SnotFlickerman

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

This is my teratoma, his name is Terry Toma.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Most mammals instead evolved to have their teeth keep growing, like beavers, thus they need to keep using their teeth to keep them from growing out of control.

Secondly, humans in particular, added tooth-enamel-eating-bacteria into our diet hundreds of thousands of years ago. Before that, we didn’t have a huge number of issues with our teeth, and so perhaps not enough time has actually passed since we got the bacteria eats our teeth for an evolutionary advantage that stops it from being an issue? Evolution isn’t so cut and dry, it’s not like it’s trying to solve problems. People with resistances to mouth bacteria probably exist, but are they reproducing enough to become the dominant geneaology? Who the fuck knows?

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

Hosting sites costs money.

Sometimes, people run out of money.

Sometimes, money runs out of people (ie people die).

My personal site was always just for me and my friends, but when it became too costly of an endeavor to keep hosting, I let it go.

A small business that goes completely out of business doesn’t need their website to exist 10 years later, now do they?

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I understand all that, but I can almost positively assure you that my shitposting isn’t super important to have saved, other than for personal reasons. I have a backup of my site from the time, I’ve held onto it, for sure. But after I die, I’d really rather it stop existing, just like I do.

And we really don’t need to remember every business that started and failed within two years. I certainly don’t see a great reason to document my dad’s shitty used car salesman antics of my youth with his own business. It’s honestly also best forgotten by time. There’s more worthwhile and prolific con-men to write about and keep documentation thereof.

And frankly, if I don’t want my past to be on the internet forever, that should be my choice. Just like in the past, pre-internet-and-computers, if I didn’t want to share my writings with anyone before I died, I could burn them properly to make sure they were lost to time.

My original intent was literally meant as a Devil’s Advocate counter-point to the point of the article. Sure, we can’t tell from where we sit what’s important to the future… so maybe trying to save everything is a fools errand to begin with, since we don’t know what’s worthwhile to save? Saving literally everything for the sake of the future seems ill-considered. Once again, I assure you my shitposting with my friends really isn’t all that important culturally or socially.

EDIT: Also this is a cute philosophical 180 degree turn from 14 years ago when numerous scientists, philosophers, and organizations were positively up-in-arms and scared about the prospect of the internet meaning “the end of forgetting” and not being able to move on from your past and grow as a person because your past life on the internet would always come back to haunt you.

www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/…/25privacy-t2.html

Previously, we panicked because everything was going to be online forever!!! Ohhh spooky, dangerous!!

Now, we’re panicked because nothing is going to be online forever!!! Ohhh toospooky, dangerous!!

Oh, humans, never stop humaning.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

You probably responded before I made my edit, but do you remember how 14 years ago there was actually a lot of worry about how things on the internet would be around forever and how that would change society?

www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/…/25privacy-t2.html

EXPIRATION DATES

Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story “Funes, the Memorious,” describes a young man who, as a result of a riding accident, has lost his ability to forget. Funes has a tremendous memory, but he is so lost in the details of everything he knows that he is unable to convert the information into knowledge and unable, as a result, to grow in wisdom. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, in “Delete,” uses the Borges story as an emblem for the personal and social costs of being so shackled by our digital past that we are unable to evolve and learn from our mistakes. After reviewing the various possible legal solutions to this problem, Mayer-Schönberger says he is more convinced by a technological fix: namely, mimicking human forgetting with built-in expiration dates for data. He imagines a world in which digital-storage devices could be programmed to delete photos or blog posts or other data that have reached their expiration dates, and he suggests that users could be prompted to select an expiration date before saving any data.

Because it’s interesting that now the other side of the coin seems to be the primary concern. Previously we were considering expiration dates on data and deep user control. Now the attitude seems to be the opposite, that it shouldn’t be up to the user, but up to the archivist.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

End Birdo Trans Erasure!

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/e3ad8cd0-39eb-45c9-8507-67736396adb3.jpeg

I remember reading this in my own Super Mario Bros. 2 manual.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

This is one of those things where Valve actually actively sucks and is actively ignoring a growing problem because the old game just isn’t profitable anymore.

Expect this to get zero interest or time spent on it from Valve because they’re knee-deep in trying to release a Hero Shooter (rolls eyes).

I have a lot of respect for Valve, but situations like this really need to make people step back and question how much Valve care about the community that uses the Steam service, or do they really care more about how much money they make?

The fact that they keep creating micro-transactions for a game that’s been completely taken over by bots says “They don’t give a shit, they just want the money.”

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Let’s not let Valve get away with shit just because they’re “good guys” compared to other businesses.

Anti-consumer is anti-consumer is anti-consumer. Valve doesn’t get a pass for being Valve.

EDIT: To be clear, I understand that they aren’t required to keep supporting a nearly-two-decade-old game, but letting it become a place where outright abuse happens is a different story. If you can’t control the abuse and you don’t want to do anything about it: do the thing nobody will like but will solve the problem: kill the damn game already if you don’t want to support it. That’s what I expect to happen before they face this issue, they’ll shut down official servers and make the game unavailable before they try to solve the bot problem for a game so old. Valve has made it clear for years that they don’t listen to or give a flying fuck about the TF2 community.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

Some of us still prefer Bandcamp over Spotify since artists actually get paid worth a shit from it, but that’s just me.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

Unlike Spotify, if I download the music, I get to keep it. It doesn’t disappear from the streaming service because of licensing issues. Even if it disappears from Bandcamp itself, if I already have a local copy, I get to keep that local copy.

For 15 years the only way I could listen to 3 Feet High and Rising by De La Soul was to listen to the rip of a CD I made years earlier, because licensing kept it off of streaming services.

Spotify can and will remove music from their library. Bandcamp can’t remove my files from my PC and various backups. It’s the equivalent of having a physical copy, but in digital format and is transferable and able to be backed up.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

This is a gateway to murdering LGBT+ people with government allowing it.

First, you give child rape the death penalty.

Then you classify LGBT living their lives as themselves and being honest with children about that as “child abuse.”

It’s just a handful more steps before you’re taking kids from LGBT couples and putting them to death.

That’s what this looks like to me anyway, especially paired with Project 2025.

Expand the death penalty, and then further expand it to include people you don’t like, by dumping them into the same category as child abusers.

Nevermind that its always fucking conservatives and religious people who fucking rape kids. It’s never lupus a drag queen.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

There’s one way to hold them accountable, and they’re pretty fucking aware of it:

reuters.com/…/us-supreme-court-seeks-security-fun…

You don’t decide to ramp up security because people are happy with you. You do it when you know you’re doing something incredibly unpopular and so you want protection from the target you put on your own back with your incredibly unpopular decision.

They know exactly what they’re doing.

Edit: To be clear this is in no way an endorsement or suggestion regarding “holding them accountable.” “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

So this issue for me is this:

If these technologies still require large amounts of human intervention to make them usable then why are we expending so much energy on solutions that still require human intervention to make them usable?

Why not skip the burning the planet to a crisp for half-formed technology that can’t give consistent results and instead just pay people a living fucking wage to do the job in the first place?

Seriously, one of the biggest jokes in computer science is that debugging other people’s code gives you worse headaches than migraines.

So now we’re supposed to dump insane amounts of money and energy (as in burning fossil fuels and needing so much energy they’re pushing for a nuclear resurgence) into a tool that results in… having to debug other people’s code?

They’ve literally turned all of programming into the worst aspect of programming for barely any fucking improvement over just letting humans do it.

Why do we think it’s important to burn the planet to a crisp in pursuit of this when humans can already fucking make art and code? Especially when we still need humans to fix the fucking AIs work to make it functionally usable. That’s still a lot of fucking work expected of humans for a “tool” that’s demanding more energy sources than currently exists.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

in Infancy Needs Improvements

I’m just gonna go out on a limb and say that if we have to invest in new energy sources just to make these tools functionably usable… maybe we’re better off just paying people to do these jobs instead of burning the planet to a rocky dead husk to achieve AI?

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

this would be a great thing for humanity.

That’s easy to say. Tell me how. Also tell me how to do it without it being biased about certain subjects over others. Captain Beatty would wildly disagree with this even being possible. His whole shtick in Fahrenheit 451 is that all the books disagreed with one another, so that’s why they started burning them.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

reuters.com/…/openai-ceo-altman-says-davos-future…

Speaking at a Bloomberg event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Altman said the silver lining is that more climate-friendly sources of energy, particularly nuclear fusion or cheaper solar power and storage, are the way forward for AI.

“There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said. “It motivates us to go invest more in fusion.”

It’s a good trajectory, but when you have people running these companies saying that we need “energy breakthroughs” to power something that gives more accurate answers in the face of a world that’s already experiencing serious issues arising from climate change…

It just seems foolhardy if we have to burn the planet down to get to 80% accuracy.

I’m glad Altman is at least promoting nuclear, but at the same time, he has his fingers deep in a nuclear energy company, so it’s not like this isn’t something he might be pushing because it benefits him directly. He’s not promoting nuclear because he cares about humanity, he’s promoting nuclear because has deep investment in nuclear energy. That seems like just one more capitalist trying to corner the market for themselves.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

The only downside of Free Open Source Software is that it has been unintentionally the biggest transfer of wealth created by labor from volunteer labor to the capitalist class in history.

Way better software, so much so that capitalists use the hell out of it to make tons of money.

The main limiting factor of the open source AI world is hardware. Hard for individual enthusiasts to compete with corporations who have billions of GPUs worth of processing power. I just have one GPU, and its an AMD, so it’s even more limited because nVidia is the brand majorly used for AI projects.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

They call it a “Terms of Service” but it includes the rules and regulations.

legal.lemmy.world/tos/

It’s in the sidebar on the front page.

EDIT:

ETA: for context, a comment of mine was removed and “rule 2” was cited but the rules in the TOS don’t seem to be relevant.

It was listed as a moderator action, and the community it was involved in was [email protected]. This is actually a lemmy.ml instance, and rules from lemmy.ml and the shiposting community apply. Rules from lemmy.world don’t apply in this case, rules from lemmy.ml do.

Rule 2 on Lemmy.ml is “Be respectful.”

Also, the mod is from lemmy.ml, which generally has a lot of people who vibe with hexbear, and that moderators profile literally says “we do a little trolling.” I wouldn’t take it personally or do anything about it. Just move on and accept it.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

Exactly. It’s a moderator action on a lemmy.ml community. lemmy.world rules are literally not applicable.

I edited my original comment to reflect the OP’s edit.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

Interesting! I wonder if the automod at lemmy.world is just reporting all moderation actions, regardless of instance origin?

I don’t think the automod on lemmy.world works the same way as it does on reddit. I think it does more reporting of moderation actions than doing automatic moderation, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, thanks for your feedback as well. I was aware of how lemmy.world was informing people of moderator actions, and I think it’s really interesting that it is including actions from different instances when they’re interacted with on lemmy.world.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Lifting human bodies is hard, especially when they’re obese (which many, many older US citizens are morbidly obese).

The people who do these jobs are underpaid and often expected to do the work of lifting large, obese bodies (300+lbs.) without the proper heavy lifting equipment.

The number of people who do these jobs who end up with long-term serious bodily harm like their backs being absolutely fucked up and needing surgery is too damn high.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I think the actual reality may be that it’s actually, genuinely not profitable enough to serve the poorest of society. (At least in the eyes of the demented greedy fucks running the show)

We’ve seen an explosion of business-to-business sales and more businesses are spending more money on “productivity” software suites and more. Software is indeed eating business and making it more costly while often not actually providing as much real value as they’re selling you. Small businesses are overwhelmed by these costs and often put out of business by them.

Even gas stations all have video ads. The money they’re making off the gas isn’t enough, they need to supplement it with advertising. Advertising is becoming more ubiquitous than I could have even ever imagined, and I thought it was over-the-top and abusively ubiquitous 30 years ago.

Fast food like Dominos has to keep assembly-line, sweatshop like conditions to keep up with internet ordering (with no built-in rate-limiter, an infinite amount of people can order pizza at the same time, they just want you to keep up), and even with those kind of conditions, it’s often just barely scraping by on breaking even on costs. Most restaurants are struggling with this right now, its an industry I expect to see fail almost completely except for rich, fancy restaurants.

It certainly feels like we’re about to see a whole glut of consumers that companies just aren’t even interested in anymore because they’re not interested in people with no money to spend.

I’m not really excited about where this is all headed. Expect more Company Towns on the horizon…

From Heroes back to Zeroes… Fuck this shithole country that doesn’t give a damn about millions of its own citizens.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

There’s lots of little signs.

Loss of 24 hour stores. It used to be profitable enough to leave places open all night for people to come in all night. Both Target and Walmart (poor people stores) have pretty much dumped it and don’t even do stocking overnight anymore. This leads to the same stores being a mess and feeling difficult to navigate (especially when its actively being stocked and you’re just trying to get past them), pushing more people to order online and pickup because its easier than trying to find it yourself and in the store the price is often wrong or just not listed.

Suddenly its not profitable to give a shit about things like customer service. It just feels like it portends that a certain number of customers now can be considered “acceptable losses.”

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

https://media.tenor.com/F9EfM4fdgzIAAAAM/vin-diesel-i-dont-have-friends.gif

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

c.tenor.com/qWJy2ieaVW0AAAAC/tenor.gif

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

Does Unraid count as paid Linux itself, not just a Linux utility?

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

KDEndlive is pretty solid, imho

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

And if you haven’t worked in a warehouse or fast food recently they often tell you to get fucked anyway!

As if that isn’t proof enough that these are skilled jobs.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

When you aren’t sure where your next meal comes from or if you can afford rent and you already work full-time…

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that is probably a valid time to be vocally loud about it.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

In this case, ending the sentence with “in Minecraft” makes it more true.

Even moreso if you end the sentence with “in Stellaris,” which is all sorts of genocide-y.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

Charlie Brown but an adult wearing the same outfit (adult sized) and just as bald.

I can “AUGH!” with the best of them.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

Won’t someone think of the profits of the private companies!?! /s

For fucks sake, it’s like it’s the only god damned thing anyone fucking thinks about.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

Sure they can, but I’m pretty sure the companies who created them have like a decade before other companies are allowed to even think about creating generic versions of the same drug. Our patent and copyright systems are both completely fucking broken.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

True, but its about their operations in the US, which are required to follow US laws. They still need a patent and copyright from the US government for their US operations.

This means their patent for the drug in the US system means they can prevent it from being available to US consumers as a generic.

Also, the issue of the cost is related to how our government isn’t allowed to negotiate drug costs like others are.

The drug is made by a foreign company that has a presence in the US. They have a US headquarters for their US business.

Local laws have more to do with the issues raised in the article than the origin country of the company making the drug.

That’s like saying T-Mobile is bound by German laws despite operating in the US because it is owned by Deutsche Telecom.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

I can’t bring my video card in bed with me.

Sorry, desktop PC, you’re just bad at snuggles while I can hug my Steam Deck.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

or even better sunshine/moonlight

Thanks for the shoutout, this is my first time reading about Sunshine. Looks pretty awesome!

github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

Not the same company, but I live in apartments with washer/dryers like this. Coin op entirely removed.

You have to have a device that is bluetooth capable to use them.

Anyway pretty sure someone in this apartment has figured out something similar because the machines keep magically becoming unpaid machines after they get serviced. After each service, they will be asking for money to be able to be used for like a day or so, but then soon enough, I’ll go back to the laundry room and all the machines will be free and not asking for money. Just ready to go, no device required.

Originally, I thought it was the company disabling them due to like a data breach or something and was trying to find out if there was an undisclosed data leak and/or a class action lawsuit brewing. Since neither of those are the case, I’m pretty sure it’s a Notorious Do-Gooder.

So, thanks, Notorious Do-Gooder, for all the free washes and drys.

(Especially since this same idea crossed my mind over a year ago but I’ve just been too lazy to view the bluetooth data traffic myself)

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

Honestly, in this case, the company in question are even bigger finks because they don’t actually care about fixing a vulnerability that could cost them money.

If that speaks to their security practices, well… Let’s just say I wouldn’t be surprised if customer data was all in an unsecured, unencrypted, plain-text Microsoft Word document.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

Around 2007 or so I used to unplug Coinstar machines from the internet (plug was usually right in back) and then put in all my coins and try to redeem an online gift card. It used to be you could only get all of your cash back via online gift cards, because the machine took out a fee to give your money back in cash.

When it couldn’t connect to the internet, it would apologize and refund me in cash, with no convenience fee (since I was clearly inconvenienced). Full amount returned.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

This is everywhere in the modern world. There’s got to be a word for it, I’m just unaware of the descriptive word for it myself.

This is the same everywhere. “Solitary confinement” has been redefined as “Restrictive Housing” and “Administrative Segregation.”

Just name it something else! Poof, all your accountability is gone because none of your paperwork references “solitary confinement” anymore! Now that it’s renamed you’re totally not doing it even though it is literally the same set of actions with a new, “friendlier” name.

It’s 100% like Trump saying “if we’d stop testing, we’d have fewer cases.”

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

scotusblog.com/…/loper-bright-enterprises-v-raimo…

scotusblog.com/…/relentless-inc-v-department-of-c…

These are the two Chevron cases. We’re not expecting a result from them until June probably.

They can still end up ruling against Chevron and make this ruling essentially pointless.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

Now we just maim them.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

Sorry, yes, I didn’t mean to pretend that death wasn’t part of it. I’m just broken by all this and sometimes all you can do is crack a dark and terrible joke in the face of the fucking evil farcical nature of it all. Cheers.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Finding sources about Bush and Cheney fuckery from 2000-2008 is getting increasingly difficult. Their crimes are getting memory-holed.

EDIT: Specifically, does anyone else remember the specific act that Bush wanted to hit Quakers with terrorism charges over? I remember it being a bunch of Quakers in kayaks doing a blockade of a naval ship, preventing it from leaving port to go to Iraq. I can’t find a fucking word on it anymore, and I can barely even find sources on Bush wanting to hit Quakers with terrorism charges other than some broken links at the ACLU. Quakers, as a reminder, are the only religious group in the USA that are default conscientious objectors because violence is 100% antithetical to their religion. These are the kind of people they wanted to use “terrorism” charges against.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

Probably a good bit. I have a backup from my personal website from 2006 to about 2013. Along with a lot of media going back to my teen years. I’m really lucky I’ve been a good digital steward of my own data and haven’t lost almost any of my personal digital history.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

Once a cop, always a cop. Eric Adams is a bastard.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

Brilliant rebuttal.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

Because the best way to handle stupidity is to coddle it like Trump, right? That’s been working out just gangbusters, right?

Sometimes people say something fucking stupid and need to be told why it’s stupid.

Even if it’s just so other people don’t have to suffer these fools.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

But that would require research, reading, and most importantly, actually giving a shit.

Far easier to just swallow AI generated swill, apparently.