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sailingbythelee

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sailingbythelee ,

I just started playing Caves of Qud. It has two modes: rogue mode with perma-death and rpg mode where it saves at a checkpoint you can set. Having both options is nice.

I like this style of game, so I’ll definitely be trying Moonring, too.

sailingbythelee ,

Yup. I had no problem with snaps or Ubuntu until I saw that underhanded bullshit.

sailingbythelee ,

Dutch is the English name for the dominant language of the Netherlands, and in English we often name people after their language. The Netherlands is also called Holland in English, even though Holland is just the most economically-dominant sub-region of the Netherlands, and the location of its main trading ports, rather than the whole country. Which makes sense if you are an English sailor who only knows the Netherlands through its trading ports and has little need to go inland.

sailingbythelee ,

Yes, you are right. I had never put it together that Dutch and Deutch are so close, but it’s obvious now that you pointed it out. Thanks for the info.

sailingbythelee ,

I want to do the same, but I’m on the fence between Nobara and Bazzite.

Are shrunken heads a rights violation?

If we consider post-mortem rights to matter morally, then something like necrophilia or defiling someone’s body after their death would be immoral even if they don’t experience it (obviously) and even if they don’t have any family or loved ones around to witness it or know that it happened. As an extension of themself,...

sailingbythelee ,

The act of transmitting a digital file does not directly cause harm to anyone, but by creating a demand for it, you are in turn driving an industry that violates the rights of people in order to keep supplying it.

We already know that people are killed in order to feed the black market for transplantable organs, so why would we allow an industry with all of the same risks to exist purely for the sake of art?

I think you may be making a logical error here. Wanting or needing a transplant, or buying sneakers, or any other consumer product for which there is a legitimate and legal supply chain, does not make you responsible for any parallel illegal/unethical/immoral supply chain. There are black market supply chains for everything from food and basic necessities to luxury goods. There is no fool-proof way to ensure that ANY product you purchase didn’t derive at least partially from an immoral supply chain. It is impossible to track all products that closely. The fault is not with the consumer but rather with the immoral supply chain participants. Don’t take away the agency of those who participate in such things.

‘A fine line between humor and flopping’: tech summit’s rap battle is the height of corporate cringe (www.theguardian.com)

The next time you’re sitting through a company-wide meeting, half-listening to a leader drone on about updates or product launches (and hoping they don’t announce layoffs or budget cuts), remember this: at least they’re not rapping....

sailingbythelee ,

I will never understand why these corporations spend big bucks on this cringe. I’ve been to one such event and I was shocked. What’s worse is that long-serving people said you had to act as if you were enjoying it or else you’d hear from your manager afterwards. Imagine a bunch of middle-aged men at a sales conference shaking their hips and pretending to enjoy a cheesy rap battle. What an utterly soul crushing, suicidal-thought-inducing experience. I can’t tell if senior management actually believes that this sort of corporate cringe is inspiring, or if they do it purposely to crush your soul and make you into a servile automaton. Are they out of touch or is it an Orwellian power move?

sailingbythelee ,

Sometimes the manager/foreman/supervisor is just the team member who is willing to be that interface between the frontline workers and senior management. The best middle managers are those who can thread that needle to the satisfaction of both groups.

I agree with you thst managers shouldn’t consider themselves smarter than anyone else. Quite the opposite. Particularly when managing professionals or others with extensive knowledge, I’m a big believer in the concept of servant leadership. That’s where you lead by inspiring the group to come up with ideas and then shaping, coordinating, and supporting those ideas through to a successful outcome.

sailingbythelee ,

We humans have these things called “boats” that have enabled the British Isles to receive regular inputs of new genetic material. Pretty useful things, these boats, and somewhat pivotal in the history of the UK.

sailingbythelee ,

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned yet is Consumer Reports. Consumer Reports is a membership-based non-profit that has been around since 1936. They are funded by membership dues, donations, and some corporate partnerships (mostly for research projects, I think). Their mission is to create unbiased reviews.

They do well reviewing large purchases like appliances. They also review consumer electronics and some software, though not in the highly technical way of a site like Tom’s Hardware.

Anyway, Consumer Reports isn’t perfect or entirely comprehensive, but the $40 per year membership pays for itself if you are a homeowner. Just in the last couple of months, they saved me $500 by directing me to a less expensive dishwasher than I otherwise would have bought.

sailingbythelee ,

I agree that AI is just a tool, and it excels in areas where an algorithmic approach can yield good results. A human still has to give it the goal and the parameters.

What’s fascinating about AI, though, is how far we can push the algorithmic approach in the real world. Fighter pilots will say that a machine can never replace a highly-trained human pilot, and it is true that humans do some things better right now. However, AI opens up new tactics. For example, it is virtually certain that AI-controlled drone swarms will become a favored tactic in many circumstances where we currently use human pilots. We still need a human in the loop to set the goal and the parameters. However, even much of that may become automated and abstracted as humans come to rely on AI for target search and acquisition. The pace of battle will also accelerate and the electronic warfare environment will become more saturated, meaning that we will probably also have to turn over a significant amount of decision-making to semi-autonomous AI that humans do not directly control at all times.

In other words, I think that the line between dumb tool and autonomous machine is very blurry, but the trend is toward more autonomous AI combined with robotics. In the car design example you give, I think that eventually AI will be able to design a better car on its own using an algorithmic approach. Once it can test 4 million hood ornament variations, it can also model body aerodynamics, fuel efficiency, and any other trait that we tell it is desirable. A sufficiently powerful AI will be able to take those initial parameters and automate the process of optimizing them until it eventually spits out an objectively better design. Yes, a human is in the loop initially to design the experiment and provide parameters, but AI uses the output of each experiment to train itself and automate the design of the next experiment, and the next, ad infinitum. Right now we are in the very early stages of AI, and each AI experiment is discrete. We still have to check its output to make sure it is sensible and combine it with other output or tools to yield useable results. We are the mind guiding our discrete AI tools. But over a few more decades, a slow transition to more autonomy is inevitable.

A few decades ago, if you had asked which tasks an AI would NOT be able to perform well in the future, the answers almost certainly would have been human creative endeavors like writing, painting, and music. And yet, those are the very areas where AI is making incredible progress. Already, AI can draw better, write better, and compose better music than the vast, vast majority of people, and we are just at the beginning of this revolution.

sailingbythelee ,

Flying the national maritime ensign upside down is an internationally recognized distress signal. A UK-flagged boat wouldn’t fly the Union Jack upside down (which would be rather ineffective), but rather the Red Ensign (for civilian vessels).

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Ensign

sailingbythelee ,

When you stop empathizing with people, you’ve taken a step toward dehumanizing them. You aren’t under any obligation to empathize, and goodness knows it is tiring. However, it is important to realize that once you stop empathizing, you are more likely to accept extreme solutions in a subconscious attempt to resolve your frustration.

How come liberals dont hate conservatives the way conservatives hate liberals

I constantly see angry mobs of people decrying “woke”, “critical race theory”, ““grooming””, and whatever other nonsense they made up this week. They march around with guns, constantly appending lib as a prefix to any word they can use to denigrate. They actively plot violence and spew hatred in the open....

sailingbythelee ,

All extremism leads to hate, whether left, right, or center. They just hate different people. It goes without saying that there is plenty of hate on the right. But, historically, the “left” has included The Terror period of the French Revolution, the Cultural Revolution under Mao, the purging of the bourgeoisie during the Bolshevic Revolution, and the vast pogroms and genocidal famine in Ukraine under Stalin. Being on the left of the political spectrum does not immunize a person against hate.

sailingbythelee ,

That’s true. The current Democratic party is the “establishment” now, and the Repubs have gone far right.

sailingbythelee ,

Exactly. And if your ISP or cellular provider wants, or is forced, to gather information about your internet activities, they can almost certainly find a way. The cheap consumer-grade VPN services most of us use just prevent casual or automated observers from easily detecting your device’s IP address. For most people that just want to torrent casually or use public wifi, it’s enough.

sailingbythelee , (edited )

This comment is so wrong. You are dehumanizing Jews and condemning an entire country as illegitimate.

sailingbythelee ,

Best response. Almost everyone alive has a net negative impact on the environment. Maybe that one Indian guy who planted a whole forest by himself gets a pass. We can try to be less negatively impactful depending on our inclinations, resources, and other interests and priorities. Some people may choose vegetarianism, some might buy an electric car or install some solar panels, some might organize politically for a new policy. Some might spend their altruism improving social conditions rather than focusing on the environment. But being ever so slightly less of a negative impact on the environment than your neighbour who has a slightly different set of priorities is hardly a reason to feel morally superior.

sailingbythelee ,

Gluetun is the bomb. You don’t realize how much automated tracking of the torrent-verse is out there until your VPN connection drops unexpectedly and your torrent client continues merrily downloading in the clear. Gluetun is a fantastic killswitch and has never failed me. All hail the developer.

sailingbythelee ,

It partly depends on whether you want to understand pre-9/11 “reasonable” conservatism or the more recent Tea Party and Trump conservative populism.

Ayn Rand expresses the fairy tale version of romantic, rugged individualism, which is pretty important to understanding modern right-wing politics, especially in North America. I think the main idea conservatives take from her work, directly or indirectly, is that progress is driven by individual work and achievement, and that any kind of forced wealth re-distribution (through social programs, for example) is effectively theft, and therefore immoral.

The modern populist right-wing movement was originally driven and disseminated by right-wing talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh. So, listening to right-wing talk radio or podcasts is also a good window into the modern movement. It puts on full display the resentment felt by modern right-wingers.

If you would rather not experience right-wing media directly, but would rather read rational analysis about it, then one good choice is David Frumm. He is an old school Reagan/Bush conservative, and has lived through the transition of the Repubs to populism. He is very critical of Trumpism, like most people, but he comes from the perspective of a reasonable and well-informed conservative insider.

Fareed Zakaria has a new book called Age of Revolutions, which views modern conservative populism as a very significant political re-alignment with similarities to various revolutions of the past, both successful and unsuccessful. Fareed talks about the conditions that lead to populism. In that sense, he treats Trump’s popularity as a symptom and outcome of specific underlying societal problems.

sailingbythelee ,

I see this in my day job, too. When I’m in a charitable mood, I chalk it up to pandemic trauma. But more realistically, I think it is a real change in our society’s ability and willingness to compromise and see the world through the eyes of others. People want what they want and they don’t give a fuck who they have to roll over to get what they want. They treat getting what they want as a matter of principle.

sailingbythelee ,

Don’t go bothering Korean Jesus. He’s busy with Korean shit.

sailingbythelee ,

The duck-duckling model would probably work okay on the highway, but not so well once you arrive in a town or city. You can’t reliably get ten semis through a set of lights in traffic without getting split up. I guess they could have a depot outside of town where human drivers would meet the ducklings for the final leg of the journey.

sailingbythelee ,

I know a guy who got one of those Russian “mail order” brides. They had a kid together and then she divorced him as soon as she became a citizen, leaving the kid with him. She married some other guy eventually and still sees the kid, but she doesn’t pay child support. My friend comes from a traditional Asian culture and is significantly older than her. The sad thing is that he was shocked when she left, since they got along fine. I don’t think it was a scam exactly. More of a transactional relationship and she no doubt felt that she held up her end of the bargain for a reasonable enough amount of time (about 5 years, if I recall) and gave my friend a child on top of the marriage.

Doesn't the need for a permit fundamentally contradict the US's ideals of free speech?

I went to some palestine protests a while back, and was talking to my brother about the organizing, when revealed something I found pretty shocking, we (the protesters) had acquired a permit to hold the protest. Apparently this is standard policy across the US....

sailingbythelee ,

The right to free speech is a limited right, not an absolute right to say anything anywhere. There are many limits on speech in every country.

sailingbythelee ,

The hard core peaceful hippies did become homeless, so they learned how to farm and live communally and sustainably. Some moved to Canada.

sailingbythelee ,

I read somewhere that there was some drama about identity politics.

sailingbythelee ,

The tiktok algorithm is good in the same sense that cocaine is good.

sailingbythelee ,

That’s ridiculous. Government doesn’t move that quickly. They’ve been thinking about how to deal with foreign interference for years. Also, I hate to break it to you, but the Palestine thing isn’t that interesting or important in the grand scheme. At best, the Palestinians, like the Houthis and Hezbollah, are pawns used by Iran to stir up trouble from time to time. This conflict has been going on for 80 years already and the overall trend in the Middle East is toward peace and economic integration with Israel. No one is going to push the Jews into the sea and liberate Palestine for the Palestinians.

sailingbythelee ,

Perhaps I misspoke. I mean to say that the periodic flare-ups with the Palestinians are not that important anymore. They used to be. But nowadays, Israel’s neighbours aren’t invading with tanks and, as I said, the overall trend is towards peace and economic integration with Israel. I agree with you that Israel is important to the US for many good strategic and political reasons.

sailingbythelee ,

I’ve been paying attention to the Middle East for almost 40 years, punk. What? Iran, like, literally just sent drones into Israel? Oh no, literally what will we do? Like, oh my god, this is so terrible.

You can’t take and hold territory with drones, especially not Iranian drones. Iran is not invading Israel. Grow up and go learn something.

sailingbythelee ,

I agree with you. The CCP classifies recommendation algorithms in a category similar to defense secrets. It isn’t just Tiktok that can’t be sold to non-Chinese, it is all recommendation algorithms. They know damn well what effect these algorithms have on a population.

sailingbythelee ,

I haven’t followed it too closely, but I know this has been years in the making so the company should have a contingency plan. You have to wonder why the company refuses to take steps satisfactory to Congress to ensure that the CCP cannot access user data or influence the content or algorithm. It is economically suicidal to be banned in the US, which makes me think that Bytedance’s CCP masters told the company to refuse. Of course, now that the law has been passed, Bytedance will have to separate their interests since I doubt they’ll allow the app to be banned. They’d lose most of their advertising revenue if they were banned in the US. Not to mention the fact that a US ban would likely be followed by bans in other countries. I’m sure Bytedance can find a way to have another company manage their data while still making plenty of money. No need to pity a company making billions in revenue on the labour of content creators.

sailingbythelee ,

You make a good point about Bytedance perhaps not being permitted to have a contingency plan. However, the CCP may have one. Whatever Xi says is law in China.

sailingbythelee ,

Why do you say that Congress is making legislation against its own citizens’ wishes? A quick Google search shows that polls suggest that twice as many Americans favour the ban as oppose it.

I’m still trying to figure out what the downside of this legislation is. It doesn’t ban any specific content or speech, it just bans a particular company from operating a specific platform in the US. Tiktok is still permitted to operate if it is controlled by a company that isn’t directly subject to the CCP. If Xi chooses to not let that happen, that is on him. Xi certainly can’t cry foul without massive hypocrisy, given that he has already banned virtually all western social media.

sailingbythelee ,

Whoa, take it easy there, friend. That got personal rather quickly. Are you mad? I don’t have a horse in this race one way or the other. I don’t use Tiktok but I don’t have anything against it either. It seems to me that social media apps pop up like dandelions and the main thing that determines whether or not they thrive is the number of people participating. I guess I’m wondering why anyone should care if Tiktok in particular survives or some other social media platform takes its place. They rise, they fall, but there always seems to be a replacement.

sailingbythelee OP ,

That sounds like an interesting possibility. I’ll check it out. Thanks!

sailingbythelee OP ,

I didn’t realize that the metadata was in such a bad state. But that would explain why I’m having difficulty finding the ebook equivalent of the smooth Jellyseer/Sonarr/Jellyfin ecosystem. Thanks for the insight.

sailingbythelee ,

That dude is a mod now. He roams around news communities endlessly antagonizing any user who doesn’t toe his anti-Israel stance. That’s why he has a ridiculously high comment count.

sailingbythelee ,

For those that don’t know, FlyingSquid is a mod who roams around various news communities antogonizing anyone who doesn’t toe his anti-Israel line, and then flaunts his mod status when someone gets upset. He’s like one of those Reddit power mods that everyone complains about.

Oh yeah, and I noticed the other day that people are getting their comments removed for “genocide denial” if they don’t line up to pre-judge the outcome of the genocide case South Africa brought against Israel. Apparently, a few mods think they are qualified to judge the outcome of the case without being, you know, actual judges qualified in the laws of war. This kind of antagonistic mod behavior is making some communities into Reddit 2.0.

FlyingSquid, wake up man. You are abusing the tiny amount of power you have to make Lemmy into an echo chamber. You oppose what’s happening in Gaza. We get it already. You don’t have to constantly roam around antagonizing people who disagree with you.

sailingbythelee ,

Case in point. Wake up man. You are making the place worse, not better.

sailingbythelee ,

Check out your own comment count. You aren’t moderating the conversation, you are dominating it. You are everywhere and you are relentless, and you apparently lack the self-awareness necessary to recognize it and moderate your activity.

I unsubscribed from a couple of communities because of you.

sailingbythelee ,

That’s a good one. I once gave an assignment for students to write an original poem. One student submitted The Charge of the Light Brigade by Tennyson and claimed it was his own. These were middle school kids so he didn’t realize how famous the poem is. This shit has been happening forever. LLMs are another phase in the never-ending arms race between teachers and students who want to cheat.

sailingbythelee ,

Fuck Hamas

sailingbythelee ,

Does anyone care about the Olympics anymore? Maybe I’m out of the loop, but I don’t see people get excited about it the way they did 30-40 years ago when it was a proxy competition between the Free Peoples and The Shadow, I mean, the Soviets.

sailingbythelee ,

Yes, there is that. I am personally against hunting because I figure wild animals are already under enough pressure from habitat destruction and climate change.

Hunting is largely cultural now and isn’t needed for sustenance except in very remote places. At the same time, I’m not sure if it is fair to classify a cultural practice as being for mere pleasure. It is a bit more complicated than that. Certainly, in Canada, indigenous peoples and the descendents of early settlers think so.

sailingbythelee ,

Agreed, at least for some species like deer. I can’t think of too many others, though, especially with global warming. Most of the animals that thrive despite human encroachment, like coyotes, crows, and raccoons aren’t animals that we hunt.

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