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blind3rdeye

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blind3rdeye ,

I’m sure Microsoft would be supportive of that point of view. And with their wealth and lobbying power … … Lets not mention it again, and hope for the best.

blind3rdeye ,

A typical ActivityPub+Lemmy post.

blind3rdeye ,

Yes. GOG. itch.io. Direct from some other website. That’s right.

Steam is very good; but the hidden cost is that you depend on them maintaining their service. If they turn evil, you’re screwed. You either have to bend to their will, or you lose your library of games.

On the other hand, GOG and itch.io are arguably not as good as Steam right now, but they don’t have any kind of lock-in. So if they start to backslide, you can still walk away with your full library of games. I do think it’s a good idea to ‘not put all your eggs in one basket.’

blind3rdeye ,

Hey, no one is trying to stop you from doing that. I’m sure it is very convenient for you.

My point of view though is that automatically uploading my personal files to some corporation computer on the other side of the world should not be the default when I try to save something. Maybe sometimes I’ll want to use that feature, but there are a variety of reasons why I don’t want it most of the time. And I definitely don’t like having to jump through hoops just to avoid it.

A PR disaster: Microsoft has lost trust with its users, and Windows Recall is the straw that broke the camel's back (www.windowscentral.com)

It’s a nightmare scenario for Microsoft. The headlining feature of its new Copilot+ PC initiative, which is supposed to drive millions of PC sales over the next couple of years, is under significant fire for being what many say is a major breach of privacy and security on Windows. That feature in question is Windows Recall, a...

blind3rdeye ,

What’s X? Is that the older version of Wayland or something?

blind3rdeye ,

To me it is weird that every day on lemmy I see new posts complaining about all tankies… but I never actually see any of the content they are complaining about. And outside of lemmy, I never see or hear the word ‘tankies’ used at all. I’ve asked a couple of people I know in real life if they ever seen discussions about it in their parts of the internet, and none of them people I’ve asked have ever heard the word before.

So… like I said, I find it weird. It’s like some kind of lemmy boogieman.

blind3rdeye ,

The “and more” is the worrying part. They’re telling us that some of the things they are adding are not ‘features’. So then what are they?

Ads, probably. That’s the trend these days. More and more ads, in everything, everywhere - just really probing the limits of tolerability.

blind3rdeye ,

Steam works very well on Linux. There is a setting in Steam to enable ‘proton’ for all games - this allows you to play Windows games on Linux without having to do anything else. It has worked flawlessly for every game I’ve tried.

As for your movies thing, I don’t know. I deliberately avoid software that automatically searches and catalogues stuff on my computer. So I’m not sure how easy it is to do what you are asking for. It’s something that I’d avoid rather than seek out.

blind3rdeye ,

Microsoft’s insidious insistence on online accounts is the main reason I stopped using Windows. Even with a local Windows account, one time I accidentally opened Edge, and it started automatically importing browser info from Firefox and then syncing it to the Microsoft account that I was using for MS Office. From my point of view, that was some extreme bullshit. Too much to tolerate. I didn’t want Edge to import anything from anywhere - no matter how ‘convenient and easy’ it is. and I certainly didn’t want it to upload anything - no matter what assurances of ‘privacy and security’ are claimed. And until that point, I thought accounts for individual apps could be keep isolated to just that app.

blind3rdeye ,

Power management is a joke. Configured as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead - as in battery at zero, won’t even boot. Windows would never do this, unless you went out of your way to config power management to kill the battery (even then, to really kill it you have to boot to BIOS and let it sit, Windows will not let a battery get to zero).

Are you kidding? Windows does this all the time. There have been countless times when I’ve left work with a fully charged laptop, then bring it back the next day to literal zero charge without having used it. I no longer trust sleep or hibernate mode at all for anything longer than an hour. And I’m not the only one with this problem. My partner (with a different laptop) has had the same thing happen, and so have my colleges.

I’ve got some ideas about why and how it might happen; but kind of beside the point. The point is that it is not true that Windows would never let your battery drain to zero while the computer is not in use. It does do it. Often.

blind3rdeye ,

In my specific case the manufacturer is Microsoft. (It’s a Surface Pro.) There isn’t anything wrong with the battery. The gist of the issue is that there are milllion-and-one different things that can wake the computer from sleep, and then a couple of reasons why it might not automatically sleep again when ideal. If it was up to me, I’d have it so that the power button was literally the only thing that could wake it. But alas, I cannot even find a way to stop it from waking when opening the case (which I would like to do to check if it has woken up from some other reason).

In any case, I’m just saying that power management can be a problem in Windows (as well as in Linux).

blind3rdeye ,

Forced accounts are evil - including Android. Here’s my Android story:

When I got my first Android phone, my intention was to not have an account - or at least have as much isolation between any account and my actual usage as possible. So I decline account creation when I first started using the phone, and told the phone to only store all contacts locally. That worked, and I was pretty happy with it. But later, I wanted to download a couple of basic apps from the app store - and that required an account. So I created a bogus account to download the apps. …

After creating the account to download stuff, I noticed that the contacts had automatically associated themselves with that new account had automatically uploaded all my contacts and personal info to google to sync with this account. This is precisely the thing I was trying to avoid in the first place. So, I immediately logged into that account via google’s website and told it to not store any contact info, and to delete all existing info. Which it did.

But then some time later… the account again decided to sync with my phone - this time to delete all the contacts from my phone (presumably because I’d deleted them from the online account). So although I’d gone to some deliberate lengths to tell my phone to only store data locally and to not upload it, what i ended up with was all personal data uploaded, and then purged from my phone. I had to try to restore my contacts from an ancient sim-card backup from my old phone.

Since then, I’ve decided that I will not use a google account for my phone for any reason, ever. I’ve use F-droid and the Aurora store instead. (But actually I very rarely use any apps anyway.)

blind3rdeye ,

How can such a fundamental element of thr human experience can be so conspicuously absent for almost all art and media.

What are you talking about? Heaps of movies have sex scenes. Heaps of songs are about sex. There are heaps of books and other stories about sex. The internet is packed with sex stuff of all kinds. Advertisements in the street are obvious implicitly or explicitly about sex. So how can you say that sex is ‘conspicuously absent from almost all art and media’? Are you looking?

Allowing explicit porn on twitter doesn’t make it ground-breaking in any way. It just changes the tone and target audience of the site, such that you will now see porn inserted into basically any conversation or topic.

The ugly truth behind ChatGPT: AI is guzzling resources at planet-eating rates (www.theguardian.com)

Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually....

blind3rdeye ,

Your problems are with capitalism and how we distribute our resources, not with advancements in automation.

This particularly story isn’t about wealth distribution though. It’s about environmental damage caused by this technology. So that’s a whole other class of problem. As for the other problems being about capitalism, I agree for sure that capitalism is a source of many many problems… but while we are in that system we should still try to minimise the problems. So if this technology has major problem when combined with capitalism, then we should either stop using capitalism, or stop using the technology - or both, until we make up our mind which we prefer to keep!

CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information (futurism.com)

You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)...

blind3rdeye ,

Google providing links to dubious websites is not the same as google directly providing dubious answers to questions.

Google is generally considered to be a trusted company. If you do a search for some topic, and google spits out a bunch of links, you can generally trust that those links are going to be somehow related to your search - but the information you find there may or may not be reliable. The information is coming from the external website, which often is some unknown untrusted source - so even though google is trusted, we know that the external information we found might not be. The new situation now is that google is directly providing bad information itself. It isn’t linking us to some unknown untrusted source but rather the supposedly trustworthy google themselves are telling us answers to our questions.

None of this would be a problem if people just didn’t consider google to be trustworthy in the first place.

blind3rdeye ,

Yeah, for me it is the ads. No one likes ads, but I hate ads more than most people. So when Windows started putting more and more ‘recommendations’ into various places… I’ve been building up a list of registry tweaks to turn it all off - but as more ads got added, just couldn’t tolerate it any more. I installed Mint with dual boot (defaulting to Mint). I thought I’d be booting into Window every so often for one reason or another, but as it happens - the only reason I ever loaded Windows was to check that the dual booting was working.

blind3rdeye ,

literally.

blind3rdeye ,

Should it bother you? Was yoru girlfriend being dishonest to you, or mistreating you? In the end, if you’re fine with it, then its fine.

blind3rdeye ,

Password managers are good; but keeping track of passwords is not the main problem with making online accounts for everything.

blind3rdeye ,

I’m sure you’ll be thinking about this conversation for longer than it took to make the original post.

blind3rdeye ,

I think we can find better things to bitch about than the price of games.

I’m sure you’re right about that. But this topic isn’t about games being too expensive. It’s about ads being forced on people with no compensation. (Many people don’t want ads under any circumstances, while some people say they would accept ads if they get financially compensated.)

blind3rdeye ,

Brand integration definitely is not neutral. Functionality to make it smooth and easy interact with nazi-central lends Nintendo’s credibility to that platform. It’s not a neutral feature.

blind3rdeye ,

Yeah, I will. These decisions don’t just come out of nowhere, and I think its always a good idea to try to understand why things happen. By understanding the reasons for things, the world is less likely to feel arbitrarily hostile and unfair - and I can make better informed choices for my own life.

blind3rdeye ,

0.1% chance would be huge. That kind of probability is an unacceptable risk even just for a personal injury, let alone the destruction of all life on earth.

blind3rdeye ,

What’s wrong with profiles in Firefox? I have 3 different Firefox profiles that I use, just for myself. (1 for general usage, 1 for banking, and one for a particular email account.) From my point of view, the profile system works fine. I don’t know what else I’d even ask for to improve it.

And even still, I wouldn’t expect most people would even want multiple Firefox accounts for a single computer login anyway; which is why the Firefox profile selector is disabled by default. (Tab-containers are a bit different, but related. I can certainly imagine a lot of people befit from those.)

blind3rdeye ,

I’m not really sure what you are asking for. From what I understand it sounds like you have multiple people using the same computer, and they all want their own Firefox profile open at the same time. You’ve got a shortcut for each profile; and it works… but you are unhappy with how the Windows taskbar looks when you have these multiple profiles open at once?

I feel like its a bit of a stretch to blame Firefox for what the Windows taskbar does while you have multiple people simultaneously trying to use the same web-browser. But sure, everyone has their own use-case. And if this isn’t doing what you need, then it makes sense to look elsewhere.

blind3rdeye ,

I have shared a computer with people, but we definitely don’t want our stuff open at the same time. I would find that confusing and a bit of a violation of privacy. So that leaves me (and most people I assume) just trying to imagine what it is that you are not happy with. And I honestly don’t know what you are talking about when you say ‘regular shortcut’. As far as I know, there is only one kind of shortcut in windows. It’s a icon that runs a command of your choice, with an icon of your choice, placed in a location of your choice (any folder, any part of the start menu, or somewhere on the taskbar). So when you talk about shortcuts not being the regular one, I don’t know what you mean.

But look, if you say it’s bad for your use-case - I believe you. When I said that it was a stretch to blame Firefox, I didn’t mean it was a non-issue. What I had in mind was that your primary complaint seems to be about what Windows is doing rather than what Firefox is doing. In any case, like I said before: if it isn’t doing what you need then it makes sense to look elsewhere. Good luck to you.

blind3rdeye ,

Vote for the best option you have. Maybe you don’t feel like the current options are great; but just suppose you keep voting for the best of your options, and that best option keeps winning. The idea is that later someone will think “maybe I can win by being even better…”. That’s the theory of democracy anyway. If the best candidate keeps winning, then the competition improves to challenge them. But right now that doesn’t seem to be happening.

As long as someone like Trump can get even vaguely close to victory, that either means that a near-majority of Americans believe Trump is the better option, or that not enough people are voting. I think it’s probably the second one. The republican strategy has nothing to do with fielding the best candidate. Instead they rely on feeding voter apathy, anger, and doubt. They want anyone who isn’t a zealot to be uncertain about voting. That’s how they win. We’re not going to see the best candidates while that strategy is in play. And to beat the ‘don’t vote’ strategy… well, you just have to vote.

blind3rdeye ,

That just means it wasn’t there last time you saw this thread. New comments appear yellow on some lemmy interfaces.

blind3rdeye ,

In some countries, zero is neither positive nor negative. But in others, it is both positive and negative. So saying the set of natural number is the same as non-negative [integers] doesn’t really help. (Also, obviously not everyone would even agree that with that definition regardless of whether zero is negative.)

blind3rdeye ,

I stopped watching this movie after this scene (which is pretty close to the start). The way the scientists and world leaders were discussing how to communicate was just so absurdly shallow that I couldn’t take the movie seriously.

Like, I can easily suspend disbelieve to watch a movie about aliens doing all sorts of weird things that are inconsistent with basic physics; but it just really bugs me when a movie makes a point of bringing together the smartest and most capable people to solve some issue, and then utterly fails to show even a faint glimmer of that knowledge or intelligence in what they do. I reckon a random person picked up off the street would do a better job of first-contact with aliens compared to these clowns.

blind3rdeye ,

Look, I don’t know exactly. I don’t think it’s an easy problem.

But I think the first stages would try to help the aliens understand how we communicate with each other. If people are waving their limbs around and breathing and poking at devices, and making all sorts of noises, it may be unclear which of those actions is meant to be communication. So the first thing is to have very clear correlations and patterns that are easy to recognise. Bring in the white-board to write words is a decent idea; but writing the word ‘human’ and then just standing there doing nothing with no follow-up is pretty much useless. There needs to be a couple of different words shown with very concrete context. ‘Human’ is not terrible, but it isn’t a great choice because you can’t really draw attention to what a human is when there is literally always a human there while you are trying to communicate. So it might be a decent word if the aliens already have the concept of words - but as a starting point… not really. Better to just say nouns for concrete things and point while doing it; with repetition and clear patterns. Writing just a list of counting numbers wouldn’t be a bad idea either. If you write all the numbers up to 100 or so I think there would be a clear pattern, so that at least the aliens would know that you are trying to communicate by writing stuff.

Regarding my criticism of the movie, it’s not so much that the whiteboard idea is bad, or that their attempts were bad; but rather that these are supposedly the attempts of experts - after other experts have tried and failed; and then the meetings with the project coordinators have weird discussions like “this method will take too long.” - as if they think you can somehow side-step the need to establish a common language. And the description of the plan from the scientist talk about teaching the different meanings of the word ‘you’, and some grammar rules - as if that’s somehow a core priority. I just think it’s a really shallow level of discussion. Their strategy is super basic (but not unreasonable), and the criticism of it from the other characters is somehow even more shallow. They were even questioning why the scientist wanted to bring in the whiteboard. Like, isn’t that extremely obviously? Do you really need to have a discussion about that? I really just felt like it was not a convincing set of smart people talking about the problem.

When I said anyone off the street could do a better job, I guess what I had it mind is that people would typically just point to things and say what they pointing to. They could bring in props and talk about the props; and perhaps try to give something to the aliens to interact with - if possible. Just basic ideas like that would be a decent start. I reckon that would be better than just holding up a whiteboard with a single word on it then just standing around. Like, how are the aliens meant to even know that it is a word at all - let alone what it might mean?

blind3rdeye ,

Perhaps you just have a different view on what is or is not an ad. For example when I see a link in the start menu for an app that I did not install, I consider that to be an ad. The most common time this happens is for Office. (Or Microsoft 365 or whatever it is called now.) Also, when I see a ‘suggestion’ to sign into a Microsoft account to use OneDrive - I consider that an ad. Microsoft aren’t telling me about OneDrive to improve my life. They are telling me to improve their profits. And when I type something in the start menu to launch an app, any result that comes up that is not something I put on my computer is an ad. It often will suggest particular websites for example.

These are the kinds of thing that we’re talking about. I’m sure if you’re using Windows on a home computer you will have seen these things. (I assume you’re talking about ads in Windows. It would be quite something else if you’d never seen any ad anywhere.)

blind3rdeye ,

I found this story to be informative, about why Germany closed their nuclear power plants. I think that context can defuse a lot of arguments about Germany’s decision.

blind3rdeye ,

It takes no time or effort whatsoever to form an opinion about post like this. So people can vote on it immediately. Whereas actual news is more often complex - and might take some time to read and process before the reader understands what it is about. They aren’t going to upvote it if they don’t know what it is about. And even then, there is a tendency to only vote things that trigger some kind of emotional response. Post that neutrally inform the reader generally don’t make people think “yes! Lets get more people to see this.”

tl;dr clickbait works.

blind3rdeye ,

Cool picture. But Chrome? Why?

blind3rdeye ,

There’s a cool computer game that makes this point as part of the story line… I’d recommend it, but I can’t recommend it in this context without it being a spoiler!

blind3rdeye ,

For sure. I bet the guy who was shot in his sleep would have been fine if keep a gun in his hand while sleeping - to scare away intruders. Maybe another gun under the pillow for extra safety. Nothing can stop gun violence except more guns.

(still /s … Some people in the USA are really weird about guns, and I don’t want to fall afoul of Poe’s law.)

blind3rdeye ,

I thought it was all just a single statement. “Pleasant to look at sex is better. [The sex] will make you happier and more confident.”

blind3rdeye ,

Recently I’ve found that I often get sad listening to wildlife. I’ve got a sense that a lot of what I’ve seen and heard is very soon to be gone. Not like in 1000 years in some hard to imagine future, but rather maybe within my own lifetime. I’m mourning for a dying world.

I sometimes think about this story about a recording of a now extinct bird; and I remember that there are stacks of other examples of species that have recently gone extinct. Too many for people to even talk about each of them. Just a few nice-sounding high-profile cases capture people’s attention every so often.

I do put in a bit of effort in my own lifestyle to not make things worse. But it seems to me that there will be vast damage to the world already before humanity course corrects appropriately. It’s very depressing.

blind3rdeye ,

A small number of humans are commanding the resources to do that damage, but they aren’t the ones creating or even directly using the resources. e.g. People often talk about the damage caused by rich people using private jets - but the rich people didn’t build or pilot the jets. They just tell other people to do those things. So I think its not as simple as just a few people causing destruction. They are only able to cause that damage because the rest of us empower them to do it.

blind3rdeye ,

I think “nobody” is overstating it a bit. But certainly the majority of people don’t care enough.

A lot of people use the reasoning that they don’t need to adjust their livestyle to reduce the kinds of things you mentioned, because some other people are doing much worse. And there is some truth to that. It is definitely true that the decisions of a small number of people make a massively disproportionate impact on the problem. But it isn’t a helpful line of reasoning unless you’re intending to take steps to change those other people.

blind3rdeye ,

Obviously the semi-censored version isn’t the same - otherwise you wouldn’t be talking about it. And the author has told you that it was a stylistic choice to use that different version. That’s enough, isn’t it? And judging by the reactions here, apparently the semi-censored version is even more hard-hitting than the full word!

Swearing is used for emphasis and to invoke a reaction. The attention it has brought here seems to show that it has invoked a reaction and captured people’s attention. Maybe that drawing of attention means it was fit for purpose - or maybe not. In any case, it was the choice of the author to do it like that.

blind3rdeye ,

You think it’s juvenile to self-censor? Have you never heard and adult use swear-adjacent words when talking? This happens for all sorts of reasons. If you think this is a childish thing to do, then I can only assume social norms are very different where you. I can’t think of any child I know ever self-censoring in this way. They’d either swear, or not swear. But I do know of adults who do it.

blind3rdeye ,

Oh my god! You’re right! I see now! Thanks for clarifying that. It was totally absurdly juvenile and silly of them to write like that. Should we really even tolerate that kind of behaviour here on lemmy? I didn’t understand how bad it was until you explained it to me - but I’m sure glad you did, because now it is so crystal clear that the way that they expressed themselves was ridiculous and possibly even harmful to the community.

blind3rdeye ,

Yeah. It makes no sense. A totally crazy mental block. Irrational and nonsensical. No sane person would ever write like that. No chance anyone would ever want to express themselves in that way unless that had some kind of twisted sinister motive. We shouldn’t allow that kind of thing here. We need to make sure everyone on lemmy knows that it is not what we want in this community. Lets keep this discussion going to make sure this wisdom is heard.

blind3rdeye ,

I don’t believe these are genuine interview answers.

blind3rdeye ,

I would have agreed with that before C++11. But since then, C++ has improved a lot. Its like the vision of what C++ suddenly became more clear. So I wonder if Linus would still say that today. (Unfortunately, there have been a lot of missteps in the development of C++ though, and so there is a lot of cruft that everyone wishes was not there…)

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