• 0 Posts
  • 1.51K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: December 6th, 2024

help-circle

  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldBo'le of wa'er
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    edit-2
    23 hours ago

    In Portuguese from Portugal, one of the words for “queue” is “bicha”,

    In Portuguese from Brasil, “bicha” is a slang word for homosexual and has nothing to do with queues.

    So the common Portuguese expression to tell somebody one’s going to stand on a queue - “vou para a bicha” (literally “I’m going to the queue”) - has a whole different meaning for Brasilians.




    • The Leave Referendum, Brexit negotiations and the actual Brexit.
    • Pretty much every single day of the government of Boris Johnson.
    • All the shit that came out in the Snowden Revelations about the “worse than the Stasi” level of civil society surveillance UK .
    • The causes and handling of the 2008 Crash in Britain.
    • The British participation in the second Iraq War which was amongst other things deemed Pillage (a war crime) in the report from the Comission on the Iraq War and the subsequent absence of accountability of British decision makers involved.
    • The current government arresting people as “Terrorist supporters” for demonstrating against the Gaza Genocide.
    • The pure propaganda BBC coverage on the Gaza War.
    • The entire Corby “anti-semitism” slander campaign including the pure propaganda BBC coverage as well as the time they basically called a Jewish Holocaust Survivor an anti-semite to try and slander Corbyn by association.
    • The ongoing crackdown on the right to demonstrate since at least 2010.

    These are just the biggest ones (not including the long-running shit-show called The Royal Family). Plenty of smaller insane shit can be found in British newspapers quite regularly.

    British politicians haven’t been serious and minded for at least 2 decades, probably more.

    Great image management and projection of a posh image, whilst totally taking the piss out of just about everybody but a handful of people in their making of policy.


  • Try Lutris or Heroic Launcher as those two wrap around Wine (and everything else needed to run Windows games in Linux, such as DXVK) and manage the whole process for you, with only a few games which might need tweaking the config to run (and the fraction of games like that is no worse there than it is in Steam).

    I use both Steam and Lutris and in my experience Steam is not at all a good launcher for anything other than games from the Steam store, mainly because it is less configurable and because it doesn’t directly expose the tools you need to use to fix those few games that won’t just run and limits the launch options you can tweak, whilst Lutris follows the Unofficial Open Source Credo of pretty much making it possible to configure everything (though Lutris specifically defaults to the best configuration for each game, but it definitelly gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself with)

    Steam is very popular because of the Steam Store market dominance so tons of people swear by it (never having used anything else), but it’s not actually the greatest option for anything but steam games and even for those, sometimes it’s worse that getting the same game from GoG and using Lutris or Heroic, mainly because the DRM in the non-GoG version of some games interferes with running them in Linux.



  • Whilst dealing with this kind of asshole in a work environment is a lot more complex, online they’re like dogs barking behind a wall - only doing it because they’re aggressive simpletons and isolated from any problems from doing it - and just as unworthy of consideration or attention as one.

    They really only have any impact on you when you give them more importance than they deserve.

    Also keep in mind that these people are at the lower end of expertise and professionalism: top experts don’t waste time with talking shit like that, they’ll just either teach you or (most likely) ignore you because they think that stuff is too basic and not worth their time, and professionals are used to being professional and shit-talking ain’t being professional - even in expertise terms these people are unimportant.


  • In my experience there really is no correlation between being powerless/oppressed and actually being a good person: plenty of such people when given a bit of power turn out to be the same kind of shithole as the ones who oppress them in other situations.

    The reason why powerless/oppressed people seldom act as shitholes is not because they’re better persons in average than the rest, it’s because they’re far more likely to suffer negative consequences if they do act in such ways, than the powerfull are.

    I think the OP’s experience is the result of this dynamic alongside the one that, when that in an online environment one is far more likely to notice the assholes (because they’re the ones activelly posting shit) than the non-assholes (because they’re more likely to just silently negativelly judge the assholes) - in a street you can see when there’s a ton of other people looking down on the assholes, but you can’t online.

    In my experience the solution for this kind of problem in an expert context is to keep in mind that the most expert a person is, the least likely they are to waste time in shit-talking, so almost invariably the people being assholes online in such a context don’t actually have knowledge beyond at most mid-level expertise and are really not deserving of any respect on a professional sense and, of course, as people who would chose shit-talking rather than helping or at worst not bothering and staying silent when confronted with somebody with less knowledge, are not deserving of any respect as persons.

    Further and given the whole “generally powerless person who will act as an asshole if they’re isolated from the consequences of it” dynamic, they’re only doing it because they feel isolated from the consequences of pissing of somebody else, but that means the other side is also isolated from them.

    Dealing with such people in a work environment is a lot more complex, but online they’re like dogs barking behind a wall and just as unworthy of consideration or attention.



  • AI isn’t at all reliable.

    Worse, it has a uniform distribution of failures in the domain of seriousness of consequences - i.e. it’s just as likely to make small mistakes with miniscule consequences as major mistakes with deadly consequences - which is worse than even the most junior of professionals.

    (This is why, for example, an LLM can advise a person with suicidal ideas to kill themselves)

    Then on top of this, it will simply not learn: if it makes a major deadly mistake today and you try to correct it, it’s just as likely to make a major deadly mistake tomorrow as it would be if you didn’t try to correct it. Even if you have access to actually adjust the model itself, correcting one kind of mistake just moves the problem around and is akin to trying to stop the tide on a beach with a sand wall - the only way to succeed is to have a sand wall for the whole beach, by which point it’s in practice not a beach anymore.

    You can compensate for this by having human oversight on the AI, but at that point you’re just back to having to pay humans for the work being done, so now instead of having to the cost of a human to do the work, you have the cost of the AI to do the work + the cost of the human to check the work of the AI and the human has to check the entirety of the work just to make sure since problems can pop-up anywere, take and form and, worse, unlike a human the AI work is not consistent so errors are unpredictable, plus the AI will never improve and it will never include the kinds of improvements that humans doing the same work will over time discover in order to make later work or other elements of the work be easier to do (i.e. how increase experience means you learn to do little things to make your work and even the work of others easier).

    This seriously limits the use of AI to things were the consequences of failure can never be very bad (and if you also include businesses, “not very bad” includes things like “not significantly damage client relations” which is much broader than merely “not be life threathening”, which is why, for example, Lawyers using AI to produce legal documents are getting into trouble as the AI quotes made up precedents), so mostly entertainment and situations were the AI alerts humans for a potential situation found within a massive dataset and if the AI fails to spot it, it’s alright and if the AI incorrectly spots something that isn’t there the subsequent human validation can dismiss it as a false positive (so for example, face recognition in video streams for the purpose of general surveillance, were humans watching those video streams are just or more likely to miss it and an AI alert just results in a human checking it, or scientific research were one tries to find unknown relations in massive datasets)

    So AI is a nice new technological tool in a big toolbox, not a technological and business revolution justifying the stock market valuations around it, investment money sunk into it or the huge amount of resources (such as electricity) used by it.

    Specifically for Microsoft, there doesn’t really seem to be any area were MS’ core business value for customers gains from adding AI, in which case this “AI everywhere” strategy in Microsoft is an incredibly shit business choice that just burns money and damages brand value.




  • Well informed people knew that it wasn’t safe already for quite a while.

    Most people did not, most companies did not, most public institutions either did not or could make believed they did not.

    That’s changing (as are lots of other things) because Trump is being far more loud about how Europe is an adversary of America than previous administrations (it was too for Democrats, though only on business and trade terms)

    There was quite a lot of fighting against treating America as a safe haven for the data of Europeans from people in the know in Tech and IT Security in Europe but we lost, but now crooked politicians can’t make believe America or American companies are safe for the data of Europeans anymore.


  • Explanation

    Mullvad just gives your machine an IP address from a range reserved for internal networks and which is not valid to use as a public IP on the internet, and then does NAT translation like your home router does.

    NAT translation just uses a gateway/router as a front on the Internet (thus, with a public IP address) for a bunch of machines with non-public IP addresses: if a connection comes from an inside machine to a machine on the internet it just replaces the source IP & port address on the outbound connection with its own public IP and available port so that if the external internet machine connects back, it knows which internal machine is supposed to receive that connection.

    So if you machine on the internal network side connects out to another machine on the Internet, at least for a while (until it purges than information from memory because it’s not being used) the NAT server will treat connections from that machine to it (remember, the NAT server is the one with a valid public IP address) as actually meant to go to your machine.

    However if a connection comes from a machine outside which your own machine has never before connected to (which is the case when you start seeding and you machine ends up in the list of seeders of a torrent), since your machine never connected to that one in the first place the NAT server doesn’t know which internal machine that connection is supposed to go to, so it never gets to that machine.

    The way to have your machine reachable by any random external machine when you’re using NAT is called Port Forwarding which is a mechanism to reserver one of the IP ports on the NAT server so that any connection to that port is always forwarded to a specific internal machine.

    Mullvad doesn’t support port forwarding, hence the problems with seeding.

    TL;DR What you can do

    After downloading a torrent, leave it seeding. Since during the download stage your machine connected with pretty much all machines in the swarm (even if just to check what they have available) the NAT server has them associated with your machine in its list so that if any of those machines tries to connected back the connection gets forwarded to your machine, hence requests from any of those machines to download blocks come through and get served by your machine.

    However new machines that join the swarm won’t be able to reach your machine because Mullvad’s NAT server doesn’t know them hence doesn’t know it should forward their connections to your machine.

    This is the same reason why if you just start seeding from scratch nothing ever manages to connect to your machine - none of the machines outside trying to reach yours is in the list that the NAT server has of machines your own has reached earlier so their connections to the public IP of the server don’t get forwarded to your machine.

    In my experience just leaving it seeding after downloading is enough to have at least a 2:1 seed to download ratio in most torrents, so if your objective is to give back to the community as much or more than you take, that’s enough IMHO.

    If however you just want to seed for other reasons, then you won’t be able to do it with Mullvad. Either get a VPN provider that supports port foward or rent a seedbox and use that.


  • Europe just did a 180 on the commitment for no ICE cars to be sold from 2035 onwards under pressure of just a handful of big automakers.

    And when I say Europe, I actually mean crooked European politicians rather than the public in general.

    I mean, even if one puts the aside the whole strategical point of Europe delaying even more commiting to the first big tech revolution of the 21st century so that a handful of large automakers make a little bit more profit, there are actually lives as stake: fumes for diesel cars are estimated to kill more than 10,000 people a year in Europe.

    Corruption in politics is both killing people and fucking up our future prosperity.


  • Yes, China has very purposefully put itself at the forefront of the first technological revolution of the 21st century and done this at multiple levels (solar panel production, battery tech, EVs)

    Meanwhile the American elites have decided that 19th century technology is were they want to be. Well, that and dead ending killing the country’s lead in the Tech revolution by going down a branch with no future in the form of LLMs and making everybody lose trust in keeping their data in anything owned by American companies.

    And, of course, the crooked politicians here in Europe are actually following America more than China in this.


  • Funnilly enough, I voted yesterday, didn’t at all follow this on TV (what’s the point: me following the news about isn’t going to change anything, better just check the final results the next day) and forgot to check the results until I saw this post in Lemmy.

    Nice to see that a leftwing guy won this first round (even though he’s from the mainstream “left” party, he’s actually from a different faction that the self-serving neoliberal crooks that have dominated that party for 2+ decades, so he’s probably center-left unlike the leadership of his party which is at best center-right)

    Not nice to see the far-right fascist who almost certainly gets support from American fascists (he certainly parrots a lot of their propaganda) getting second place followed by the far-right ultra-neoliberal (who also probably gets support from the more traditionals American far-right, though Reaganists - when it started his party under his leadership wanted to privatise the National Health Service until they found out the public were overwhelmingly against it - rather than Fascists) in third place.

    Nice to see the sleazy rat with fingers in all pies fielded by the curreny mainstream rightwing party in Government only get 11%.

    That said, there will be a second round between the top two candidates and if you add up the numbers from just the people who are very openly and without a doubt rightwing, they exceed 50% (just) so there is still a real risk that the far-right fascist might win.

    Also note that the President in Portugal is a position with very little power, with almost all of the power being in Parliament and Government, similar to Germany.


  • “I don’t like the most outspoken people who like it” isn’t exactly a rational reason to inform one’s choices in Tech, more so given that you don’t actually have to be in contact with such people to use that Tech.

    It’s like refusing to play a single player game because there are fanboys for that game on the Internet.

    If making your choices by following a random crowd of people you don’t even know personally and don’t even have to talk to is the most low-self confidence imature thing one can do, making your choices by setting yourself in opposition to a random crowd of people you don’t even know personally and don’t even have to talk to is the second most low-self confidence imature thing one can do.

    Why the fuck should you care about their opinion either way? They do they, you do you.


  • The rest is pretty cartoonish Bad Guys Bad, Good Guys Good.

    Andor was way more nouanced.

    Further Andor showed the machinery of Fascism from the inside and had various different kinds of people with different levels of commitement and reasons for participating in it.

    You could really feel the machinery of Fascism slowly closing its maw on people who were just pro-Obbey-The-Rules rather than pro-Fascism and either coopted them or crushed them. Meanwhile in the rest of Star Wars the Empire was pretty much just is Big Powerful Evil For The Sake Of Evil Guys + Mindless obedient human puppets.

    For the Empire side Andor showed people under Fascism, the rest Star Wars just shows the symbology of Fascism (down to the detail that all the members of the Empire are human, never other species) but not the human side of it or the machinery influencing and even forcing them to behave as they do.