lvxferre

lvxferre , 16 hours ago

Have the router ask the server if there’s an update available when turned on. If none, proceed as usual; if there is, force the update, regardless of the time of the day. Problem solved.

Of course, for that you need to acknowledge that you violated the “ask, don’t be an assumer” rule, instead of bossing customers around with “golden rules”. You won’t change their silly and pointless habits anyway.

lvxferre , 21 hours ago

Both bad and good mean skibidi.

lvxferre , 19 hours ago

Let’s make one for reading comprehension:

• Take your time and read the whole thing.
• Observe the central points.
• Investigate the context.
• Let assumptions go away.
• Examine the overall discourse.
• Take your conclusions.

lvxferre , 1 day ago

So this is just another part in reducing cost on section that doesn’t produce money.

That’s what I immediately thought - they’re cutting corners to decrease dependency of googlebux, as depending on how things go those bux will go dry.

lvxferre , 3 days ago

I don’t see this as an unpopular opinion, but I do agree with it - at least here (Brazil) Twitter was evolving into a containment cage for nutjobs and morons, until it was blocked. (And it’s damn easy to find who’s who in the Bluesky diaspora, as the nutjobs/morons miss Twitter while the saner people are glad to see it locally gone.)

lvxferre , 3 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

It’s interesting how interconnected those points are.

Generative A"I" drives GPU prices up. NVidia now cares more about it than about graphics. AMD feels no pressure to improve GPUs.

Stagnant hardware means that game studios, who used to rely on “our game currently runs like shit but future hardware will handle it” and similar assumptions get wrecked. And gen A"I" hits them directly due to FOMO + corporates buying trends without understanding how the underlying tech works, so wasting talent by firing people under the hopes that A"I" can replace it.

Large game companies are also suffering due to their investment on the mobile market. A good example of is Ishihara; sure, Nintendo simply ignored his views on phones replacing consoles, but how many game company CEOs thought the same and rolled with it?

I’m predicting that everything will go down once it becomes common knowledge that LLMs and diffusion models are 20% actual usage, 80% bubble.

lvxferre , 3 days ago

I would like to introduce you to the indie game scene. Where AAA is faltering, indie has never been in a better place.

Amen.

Indie games might not be flashy, but they’re often made with love and concern about giving you a fun experience. They also lack all those abusive DRM and intrusive anti-cheat systems that A³ games often have.

lvxferre , 3 days ago

It’s a great analogy though - Linux users aren’t deemed profitable by the A³ companies, just like offal is unjustly* deemed yucky by your typical person.

*I do love offal though. And writing this comment made me crave for chicken livers with garlic and rosemary over sourdough bread. Damn.

lvxferre , 3 days ago

Adding the same ingredient twice, for two different roles. A few examples:

• Tomato sauce: a single tomato, diced small, to add near the end, to improve the texture.
• Curry: half of the onion gets grated and goes in the roux, with a bit of baking soda (so it melts down). The other half is diced larger, and gets added near the end as a plain veg. As a result I get a thicker and tastier curry.
• Farofa: whatever filling I’m adding (pork rinds, bacon, banana, scrambled eggs…), I reserve some bits to add near the end as garnish. It’s both more pleasing to look and it allows people to pick a bit more of the filling if they so desire.
• Breaded anything: seasoning goes both in the marinade and the flour / breadcrumbs.

lvxferre , 3 days ago

It is - the carb in it is typically fried yucca meal or maize meal*, but I’ve seen people doing it with breadcrumbs and even rolled oats. There’s a lot of freedom for the fillings too, although farofas made as side dish for meats tend to be simpler than the ones intended a as full meal.

Just as an example here’s my breakfast farofa. It’s enough for two people.

• a hard sausage, diced small
• 3 eggs, whisked with some salt and black pepper
• half onion, diced small
• a handful of maize meal (the amount is eyeballed)
• hot pepper sauce, veg oil, salt

1. Brown the sausage on a non-stick large pan or wok, using a bit of veg oil. Reserve some if you want.
2. Add onion, turn the fire to low, and let them cook until transparent.
3. Add whisked eggs. Scramble them with a silicone spatula; they’ll stick to the other fillings but that’s OK.
4. Add maize meal, salt, hot pepper sauce, and a bit more of veg oil if necessary. Mix it constantly. When the meal darkens just a bit, turn the fire off but keep mixing it (as the pan heat might otherwise burn it). Transfer to two bowls and, if you reserved some sausage, add it as “garnish”.

Now thinking, the salt here is also a nice example of using the same ingredient twice. You need to season the eggs and the meal separately.

*I’ll provide a pic because I don’t know how to call this type of cornmeal in English. It isn’t the same as polenta:
https://www.saborbrasil.it/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/farinha-de-milho.jpg

lvxferre , 2 days ago

I think that either flaked corn or corn flakes could work really well for this. The process behind farinha de milho* is different from both (the maize is hulled, soaked, ground while wet, and dried over low fire), but as long as it’s something pre-cooked it should be fine. And as I mentioned in another comment, people make farofa even out of rolled oats.

*even in Portuguese alone the name is a bit messy, as it’s shared with the maize meal used for polenta. Most people specify the later as “fubá”, I’m used to specify the former as “farinha biju” (biju is the flakes).

lvxferre , 2 days ago

I’ve done this once after seeing it in a Chinese recipe for chicken thighs, with Shaoxing wine. Apparently the alcohol does wonders to bring the flavour out of onions.

lvxferre , 5 days ago

You know, the ban here was enlightening for me, about certain people from my social circles. Four examples:

1. Resumed Twitter shitposting in Bluesky. Different URL. No mention of Twitter.
2. Cheering Twitter being gone, as they were only using it due to their contacts, but felt like shit for doing it. Criticising how Moraes did it, but not the goal itself.
3. LARPs as against fascism but screeches nonstop in Bluesky about Twitter being gone, as they think that the world revolves around their own convenience.
4. Left microblogging altogether.

But I digress (as this has barely anything to do with the OP). Those people like Musk are bound to “creatively reinterpret” the words: in one situation orange is yellow, in another it’s red, both, neither. Sometimes it isn’t “ackshyually” related to red or yellow, it’s “inverted blue”. And suckers fall for it. That’s what Musk is doing with fascism.

lvxferre , 5 days ago

I remember. And how much shit the community flung towards them. And their rep is still stained with it, as it should be.

lvxferre , 3 days ago

I always got this feeling that LMDE will eventually become Mint’s main distro, with the Ubuntu-based version slowly fading away.

lvxferre , 2 days ago

At least when it comes to languages, the eurocentrism and subjectivity are being addressed for at least a century. Sapir for example proposed that the “classical languages” weren’t just two but five - Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit. And the definition became roughly “varieties with a heavy and outlasting impact outside their native communities”. (Personally I’d also add Sumerian, Quechua and Nahuatl to that list. But that’s just me.)

Additionally plenty linguists see the idea of “classic” not as specific languages, but as a potential stage of a language, assigned retroactively to the period when its prestige and cultural production were specially strong. For example, Classical Ge’ez is defined as the one from centuries XIII~XIV.

lvxferre , 2 days ago

The alt right obsesses over the Roman empire, but ignores the republic, as if Julius Caesar and Octavius were the origin of everything. As such I’m not surprised that they don’t learn about what caused the fall of the republic. (A century or so of oppressed masses and greedy elites did it.)

And, even when it comes to the empire, they’re busier cherry-picking examples that show that the grass was greener, the men were manlier, the women were chaster, and dogs barked quieter.

lvxferre , 2 days ago

But there’s enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.

True that.

Weirdly enough (or perhaps not surprisingly) I see the same here with Bolsonaro supporters; there’s a disproportionally high amount of them among classicists, even if humanities as a whole leans heavily to the left.

lvxferre , 8 days ago

He reminds me Marie Antoinette, the last queen-consort of France. It’s said that, upon hearing about bread-less and starving peasants, she would’ve said “let them eat brioche instead”. The historical accuracy of that is dubious…

…but come on, this muppet is literally doing that dammit. Spend a year on the beach if you’re fired? He could’ve literally said “sucks to be you lol” and it would be less abrasive.

And as most people here probably know he’s outright lying when he claims that it was not caused by greed.

lvxferre , 8 days ago

It conveys “I have such a disdain for that thing that I’m asterisking its name like it was a slur or swear word”.

I’m not a big fan either, even if you can find some secondary roles for that (as keeping someone from finding it, like ilinamorato exemplified). It distracts the reader from what is being said to the author’s personal opinion about what is being said.

lvxferre , 8 days ago

It’s the result of the “bombastic” mix of false dichotomy, assumptions, and social media dynamics.

False dichotomy prevents you from noticing nuances, complexities, third sides, or gradations. Under a false dichotomy, there’s no such thing as “Alice and Bob are bad, but Alice is worse than Bob”; no, either they’re equally bad (thus both deserve to die), or one of them is good.

In the meantime, assumptions prevent you from handling uncertainties, as the person “fills the blanks” of the missing info with whatever crap supports their conclusion. For example you don’t know if Bob kills puppies or not, but you do know that he jaywalks, right? So you assume that he kills puppies too, thus deserving death.

I’m from the firm belief that people who consistent and egregiously engage in discourse showing both things are muppets causing harm to society, and deserve to be treated as such. (Note: “consistent and egregiously” are key words here. A brainfart or two is fine, as long as there’s at least the attempt of handling additional bits of info and/or complexity.)

Then there are the social media dynamics. I feel like a lot of users here already addressed them really well, but to keep it short: social media gives undue exposure to idiots doing the above due to anonymity, detachment from the situation, self-reinforcing loops (“circlejerks”), so goes on.

lvxferre , 8 days ago

True that. And you reminded me a tidbit of human nature, that interferes in this situation:

If you mince words to make something look stronger, weaker, better, worse than it is, plenty people fall for it. Because they care too much about how something is said (the words) and too little about what is being said (the discourse).

lvxferre , 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

Possible? Yes. Desirable? No; at least, not for most news sources - the extreme sells better than the simply informative, and often this lack of precision is how they manipulate your views towards a certain subject.

lvxferre , 8 days ago

That includes me. Or at least my geospoofed location for the sake of google search (when I need to use it - I’d rather use DDG but… meh), so Google stops trying to sell me local shit.

lvxferre , 9 days ago

Nurture or nature?

Yes.

lvxferre , 8 days ago

Typically “nurture” includes those things. You’re right though - it isn’t just our parents and childhood, it’s everybody through our whole lives. We only stop changing when we die.

lvxferre , 9 days ago

No one is forced to use our advertising technologies – they choose to use them because they’re effective.

Like an antlion saying “ants aren’t forced to fall into my trap! They choose to!”.

Google’s advertisement monopoly is directly associated with its other monopolies: browser monopoly, search, mobile OS, video sharing. It can use each of those monopolies to change the rules of the game ever slightly, to prevent competitors from entering or remaining into the market.

lvxferre , 9 days ago

My prediction is different: I think that, in the long term, banning targetted ads will have almost no impact on the viability of ad-supported services, or the amount of ads per page.

Advertisement is an arms race; everyone needs to use the most efficient technique available, not just to increase their sales but to prevent them from decreasing - as your competitor using that technique will get the sales instead.

But once a certain technique is banned, you aren’t the only one who can’t use it; your competitors can’t either.

And the price of the ad slot is intrinsically tied to that. When targetted ads were introduced, advertisers became less willing to pay for non-targetted ads; decreased demand led to lower prices, and thus lower revenue to people offering those ad slots on their pages, forcing those people to offer ad slots with targetted advertisement instead. Banning targetted ads will simply revert this process, placing the market value of non-targetted ad slots back where it used to be.

lvxferre , 10 days ago

As others highlighted this is not surprising given that Gen Z uses phones a lot more than computers, and writing in one is completely different than in the other.

[Discussion from multiple comments ITT] It’s also damn slower to write in a phone screen, simply because it’s smaller - you need a bit more precision to hit the keys, and there’s no room to use all the fingers (unlike in a physical keyboard).

Swiping helps, but it brings up its own problems - the keyboard application needs to “guess” what you’re typing, and correcting mistakes consumes time; you need to look at the word being “guessed” instead of either the keyboard or the text being written, so your accuracy goes down (increasing the odds of wrong “guesses”); and eventually you need to tap write a few words anyway, so you’re basically required to type well two ways instead of just one to get any semblance of speed.

lvxferre , 9 days ago

The difference is sort of like the difference between a qualified ESL teacher and a native English speaker […]

This example is perfect - native teachers (regardless of the language being taught) are often clueless on which parts of their languages are hard to master, because they simply take it for granted. Just like zoomers with tech - they take for granted that there’s some “app”, that you download it, without any further thought on where it’s stored or how it’s programmed or anything like that.

lvxferre , 10 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

This is bad on three levels. Don’t use AI:

1. to output info, decisions or advice where nobody will check its output. Will anyone actually check if the AI is accurate at identifying why the kids aren’t learning? (No; it’s a teacherless class.)
2. use AI where its outcome might have a strong impact on human lives. Dunno about you guys, but teens education looks kind like a big deal. /s
3. where nobody will take responsibility for it. “I did nothing, the AI did it, not my fault”. School environment is all about that blaming someone else, now something else.

In addition to that I dug some info on the school. By comparing this map with this one, it seems to me that the target students of the school are people from one of the poorest areas of London, the Tower Hamlets borough. “Yay”, using poor people as guinea pigs /s

lvxferre , 10 days ago

Fair - my conclusion in this regard was incorrect then.

They’re still using children as guinea pigs though.

lvxferre , 10 days ago

Travelling 1600km by bus is… urgh, a bit painful. Even if you get a nice bus, where you can comfortably sleep, with plenty stops, lacking annoying loud people, you’ll probably feel glad once you hop off. Doubly true when returning home.

If you’re still doing it: a book, a fully charged phone and/or laptop (remember earplugs!), comfy clothes makes it more bearable. Don’t assume the person next seat wants to chitchat, or can chitchat about interesting topics.

It’s a good idea to have a water bottle and something to snack on, even if you can stop midway to buy food. My go-to snack was nutrient bars - they take almost no space, they’re discreet¹ and filling enough.

so I assume young people and public facing employees at the bus exchanges to speak some of it…

Don’t assume; look for that info. Preferably on a city level if possible/available, but if you can’t find it at least on country level.

Also take in mind that plenty people don’t feel morally obligated to shift languages based on outsiders’ convenience, even if they do speak it².

1. A big “fuck you” to the muppet on a 600km bus travel that I did, who decided to eat pork rinds while in the bus. That “CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH” was aggravating.
2. I’ve seen this two times. In two different countries. I’ve seen the opposite too, people going the extra length to help you out, so don’t take it as a general rule, just keep it in mind.

lvxferre , 10 days ago

It was supposed to be 14 hours. It was 28.

I feel like this can’t be emphasised enough: the bus travel will take more time than they claim it to.

lvxferre , 11 days ago

I didn’t know that I needed to know about Jevons’ paradox. Such a simple but brilliant reasoning.

You’ll get less pollution and crash deaths if, instead of trying to improve cars, society improved transportation methods that compete with cars: walking, biking, public transport, so goes on. They either don’t show those issues, or show them in a meaningfully lower level.

lvxferre , 11 days ago

Even taking only English speakers into account, it isn’t a bad name. It’s a simple word, it sounds like “let me” (good association - unlike… GIMP), at most it might evoke you Lemmings.

And once considering other languages it’s actually better than plenty brands out there, including Reddit, Facebook or Twitter. By sticking to CV syllables there’s less room to butcher it into unrecognisability.

lvxferre , 11 days ago

I mostly agree with the OP, it would be great if Lemmy had more sources of newbies than just “pissed off redditors”. (I have further reasons for that, but they don’t matter here.) As such I’ll focus on specific tidbits here and there.

The content is indexable (by Google), but your point stands as it sucks. It’s hard to reliably find Lemmy content by it.

Do you - or anyone here - have a good idea on how to solve that? Someone suggested a Lemmy-based engine; it’s tempting but it wouldn’t help if the person doesn’t know about Lemmy already.

Reddit is not something you discover from word-of-mouth or join from peer pressure

It used to be like this. “Stumbling” upon the site was only a thing later, as it had already enough content to become a source of info.

lvxferre , 11 days ago

The “instances hosting communities” structure alleviates albeit not solves this problem; communities about related topics end in the same instances, that you can block.

lvxferre , 11 days ago

I’ve seen your post. Ouch - you stumbled upon some nasty circlejerking there. On multiple levels.

Plenty people here expect you to treat their “vision” as above everything else. Including your agency (“free will”), issues that you might want to solve, etc. That makes them unable to tell the difference between “criticising Apple” (a fair thing to do) versus “treating someone who bought an iPhone as an emissary of Satan” (what they’re doing against you).

To make things worse plenty muppets there are putting words in your mouth, regarding Samsung vs. Apple.

If it’s any consolation, it isn’t just Lemmy. The whole internet of the 20s feels like this nowadays.

TL;DR: I know that feel, bro.

lvxferre , 11 days ago

I’m aware of the site:example.com google feature. And, while useful for users who already know about Lemmy, it doesn’t help to recruit new users, and that’s a main point of the OP.

About centralisation: that “yet” is key. Putting all your eggs in the same basket is not a bad thing… until someone drops the basket, you know?

lvxferre , 12 days ago

same³

Now you got it.

(By the way, same⁴)

lvxferre , 12 days ago

Ctrl+S a sandwich too.

lvxferre , 12 days ago

Plenty HB users are authoritarian. I disagree with them in this; however I don’t think that both things cancel out, given the fascism is orders of magnitude worse than authoritarianism alone.

lvxferre , 12 days ago

Yeah, because saying “cat shit is not as huge as elephant shit” is the same as saying “cat shit is not shit”. /s

lvxferre , 12 days ago

My experience with LW users is mixed: some great users, some really trashy users. It’s what you expect from a huge instance not geared towards any specific demographic.

As such I don’t think that it’s sensible to generalise LW users like this.

lvxferre , 11 days ago

I think that this is a red herring.

Even if the first two points apply (do they? I don’t think so, but I’m not going to dispute it*), the problem with T_D was neither, it was users there actively promoting hate against marginalised groups.

And, while you can complain a thousand things about Hexbear, they are not promoting hate against marginalised groups. On the contrary - if they even smell that you might be potentially promoting it, they’ll ban you under a “better safe than sorry” approach.

*reason: I don’t care about USA internal politics.

lvxferre , 11 days ago

To be fair I’ve had a few bad experiences with Hexbears, but I think that most of them boil down to “unfunny guy interacting with unserious kids”. But since I’m often lurking there in my political account, I feel like my opinion about them is a bit less ungrounded than this whole “Hexbear bad! EDIT WOW THANKS FOR THE GOLD KIND STRANGER!” echo chamber.

(I also have a few bones to pick with .ml [the people in charge, not the whole instance], but they don’t apply to LG or HB, it’s a matter of transparency.)

lvxferre , 10 days ago

I don’t know for sure. I’ll voice a strong belief in this regard, but take it with a grain of salt.

I think that Hexbear’s views on Russia is a specific case of a general tendency that you see all across social media (not just HB or Lemmy): to dichotomise complex matters into exactly one good side and exactly one bad side, while assuming that everyone belongs to those two bags. It should go like:

1. NATO bad.
2. NATO fights Russia.
3. Criticism against Russia assumed to be NATO support.
4. Since NATO bad, NATO supporter bad.
5. Anyone who would otherwise criticise both NATO and Russia gets screeched at, and eventually shuts up.
6. “Russia good” becomes part of a local consensus.

It gets messier when you add Ukraine into the equation, or consider people conflating governments and populations, but it should give you an idea - it starts with somewhat sane premises but quickly devolves into insane lack of logic.

It explains nicely why they’re supporting Palestine, even with the apparent contradiction: Israel is associated with USA and thus with NATO.

IMO their dichotomy in this topic is idiotic. However it is not just from their part, and blaming specifically Hexbear for this, like some people would do, would be unjust (and a self-demonstrating example). We, people using the internet in the 20s, are collectively doing it.

By the way, you see another example of the general phenomenon in this comment chain. Ctrl+F “elephant shit” and look at the comment I was replying to - “you either treat two types of bad as the same, or you’re defending one.”

[Now I probably drew the ire of all sides at the same time. Frankly? I don’t give a fuck; I’m too old and grumpy to play along.]