GenderNeutralBro

@GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Okay. Good for China?

This seems like a really weird way to say "EU countries aren't investing enough into green tech".

TIL about Roko's Basilisk, a thought experiment considered by some to be an "information hazard" - a concept or idea that can cause you harm by you simply knowing/understanding it ( en.wikipedia.org )

Roko's basilisk is a thought experiment which states that an otherwise benevolent artificial superintelligence (AI) in the future would be incentivized to create a virtual reality simulation to torture anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development, in order to...

GenderNeutralBro ,

Everything old is new again. Sounds a lot like certain sects of Christianity. They say you need to accept Jesus to go to heaven, otherwise you go to hell, for all eternity. But what about all the people who had no opportunity to even learn who Jesus is? "Oh, they get a pass", the evangelists say when confronted with this obvious injustice. So then aren't you condemning entire countries and cultures to hell by spreading "the word"?

Both are ridiculous.

Are you embracing AI? ( viewber.co.uk )

There’s something of a misunderstanding in the UK property industry that agents are luddites, clinging to fax machines and Rolodexes, but quite the opposite is true. Sales and letting agents like nothing more than finding new efficiencies – whether through careful outsourcing, digital signatures or virtual tours, begging the...

GenderNeutralBro ,

For all the talk of regulating AI, I think the only meaningful regulation is very simple: hold the people implementing it accountable.

You want to use AI instead of a real certified professional? Go nuts. Let it write your legal contracts, file your taxes, diagnose your patients. But be prepared to get sued into oblivion when it makes a mistake that real professionals spend years of expensive training learning to avoid. Let the insurance industry do the risk assessment and see how unviable it is to replace human experts when there's human accountability.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I came in here knowing exactly what the comments would look like, and I'm still disappointed. "Just don't use so many tabs" is not an answer. If you don't have anything constructive to say, just move on instead of getting uppity about...not using browsers very heavily or understanding other use cases.

Yeah, thousands of tabs seems extreme. But "you should dedicate a larger amount of time and effort all day, every day to make the computer's job easier" is a bad take. That's obviously worse than OP's existing workflow.

Sorry OP, I don't have a real answer either. You might find Arc Browser's tab system to suit you better, but since it's chromium-based I suspect performance might be worse.

Edit: out of curiosity, how much memory does your PC have, and how much is Firefox using during these freezes? I wonder how much of the delay is caused by swapping.

GenderNeutralBro ,

This chart on Wikipedia sums it up neatly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption#/media/File:Global_Energy_Consumption.svg

You can see that from 2000 to 2021, renewable energy usage grew faster than any other type. However, coal, oil, and gas usage still grew, by a lot (with a couple recent dips that don't appear to constitute a trend yet). Overall energy usage is increasing and that is unlikely to change. For now we're merely slowing the growth of fossil fuel usage. Slowing down is not the same as reversing course.

So yeah, it's true that "more is being done now than ever before", but we're operating from a baseline of nearly zero from 40 years ago. It's easy to grow in proportional terms when you're tiny to begin with.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I agree with a lot of what you're saying. Deflecting the blame to consumers is a misinformation tactic by corporations and governments. That doesn't mean consumers can't or shouldn't take action on their own, of course -- just that we also need to hold corporations and governments accountable. There are things that need to be done at a personal level and things that need to be done at an institutional level. Individual behavior influences institutional behavior, and vice-versa.

Take bottled water, for example. We ship fucking water across the country in plastic bottles when it is verifiably no better than the tap water in any reasonably-maintained system. Is it the consumers' fault for buying it, the corporations' fault for being completely amoral, or the government's fault for allowing these ass-backwards incentives to exist and persist in the first place, and failing to provide sufficient alternatives? My choice to avoid bottled water whenever humanly possible in no way absolves these instutions of their failures and corruption that have made it a global problem.

Maybe the issue isn’t how people get to work but how they’re entirely reliant one getting the things they need to survive being supplied through unsustainable means.

That is unquestionably the bigger problem, yes.

We really do need to reduce car usage, but that's not something that's easily done by individuals when the cities they live in were designed to be unsustainably car-centric. We've spent about a century accumulating infrastructure debt and there's no quick fix there. For me personally, I would not want to in a city that wasn't walkable and bikeable, and I don't ever want to drive if I can avoid it, but there aren't enough cities like that in the world for everyone to do that. I do what I can in the hope that I will contribute to reaching critical mass. And this strategy is working to a degree -- there's a lot more attention given to city infrastructure today than there was even 10 years ago. There is political pressure locally to redesign cities to be more sustainable, driven by passionate grass-roots efforts. I always promote and vote for transportation alternatives in local elections, which is always a highly divisive topic because oil addiction is pervasive, deep-rooted, and in some places even lionized.

The same argument can be made for a lot of eco-friendly lifestyle choices, like vegetarianism. I'm not a strict vegetarian, but it's really not hard to cut the vast majority of meat out of my diet. I understand that for some people that's not viable, and we don't have the infrastructure for everyone to go veg overnight anyway. So no judgment. It's a drop in the bucket, to be sure, but hey, a drop is better than nothing.

On a larger scale, we have a huge problem with our economic structure. We've chased efficiency year after year, decade after decade, and now we're so gosh-darned efficient that we have little redundancy or resiliency, wealth is hyper-concentrated, and local economies just bleed resources into the void. What would it take to feed a major city without importing food by truck and ship? It's hard to imagine. It would require change at many levels of society, from the personal to the global.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Regarding lemmy.ml: yes, you should avoid it. It does not make sense to create politically-neutral communities on a politically-oriented instance.

Regarding Dessalines: The great thing about Lemmy is that I don't need to give a shit about the lead developer's politics, because he's not in control of how Lemmy is used, and if he ever tried some kind of heinous cross-instance power grab, it would get shut down before it got started.

Regarding the cognitive dissonance required to A) value decentralization of power, and also B) support the CCP: 🤦

GenderNeutralBro ,

Not sure I understand this one. I'm finding it difficult to read this as anything other than "yes, most people understand negation as negation, and not as something entirely different". Are there any languages or cultures where negation is same as inversion?

How would you even invert an adjective that doesn't exist on a one-dimensional scale? For example, good<->bad makes sense, because they are clear opposites. But happy<->sad does not make sense, because emotions don't exist on a single axis and do not have clear opposites. "Not happy" encompasses all states besides happiness. Could be angry, could be sad, could just be neutral. Like the old saying goes, "the opposite of love is not hate; it's indifference".

GenderNeutralBro ,

OP must have it set to the lowest compression level. All levels are lossless, but higher compression levels are smaller, at the expense of increased encoding time. Should be half the size or less in general.

GenderNeutralBro ,

LLM summary:

  • Clear-air turbulence, which is invisible and unpredictable, is becoming more frequent and severe due to climate change.
  • Studies have found a 55% increase in severe clear-air turbulence over the North Atlantic since 1979, with similar increases over the continental USA.
  • The warming climate is strengthening wind shear in the jet streams, which is a major driver of increased clear-air turbulence.
  • Convection caused by rising heat, particularly over oceans, is disrupting the fast-moving jet streams and leading to more turbulence.
  • Climate models project a doubling or tripling of severe turbulence in the jet streams in the coming decades if climate change continues as expected.
  • The increase in turbulence poses safety risks, as demonstrated by a 2024 Singapore Airlines incident that injured 83 passengers and resulted in one fatality.
  • Passengers are advised to keep their seatbelts fastened even when the seatbelt sign is off, as turbulence can strike suddenly and unexpectedly.
  • The FAA has documented 163 serious turbulence injuries to passengers and crew between 2009 and 2022.
  • The jet streams, which commercial airliners fly through, can both help and hinder flights by pushing them across the Atlantic or slowing them down.
  • Rising greenhouse gas levels, which are the highest in at least 800,000 years, are the primary driver behind the warming climate and resulting increase in turbulence.
GenderNeutralBro ,

I'd love to switch to AntennaPod, but I haven't figured out how to sync across platforms. I've heard of Gpodder, but I guess I'd need to host my own instance? Gpodder.net just gives me errors when I try to sign up, and from a quick web search it seems like this has been normal for quite a while now.

I wish I could just save all my metadata to a standard file format, sync those files any way I want, and have all my clients use that. But I don't think that's possible with any existing podcast clients. :/

GenderNeutralBro ,

Can't get lower-maintenance than a spider.

I don't think I could date an arachnophobe. No way I'm killing or evicting my bathroom spider! We're bros.

GenderNeutralBro ,

If I had a massive spider infestation, yeah, I'd want to investigate. But fruit flies and mosquitoes come and go often enough anyway. Presumably enough to sustain one or two spiders.

Had a bit of a gnat (I guess?) problem last summer because they're small enough to get through my window screens. Made me crazy, but even then I don't think they were actually nesting in my home.

GenderNeutralBro ,

AI does not mean artificial brain or anything similar. It's a very broad term that's been in use for about 70 years now.

Pac Man has AI.

GenderNeutralBro ,

1mbps is awfully low for 1080. Or did you mean megabyte rather than megabit?

GenderNeutralBro ,

Gotcha. Typically lowercase b=bit and uppercase B=Byte, but it's hard to tell what people mean sometimes, especially in casual posts.

Come to think of it, I messed up the capitalization too. Should be a capital M for mega.

GenderNeutralBro ,

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Cat_fall_150x300_6fps.gif

‘My whole library is wiped out’: what it means to own movies and TV in the age of streaming services ( www.theguardian.com )

*What rights do you have to the digital movies, TV shows and music you buy online? That question was on the minds of Telstra TV Box Office customers this month after the company announced it would shut down the service in June. Customers were told that unless they moved over to another service, Fetch, they would no longer be...

GenderNeutralBro ,

Even if they were trustworthy, nothing lasts forever.

Does anyone seriously think Google Play Movies or whatever they call it is going to be around in 50 years? Audible? Spotify?

Unlikely.

I grew up with access to books that were printed before my parents were even born. I doubt your grandkids will be able to say the same. Not if you buy into DRM-infected ecosystems and vendor lock-in, anyway.

The only consolation is that pirates are always one step ahead. But I wouldn't want to count on that remaining true in 50 years either.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I had some CD-Rs that rotted within a few years. I was devastated, because at the time CD-Rs were hyped up as the most durable of any consumer media, and storage was expensive. I had tons of stuff that was ONLY on CD or DVD. That's how I archived everything.

There was an old site that did a comprehensive analysis and ranked different brands of CD-R and DVD-R discs into tiers. My main takeaway at the time was Verbatim or bust. There were some other brands that got discs from the same manufacturer, but not consistently so it was something of a gamble. IIRC Sony was one of the better ones, but Verbatim was the safest choice.

I can't say I've tested any of my old discs in the past 10 or maybe even 15 years. I copied my most important data into newer media, but I still have a ton of discs I should probably clone to my NAS. One of these years...

Then came M-discs, which as far as I know are still considered legit. They never really caught on, and production has either halted entirely or is at least limited. I never used them myself.

GenderNeutralBro ,

It's nutty that we haven't had a proper offline mode in like 20, maybe 25 years. This was something every browser had in the 90s. Loading from cache was the default, even. Now it's like, I'm not sure why Firefox even has a cache folder. They bend over backwards to prevent you from using it.

Before you tell me that Firefox has an offline mode, yeah, I know. It's basically useless.

I would love a way to have my browser automatically store a local, static copy of everything I view.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Everything old is new again. As long as there have been bars, there have been sleezy men lying to impress women in bars.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I was confused at first, but it turns out these are actually the traditional representations. From Wikipedia:

In John's revelation the first horseman rides a white horse, carries a bow, and is given a crown as a figure of conquest,[2][3] perhaps invoking pestilence, or the Antichrist. The second carries a sword and rides a red horse as the creator of (civil) war, conflict, and strife.[4] The third, a food merchant, rides a black horse symbolizing famine and carries the scales.[5] The fourth and final horse is pale, upon it rides Death, accompanied by Hades.[6] "They were given authority over a quarter of the Earth, to kill with sword, famine and plague, and by means of the beasts of the Earth."[7]

I'd only ever heard Pestilence before, not Conquest. Conquest and War seem awfully similar to me as concepts.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Where is the graph from?

I was curious so I looked it up on Webster's: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bruh

The words Brer and bruh both originated as written forms of a spoken alteration of the word brother that is used especially in southern African American English. Brer appears most commonly today in written versions of African American folktales (such as those popularized by Joel Chandler Harris), where it occurs as a capitalized title before a male character's first name.

"These are traditional African American folktales crossed with Cherokee and Creek folktales," says [Honorée Fanonne] Jeffers of The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus—a compilation of children's stories that detail the adventures of characters like Brer Rabbit and Brer Wolf.
— Tembe Denton-Hurst

… folktales with African roots, introducing Brers Fox, Rabbit, Wolf, and Bear.
— Judy Freeman

The word bruh is also sometimes used in this way.

The little animals held a sit-down talk, and one by one and two by two and all by all, they decide to go see Bruh Bear and Bruh Rabbit.
— Virginia Hamilton

Bruh.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Or metamorphosis.

GenderNeutralBro ,

That's a puma, not a lioness.

Though you might still be right. I'm not sure if there are clear visual indicators in pumas.

GenderNeutralBro ,

For people ages 0 to 2, the model often classified them as being between 12 and 18 years old.

I guess they're just not training with baby pictures then? I mean, this seems like it should be the easiest distinction to make.

Doesn't seem like there's any information on the purpose of this analysis. Google Photos has been doing face recognition and other classification for a long time, and it's genuinely useful because it lets you sort your photo collection by person. It also categorizes pet photos and does a halfway-decent job of distinguishing one pet from another. I'd genuinely appreciate similar functionality in the open-source photo apps I use. This seems like a natural fit for Instagram. Not sure about TikTok, but honestly, I'm too old and ornery to understand how people actually use TikTok.

GenderNeutralBro ,

It's a big problem all across the fediverse. New users have no idea which instance to join. In the absence of any way to differentiate between instances, they go with the most popular one, or the one they've heard of the most, or the one that sounds vaguely official or "vanilla". Lemmy.world is the obvious choice for these users.

This leads to the biggest server becoming a runaway train, which is bad for diversity and also bad for the admins because it makes it harder to manage the load. It's the same thing with mastodon.social.

I would encourage users to avoid the biggest instance as a rule, no matter which service they are signing up for. Ideally, avoid the top three or five. That will naturally lead to a healthier balance.

The problem is, there aren't a lot of "general purpose" Lemmy instances. Someone following my advice, who doesn't know better, might find themselves on hexbear, dbzer0, or lemmygrad. These are bad choices for a new user who expects something more or less equivalent to major centralized sites.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Something to that, for sure. The only problem is if the choices are overwhelming. People like choice when it's immediately comprehensible and meaningful, and hate it with a vengeance when it's not. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

Mastodon is already pretty good about this with the official app and nevertheless, the most common complaint I heard during the Twitter exodus was that signing up for Mastodon was too complicated. Lemmy is far worse in this regard. The closest thing to an "official" Lemmy app doesn't even have "Lemmy" in the name, and doesn't pop up on the first screen of results in Google Play.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Do a religion tier list next.

Instagram Advertises Nonconsensual AI Nude Apps ( www.404media.co )

Instagram is profiting from several ads that invite people to create nonconsensual nude images with AI image generation apps, once again showing that some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies unable or...

GenderNeutralBro ,

Thank god Amazon only allows bots to publish 3 books per day. They saved humanity!

GenderNeutralBro ,

Agreed. I mean yeah, image generators are still very limited (or at least, difficult to use in an advanced, targeted way), but there's a new research paper out every day detailing new techniques. None of the criticisms of Midjourney or Stable Diffusion today are likely to remain valid in a year or even six months. And they're already highly useful for certain tasks.

Same with LLMs, only we've already reached the point where they are good enough for almost anything if you care to write a good application around them. The problem with LLMs at this point is marketing; people expect them to be magic and are disappointed when they don't live up their expectations. They're not magic but they are extremely useful. Just please, for the love of god, do not treat them as information repositories...

GenderNeutralBro ,

Parasite SEO

Is there any other kind?

GenderNeutralBro ,

Lemmy and similar are not inherently more resistant to this. Actually, they are probably less resistant from a technical standpoint, since there is virtually no barrier to creating an account. I didn't even need an email address to sign up, let alone a phone number like the corporate sites require nowadays (not sure about Reddit, but Google, Facebook, and Twitter all require phone verification to register last I checked).

I fear that we are not ready for the wave of spam that will come as soon as the fediverse becomes mainstream.

On a more fundamental level, I don't know how to reconcile the competing goals of accountability and privacy.

Realistically, there is no way to distinguish AI comments from human comments. Not in any way that wouldn't become obsolete the day after it was implemented.

This comment is brought to you by NordVPN. NordVPN: Because You've Never Heard of Our Competitors!

GenderNeutralBro ,

I've also heard "the War of Northern Aggression". No idea how common either is. I assume it's just a handful of crazies playing pretend.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I've never found a problem that can't be exacerbated with Microsoft Access.

Thoughts about Posteo?

I've thinking about ditching my Protonmail email address with Posteo since I need IMAP support (because I hate using the Protonmail app) and honestly paying for Proton Mail Plus didn't worth the money because they are pushing me to buy the Protonmail Unlimited but I don't need all those capabilities nor would I use them and the...

GenderNeutralBro ,

Edit: I replied to the wrong comment. Sorry!

GenderNeutralBro ,

I think that page is a really nice starting point, but keep in mind that the criteria used for ranking prioritizes anonymity highly. Security and privacy aren't the same as anonymity. If you're looking for an address to use publically, anonymity is a non-issue so the rankings there won't be meaningful to you. The writeups are still useful though.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I love her channel. She's a fun combination of exasperated and chill. Her videos are quite long so you might like 1.25x speed.

I am a victim of the network effect who wishes to degoogle. What do I do?

This post is going to be a bit personal (and maybe a little bit out of context, it's not just Google software I want to remove) but I'm tired of not knowing what to do about it. I want and have wanted to get rid of a bunch of proprietary software in my life, including but not limited to Google's software, for quite a while now,...

GenderNeutralBro ,

Have you looked at these threads for the DJI app issue?

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/904-grapheneos-pixel-6-dji-fly-app-compatibility

https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/2527

As for Instagram...ugh. Absolutely insane to use Instagram for private communications, but I get it, you can't change your whole social circle. What you can do is isolate Instagram and similarly untrustworthy apps into a second user profile in Android, so at least it won't have access to your real photos, contacts, etc. I use Shelter for this purpose, but there are other options as well.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Mine shows 90% videos from channels I've either subscribed to or at least watched before, and 10% random pop culture stuff.

Then again, I don't actually use YouTube very much, and if I come across a video on Lemmy or wherever I never open it with a logged-in browser. Maybe I've inadvertently gamed the system.

GenderNeutralBro ,

What's special about 37? Just that it's prime or is there a superstition or pop culture reference I don't know?

GenderNeutralBro ,

Thanks!

GenderNeutralBro ,

I'd spend a lot more money on TV and movies if I could get them without DRM and in high quality. No question. Both in streaming and in disc form.

GenderNeutralBro ,

AFAIK there's still no way to dynamically link to posts or comments on Lemmy. :( You can only link communities or users.

Anyway, totally agree. Being technically able to bypass DRM doesn't make it okay. I'm honestly not sure how to rip a Blu-ray on Linux anyway. I haven't looked into it in years so maybe it's easier now than I remember.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I'm not really familiar with Automattic or any of their acquisitions (I know Tumblr and Pocket Casts, but I'm not a regular user of either). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automattic#Products

What's their track record here? Should we expect anything they acquire to be gutted and squeezed like they're Broadcom, or do they actually develop the things they acquire in a way that serves their users?

GenderNeutralBro ,

Cloud cloud cloud, cloudy cloud, cloudy cloudy cloud cloud.

-Management

YSK there is a condition that makes your armpits smell worse called trichobacteriosis that is common and easy to treat

I was talking about hygiene with my partner who is a nurse and they were telling me that a lot of people remark that their armpits are smelling worse than normal and they are using more and more deodorant and people just think it is normal....

GenderNeutralBro ,

In a pinch, hand sanitizer or isopropyl alcohol will do wonders. They'll dry out your skin, so you might want to use some kind of moisturizer afterwards when you have the chance.

If I'm camping or traveling for a long time, hand sanitizer is clutch.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I wouldn't say Apple disregards backwards compatibility, but they certainly don't prioritize it to the degree Microsoft does, or that the general open-source community does. For Microsoft, backwards compatibility is their bread and butter. Enterprise customers have all sorts of unsupported legacy shit, and it dictates purchasing decisions and upgrade schedules.

Apple gave devs and users a ton of lead time before dropping 32-bit support. The last 32-bit Mac hardware was in 2006 (the first gen of Intel Macs); it wasn't until Catalina's release in 2019 that 32-bit apps stopped running, and Apple continued releasing security updates for older OSes that could run 32-bit apps for a couple years after that. So that was basically 15 years of notice for devs to release 64-bit apps.

That was much more time than they gave Classic Mac apps under OS X, or PowerPC apps on Intel. I was much more annoyed when PowerPC support was axed. Only a matter of time until Intel apps stop running on Apple Silicon, too. That's gonna be the end of the world for Steam games. Ironically, it's already easier to run legacy Windows and Linux games on Mac than it is to run legacy Mac games.

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