maegul

joined 2 years ago
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[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 8 points 11 months ago
[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 13 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Some vague stories around my grandfather before they migrated that sound like a godfather film but which no one knitted anything about.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 months ago

Yea, let’s get the “puppet cut”!

It was clearly a fuck up, and the film is almost lucky to have been so good in almost every other aspect that we can forgive the ash synth CGI.

It would be really cool if someone just put the work in to clean it up for a blue ray release or something, just for the fans and the franchise, which is going on 45 yrs now, as old as Star Wars.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 5 points 11 months ago

Ha. Oops! I got the vibe that the conversation had become more general. But also I’m genuinely tired and tired and not wearing my glasses. Sorry!

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Electric guitar and the quality of digital amplification. Takes all the pain, inconvenience and expenses of the traditional amp as a PA system away while letting you sound good. Really awesome TBH.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 months ago

Maybe, I’m not in the US, so I’m not sure. Time and date dot com C (see link in post) says CT is no different from CDT, so I figured it was convenient. But I’m going there’s a more commonly used Timezone that would be better?

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago

Yea I agree, a simpler approach could have been taken. Though I don’t think any of the film’s fan service was intended to be subtle.

I personally liked the appearance of an Ash type synth. I think it adds weight to the sense of synchronicity of Romulus and Alien 1. Shame about the execution of it and the focus they put on it, of course.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 5 points 11 months ago

Yea, absolutely. Just as the Omicron variant broke out, I came to the conclusion that we had basically added a new virus on top of Influenza. One that was generally worse and not at all seasonal like Influenza. And that the net effect was and is humanity's global prosperity taking an easily measurable hit. Before Omicron, IMO, there was hope that we could beat it.

The way Omicron happened and the way we responded (IE "didn't you know the pandemic is over!") made it pretty clear what people's attitudes were. The only thing that really got us through the pandemic was bio-medical scientists nailing their job, and it will be the only thing that will help us, and as much cause for celebration that is, the dark side is that hyper-individualism has prevented any other faculties to help out in the mean time (or, as I said above, prevent us from going down a darker path).

I formative experience for me was that amongst my internet COVID bubble (mostly a particular sub-reddit) I was the first to hear about Omicron and share news about its many mutations (this was before it really spread anyway and just when the first analysis of its genome came out). The response from people, who were generally concerned enough about the pandemic to be on a sub-reddit about it, was entirely dismissive. "Fear mongering", "viruses evolve toward being less severe" ... etc ... were the universal and popular response. All when it was black and white as anything ... more mutations meant more immune escape, just like with influenza from year to year.

But no one wanted to hear that. They were all done with the lockdowns and panic and had subscribed, essentially religiously, to the "promised coming of the end of the pandemic". And then the variant turned out to have plenty of immune escape, spread like wildfire, and in my area cause the greatest spate of deaths in the whole fucking pandemic. Now it's probably fair to say that it was the second pandemic and we welcomed it with arms wide open (all variants since are direct descendants of omicron, AFAIU, and omicron itself was not descended from any of the other variants around at the time but a separate branch from or near the original strain).

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 29 points 11 months ago

How dumb it all is. Seriously. The highly regimented structure of curricula and examination is a shitty way to learn. It’s optimised for making teaching and grading easier. And also teaching young people to be obedient facile production line workers.

But intellectually and academically, it always seemed obviously bad and boring to me. And I’ve since gotten to understand a number of academic topics relatively well to know how true this is. Proper understanding, intellectually, and skill in application, are things that are far more organic and purpose driven than the shitty curricula that pencil pushing educators spit out as though the human mind were an excel spread sheet.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 14 points 11 months ago (3 children)

The 5 year mark of the pandemic is just around the corner now. And it’s interesting to reflect on how well things are going compared to early forecasts.

My memory is that 3-5 years was put out there as the likely longest horizon for the pandemic. Objectively, it’s seems pretty clear that it has not gone away at all and that any progress on actually reducing its prevalence is either speculative (eg new nasal vaccines) or ”unacceptable” civil or infrastructural measures (masks, remote work, air filters etc).

All of which is basically a failure.

Another way of cutting it though might be to view the Omicron variant as a second pandemic that is proving generally worse than the first in part because it’s catching us at our most indifferent.

I feel like there was a point there where a good vaccine roll out could have contained the delta or preceding variants. Which to me only highlights how all of the civil measures we were taking and could have taken were not just about maximising health at that time but also about preventing us from going down a darker path of no return which seems to be where we are now. If global measures were taken to limit the spread of the virus and so prevent its evolution, I’d wonder how good of a chance there’d be that a vaccine could then have quashed the virus.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 6 points 11 months ago

As someone who has worked in science, this passes the sniff test.

That is, science isn’t perfect, at all and is a constant process. Trying to win an argument by “citing the science” is often unscientific, however problematic it is that this can be leveraged by unscientific folks pushing an agenda.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

IMO, app developers in general are lacking imagination or ambition over ideas like this. I’ve even suggested it directly to a developer or a popular mastodon app, who was entertaining the idea of making a lemmy app … and they said they couldn’t see how it would work.

 

This is just to followup from my prior post on latencies increasing with increasing uptime (see here).

There was a recent update to lemmy.ml (to 0.19.4-rc.2) ... and everything is so much snappier. AFAICT, there isn't any obvious reason for this in the update itself(?) ... so it'd be a good bet that there's some memory leak or something that slows down some of the actions over time.

Also ... interesting update ... I didn't pick up that there'd be some web-UI additions and they seem nice!

 

Just a general observation I've made in my time on lemmy.ml, which I figure is attributable to lemmy the software, that may or may not be useful.

I'm talking about writing comments to posts (or replies to other comments, not sure if I've seen a difference).

And, just anecdotally, it seems that the longer the instance has been up without a restart or update (AFAICT of course), the longer the time between me clicking the Reply button and the time that the request is completed.

Usually, the first sign in my experience that the instance has been restarted is that this latency speeds right up to being almost instantaneous.

Anyone else notice the same or on other instances? It might be a clue to performance issues??

EDIT: applies to posts too (including this one incidentally)

 

This is supplementary/separate from the Twitch Streams (see sidebar for links), intended for discussion here on lemmy.

The idea being, now that both twitch streams have read Chapter 4, we can have a discussion here and those from the twitch streams can have a retrospective or re-cap on the topic.

This will be a regular occurrence for each discrete set of topics coming out of The Book as the twitch streams cover them


Ownership and the borrow checker are obviously a fundamental and unique topic to rust, so it's well worth getting a good grounding in AFAICT.

  1. Anyone up to trying to summarise or explain ownership/borrow-checker in rust?
    • it can be a good exercise to test your understanding and get feedback/clarification from others ... as well as probably a good way to teach others
  2. Any persistent gripes, difficulties or confusions?
  3. Any of the quizzes from The Book stump you?
  4. Any hard learnt lessons? Or tried and true tips?
 

We've got two parallel streams going here. One is up to chapter 10 on Traits and the other on chapter 5 on Structs & Enums.

  • How are we feeling about Rust the language?
  • Any persistent confusions or difficulties?
  • Favourite features or success stories?
  • How are we finding "The Book" in general?
    • Personally, I think it's good but not great and am definitely reaching out for other learning experiences or materials, lately finding myself going through the Std Lib Docs a bit
    • Andy Balaam's Rust Tutorial Series over on peertube are also good and I recently remembered to watch them as I go

Otherwise ... any thoughts or requests on what else can happen here for those going through "The Book"?

  • I'm thinking of having posts on sets of chapters once the two twitch streams have gotten up to them.
  • So right now, both have gotten through the borrow checker chapter (ch 4).
  • The idea would be to have a reading club happen here too ... to allow written discussion/questions here for those not able to make the streams (or who like/prefer written discussion), but also to provide a retrospective for those who've gone through the streams.
  • Personally, in these discussions I'd post my understanding of the topic, look back on the quizzes to see what tripped me up, or any other practical issues I ran into, and post anything else I may have found that helped me on the topic. Basically to see what I actually learned from that chapter.
  • Thoughts??
  • Another thing I can think of is challenges and exercises. I tried one a while back, but I think it was too much/long, so smaller exercises would probably work better for getting us thinking/coding in rust. AoC has come up and there are plenty of others. Would regular posts from such a thing be welcome or helpful??
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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by maegul@lemmy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml
 

It recently struck me recently that a number of users mostly scroll the All feed. This came up in a conversation where people were discussing how their main usage of lemmy was to scroll All and then rely entirely on blocking to refine their feed.

Now whether that's a pathological instance of Hyrum's law of all possible uses being relied on or an intended or fair use of a lemmy/reddit system, it does strike me that a substantial portion of the user base doing this likely has an effect on what happens within communities and the ability for communities to define themselves.

Thoughts and speculations (and perhaps paranoia/exaggeration):

  • I don't know what happened on reddit in this regard, but I wouldn't be surprised if a relatively high proportion of users rely on All as described above compared to reddit in order to "fill out" their feeds more due to the smaller user base here.
  • A higher amount of All-feeders means fewer people willing to invest, contribute to or even care about specific communities.
  • This likely means community migrations away from toxic mods, or, starting new communities can run into more friction or less engagement.
  • Which, arguably, becomes a problematic feedback cycle in which All becomes a "better" feed than curating a set of subscriptions.
  • Perhaps a clear mechanism for this to manifest is that anyone can up/down vote anything, which means All-feeders can influence what appears in Subscription-feeders' feeds by imposing their tastes/preferences on posts' scores. In fact, if All-feeders are substantial in number and activity relative to Sub-feeders, this could be a sizeable influence on post ordering across lemmy/threadiverse.

Now I don't know if any of this is really a problem at all, I'm just thinking out loud here (as, to make my bias clear, someone who doesn't get using the All).

As far as Lemmy design decisions go:

  • Should non-subscribers be allowed or disallowed to vote on posts/comments in communities they're not subscribed to? My intuition on this is obviously not (ie, disallowed) and that the All feed is just for browsing not participating. For me, it's about enabling communities to form their own identity and sub-culture that doesn't get pushed around by others.
    • How this could be enforced? No voting from the All and/or Local feed. Seems easy and straight forward.
    • You could limit voting to those who have a subscription to the community, but then anyone could just easily subscribe and then vote while sticking to All. And that'd be harder to implement too I'd imagine.
  • Maybe communities should be able to control this behaviour. Private and local-only communities are apparently on the road map. Excluding non-subscribers from voting seems like a reasonable continuation of such options.
    • To get even more annoyingly complex, I could imagine communities having the option to exclude down votes or exclude down votes for non-subscribers. I'm sure that'd raise issues for some people's feeds as non-down-voting communities might unreasonably rise to the top or something. But if multi-communities come along, and voting in All is off or not guaranteed, this feels like a non-issue to me.
 

cross-posted from: https://hachyderm.io/users/maegul/statuses/112442514504667645

Google's play on Search, Ads and AI feels obvious to me.

* They know search is broken.
* And that people use AI in part because it takes the ads and SEO crap out.
* IE, AI is now what Google was in 2000. A simple window onto the internet.
* Ads/SEO profits will fall with AI.
* But Google will then just insert shit into AI "answers" for money.
* Ads managed + up-to-date AI will be their new mote and golden goose.

@technology

See @caseynewton 's blog post: https://mastodon.social/@caseynewton/112442253435702607

Cntd (Edit):

That search/SEO is broken seems to be part of the game plan here.

It’s probably like Russia burning Moscow against Napoleon and a hell of a privilege Google enjoy with their monopoly.

I’ve seen people opt for chatGPT/AI precisely because it’s clean, simple and spam free, because it isn’t Google Search.

And as @caseynewton said … the web is now in managed decline.

For those of us who like it, it’s up to us to build what we need for ourselves. Big tech has moved on

 

Dunno about this.

S 1 sucked, let's be real. This doesn't convince me S2 will be any different, so I guess I'll go in expecting to be disappointed.

Though, from the plot points they're showing, it does seem like S1 was just setting the stage and now, as the show runners have claimed, they can just tell the story. We'll see I suppose.

 

With the VisionPro hype already dead (maybe forever?), bad or tasteless iPad ads, purposeless updates to iPad, Apple dropping their car project, and reaching out to OpenAI or Google for AI services ... it certainly feels like it to me. They've at least run into their limitations recently however much they want to find the "next iPhone".

With the VisionPro, I always thought it'd flop and so predicted that it'd be the end for Cook. I'm still holding onto that prediction.

 

The linked video (cinemastix) runs through the ideas (which others had come up with) and how they're actually applicable to Star Wars because Lucas said they were actually more like silent films, based more on their music and visuals than dialogue.

Now no one needs to be told the dialogue in Star Wars isn't the main attraction ... but I'd never thought about them as silent films let alone actually watching them that way. I'd kinda be into trying that out, at least maybe for ESB.

And then there's the idea of a Black and White samurai version of the prequels! Which is a thing (with Japanese dub) ... and well that actually looks legit!

 

In this case, it's one specific channel: https://diode.zone/c/andybalaam_lectures/videos?s=1. That is, !andybalaam_lectures@diode.zone. It's run by @andybalaam@lemmy.ml / @andybalaam@mastodon.social

AFAICT, federation hasn't been working from this channel to lemmy for ~3 months, for all the instances I checked (perhaps a particular lemmy version broke things?).

EG:

By comparison:

I'm not following anything else on peertube so I don't know how common this is (and I couldn't find anything on the GitHub issues), but different behaviour on mastodon and lemmy would superficially indicate that it's a lemmy problem, which would be a shame given that lemmy is much better for consuming peertube.

 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15178977

FWIW, this isn't to do with me personally at all, I'm not looking to do anything dodgy here, but this came up as a theoretical question about remote work and geographical security, and I realised I didn't know enough about this (as an infosec noob)

Presuming:

  • an employer provides the employee with their laptop
  • with security software installed that enables snooping and wiping etc and,
  • said employer does not want their employee to work remotely from within some undesirable geographical locations

How hard would it be for the employee to fool their employer and work from an undesirable location?

I personally figured that it's rather plausible. Use a personal VPN configured on a personal router and then manually switch off wifi, bluetooth and automatic time zone detection. I'd presume latency analysis could be used to some extent?? But also figure two VPNs, where the second one is that provided by/for the employer, would disrupt that enough depending on the geographies involved?

What else could be done on the laptop itself? Surreptitiously turn on wiki and scan? Can there be secret GPSs? Genuinely curious!

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