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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I personally feel like anyone who’s not a bigot IS by nature a feminist at least in a solidarity for the ENTIRE human race sense, but keep in mind, this is coming from my perspective as a male, so I might be missing something by virtue of it not regularly impacting me personally.

    I’d love a less-abused word, personally.

    As a guy, I don’t think I’d WANT to call myself a feminist, lest I be incorrectly associated with the likes of Joss Whedon, Neil Gaiman, or a whole host of other clearly NON-feminists who hid behind the word to cover their actions.




  • Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.

    Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It’s one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we’re still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.

    You realize that’s because the gigantic server farms powering all of this “AI” are orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum total of all of those idle home PC’s, right?

    Folding@Home could likely also do in it in under a second if we threw 70+ TERAwatt hours of electricity at server farms full of specialzed hardware just for that purpose, too.






  • the brutal trolling in Ultima Online made me quit

    I’m sitting here thinking “I don’t remember it being TOO bad…”

    and 4 or 5 guys on horseback come and fuck your shit up for an hour or two

    Oh. Yeah.

    There’s a reason someone (Midas?) once parodied the entire steppenwolf song…

    Well

    You don’t know what

    We can find

    Why don’t you die for me little n00b

    On a magic Corp Por ride



  • So, I kinda had this problem myself at one point a decade and a half ago, only it was booze and serviio.

    I ended up taking an old tower I had, installing Ubuntu on it with no Xwindows or GUI of any kind, set up ssh, and unplugged the monitor, keyboard, and mouse and accessed the Ubuntu box only from a putty session on my windows box.

    Then, when I wanted to do anything on the Linux box I’d ssh in and command line it. And Google and try again until I got it right.

    I turned it into a domain controller for the windows boxes (well, login server via ldap) and had an irc bouncer and a bot on it, among other things.

    All while still drinking and streaming video.

    I can’t say what the magic bullet will be for anyone else, but I was able to learn by removing my “crutches” until it just… Clicked for me. YMMV but don’t stop trying.



  • More like “sales teams are the reason middle managers think ALL employees slack off when not watched.”

    I get that sales is a SUPER depressing culture, a ridiculously antiquated work environment, and full of some utterly soul-sucking mandates from above, but I have never seen, in any workplace, a team that needs someone constantly riding herd on them like the sales team.

    Every place I’ve worked, every place that a place I’ve worked has had as a client, and every business I’ve ever visited had the same problem – sales people are largely unmotivated because their job has a much higher chance to SUCK OUT LOUD than most of the other jobs at a given company.

    When five figure quarterly bonuses, daily friendly team competitions for gift cards, more paid-for-by-the-company outings than the c suites get and pickle ball on company time twice a week aren’t enough to hype people up to do their actual job, something is really fucking wrong with the job expectations.


  • Some of it is about the "Why"s.

    Netflix nearly stamped out piracy for a while there by being a vastly more attractive alternative. Between them and Hulu, and to a lesser extent prime(at the time) if it was streaming, you could watch it somewhere at a reasonable price for a marginally reasonable viewing experience that was at least as good as most TPB downloads.

    Then the IP owners got greedier and decided to strike out on their own with the “everyone has a streaming service” model, which would be GREAT if they largely shared content, but they don’t.

    The greed continues, not in order to adequately compensate creators, but to make a few handfuls of people not just rich but filthy rich. Every action they take suddenly becomes more penny pinching for more greed. At this point lots of the CONTENT CREATORS wish they had a better choice (how often do they say ‘please watch it this way, that’s just how they rank stuff, sorry’?)

    Why is it the opposite with AI?

    Because in comparison with stuff like streaming video or music platforms, AI is BARELY pretending to offer a functional service in exchange for the greed that’s behind all of the money they’re trying to force it to make for them.

    And that’s just for one side of the debate.

    Why isn’t the fact that AI is largely garnering the same responses even from DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED GROUPS telling you something about how bad of an idea it is in it’s current incarnation?



  • What in the actual fuck are you on about?

    They genuinely believe some random guy is god incarnate so they tormented him his entire life to try and get him to kill himself,

    Nothing in wicca allows any of that, so far as I’m aware.

    That’s SO far off base with what I understand of the basic tenets of wicca that it’d be like an humanist atheist vegan suddenly signing on to work as a halal butcher and then deciding animals aren’t enough, it’s time to butcher people instead.


  • Why do you think a different word is needed?

    Because the word has been largely washed of all negative connotations, at least across the minds of the majority of the populace in the U.S.

    If you are trying to convey what the word settler means in a dictionary by using it in casual conversation, you are likely to find that it is not carrying the full weight of its intended meaning in the mind(s) of the listener(s).

    This makes it a FUNCTIONALLY inadequate word despite being a technically correct one.


  • The kicker there is … Nobody I know is going to think “wow, playback on this video sucks, I should disable my ad blocker”.

    Like, it wouldn’t occur to ANYONE I know that a piece of software we consider necessary could be the problem, ESPECIALLY if everything else is working fine.

    That’s not even number ten on the list of troubleshooting steps and most people don’t make it past one or two before giving up.

    WTF were they thinking?