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leftzero

@[email protected]

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leftzero ,

non-fire- removed ant

I don’t know which instance is doing this shit (world or ml, I assume), but it’s absolutely removed. 😤

leftzero ,

You don’t seem to allow much of anything, lately. It’s all remove this, ban that.

Your instance truly makes Lemmy feel like Reddit at its worst.

leftzero ,

That I really want? Replicators. Man think about a life not having to cook or clean dishes.

Drug addicted, Mafia made, trash fed makers from Transmetropolitan, specifically.

https://blog.jverkamp.com/embeds/books/attachments/transmetropolitan-1-4.png

https://i.imgur.com/MoAtgxC.jpg

leftzero ,

Not that I’m aware. Probably Baader-Meinhof.

To wit, coincidences are more noticeable than non-coincidences, and once you’ve noticed one it’ll be much easier to notice others you might have missed.

I myself once spent about a week seeing Curta hand-held mechanical calculators everywhere. Books, magazines, blog posts, youtube… I wasn’t complaining, of course, the Curta is an amazing piece of engineering, but still, it was a bit weird.

leftzero ,

Yeah, some Catalan politicians say “els ciutadans i les ciutadanes”, much like some Spanish politicians say “los ciudadanos y las ciudadanas”. Romance languages tend to have gendered nouns (and by extension articles). 🤷‍♂️

leftzero ,

*lead

leftzero ,

I’m pretty certain Excel supports scroll lock. It lets you scroll the sheet with the arrow keys instead of moving from cell to cell (also last time I tried you could go to the ribbon menu with the slash key, like in the good ol’ Lotus 123 days). Wouldn’t be surprised if it also works in other spreadsheet programs.

leftzero ,

Switches Excel to scroll the sheet with the arrow keys instead of moving from cell to cell.

leftzero ,

Had to do x km/day on the static bike, because fat.

Got no time for that.

Old static bike, with mechanical revolution counter.

Unscrew spinning cable that feeds from the bike into the counter.

MacGyver Lego contraption, with motor, with a pointy bit that fits where the cable would go.

Motor goes brrr, do required km in seconds, plug cable back in, rinse and repeat;, parents never find out (I “exercised” while they were working).

Still fat. 😞

Yo, what was your first computer? How old were you, where and how did you get it, what did you do with it, etc.

TL;DR It was an old Wang system, 286 processor(I think, anyway), with no hard drive, a 5.25" floppy drive, and a lovely green monochrome monitor. I didn’t have it long enough to reach the point where I could have identified the actual hardware/specs....

leftzero ,

Dragon 32, if I recall correctly.

Mostly try to learn some basic (probably was too young for that), play some games, and try to get the cassette to work. It almost certainly wasn’t the right computer for a kid my age.

Later, if I recall correctly, some model of Atari ST, which again was mostly wasted, though it introduced me to graphics editing, and some 16MHz (with turbo on!) 286 computer with a 65MB hard drive and CGA graphics (later upgraded to EGA and eventually VGA, though that might have been with a later 486), which introduced me to DOS (and extended and expanded memory), WordStar, dBASE 3, Lotus123, LucasArts and Sierra adventures, Wing Commander, a multitude of CRPGs, and eventually Windows 3.x.

I didn’t really get online until I went to the university, back in the glorious days of Yahoo, and the much superior Altavista, surfing on Netscape, before Internet Explorer ruined everything.

There were some great SGI Indigo machines (my first contact with a Unix type OS) and a prehistoric VAX machine with actual dumb terminals (never saw the actual server, sadly) for us to practice with there at the university, though, so that was great (though it didn’t make up for the Pascal).

"If you tell a lie big enough and tell it frequently enough, people will eventually come to believe it". What is an example of this happening today?

I would really rather that these were actual examples, and not conspiracy theories. We all have our own unsubstantiated ideas about what shadowy no-gooders are doing, but I’d rather hear about things that are actually happening.

leftzero ,

By any civilized standard democrat politicians are far right extremists (a few token exceptions are closer to right or even center-right on some points, but they have little effect on the whole). Republicans are outright deranged lunatics, mixed with a worryingly increasing percentage of fascists.

leftzero ,

You’d need more than two parties for that.

leftzero ,

Not if the American automotive industry has anything to say about it. The whole country has been built around making walking impossible or too dangerous to attempt, just to maximise car sales at the expense of citizens’ freedoms.

leftzero ,

If it only was dihydrogen monoxide… these days they’re putting all kinds of chemicals in water… oxidane, hidrol, hydric acid, oxygen hydride, hydroxylic acid, hydrohydroxic acid (and a bunch of other acids, really), μ-oxidodihydrogen…

leftzero ,

Why have grass or dirt when you can have roads…? Grass and dirt sell no cars.

leftzero ,

Judging by the pictures I’ve seen of the US, and google maps street view, more road, or parking lots. Sometimes, but not often, short stretches of sidewalk, often not wide enough to walk on safely, regularly interrupted by lampposts and whatnot.

leftzero ,

Seems like a reasonable demand.

leftzero ,

Also, especially in Argentina’s case, because the other guys are literally the worst. ¹

¹ Except that this guy is somehow even more worst. But hey, at least it’s new ² worst.

² It’s not really new. Just the same old fascism ³, with a new shiny coat of paint. ⁴

³ Except somehow even more stupid and irrational than ever before.

⁴ It’s not really paint. ⁵

⁵ Shit. It’s shit. Brightly coloured shit, because of all the blood and other bodily fluids mixed in.

leftzero ,

Majestic.

(Though probably not as much if you could smell it.)

leftzero ,

There were several on /hfy and /humansarespaceorcs.

leftzero ,

Problem is that stuff seems to be more lemonated caffeine than caffeinated lemonade.

Do you think the Internet and websites with 'voting' systems encourage hivemind thinking and discourage any debate or discourse? Solutions?

I ‘upvote’ more or less all posts I interact with (sometimes I forget to vote). I feel like we should bring back open dialogues and heavily dissuade people from simply disregarding someone’s entire belief system or ideals based on 200 characters of text (an example)....

leftzero ,

Sounds more like an enlightened centrist to me, but same difference really.

If a maniac wanted to shoot someone ten times, and the victim wated not to be shot, the enlightened centrist would smugly proclaim that the maniac shooting the victim five times would be a just middle ground that’d be fair to both parties, and that the victim would be unreasonable, intolerant, and antidemocratic for not agreeing to it.

Same result, orders of magnitude more hypocrisy and idiocy, and of course you can’t criticise them, since by enabling the maniacs they’re just debating and trying to find a compromise, and disagreeing with them is being hostile and going against the very principles of democracy itself.

Malignant asshats, the whole lot of them, wouldn’t recognize the paradox of tolerance if you violently hit them in the head with it.

Google urges US lawmakers not to ban teenagers from social media. (indusbusinessjournal.com)

Google urges US lawmakers not to ban teenagers from social media.::San Francisco– Google has asked the US Congress not to ban teenagers from social media, urging lawmakers to drop problematic protections like age-verification technology. The tech giant released its ‘Legislative Framework to Protect Children and Teens...

leftzero ,

Good, ban boomers too, then.

leftzero ,

I’m not sure Townscaper can be called a game either, but it certainly is an excellent relaxing and enjoyable way to waste one’s time.

leftzero ,

Mandrake:

Yes, Jack?

Ripper:

Have you ever seen a commie drink a glass of water?

Mandrake:

Well, no I… I can’t say I have, Jack.

Ripper:

Vodka. That’s what they drink, isn’t it? Never water?

Mandrake:

Well I… I believe that’s what they drink, Jack. Yes.

Ripper:

On no account will a commie ever drink water, and not without good reason.

Mandrake:

Oh, ah, yes. I don’t quite… see what you’re getting at, Jack.

Ripper:

Water. That’s what I’m getting at. Water. Mandrake, water is the source of all life. Seven tenths of this earth’s surface is water. Why, you realize that… seventy percent of you is water.

Mandrake:

Uhhh God…

Ripper:

And as human beings, you and I need fresh, pure water to replenish our precious bodily fluids.

Mandrake:

Yes. chuckles nervously

Ripper:

You beginning to understand?

Mandrake:

Yes. chuckles. begins laughing/crying quietly

Ripper:

Mandrake. Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rain water, and only pure grain alcohol?

Mandrake:

Well it did occur to me, Jack, yes.

Ripper:

Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?

Mandrake:

Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes.

Ripper:

Well do you now what it is?

Mandrake:

No. No, I don’t know what it is. No.

Ripper:

Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?

(…)

Ripper:

Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridated water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake. Children’s ice cream?

Mandrake:

Good Lord.

Ripper:

You know when fluoridation first began?

Mandrake:

No. No, I don’t, Jack. No.

Ripper:

Nineteen hundred and forty six. Nineteen fortysix, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your postwar commie conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard core commie works.

Mandrake:

Jack… Jack, listen, tell me, ah… when did you first become, well, develop this theory.

Ripper:

Well, I ah, I I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.

Mandrake:

sighs fearfully

Ripper:

Yes a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly: loss of essence.

Mandrake:

Yes…

Ripper:

I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women… women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.

— From Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove: or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

leftzero ,

Yankee, or Yank.

leftzero ,

In the US, sure.

Outside, a Yankee is a Yankee, even if they’re cosplaying a ghost while standing in front of a burning cross and waving a confederate flag. We don’t care enough to ask in which state they had the misfortune of being born. 🤷‍♂️

leftzero ,

Yeah, but British is a thing, and everyone knows about it (the British made damn well sure, back when they were the main global bully)… American, on the other hand, doesn’t work, because it refers to the whole damn continent, not just the USA… so if we want to refer to the citizens of the US Yankee / Yank is about the only option we have; not the best, maybe, but probably the least worst.

Which task would be ideal for an LLM such as chatGPT?

Here’s some context for the question. When image generating AIs became available, I tried them out and found that the results were often quite uncanny or even straight up horrible. I ended up seeing my fair share of twisted fingers, scary faces and mutated abominations of all kinds....

leftzero ,

Horoscopes. Fortune cookies. Political speeches.

leftzero ,

You just haven’t turned the current high enough.

leftzero ,

Activision Blizzard was already about as anti-consumer as possible, so in this particular case at worst nothing will change, at best Microsoft might actually clean house and there might be some improvements for the consumers…

leftzero ,

Yeah, sorry, I was thinking from a PC standpoint and sort of ignored the whole console perspective (though, frankly, the console market seems to have been absolutely fubared from its inception, from a consumer standpoint, so anything Microsoft does will probably be as relevant as farting into an ocean of shit…)

Unity CEO John Riccitiello is retiring, effective immediately (arstechnica.com)

John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity, the company whose 3D game engine had recently seen backlash from developers over proposed fee structures, will retire as CEO, president, and board chairman at the company, according to a press release issued late on a Monday afternoon, one many observe as a holiday.

leftzero ,

No one’s saying they can’t also be dropped from a plane while strapped to a heavy weight. Planes are big, there’s room for CEOs and boards, and anyone else who promotes enshittification. 🤷‍♂️

leftzero ,

That seems like an excellent idea, we should all make everything possible to make sure such AI overlords are built.

Please don’t hurt me, or an eventual future indistinguishable facsimile of myself…?

leftzero ,

People don’t use Windows because it’s a “fantastic” OS for their needs. It very evidently is not “fantastic” (or anywhere close) for anyone’s needs but Microsoft’s. People use Windows because it comes bundled with their PCs due to Microsoft’s monopolistic malpractices, and because they can’t get bothered to figure out how to get rid of that bloatware / malware (or, they would get rid of it if possible, but are held hostage by the software — or malware, e.g., Adobe — they need to work only working on Windows, again due to said monopolistic malpractices).

leftzero ,

Luckily, Activision Blizzard already stopped investing in quality and started shafting customers quite a while back, so worst case scenario (in this particular case, your criticism is still valid for most others) nothing changes, best case scenario Microsoft actually cleans house and the market becomes slightly less anti-consumer with one of the worst offenders gone…

leftzero ,

TESIV Oblivion is 2006, Tachyon The Fringe is 2000… 1994’s Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger has a whole IMDB page, with the likes of Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, and Malcolm McDowell playing main characters.

And there’s earlier games with less stellar casts, like 1991’s Tex Murphy: Martian Memorandum. Actors in games have been a thing for quite a while.

leftzero ,

Oblivion is TESIV.

leftzero ,

And John Rhys-Davies!

leftzero ,

Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, and Malcolm McDowell (among others) in Wing Commander III Heart of the Tiger (1994), for instance…?

leftzero ,

With Malcolm McDowell and John Rhys-Davies.

leftzero ,

I got glasses. That definitely changed the way I saw things. Everything suddenly became more focused.

leftzero ,

The point is that, other than Gabe, Valve doesn’t have any shareholders to put before their customers. A publicly traded company, on the other hand, effectively has no choice but to cause as much harm as possible to their customers and to society in general in order to maximize short term shareholder profits, leading to runaway enshittification.

leftzero ,

Exactly, Steam got where it is because it managed to be more convenient than piracy (as Gaben himself said, piracy is a service problem), as did Netflix before the fragmentation (and rampant enshittification) of the streaming market made piracy once more the most convenient (and better quality) option.

Epic store exclusives don’t promote Epic, they promote piracy, as that is the second most convenient option after Steam (it’s worth mentioning that Steam also acts as unobtrusive DRM; infect your game with malware like Denuvo and suddenly piracy again becomes the more convenient — even the only reasonable — option, as cracked games perform better and are more stable than malware DRM infected ones; Steam provides a good enough and, more importantly, harmless option for both consumers and developers, something no alternative, including piracy, has managed to achieve).

And, of course, the instant Gaben retires and Valve goes public and begins to enshittify itself we won’t be going to Epic or GOG (unless they manage to replicate what Steam has achieved), we’ll be back to sailing the high seas.

leftzero ,

Because scientific facts, or social and economic issues (that definitely affect and belong in the workplace) are not “politics” regardless of how much you’d like to label them as such so you can shove them under the rug and forget about them, you retrograde fossilized lich, and because “agreeing to disagree” with assholes who hold harmful opinions only serves to empower them and enable them to keep causing harm.

18+ What makes something moral or immoral?

I just came to know of a woman who was raped. i.e., not on TV but in real life, I saw her sobbing face. I didn’t have a clue what to do. I believe the right thing to tell her would have been to say, go to the police right now and give a rape exam, this would at least make sure there is a small chance that the scumbags who...

leftzero ,

“…And that’s what your holy men discuss, is it?” [asked Granny Weatherwax.]

“Not usually. There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment on the nature of sin, for example.” [answered Mightily Oats.]

“And what do they think? Against it, are they?”

“It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.”

“Nope.”

“Pardon?”

“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

“It’s a lot more complicated than that–”

“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes–”

“But they starts with thinking about people as things…”

—from Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett.

Announcing Microsoft Copilot, your everyday AI companion - The Official Microsoft Blog (blogs.microsoft.com)

Today we take the next step to unify these capabilities into a single experience we call Microsoft Copilot, your everyday AI companion. Copilot will uniquely incorporate the context and intelligence of the web, your work data and what you are doing in the moment on your PC to provide better assistance – with your privacy and...

leftzero ,

In science fiction there’s sometimes a distinction between virtual intelligence (something that simulates intelligence but isn’t really intelligent) and actual artificial intelligence (something really intelligent but created through science and engineering instead of natural biological evolution).

Large language models would almost certainly be VI by those definitions, not AI.

leftzero ,

And about DC being arses, and Finger’s gay son having against all expectations a daughter being the only reason said arses eventually recognised him as co-creator.

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