograhy and in sex work by the very people who want to demonize their very existence.

SnotFlickerman , 18 days ago

I want you to go back and re-read both of my posts and tell me where I said the words “porn addiction” or alluded to porn being the addiction. I’m trying to work with you here buddy, but you’ve decided that I’m saying something I haven’t said, after I took the time to clearly explain as much.

I literally am not talking about porn addiction nor have I used the words porn addiction, so can you take your crusade elsewhere, please and thank you.

The people you’re talking about with cum jars often don’t even see their behavior as a problem, much less labeling themselves addicts.

Literally what I am talking about and why I didn’t use the term porn addiction.

SnotFlickerman , 18 days ago

how that relates to dopamine in your first comment if you’re not talking about porn addiction

Dude, we’re literally talking about how orgasms release dopamine. What the fuck are you smoking? I’m literally talking about the orgasm itself!

Fucking reading comprehension is dead.

SnotFlickerman , 18 days ago

I’m not really sure where this is breaking down.

Phrases like “couple this with” from this sentence from my first comment are how I’m breaking it down. The meaning of this is “in addition to” not “these are equals.” I’m sorry you’ve not managed to read the context words I added specifically for this purpose.

Couple this with how incredibly unhealthy the social relationships portrayed in most pornography are, and you’re gearing up for a lot of young men addicted to wanking and having unrealistic expectations of sex.

From my second comment:

The porn is rather a social knock-on effect because people often seek out porn to make the pathway to dopamine release easier.

Because it’s true that people use shortcuts to cumming, like porn.

I reiterate, reading comprehension is dead.

SnotFlickerman , 18 days ago

Ima be real with you.

Arguing all masturbation is inherently good isn’t any better or morally superior than arguing all masturbation is inherently bad. Extremism is extremism and literally all I was talking about was moderation. If you can’t handle someone arguing moderation, it sounds like maybe you really do have a problem.

SnotFlickerman , 18 days ago

Anyone trying to sell you a cure for something mainstream society tells you is shameful, doubly so.

Trumpers really took this one and ran with it during COVID with not masking and spitting in people’s faces.

They literally want to hang the people who tried to sell them a cure for something mainstream society told them was shameful, a disease they decided was a “librul hoax.”

…because guess the fuck what? They were actually, genuinely, acting shamefully. Too bad they had no shame.

I don’t think this as strong of an argument than you think it is. Sometimes mainstream society can be right about an act being shameful.

SnotFlickerman , 18 days ago

Public Libraries are struggling and looking for relevance in the modern world. Libraries brought us the Dewey Decimal System, and early attempt to “categorize all the world’s information and make it useful,” as was Google’s claimed original goal.

A coalition of public libraries and data-scientists seems like the path to me. Libraries are already in the business of categorizing and organizing information, sooooooo.

SnotFlickerman , 18 days ago

Look around you, we’re winning, and we’re not even trying. We are literally in the midst of a mass extinction event driven by human behavior.

Maybe roaches will outlast us, but we’re headlong into make this planet pretty unlivable for almost all species, let alone ourselves.

SnotFlickerman , 18 days ago

I guess this guy’s never heard of humans being omnivores or that you can get protien from certain plants.

I mean, it’s not like we’re in an open system powered by the sun and the only way any of us actually get energy is because plants can synthesize solar energy and then mammals and other types of animals then eat those plants taking the energy they have converted, and now these animals convert energy from the plant into energy for themselves.

But yes, somehow, plants will cease to exist and functionally not be edible. /s

SnotFlickerman , 18 days ago

After how expertly Fallout nailed its landing by using literal assets from the game for set design…

Yeah this is gonna flop hard.

SnotFlickerman , 19 days ago

To be clear, this doesn’t necessarily mean “get diagnosed for depression” either.

No, as others have suggested, get a blood test.

Accelerating depression was surprisingly a symptom of my cancer. So being depressed can also be a symptom of something far more serious than just depression.

My depression is still bad, but the difference between taking my cancer meds (not psychiatric meds) and not taking my cancer meds, is a world of difference, depression-wise.

SnotFlickerman , 19 days ago

Yes.

(I think this question needs to be a little bit more open ended)

SnotFlickerman , 19 days ago

Fighting off bots and scrapers has become a huge problem for every site on the internet.

It’s not surprising that a site that has kept a web 1.0 ethos and style hasn’t updated the back-end to more appropriately deal with these types of attacks.

Further, craigslist functioned on not needing a ton of moderators for the whole shebang. Keeping it simple allowed costs to be low.

The bot armies have changed that calculus, now you need a ton of well-paid moderators to make it functional, and I would suspect a site like Craigslist simply doesn’t pull enough income to be able to justify those sort of costs.

So instead, it will wither and rot on the vine.

SnotFlickerman , 19 days ago

The story of how we went from couchsurfing.com to airbnb.com

Couchsurfing became a for-profit company in 2011, after having been a volunteer-outfit since 1999.

SnotFlickerman , 19 days ago

Young people don’t use Facebook because it’s full of old people just like what happened to MySpace and young people moving to Facebook because it was… full of old people.

TikTok went from being a Gen Z hangout to being filled with millennials who wanted to stay hip and young, and now young people are bailing on TikTok, too.

It always goes: Youth find cool space. Older youth want to stay hip and young and so populate youth space. Older youth quickly age up, soon making it a non-youth space. Younger youth leave to find a new cool space for youth. Some kind of Samsara.

SnotFlickerman , 20 days ago

Being depressed.

SnotFlickerman , 20 days ago

Sounds more like a way to push Microsoft accounts and Windows Hello than consumer oriented.

SnotFlickerman , 20 days ago

https://i.giphy.com/Y8SqjWuohk8Rq.gif

SnotFlickerman , 20 days ago

I’ve seen this suggested elsewhere, this isn’t my idea:

Journalism is falling apart and now is reduced to clickbait journalism because they can’t find the money to pay for real, good investigative journalism.

LLMs need endless amounts of quality text to learn from.

AI companies need to make working deals with journalism outfits to be able to train off of all new journalistic writing. (We won’t get into older writing because that’s more complicated, just make the deal for anything written after the deal)

You’ve just solved two problems. Now good journalism is well-funded and LLMs have a legal, endless path to training. There will always be more news to write about. Win-win.

Personally, I think this would solve the copyright issue as well, because this is actually paying people a good wage for their copyrighted material.

The first AI company to come to an agreement with the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal will likely have a very safe position in the market.

SnotFlickerman , 20 days ago

Good critique.

Well, for one, the whole publishing industry is struggling and writers in general are struggling to make money. They could start financing the arts they’re ostensibly taking so much from to train their models. In doing so they could create an explosion of new, quality literature and journalism. It could change the face of a dying industry and revitalize and reshape it. However, it would require the “benevolence” (*slight retch) of tech moguls to accept that perhaps the people producing the content they train their AI on should be properly compensated.

The reason to pay a special rate would be to support the arts and produce new, quality text of all varieties to train on. Available internet training data is easily and cheaply accessible, but less quality, and quickly being diluted by websites auto-generated by AI, causing AI to be trained on AI. By “financing the arts” you would produce quality PR for your company as well as making a short pathway to a constant churn of new content for your models. You could even extend this to scientific publishing, to go beyond the arts and into financing science publishing.

Especially considering there are many continued lawsuits about abuse of copyright to train the models. Everyone knew where the books3 corpus came from, it was known from the beginning that it was all pirated books from Bibliotik, all these groups really shot themselves in the foot by using a well-known pirated document of thousands of copyrighted books for training. They could make all those lawsuits go away with agreements with writers, journalists, and publishers and come out looking like heroes for saving the entire publishing industry and helping clean up the internet and publishing by prioritizing quality, well-written content.

SnotFlickerman , 21 days ago

So it couldn’t just be a web based player for something like PlexAmp? Thats literally all I would want it for. Seems like it could do the job it was made for but for another app would be ideal.

SnotFlickerman , 22 days ago

I’d vote for Ben Schwartz.

SnotFlickerman , 22 days ago

I think the main reason this comes as a Fuck You to a lot of folks is that this came with (don’t know if it still does) Raspbian/Raspberry Pi OS as the default VNC software. So a lot of hobbyists might have not thought about this in a long time and are suddenly facing needing to set up SSH suddenly because the VNC they were using is now off the table. (Makes me glad I defaulted to SSH+keys pretty soon after learning how to use it)

It probably should have never been bundled as the default for a hobbyist operating system. I guess we’ve seen the writing on the wall for the Raspberry Pi Foundation making bad moves for a while now.

SnotFlickerman , 22 days ago (edited 22 days ago)

raspberrypi.com/…/bookworm-the-new-version-of-ras…

So reading around it looks like Raspberry Pi Foundation now suggests TigerVNC because its optimized for Wayland and the newer version of Raspberry Pi OS (Bookworm) is all Wayland now. RealVNC is not optimized for Wayland and now is pulling this shit on Home users.

I haven’t tested this myself yet, just found it through some quick searching.

How-To Set Up TigerVNC on RPi OS Bookworm: picockpit.com/…/tigervnc-and-realvnc-on-raspberry…

But this How-To seems to recognize the reasons why the changeover is happening and what RPi Foundation suggests to use, so it seems like a good place to start.

TigerVNC also seems to be Open Source and unpaid, so it seems like a valid replacement option for the moment.

tigervnc.org

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TigerVNC

It looks like Bookworm is supported all the way back to the Pi 3B+ which is good news for me, specifically. Sounds like its some hoops to jump through in the Raspberry Pi OS Imaging Tool to get it to happen, but it’s there.

I am unsure about TigerVNC support for previous versions of the RPi OS, but its maybe still possible for older models.

SnotFlickerman , 22 days ago

Meanwhile, US and other countries are dumping everything into AI while screaming about how we need new energy sources to run it.

In other words, the selfish pricks at the top ain’t gonna stop… Unless they are forced to stop.

SnotFlickerman , 23 days ago

filing a complaint with the San Jose BBB, but that seems to be too much effort.

lol may as well file a complaint with Yelp, because Yelp is the modern version of the BBB.

SnotFlickerman , 23 days ago

apnews.com/…/biden-immigration-executive-order-as…

It wasn’t brinksmanship, in my opinion. As evidenced by this.