bilb

bilb , 2 months ago

I think in threads where an obviously well-informed computer user asks a question about how to accomplish something or troubleshoot something in Windows, it’s pretty much never helpful to recommend using Linux instead. They probably know about Linux. They either must, or want to use Windows. It’s a pretty common occurrence, however.

Though these days, you might get to recommend Linux anyway by saying “you should use wsl2.”

bilb , 2 months ago

It definitely has many compromises and I wouldn’t use it for hosting something in production or something like that. (Is that something people do?) It is situationally very useful though, usually for things I used to spin up a VM for. I’m happy to have it available as a tool when I need to use Windows.

bilb , 2 months ago

Elon Musk is a brilliant inventor nonpareil. He invented tunnels, rockets, electric cars, and now Twitter.

bilb , 2 months ago

It’s not quite as good as reddit was for me when reddit was good.

My hope/expectation is that for lemmy (and the wider “threadiverse,” e.g. kbin) the best days are still to come.

bilb , 2 months ago

I try to do an “end-run” around federation drama by using my own instance, especially since I prefer to be as openly federated as possible. This is not without drawbacks, but it’s really not bad.

My fear is that one day the biggest instances will switch from using block lists to instead only federate with an allow-list. That would basically make this use non-viable.

bilb , 3 months ago

Exactly, you never intended to commission an artist because you think so-called “AI art” is good enough to replace them.

Weird argument to make on a piracy sub, honestly. The existence of an AI generated image does not imply that a somewhere an artist lost a commission. Nobody was replaced. It’s not a choice between AI art and commissioned art, it’s a choice between AI generated images and nothing at all because that was the point of his project.

Whether we find it tasteful or interesting is another topic.

bilb , 3 months ago

“Instead of working on that project that you were enjoying working on in your spare time, why not do this completely different other thing?”

That’s not reasonable.

bilb , 3 months ago

Kind of a drama lightning rod. Fair warning.

bilb , 3 months ago

Meta can only do that on threads though. I don’t care, that’s really not my business.

bilb , 3 months ago

You’re missing the point. I don’t want you to understand my feelings, I want someone to explain to me what the big deal is. How meta “moderates” their platform has no effect on me, a non-threads user. What is my stake in it?

bilb , 3 months ago

Yeah, he’s pretty hot

bilb , 3 months ago

I run my own instance that technically does have open registration, but I can’t really recommend anyone actually sign up to use it. It’s not running on very powerful hardware, and my commitment to keeping it running 24/7 is “as long as it stays convenient and interesting.” There are probably many, many of those. But there are a good collection of second and third tier instances now as well, I’m not to worried about .world’s popularity so long as they don’t do something like switch to a federation allow-list rather than a block list.

bilb , 3 months ago

I’m aware of the risk, but so far the captcha seems to have prevented any mass sign-up, and none of the few other existing accounts so far have any activity. That said, since I have no intention to support a user base anymore, I probably should close it anyway.

bilb , 3 months ago

Agreed, and I don’t intend to stop at the moment. When I wrote “close it” I meant registration, sorry about the ambiguous language.

bilb , 3 months ago

Personally, I think it’s okay for things to disappear sometimes. Nothing is permanent. I have no anxiety about this.

bilb , 3 months ago

The bigger deal is that development by this team has been halted, not that it will be a little harder to find a trustworthy download of the most recent version.

bilb , 3 months ago

I love Jod

bilb , 3 months ago

Ah, you’ve got them now!

bilb , 4 months ago

Several side quests were unfinished or broken at launch, weren’t they?

bilb , 4 months ago

I think I’m remembering this early patch that finished several questlines that seemed to just end:

bandainamcoent.com/…/elden-ring-patch-notes-v1-03

bilb , 4 months ago

I drive an EV and I always tell people not to buy one for this or that reason. The truth is that I don’t want too many other EVs on the road because I bought it just to feel superior to others, and I can’t do that if everyone else also drives an EV.

bilb , 4 months ago

Oh, that wouldn’t be the same! I’ll have to supplement my vehicle with incredibly smug bumper stickers.

(I don’t mind being downvoted, but I think I should point out for the sake of not making someone’s depressive mood worse that this and my previous comment in this thread were meant to be humorous and I’m not actually this insane. I don’t expect my Bolt EUV to seriously impress anyone. I do like driving it though!)

bilb , 4 months ago

You can both relax! I checked each word and neither of you misspelled anything.

bilb , 4 months ago

The way I remember “discovery” working on Napster was when someone incorrectly labeled unrelated music as by an artist you searched for. Wow, new music!

bilb , 4 months ago

Here’s what Kagi gave me:

The passage discusses the concept of “enshittification” in the tech industry, where companies initially attract customers through innovation but then exploit them by increasing prices and fees. This phenomenon has occurred at companies like Facebook, Google, Uber and food delivery services. The term was coined by author Cory Doctorow to describe how these companies stop innovating and focus only on generating value for shareholders at the expense of customers. However, the passage notes that increased unionization among tech workers and more aggressive antitrust enforcement could help reverse these trends and encourage more competition in the industry. An interesting point highlighted is that while enshittification is not necessarily directly malicious, it can be a product of business environment pressures and lack of regulation that incentivize prioritizing profits over customers. This suggests policy changes may be needed to realign company incentives with serving users.

bilb , 4 months ago

They are wrong. You can stamp your feet and insist otherwise because you’re scared of losing, but they’re wrong.

bilb , 5 months ago

You’re both completely wrong. The only important measurement of a vehicle is spirit

bilb , 5 months ago

how do i summion wengido

bilb , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

It’s kinda unusual for Saudi Arabia to stick up for Palestinians, isn’t it? Am I wrong about that?

ETA: After a little reading, it seems that I am wrong about that but “it’s complicated.”

bilb , 5 months ago

I would not care if they were.

bilb , 5 months ago

I hope this is true but I don’t believe it

bilb , 5 months ago

I wonder if it has to do with the region you try to load it from. The message in the screenshot seems to indicate that it might.

bilb , 5 months ago

As cool as I think the knapping and clay working mechanics are, I also quickly decided that they were tedious. I do mean to get back to it though since I didn’t get much further than that, and I definitely missed a lot of what is there. Maybe playing solo did it no favors.

bilb , 5 months ago

You gotta host your own instance so that when it disappears you can only be disappointed in yourself.

bilb , 5 months ago

There’s plenty of art that I don’t value the human element of at all. I don’t think any of the Corporate Memphis blob people on tech sites or the designs on a billboard are “sacred,” for instance, but they are unambiguously art. If you do these things with generative AI, I won’t regret the loss of human involvement.

Art done to express something human will never go away as long as people feel a need to express themselves that way. Companies will hire fewer graphics designers, true, but I don’t really give a fuck to be honest.

bilb , 5 months ago

I eat one 7 pound can of pudding with every meal

bilb , 5 months ago

People pretending it’s not useful and/or not improving all the time are living in their own worlds. I think you can argue the legality and the ethics, but any anti-ai position based on low quality output (“it can’t even do hands!”) has a short shelf-life.

bilb , 5 months ago

I think if you blocked the person who posted this you’d see a big reduction. It’s usually the same account posting Musk news.

bilb , 5 months ago

Yes, they could limit their reach even further by only using the fediverse.

bilb , 5 months ago

Local by default, option to go remote. Even the privacy-first types might want to offload that to a more powerful local machine.

They could even sell access to a Mozilla provided AI server like they do with the VPN service.

bilb , 5 months ago

Well, if they flushed out the corruption that undermined their capabilities then one might expect their capabilities to increase afterward.

bilb , 5 months ago

Not very well! But things can improve, and I appreciate the gesture.

bilb , 5 months ago

I thought Servo was basically dead since the layoffs at Mozilla in 2020, but your comment caused me to look into it and evidently funding was found to resume development on it at the beginning of last year. That’s good news! (to me!)

bilb , 6 months ago

I think it’s perfectly capable of being used to make a compelling game, but Starfield seems to be a game for which the strengths of the engine AND the strengths of the writers and designers at Bethesda are completely mismatched.

bilb , 6 months ago

I’m not personally in favor of preemptively blocking threads on my instance and I don’t find the EEE argument at all convincing in this case. But other instances doing that is no problem at all, it’s fine!

bilb , 6 months ago

Personally, it’s the implausibility of 2 that makes all of this seem like no big deal to me. In fact, I think federating openly with Threads might signal to Threads users that they can use alternatives and not lose access to whomever they follow on Threads, thus growing the user-base of other federated instances.

I think people who are going to use Threads for Meta-specific features are likely going to use Threads anyway, and if any of those features are genuinely good (i.e. not simply Instagram and Facebook tie-ins) they will be replicated by the various open Fediverse projects which already differ from one another in terms of features.

The moderation issue is entirely different and there are some instances that have an understanding with their users about protecting them from seeing any objectionable content or behavior as defined by whatever culture they have. Defederating from such a large group of people makes sense, perhaps even preemptively, no different from when they defederate existing large instances now.

bilb , 6 months ago

The problem, as I’m sure you know, is that a home server is not fit for purpose for the vast majority of people. Managing that is a fun project for some, but a complete non starter for most.

bilb , 6 months ago

that’s impressive stuff, logic bomb.