Ephera

@Ephera@lemmy.ml

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Ephera ,

Aside from the technology stack being the embodiment of vendor lock-in and misery, the scamming is really what makes me not want to work on Generative AI tasks, or whatever the next hype thing is going to be.

The worst part is that many people want to be scammed. We have customers come to us, asking for a solution to a problem they've had for long time, and asking it to be solved with GenAI.
Then we tell them that there's really no use-case for GenAI there, that it could be better solved for half the money using traditional methods.

At which point, they ask us to integrate GenAI in some place anyways, because otherwise their boss will not give them the money. And of course, that boss also has a boss who also only frees up budget for GenAI.
And that just repeats upwards, until you have shareholders at the top, who eat up the hype, because other shareholders eat up the hype.

Ephera ,

Excludes February 29.

Ephera ,

Well, in a neighborhood, cars won't always be driving 50 km/h. And the engine will be especially loud, when they need to accelerate after a turn or whatever.

Either way, I do hear the difference when an electric car goes by.

Ephera ,

You can write any conditions you want into a license.

That's what actually differentiates proprietary licenses from open-source licenses.
Open-source licenses follow certain rules, and you usually select an existing license, so therefore they can be reasoned about, collectively. People often implicitly mean "OSI-approved license", when they talk of "open-source licenses".
Proprietary licenses, on the other hand, can contain whatever bullcrap you want.

Having said that, I'm not a lawyer, but I imagine, if you also called your license "GNU General Public License", then a case could probably be made in court, that your license is deliberately confusing.

Ephera ,

Wow, I've definitely seen that before, but I never realized how wild that is. So many companies will start drooling like a dumbass when anything contains the GPL.

So, it's not like they can't ever use GPL software, most do use Linux knowingly or unknowingly. But if you use GPL software in a way the legal department hasn't seen before, they'll always feel uneasy about it.

Frankly, I'm surprised that Java gained any traction in the corporate world at all, then.

Ephera ,

I am 100% on board with people doing with their body whatever they want. Restricting that is just ridiculous.
But that also necessarily means, they can decide to do immoral things with their body, which I do not need to be a fan of. And that's where I'm still somewhat undecided on how to think of the whole sex work industry.

As you say, to some degree, it is simply mental care for those customers. I do think, the offering should exist.
But it's also all too easy for it to become extremely exploitative.

I'm thinking, in some far-off, progressive future (not sure, if we get there before work stops really being a thing), there would be self-help groups or simply therapy offerings, for those who spend their life earnings on getting sex work done.

Ephera ,

I don't really understand why they decided to introduce this. Chrome's history search was always rather poor compared to Firefox's, and I always figured, they wanted people to search with Google Search instead.

That is a way of upholding their monopoly with their other monopoly, which they could theoretically get slapped for by competition regulators.
But in practice, it would be hard to sue them for having a bad implementation of a feature.

Ephera ,

In this case, I was referring to the URL bar search. I rarely use the other one.

And well, this isn't really a solution, but as a techie, if you really need that, then what you could do, is to install sqlitebrowser and open the places.sqlite file in your Firefox profile folder.
Then you can run SQL queries to your heart's content.

Ephera ,

Man, can you imagine standing in front of a class, telling them they need to learn XYZ for their future, while that future is being destroyed.

Obviously, not teaching them is no solution either. But it's gonna be hard to motivate those kids, once they catch on to how fucked they are.

Ephera ,

On my phone, I can't set the volume high enough for things to be audible via the phone speaker, due to stupid OS limitations.

So, to mitigate that, I've pushed all the sliders in the equalizer to the top. It doesn't sound any different, just louder.

That's also what happens, if you don't balance the numbers. It's just overall slightly more or less loud. And the numbers for volume are completely arbitrary anyways, so no need to worry about it.

Ephera ,

Hmm, do you mean in the web console?

I know Firefox has a bit of a reputation for being rather precise in how it handles web standards compliance. So, it'll show comparatively many warnings and errors, if you don't keep to the web standards.

This is actually quite useful for web devs, because it means, if Firefox is happy with your implementation, then it's relatively likely to run correctly on all browsers.

Ephera ,

BTW, you can use Sepia Search to search across all public PeerTube instances.

Ephera ,

Ah, that's a coincidence, in this case.

I had read this comment asking for environmental cost of certain foods and I remembered there being a solid report on that by Hannah Ritchie on ourworldindata.org, so I started researching that, but then stumbled over this graph instead.
@zeekaran

Edward Snowden releases new message: "You have been warned" ( www.newsweek.com )

Edward Snowden wrote on social media to his nearly 6 million followers, "Do not ever trust @OpenAI ... You have been warned," following the appointment of retired U.S. Army General Paul Nakasone to the board of the artificial intelligence technology company....

Ephera ,

Don't really need the credentials here. The publicity is more important.

Ephera ,

I stumbled over this chart earlier, which certainly blew my mind a bit:

https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Environmental-impact-of-food-by-life-cycle-stage_1350.png
Source

Ephera ,

Yeah, I'm genuinely feeling like I don't want to publish things I create onto the internet, because these companies will gladly break laws to use it. Companies spent decades building up ridiculous copyright laws and when they go to violate those laws themselves, law enforcement fails.

Ephera ,

Hey now, they do kill everyone equally. Whether you're an LGBTQtie or nah.

Ephera ,

I only really understand half of it without getting my fingers on it, but sounds like some good stuff.

The path::absolute() that's hidden in the stabilized items is definitely something I've wanted for a while, though.

Ephera ,

Yeah, I'm imagining, I've run into these problems in the past and then the compiler told me to do it differently and so I did. I'm definitely glad that such unobvious behavior is being reduced, I just probably won't realize until I'm writing similar code the next time and the compiler does not complain.

Ephera ,

Well, as it says in the documentation I linked:

unlike canonicalize absolute does not resolve symlinks and may succeed even if the path does not exist.

Primarily, the latter part is what I want. There's just sometimes situations where a path doesn't exist (yet), but you want to know what it would look like as an absolute path.

Ephera ,

Yeah, our company likes to outsource stuff to India. The workers they hire there are deliberately underpaid and undertrained for what's being asked of them, so that already makes communication difficult.
But the real problem is often rather the different time zones. You can practically only schedule a call with them in the late afternoon, when they'll have all their other meetings, too.

This is so problematic, that parts of the company now also like to hire underpaid, undertrained workers in a different country, which happens to be in the same time zone as we are.

Ephera OP ,

Yeah, I'm from Germany and we experienced this second-hand in 2022, when lots of French reactors were either in reparation or had not enough cooling water during the drought, so France imported tons of power from us and drove up prices.
This all happened on top of inflation and the Russian conflict, so hard to say how much it actually influenced prices, but those were quite high in the end, so presumably not nothing.

https://www.grs.de/en/news/situation-nuclear-power-plants-france-how-has-situation-evolved-our-neighbouring-country

Without this happening, I probably wouldn't have been acutely aware of nuclear producing much heat. Obviously, they do have those massive cooling towers and I have read before that it's just another form of steam power, but you know, never properly thought about it.

Ephera OP ,

Thanks.

Source for that image: https://explainingscience.org/2021/10/18/opportunities-for-solar-energy/

Ephera OP ,

Well, my thinking was that if the produced heat was not negligible, then it would be cooler (literally) to use energy for heating which is being pushed into our atmosphere already anyways, rather than actively unearthing additional energy.

Ephera ,

Man, I'm tired of humanity min-maxing.

Sometimes it feels like everything we do, we compulsively scale it until resources are depleted and ecosystems collapse.
And because everything is globalized, that resource/ecosystem ends up being our whole planet. Anyone who does not participate, gets fucked anyways.

Ephera ,

What the fuck. If you let healthcare experts do their job, they will pick the evidence-proven measures themselves. If you prohibit them from doing their job freely, then they can't do that.

Ephera ,

I was hoping the emoji was actually the flag of Monaco, so I could be even more smug about it, but nope, OP actually used the Unicode symbol for the Indonesian flag.

Ephera ,

FUTO's The Open Source Definition

Open source just means access to the source code. [...]

What is wrong with this company? How do you have the thought and then follow all the way through with it, that you need an own definition of a commonly used word? That's just being obtuse and annoying.

Ephera ,

We'd need some special syntax for fedi post links then, like there is for mentioning Lemmy communities. Otherwise there's no way to know, if e.g. https://programming.dev is a Lemmy instance or some other random website.

Ephera ,

Well, yeah, you could rewrite every link that's displayed. So, if someone links to https://the-link-you-want-to-go-to.com/, then your instance would basically make that link instead point to https://your-instance.com/outgoing?url=https://the-link-you-want-to-go-to.com/.

And then your instance's server would do the check and redirect you accordingly.

But the downsides are then:

  • It's slow. Instead of links opening directly, all of them need to redirect first.
  • It increases the server load.
  • It allows instances to track which links you click on. (And this is what such link rewriting is often used for. People here would absolutely riot.)

And well, in theory there's nothing stopping Lemmy from displaying posts from Mastodon or other Fediverse services. You can just request their data from the federated server via ActivityPub.

In practice, though, it's not always easy to display these posts in the UI of a different service. For example, Mastodon posts only show up on Lemmy, if the person who created the post tagged a specific Lemmy community, because you kind of want them to show up as part of a specific community.
On the other hand, Kbin is a piece of software that federates well with Lemmy, because they offer a similar user experience, and of course a lot of development time got invested into ensuring compatibility.
Federation with other Fediverse services are not supported yet, to my knowledge.

Ephera ,

Well, there's also the point that the holocene just started 11,700 years ago. That's basically yesterday, in geology terms. We can be the dominant occurence of the holocene. We don't need to give it a new name, just because we've now entered industrialization and whatnot.

Ephera ,

Many of the geological epochs ended with a mass extinction event like we're currently seeing. It's perfectly reasonable to declare the Holocene as the time period from the rise of the humans to their extinction. After we're gone/unimportant, something else will take over and then that's a new epoch.

Ephera ,

Well, the way I see it, the current mass extinction cuts off the food chain that we sit on. I doubt, we're going completely extinct, but I don't think many humans will still be around in 500 years. In that case, calling the epoch that follows the mass extinction as anything with "human" in the name, isn't very fitting.

And I'm not saying that the Holocene is currently defined as being about humans. I'm rather saying if people feel like there should be an epoch declared, in which humans altered geology, then I would declare the Holocene as such.
It only started 11,700 years ago. Since then, we've been dropping tools and treasures onto the ground, cultivated farmlands, built pyramids and castles, dug mines and quarries, dammed off rivers and oceans, and so on.

But ultimately, I rather think the post-industrialization time frame is a geological event, not an epoch.

Ephera ,

sunglasses
sunglassesed
sunglassesing

Ephera ,

It's next to the House of Finally.

Probably...

Ephera ,

Gemini is basically an alternative web, so it has its own protocol, own server and browser software, and an own content language (heavily inspired by Markdown).
Everything is built to be much more lightweight, so certainly in the spirit of solarpunk.

But big downside is that "the thing you want" is honestly probably not on Gemini at all, because it does not share content with the HTTP web.

That does mean that all the ads and bullshit are gone, too (and cannot be implemented beyond static images, sponsored articles and I guess, ASCII art).
But yeah, at this point, it's most useful for reading (and writing) blog posts, and having fun with the technology itself. It does have a lovely community for that.

Ephera ,

Yeah, that shit is illegal where I live and search engines do it anyways. Unfortunately not enough lawsuits...

Ephera ,

This question actually came from another dude, but similar energy: I have a deep voice, so they asked, if it's relaxing to feel those bass vibrations in my body whenever I talk.

Ephera ,

It for sure is. Like a goddamn built-in subwoofer.

I just had never thought about it before the guy asked, because obviously, I kind of grew up with that voice.

Ephera ,

I think, it has to do chest voice vs. head voice.

Basically, when you vibrate your vocal cords, then depending on the frequency, it can either resonate with your chest cavity or with your head cavity. The chest cavity is larger, so it resonates at a deeper frequency and the resonance is louder, which is why most of us use chest voice while talking normally.

But yeah, as you go up, there's a bit of a range where you have to put more force into making your vocal cord vibrations heard, because at those frequencies, it does not resonate well with either chest or head cavity.

And then beyond that, you get into the range where it resonates well with the head cavity, so it's again not as taxing anymore to speak in that range (although still usually more taxing than chest voice, because it just resonates less loudly).

So, even with my deep chest choice, I do also have relatively good range into the upper registers, because well, my head cavity isn't particularly larger than others'.
But I have heard that some people cannot tap into their head voice, not without vocal training anyways.

Ephera ,

My mum does like to tell the story that when I was in like first or second grade, she attended some stage show that we were doing. And when I said something on stage, another mum whispered to her "Wow! What a deep voice that boy has!".

I do also remember not actually having that big of a voice change during puberty, so yeah, that is perhaps closer to the truth than one might expect. 🙃

Ephera ,

A million years ago, back when Reddit still existed, I used to hang out in the Firefox Subreddit and basically helped out with tech support there. At first, I just answered all the low-hanging fruit, but also read the answers from the more experienced folks and learned a lot from those.

And so, every so often someone at work (usually colleagues) will remark that their Firefox isn't working as expected. At which point, I have my ten minutes of being a Firefox support professional, where I walk them through the usual troubleshooting steps and we get the issue resolved in no time.

It's always kind of funny, because no one expects it. Like, it is a tech job, so it's not unusual for a colleague to have deep knowledge about a technology, but with browsers, people just seem to think there isn't much to know about them.

Ephera ,

To be honest, the issues are quite varied, because there's so many webpages and extensions out there. But thankfully the solutions are pretty uniform.

Very often, all that people need is a hard refresh of the webpage they're looking at (Ctrl+F5).

If that's not it, then frankly these steps will resolve 95% of problems: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-and-diagnose-firefox-problems

If the problem looks more fundamental, I also like to narrow it down by trying a fresh Firefox profile right away.
This gives you practically a factory-reset Firefox (except you can switch back to your old profile to get your configurations back). So, if it still occurs in the fresh profile, then something's wrong with the OS or the Firefox installation, not with Firefox's configuration.

Ephera ,

If you get the frozen ones, you can use them as a tire. 🙃

Ephera ,

A lot of the processing and multitude of ingredients is also done, specifically because people want the flavor, texture and look of meat, cheese etc.. There's tons of vegan options for protein that have 1 ingredient and 0-2 processing steps.

Ephera ,

I enjoy how Microsoft seems to just sit it out. I get that if they respond to it, it gives more attention to the problem. But genuine security researchers poking holes into your feature, that is not something you can sit out. It will be exploited, if they release it like that.

Ephera , (edited )

Man, during my apprenticeship, I spent a month in the offensive security department, meaning white-hat hackers. My most memorable experience there was us scrolling through a WireShark log of a server (which a user had conveniently placed into a web-hosted folder, so that our automated scanners could pick up on it).

Then we found an unencrypted FTP connection in there, which meant the password got logged in plain text and then we tried the same password for SSH. In roundabout 10 minutes, we had root access. On a real-world system.

And yeah, watching the guy in the video scroll through those Recall logs, that felt eerily similar. Like you just need the right Ctrl+F, the right screenshot or any clue that they're using some insecure technology to exploit. If you can extract those logs, it's likely just a matter of time until you find something.

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