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festus

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festus ,

The police literally have ‘courtesy cards’ they hand out to friends and family to avoid getting them ticketed - that’s a practice that absolutely needs to stop.

festus ,

Because percent change uses the previous value in the denominator, which here was negative. (2.33- -0.5)/(-0.5) = about -5.66, or -566%. What number do you think would make more sense?

festus ,

Yeah I’ll agree that on its own it’s not a good measure because of situations like this.

festus ,

Out of curiosity - what laptop maker is installing Sway by default?

Linux Scores A Surprising Gaming Victory Against Windows 11 (www.forbes.com)

I recently spent some time with the Framework 13 laptop, evaluating it with the new Intel Core Ultra 7 processor and the AMD Ryzen 7 7480U. It felt like the perfect opportunity to test how a handful of games ran on Windows 11 and Fedora 40. I was genuinely surprised by the results!...

festus ,

I pay for the Softmaker Office suite, it’s pretty good and has Linux native versions.

So what did it take for you to go to Linux? (kbin.melroy.org)

I'm asking what big motivational factors contributed to you into going Linux full-time. I don't count minor inconveniences like 'oh, stutter lag in a game on windows' because that really could be anything in any system. I'm talking, something Windows or Microsoft has done that was so big, that made you go "fuck this, I will go...

festus ,

I had a few false starts before, but MS force-updating me to the objectively worse and user-hostile Windows 8 triggered my latest (and successful) switch.

festus ,

I switched jobs earlier this year for a 47℅ ‘raise’ - I’m absolutely loving my new role.

My understanding is that a potential sale of my previous employer fell through because I was basically the brains that developed / maintained the only innovative thing they had done in the past 15 years, and given their lack of investment in anything else there was nothing else of value for the buyer.

Outsourcing emotion: The horror of Google’s “Dear Sydney” AI ad | The company suggests using AI to write a child’s fan letter and the ad is so bad that Google turned off comments for it on YouTube (arstechnica.com)

If you’ve watched any Olympics coverage this week, you’ve likely been confronted with an ad for Google’s Gemini AI called “Dear Sydney.” In it, a proud father seeks help writing a letter on behalf of his daughter, who is an aspiring runner and superfan of world-record-holding hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone....

festus ,

Other way around - the AI is writing a letter “from” the daughter to be sent to the athlete. Still BS though, and I’m sure famous people just love getting spam fan mail where the person couldn’t be bothered to draft it themself.

festus ,

Maybe the Republicans should do the same thing then and have Trump stop running.

festus ,

You can’t not serve someone because of their country - the hotel doesn’t know whether this man is a soldier or not, just that he’s Israeli.

festus ,
  • He could be an Arab Israeli
  • He could be ultra-orthodox
  • He could have had a medical exemption
  • He could have received Israeli citizenship later in his adult years after conscription.
  • He may have served but in a role that isn’t committing human rights abuses (say working on missle defense)
  • He may have served but his political views have since developed and he’s now pro-peace / anti-apartheid.

To generalize and assume that nearly all Israeli men are war criminals is to generalize on the basis of national origin which in most jurisdictions is rightfully assumed to be racist.

festus ,

Perfect article about exactly this situation.

ChatGPT outperforms undergrads in intro-level courses, falls short later (arstechnica.com)

Researchers create 30 fake student accounts to submit model-generated responses to real exams. Professors grade the 200 or 1500 word responses from the AI undergrads and gave them better grades than real students 84% of the time. 6% of the bot respondents did get caught, though… for being too good. Meanwhile, AI detection...

festus ,

Not at all surprising. ChatGPT ‘knows’ a course’s content insofar as it’s memorized the textbook and all the exam questions. Once you start asking it questions it’s never seen before (more likely for advanced topics that don’t have a billion study guides and tutorials for) it falls short, even for basic questions that’d just require a bit of additional logic.

Mind you, memorizing everything is impressive and can get you a degree, but when tasked with a new problem never seen before ChatGPT is completely inadequate.

festus , (edited )

Biden will lose against Trump. Changing candidates this late isn’t ideal but it’s better than guaranteed failure, and it’s better than after the convention if Biden deteroriates from where he’s currently at.

festus ,

I read somewhere that people who fork over money for a special visa to Saudis Arabia have access to air conditioned stations along the way. Most likely the Egyptians are doing it unofficially, which is likely easier to get away being in the general region already.

festus ,

I hadn’t read this exact article but still commented because I’ve read about the same events in other publications.

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...

festus ,

I both agree and disagree. I agree that there isn’t going to be a single ‘straw’, because everyone’s thresholds are different. For me it was back when Microsoft auto-upgraded my PC to Win 8, which was also when they started putting in hard-to-disable telemetry and bad UI. It sounds like Recall is the threshold for some other people.

Also don’t discount that MS’ market share is dominated by a ton of corporate users (who lack a choice) and casual users (who don’t care / are unaware), but at least anecdotally they’ve been losing the power users in my life, which if true in general which will have negative downstream effects for them moving forward (IT departments working to support alternatives, software developers refusing to build on Windows Server / MS software stack, etc.)

festus ,

There may be a component that felons have to have finished their sentence which could exclude Trump.

festus ,

He’s a Florida resident though.

festus ,

That just means the DDOSer is taking Internet Archive down without any further work required.

festus , (edited )

Paywalled, but the word does have some subtle sexual connotations: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/…/678505/

EDIT: Try this link

festus ,

Lol I’m neither Graeme Wood nor am I associated with Israel in any way. At the start of this conflict I was much more pro-Israel but it’s been clear that they don’t care one iota about minimizing civilian causalities (or worse, they do care but in the opposite direction). But being anti-Hamas doesn’t make you pro-Israel - sometimes there are conflicts where both armed sides absolutely suck and civilians are stuck in the middle, and this is one of them.

festus ,

I too use Kagi but it’s worth noting that Kagi gets most of its results by paying and using other search engines including Google and Bing, so it’s not 100% independent or immune from say Bing’s outage. Still the best option by far though.

festus ,

Only to countries that are part of the ICC. Many countries, including the US, aren’t a part so Netanyahu can safely travel to those places.

festus ,

Cue them freaking out when bearded hairy trans men are forced to use women’s washrooms because of this law.

festus ,

They’ve designed their platform so that you can outsource different aspects to different servers. So you can choose a moderator who curates your experience and that’s a different person from who hosts your data, which may be different to who sorts and determines the ‘top posts’.

festus ,

Looks like Microsoft needs to further enhance the consumer experience by adding more personalized product recommendations, that’ll fix it right up!

festus ,

I mean the sale agreement could require the buyer to never expand outside the US.

festus ,

My sister (parents’ cat) is great at communicating. She’ll get your attention and then lead you to whatever she wants. The door to go outside, the food drawer for treats, the bathtub for running water, and to her toys if she wants to play.

Sometimes she likes to steal my dad’s office chair; for that she’ll lead him out of the room as if she wanted something else and then run back in to claim the now-vacant chair. Or she just jumps up and wedges him off :D

festus ,

Please be specific about this being the UK’s democracy and not democracy in general. In Canada for example courts are stronger and it would be much more difficult (albeit not impossible) for our Parliament to do something like this.

festus ,

The UK system has the concept that Parliament is the ultimate authority of matters. So courts there interpret laws but are unable to reject them.

Canada on the other hand has a constitution which lists different rights that people have, and Parliament has no authority to take away some of these rights. There is some controversial leeway with some of the rights where Parliament, using the ‘Notwithstanding clause’, is allowed to temporarily ignore some sections of the Constitution, but they have to keep renewing that every several years or else it expires, and it can’t be applied to some rights like voting rights.

Regarding this specific law I’m unsure of whether there’s anything in our constitution that would prevent deporting irregular migrants to a third country.

festus ,

I’m referring to the the Charter of Rights and Freedoms from 1982. But yes there is still a lot of unwritten rules too like the UK.

festus , (edited )

I’m not in the EU but I got captchaed too.

festus ,

Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it isn’t barbaric. Male lions will regularly kill cubs to make the mother ready for sex - that’s natural but we’d never accept (correctly) a human doing that.

festus ,

Rape then? Lots of animals rape and humans do so too. It’s ‘natural’ but barbaric.

Roku has patented a way to show ads over anything you plug into your TV (arstechnica.com)

A patent application from the company spotted by Lowpass describes a system for displaying ads over any device connected over HDMI, a list that could include cable boxes, game consoles, DVD or Blu-ray players, PCs, or even other video streaming devices. Roku filed for the patent in August 2023 and it was published in November...

festus ,

if the video being displayed is static

Imagine you’re playing Skyrim and while reading one of the books your TV covers up the content with an ad! That would be infuriating!

festus ,

Ever watch an extra wide screen film? That black bar above and below licensed content is the perfect place to inform you about exciting products and opportunities!

Did you know that your eyes only look at one spot at a time? Our customer optimizers are working hard to design a system to use AI to identify this spot in every frame, so that we can fill the rest of the screen with even more consumer opportunities! This applies to audio gaps too - we’ll fill in those awkward silences with exclusive content!

festus ,

Are you talking about Biden’s efforts specifically or more generally? Because Biden is constrained by:

  1. Having to act in the framework of what existing laws let him do as Congress won’t pass anything.
  2. Most colleges are regulated by individual states and the federal government’s power to regulate them is very limited.
festus , (edited )

They also believe we (Arch users) are unaffected because this backdoor targeted Debian and Redhat type packaging specifically and also relied on a certain SSH configuration Arch doesn’t use. To be honest while it’s nice to know we’re unaffected, it’s not at all comforting that had the exploiter targeted Arch they would have succeeded. Just yesterday I was talking to someone about how much I love rolling release distros and now I’m feeling insecure about it.

More details here: gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/…/2

festus ,

Some of these people have been with Reddit since the very beginning and this is basically their first practical chance to sell any of their shares - I wouldn’t read too much into their activity this week. For a company valued at $9B, having the founder & other executives only sell $41M in the week of the IPO if anything feels like the opposite of dumping.

festus ,

I think they are house rules, but a majority of Congress can changes those rules at any time. So if Democrats take the house they can just reverse it as part of installing a new speaker.

festus ,

Part of the problem is that many of the states where insurance companies are leaving have rules that limit what they can charge. That sounds good in principle, but with climate change causing these disasters to happen more often the insurance companies are bleeding money. Ultimately insurance as an industry can’t work if you keep having losses, and if you can’t increase prices to cope then you have no choice but to withdraw.

I’ve sure State Farm is happy to cover catastrophe-prone areas, but only if they won’t lose money on average.

festus ,

It’s been a while since I’ve read about this but my understanding is that many people in rural areas will lack the documentation showing that they’ve always lived in India and have citizenship. Basically, this would let the government then start questioning people’s citizenship and effectively pretend that many rural Muslims are illegal immigrants while allowing Hindus without documentation to be unaffected.

festus ,

I started self-hosting a bit prior to when Docker took off, and getting multiple services running was much harder. Service A wants a certain version of PHP installed with certain plugins while Service B wants a different version. You’d follow a tutorial for installing Service C and desperately hope that it wouldn’t somehow break Service A or B. You installed Service D for a bit despite all the installation pain and now want to uninstall it - I hope you tracked exactly what config changes you made throughout the system so you can undo it.

Docker fixed all of this by making each service independent through containers which made self-hosting 10x easier. I’d also add that I love how easy it is to transfer my setup to a new server - I keep all of my container volumes in a specific directory and my docker-compose files in another and that’s all I need to backup / transfer. Without Docker you’d have to specifically handle each & every configuration file and database location, and if you later upgrade to a newer version of the OS or a different distro you’d have to handle possible conflicts between your versions and what the distro expects.

UN experts say grounds to believe rape occurred in Hamas attack on Israel (www.aljazeera.com)

“The mission team found clear and convincing information that some hostages taken to Gaza have been subjected to various forms of conflict-related sexual violence and has reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may be ongoing,” the report also said.

festus ,

I’ve seen a fair number of people on Lemmy claim that Hamas didn’t rape women or even kill civilians, that’s it all lies, etc.

festus ,

Worth noting that (at least for Red Alert 2) , they aren’t requiring you install whatever their launcher is.

festus ,

I used to play the demo for Star Trek Bridge Commander so much and always wanted the full game - several years ago I bought a copy off Amazon (now it’s available on Gog). Fun game, but it shows its age now.

festus ,

Maybe you’re thinking of Pulsar: Lost Colony? It has some similarities (in that someone can captain a ship and look around the bridge) but the gameplay is pretty different. ST:BC was from the early 2000s so there’s definitely not a VR version of it in particular.

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