And I feel guilty as I type this because maybe I could be doing more to solve some of these problems, but individual action only goes so far. Some of the world's problems would take collective action to really fix.

If everyone were on the same page and priorities straight, climate change could've been solved by now. Again, not trying to shame individuals. We should all do our best to reduce our carbon footprint but a real solution would require coordinated effort by society getting its priorities in order and realizing the future of civilization is more important than money

And speaking of money, poverty and homelessness shouldn't exist anymore. We should have universal basic income and free housing, it would save money in the long run and make life better for everybody, but we can't have that because some people are stuck on the notion that we can't give stuff to people who don't earn it. Unless they're born rich.

And the inevitable AI disaster wouldn't be inevitable if we could all collectively just stop building it. But we can't have that can we? Cause countries don't trust eachother not to keep building it. And rich people.

And the frigging fascist takeover of America and probable oncoming genocide against various minority groups in America would be so easily prevented if the fucking government dud its fucking job and enforced the rules, but too many of them are criminals

It's all preventable but isn't being prevented because society fucking sucks. Especially capitalist society. Humanity as a whole didn't deserve to survive the pandemic cause we suck. At least that's what I'll tell myself to feel better while civilization collapses. Maybe we fucking deserve it.

But then a part of me is still optimistic. Humanity has survived a lot more than we deserve to. Every generation ever has believed they were in the end times. Maybe we'll survive all of this and come out better than before. Keep some hope alive. If I should die in a concentration camp or be killed by robots, I want to die with at least a little hope in my heart that the future will be better

I'm gonna try and not give too much detail, lest they figure out I'm talking about them, but somebody posted on Facebook about a specific injustice they heard about and declared they will unfriend anybody who doesn't care enough to post about it.

Okay, should I assume you don't care about the fact that Trump is going to interfere in elections because I didn't see you post about it? Should I assume you don't care about the war in Iran or Ukraine or Israel because I haven't seen you post about it? I recently saw a YouTube video informing me that the country of Niger just made some new draconian anti-LGBTQ laws. Am I to assume you don't care about that if you don't make a post about it?

You're a bad person now if you don't virtue signal by making a post about wvery injustice in the world. If I make a post about every injustice, they'll all just get lost in the pile. Injustices happen every day to millions of people. I guess you don't care about the majority of them.

What does making a post about it even do? Let everyone know how good you are for caring about the issue? At best it raises awareness but action requires more than just spreading awareness.

i was scroll through Amazon Prime Video lookin for something good to watch... i see the movie IP MAN... im like oh yeah aesome sounds like some thing like matrix, or johnny new manic, or judge dread... imagine my disappointment its about the chinese guy who started wang chung!!!

1/5 starts

I do software development, and I'm one of two computer people in our business, with my boss being the other (the rest of the business is manufacturing). My boss recently discovered that retool has a "make stuff with ai" feature, and he just showed me his attempt at remaking one of my bigger projects with this. During the whole conversation, I couldn't get him to even start to understand any of my practical or moral objections to the whole "ai development" shit. He's acting like this is just another approach to development and doesn't seem to be considering the fact that you're offloading your thinking and understanding to a product owned by a private company with no transparency in what ends up getting made, or that this won't let future projects be better. It's just "we can make the thing faster".

I have used computers starting around the mid to early 1980s. The first computer I used was an Apple 2e. (actually it was wrote as Apple IIe)

I have built my own computers. I am the guy that people used to come and ask questions about computers and software. For the last several years developers have been insistant on making things harder and more complicated.

It just took 40 fucking minutes for me to turn on and transfer the data from 1 ipad to a new ipad.

How the hell do you the software developer make things that fucked up?

I do exactly what was asked and the damned (new) Ipad just keeps looping.

For the love of all that is good in this world, if you are the developer that thinks this shit is ok, find the tallest building on the planet and jump. There is no reason to make things this screwed up. I hate you just as much as I hate trump, and that is saying something.

There is nothing that this planet would lose if you were gone from it. I am so sick and tired of dealing with shit products.

this is the sad thing. I installed and am using linux mint and that is a dream compared to some of this garbage.

Why do you feel the need to make things that just plain suck? It isn't just apple. It's microsoft. It's interfaces on other electronic items. Please just stop doing stupid shit. and if you aren't capable of stopping the crappy way that you think. Just go flip burgers at McDonalds.

Edit: These others have said you’re right it’s managers and boards, but there are pheromonal developers also the same way they just don’t get it. But you are right the majority of the problem is the managers and the system that has been created.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/59442175

When you choose a Lemmy home instance, you're trusting somebody else's infrastructure with your account, posts, comments, and uploaded media.

If that instance disappears without a usable backup or migration path, years of your contributions can disappear with it.

Yet when I look at most instances, I have absolutely no idea what I'm trusting.

Is this running on:

• A $5 VPS?
• A dedicated server with redundant storage?
• Someone's mini PC under their desk?
• AWS with costs that explode exponentially as traffic increases and hapless admin not realizing that just shutting it down as they never had a plan?
• A database with proper backups?
• A server with no backups at all?

I recently had an instance tell me my posting activity alone was becoming too expensive for them. Their solution was - just banning me and removing all my data. no im not kidding - thx https://lemmy.radio/.

That immediately makes me wonder: what are you running? (apparently it was aws micro or something and person clearly had no idea what they were doing)

If a few hundred posts can create a meaningful financial problem, is the instance massively undersized? Are you paying enterprise hyperscaler prices for workloads that could run cheaply on dedicated hardware? Is storage the problem? Bandwidth? Pictrs? Database load? Do you even have a plan my friends?

I don't know, because users are given almost zero infrastructure information.

I'm not asking admins to publish IP addresses, network diagrams, credentials, or anything security-sensitive.

Just put some basics in /about:

• Hosting: OVH / Hetzner / AWS / home-hosted / etc.
• Compute: 8 cores / 32 GB RAM
• Storage: 2 TB NVMe
• Backups: Daily, retained 30 days
• Media backups: Yes / No
• Off-site backups: Yes / No
• Approximate capacity: Small / Medium / Large
• Funding: Self-funded / donations / nonprofit / etc.

That tells me infinitely more about whether I'm comfortable making an instance my home.

• Have admin(s) ever hosted any production software before? First time?
• are there even backups?
• Is there even any plans for scalability? What if your traffic goes 4x? what about 20x? do you have a plan beyond banning me and removing everythig I ever posted?
  And honestly, backups matter to same tune as CPU model.

Federation gives us the freedom to choose our instance. Great.

But you can't make an informed choice when you have no idea whether your digital home is a properly backed-up server or a $5 VPS held together with Docker Compose and prayers.

Is that the reason why all lemmy instances dont let you upload more than 5Mb media? probably.

If you cant afford hosting costs - holy fuck, just stop fucking saying "everyone welcome" if you then going to ban those same "welcomed" people after they post 10 image memes (thx https://sopuli.xyz/ and https://lemmy.zip/ and https://lemmy.radio/ and https://lemmy.ml/). no no - 👏you 👏 cant 👏 afford 👏 non-text 👏 users 👏, - instead you falsely accuse people of spamming and banning their accounts. No wonder lemmy is at 35k MAU. Hardware poor admins - you don't even know what spamming is, you shouldn't have ~~kids~~ users if you cant afford them, dont invite them in or just advertise your instances as text-only.

Hardware poor admins - stop inviting people. you have no capacity and only actively harming lemmy adoption.

There should be a list of such instances that should be inviting people at all.

Instance infrastructure shouldn't be a mystery.

If you're asking users to build years of history on your server, give them enough information to understand what they're building it on. You likely cant afford non-text users anyways.

It has often been memed that you can count the amount of coders of Twitter on one hand. This is cited as being the reason Twitter traps people in verification loops when it suspects people are bots, at least when the other reason isn't being cited which is the suspicion that Twitter wants to force everyone to use the app. If true, Twitter has less of a workforce than Wikipedia and even less of a workforce than minor art websites like Sheezy Art. SHEEZY ART has more of a workforce than Twitter. Think about that for a moment.

I was talking about this with someone I'm subscribed to on YouTube the other day. Today, they then got stuck in the verification loop in question. Usually people get stuck in these loops because they shared a link (god forbid) or even uploaded a picture, which often has the accidental side effect of someone being seen as a bot, since pictures are processed like links. This person's crime? Simply copying and pasting a Twitter URL from Discord into a new tab. That was literally it. They pasted the link, and it brought them straight to the unverifiable verification page. Now they're stuck there, forever.

And no, not everyone is able to chalk it up to "it's Musk's website, he can do what he wants with it", because 1) Musk also says that accounts that are inactive for a certain amount of time become deleted, and 2) people like this YouTuber have their whole art career on this website. Combined, that means that once the account is banned, anyone who stole their pictures are now the OG owners of those pictures.

Elon Musk, you're a trillionaire. I'm not saying this just as a way to be confronting, but it's time to start acting like one. As someone who also has money, it's worth mentioning that having this amount of money while being this bumbling is an unfortunate recipe for chronic theft (of goods, of services, etc.), as people begin to feel fed up and themselves cheated with no way out (because according to people in our modern culture, this should be how "great power without great responsibility" is sized down; their words, not mine).

And the worst part is how they refuse to listen to me. I'll help people get off big tech. I'll help them learn what the internet actually is and how web 3.0 is shit and ruined everything. But they won't listen to me and just make fun of me. Their loss. I wish i had smarter friends.

Yesterday I was playing around with my other CD-RW drive which only works under Windows.
Someone suggested the issue might stem from my IDE adapter, so I tried it with this one again, just to find it stopped working at some point.

Why I find particularly this one a great loss

It worked just fine with Linux, unlike the other one.
But also, the audio output is clean.
The other one is extremely noisy. This one on the other hand doesn't even produce audible hiss, like my phone does, for example.

That brings me to a second point, the play button. Like many older IDE drives, it has a headphone jack in addition to the rear audio port. But the play/skip button means it needs no command to start playing audio from a computer, and therefore I could also use it as a standalone CD player.
Yet I could still use it for burning and reading data discs.

What it does now

It can't read burned discs reliably. With audio, it will keep skipping. It also produces unreadable burns.
It can still play pressed discs, which suggests major laser degradation at the young age of 23 years. (It did have issues skipping tracks even before, so it wasn't that sudden.)

Yeah, I get it... the formatting goes away... why so alarmist? And is the formatting really "data" anyway?

I mean obviously if we stop going outside, socializing will be harder. If we see too few face to face, we'll feel lonelier. But what I've noticed is that social media kinda creates artificial loneliness. I've mainly started using social media to find people and talk to random people about a year or 2 ago. Before that, I've never felt lonely even if I was home and not talking to anyone. After I started using it in a way to talk with random people, I just felt lonely constantly, as if I wasn't talking to people. I've realized this, and quit doing it to see if my theory was true, it was. I didn't feel lonely at all, even though I technically had less human interaction than before. Social media, if used this way really just creates an artificial loneliness feeling so you keep using it, as I think about it though, it was probably engineered to "trap" people to keep using the apps.

I just started noticing lately that so many people unintentionally assume women can't do anything. For example, I've seen people applaud a girl after she dropped her motorcycle and picked it back up, as if they were amazed by it. I swear to God, people just straight up think that women are incapable of doing basic stuff. What's wild is that I've met quite a few women who actually enjoy this. It's so goofy because they are literally being viewed as less capable, yet they are happy about it. Then, you get criticized just because you didn't treat them like they were less. I'm a dude, but damn, this situation kinda vexes me. I mean sure, enjoy chivalry if you want, but getting shit on for not assuming you're less capable is so annoying. It's not even that I don't want to help, I mean I don't mind helping, if it's needed but like god damn, I can't read minds.

I'm not talking like the laws of physics, yes those exist in nature. I'm talking about manmade laws.

Laws are a social construct! They mean nothing unless someone enforces them!

In the book Lord of the Flies, when the kids are on a desert island with no adults, there's some inertia initially where they still behave as if adults are watching. Until it dawns on them that nobody is there to enforce the rules and they can do whatever the fuck they want, then there's chaos.

People still behave as if the law is just some natural force that exists regardless of enforcement. No matter how many times they see the law broken without consequences. No matter how many times cops ignore crimes or prosecutors drop cases they shouldn't or judges make a bad ruling, some people still have this blind faith that when something illegal happens, it will be punished. Or some even seem to think people in power physically can't break the law.

I had a fight with someone cause they were posting some shit about how ICE "can't" enter houses without a warrant and I replied with the meme about how robbers can't legally take your stuff without your consent. Sorry but ICE can and do do things the law says they "can't".

And sorry, but Trump can and probably will interfere with elections and stay in office for as long as he lives and invade other countries and commit full on genocide if nobody stops him.

And people act like it's an inevitability that Trump and the other fascists will face nuremberg trials. Sorry but it's not an inevitability. The nuremberg trials happened when other countries successfully invaded Germany and put an end to the regime. It's not going to happen automatically. It's only going to happen if there's revolution or war. Maybe a newly elected government will prosecute these clowns, but I doubt it.

The law is made up. It doesn't exist in nature. The only thing protecting your rights is a social contract. It is not inevitable that justice will be served. This isn't just in the Untied States. All over the world, laws are enforced inconsistently. Nothing guarantees the law will work as it is supposed to.

Right when Fable is available again, and I can finally start writing my book.

What happened

I didn't pass enough subjects. To study there again, I'll have to go through regular admission procedure again, but it's too late to sign up for next year.

Passed subjects acceptance

Like other colleges, the one I went to accepts passed subjects from previous studies. So if you studied at a different college and passed the same subjects (within past x years), you don't have to re-do them.

However, unlike with the others I checked, our college will only accept subjects passed at A or B. This probably makes sense, as they might not trust other colleges to hold students up to the same standards.

This means that I'll have to retake the subjects I already passed.

Idea 1 - immediate transfer request (not possible)

Not wanting to wait a year, I hoped to go to different college of the same university, and ask for transfer right after registration. (If rejected, idea 2)

Unfortunately, the university's rules only permit transfers within the same field, and the same one is not available to sign up for anymore.

Idea 2 - Piggyback on different college for a year

There are 2 colleges on the same university that still accept students and offer housing on a dorm in the same city.
The university rules also permit students to change their study plans, with possibility of registering subjects on different colleges of the same university.

Thus my idea was to officially "attend" College of Mechanical Engineering (which is desperate enough to have no entrance exams), withdraw from all their subjects, and register relevant subjects on College of Informatics.

I asked the study department about my plan. They confirmed it should be possible, but the A/B grading requirement remains.

How does that make sense?

I could take their subjects at their own college, pass them by their own standards, yet they themselves wouldn't accept them.

Alternatively, I could attend an easier college with lower standards, spend less effort for A/B, and pass just the same.

Alternative ideas

Only idea 1 makes sense economically (if the request got accepted), as otherwise I'd pay for 2 extra years rather than just one.
That sucks, I wished to basically go "hey, I am still here like a cockroach".

So to stay here, it's best to just get a job for a year and try not to loose too many fingers (all I found in my location with provided training and no required education is "plastic press operator" or "metal machinist").

Or give up, and study a different field.

I see this often on Facebook. Lately, on posts about Taylor Swift's wedding. Every news story, people in the comments want to tell everyone how little they care

1. if you truly didn't care, you wouldn't expend the energy it takes to comment on it, you'd just scroll on by. You clearly care about the fact that it's being talked about

2. if it came up on your algorithm, you probably did something to give the impression you were interested in it

3. you're continuing to show the algorithm you're interested in it by leaving a comment. Since you reinforced that you want this type of content, it will continue to appear on your feed!

4. the pages posting these stories benefit from engagement even if it's negative. By leaving comments, you're reinforcing it and causing them to post more of it

On a similar note, why do people follow pages that solely post stuff they don't want? I used to follow this page called Geeky Memes that just posted content to troll the right wing. And, because right-wingers are stupid, a lot of them kept complaining about it and never seemed to catch on that they should just unfollow the page when literally all it posted was stuff to piss them off. This was back when Facebook only showed you posts from pages you were following too, not like now when just anything might pop up on your feed

I don't need 24oz of pasta sauce. Or 48. Or by the gallon. I need 8 ounces. And no I don't want to have this jar of pasta sauce hanging around my fridge till it goes bad and not dominant to have pasta 3 time in a row.

There should be no debate! It should be universally agreed that that cop fucked up! What is wrong with your head that you think opening fire in the vicinity of A BABY OVER A CASE OF ALLEGED SHOPLIFTING was somehow justified?

Do you think defending this makes the police look good? What would make the police look good would be universal condemnation of this act! Just fucking accept that sometimes people in power fuck up!

People are going well the mother shouldn't have taken the baby with her to commit crimes. Fuck you, she had a receipt, she didn't even commit a crime! What you mean to say is, she should have known better than to go shopping while black! They go well why did she flee? Well if I were black in America I'd be afraid to pull over for those trigger happy lunatic cops too! Even if she had been stealing, since when does the law execute the children of shoplifters?

Shouldn't this whole thing make you stop and think maybe police should stop dealing with minor crimes by opening fire? I live in Canada and have dealt with lots of police officers and I've never EVER seen them pull a gun. I'm pretty sure they save it for when it's absolutely necessary. In England, cops don't even usually carry guns! Why don't you Americans stop and think maybe lethal force isn't an appropriate way for cops to deal with minor issues? Maybe there are other options? If they were that concerned about stolen diapers, photograph her luscence plate and go get her later! But they weren't concerned about stolen diapers, were they? They were concerned she committed the crime of being black in public!

All it would have taken was minding their own business, and that money could have paid a couple CEO wages instead. Think of all the good that could have been done if that money went into Musk or Bezo's pockets instead.

I am not talking about the obviously cheap Temu items that are made for 1 use before disposal or burial in a hoarder's house.

Instead it's about electronics which seems nicely made until "oh, what the fuck is this".

Some examples:

Other electronics

RFID scanner with permanently half-pressed button

If testing for "does it work" was all they did, then yeah, it passed. But the plastic housing was too narrow for the button, causing it to be mostly pressed. Even just touching the housing elsewhere would make that register as button press.

Speakers/earphones that scream "low battery" at full volume

Not much to comment here. I bought some earbuds, and got a nice midnight shock when they did that.

Screwing into plastic

I've got a 5.25" drive enclosure. Taking it apart, I was pleased. For the outer metal sheets they put metal inserts into the inner plastic for the screws.
And then the thing that actually holds some weight is tapered holes in brittle plastic for mounting the drive.

Lack of insulation

I've got an IDE to SATA adapter. Sounds like a piece of electronics that needs some thought to design.
And... what the fuck, the power connector leads are only separated from touching metal by a thin piece of foam tape they will puncture soon.

Badly designed phone cases

At this point I just expect to need a knife to fix them.
2 phones back I had to cut a lager hole for the headphone jack.
With previous phone I had to cut down some of the silicone (?) to reach side-mounted fingerprint scanner.
With current phone I had to cut off the entire camera lens protector part as it was conducting light from flash back to the lens.

Smartphones

And now the main part.

There are a few brands that manufacture unique phones such as Doogee, Unihertz, Ulefone, etc.
There's also many devices with pretty powerful hardware for a great price.

But the software...
Seems to frequently be a very buggy experience. Also, previously I had a Poco which had ads throughout the UI.
Oh, and there's a chance for pre-installed malware.
Anyway, for the bugs, it's things like random restarts, partial system crashes, and it seems even a chance of bricking on update.
If you check reviews from people online, you'll figure out one thing quickly: if the software currently works at a usable level, DO NOT UPDATE EVER AGAIN.
Oh, one of the more important bugs was reversed L/R channels for microphones on the Poco.
Speaking of audio, my Ulefone has really crappy audio post-processing, so the only way to get usable audio is to use "Unprocessed" audio source in Open Camera, and then edit the audio appropriately in Audacity.
Anyway, the list of bugs would be quite long.

What really sucks, is the lack of custom ROMs since these devices tend to be MediaTek-based.
And I really hate that as there's so much interesting hardware with crappy software.
If you haven't seen them, they have really tiny devices, devices with huge batteries (like 25,000mAh large) that look like bricks, phones with keyboards, massive speaker, extra strong lights, even built-on projectors, etc.

This feels odd to explain, but there's 4 main scenarios:

1. There's too much stuff I have to do

I just get overwhelmed. I don't know where to start. What do I do first? I must start right away, but how?
If I pick one thing to do first, the knowledge of other ones keeps taking my focus, and I just end up doing nothing and panicking.

2. There's just something I have to do

Absolutely anything will suddenly seem interesting. I am supposed to study math?
How about getting back to Meteor LRPT reception? What about checking out the TETRA signal in your location? Installing Proxmox on a laptop, sure thing. Yes, now is the time to read datasheet of NTAG NFC tags and try out manually sending the commands in hexadecimal. What's math, let's start studying railroad regulations. Meshcore? Hell yeah, let's join the network.
etc...

3. There's nothing to do

Sounds like the time for my interests. But now, nothing comes to mind. Nothing sounds interesting. Absolutely nothing. I don't want to waste time, yet at the same time I don't want to... anything.
Even just getting dressed up feels like dragging my soul across sharp rocks.

4. Deadline is approaching FAAAAAAAST

Oddly, in some way the best scenario. I can finally get myself to be productive, and it even feels good. I see what I did, I see I spent the time well, I can focus.
One good example, an assignment I managed to do shortly before deadline. I put in 16 hours at once, only leaving to the toilet. I finished it at 4am before waking up at 7am, yet, I felt satisfied.
However, one "bad" thing that can happen here is "deadline extended by one week" if I cannot manage it. Suddenly, I loose that feeling of urgency, and slip back into scenario 2.

Bonus: Everything is a distraction.

I occasionally see people recommend putting your phone away, disabling notifications, etc...
Cool, cool.
However, I often get distracted by things like... the pen and paper. Look at that beautiful ink being transferred to the sheet of paper.
But hell, you can remove any physical objects, but you can't remove thoughts. I am listening, I am focused, and oh fuck, there goes a 10 minute imaginary conversation.
OK, I need to do better. Focus, listen, read, think, focus, listen, read,... great, I am focusing on focusing itself.

And lastly, ever heard of /dev/null? My brain pipes to it fairly often. Past 5 minutes? Never heard of them.
I can re-read something 3 times, and just immediately forget what the hell that was.
I can think of something, make the slightest physical movement, and it's gone.
I can listen to someone, process it, answer, immediately forget what I just answered to.

Sorry, I'm high, I don't know if this is going to make any sense

I have a board game called Disney villainous and most of its expansions. My aunt told me the only reason they make expansions is to make more money.

She's right, Disney's primary goal in making board games is to make money. But my question is so what? Seriously, as opposed to what? What would be the non-cynical reason they would make more board games? Each expansion does add new elements, creativity and fun are also goals of the makers. But yeah, the primary goal is money. I just don't get why my aunt felt a need to point that out. Yes, they're doing it for money. What is the alternative reason you're suggesting they should be doing it? I think it was that she thought they were claiming the expansions were necessary when they're really optional.

More and more stores are putting in those stupid turnstyles or electronic gates so you can't just go back the way you came. Leaving the only way out via the tills, that are closed and gated so you have to push through the self checkout, lord help you if you stuck a coin in the trolley, they don't have what you came in for and now you got to get through a till with an empty trolley so you can get it back.

It's even worse with the shops that have an opticians or chemist in them that you can't get to thanks to the one way exit gates.

Aarrgghhh.