I suspect that the people who are making money are the companies who build and maintain the cloud connectivity — i.e. business-to-business contracts.

I read a thing recently where someone was having a lot of problems with their Beko Bosch dishwasher. They’d gone for that brand because they’re known to be one of the more reliable brands, and they thought they were getting one that didn’t have silly “smart” features, but they were dismayed to find that they were wrong. I remember it caused them a lot of stress because functions that used to be available via a button on the dishwasher were no longer accessible without connecting stuff.

Edit: and by “recently”, I mean a several months ago.

Edit 2: down thread, someone posted a video by the same guy, I think. I read it as a blog post, but this is the video version if you fancy watching a thing that will make you curse the modern world.

Boycotts worked in protesting apartheid South Africa. Boycotts have also had tangible impact on Israel’s economy, and given that it seems that internationally, the tides have changed in terms of countries actually recognising the genocide.

You’re right that it’s more powerful to identify what activists are doing and to join in their efforts, but this isn’t an “either/or” kind of problem. I agree that it’s not productive if people boycott a thing and go no further — we do need people pushing back in more active ways. However, boycotts can have an impact if enough people do it. Furthermore, I think that boycotts can act as an easily accessible first step towards more active support of a cause, as well as a way of keeping an issue in people’s minds.

Damn, thanks for this comment — it was doing my head in trying to remember where I knew the name Erika Ishii from

I feel like this should be an xkcd explains (if it isn’t already one)

That sounds like an awesome gift. I bet they have loads of people saying “awesome t-shirt, where did you get it?”, and then they get to say “thanks! My friend made it for me.” That’s the best feeling

“i don’t know trees.”

That’s a shame. Trees are cool. However, I bet this means you know some cool stuff about things I don’t know about, so it’s swings and roundabouts.

Yes.

I feel this. I’ve found that a good response in those circumstances is to say “sorry, can we put a pin in this? I feel like I don’t have the capacity to properly process what you’re telling me right now, so I’d rather we resume this conversation at a later point. Thanks for helping me figure out [bool question] though.”

It’s a useful response if one genuinely is interested to learn, but not at that moment.

Sometimes, (amongst friends who accept how thoroughly weird I am) I will actually say “XOR” when I want to make my intentions clear. It means that when they give the silly OR answer, I can jokingly chastise them for poor listening. The downside is that they relish the opportunity to give OR answers when I am not sufficiently specific in my question. I reap what I sow ¯_(ツ)_/¯

If it does kill you, it’ll often be a slow, drawn out death that takes days, if not weeks to kill you. And if it doesn’t kill you, it’ll give you permanent liver damage. I’m honestly shocked that it’s available over the counter, with how close the toxic dose is to the therapeutic dose. Scary stuff

I agree with your assessment of Reddit. I’ve been on Lemmy since the Reddit API debacle, and part of why I’ve stuck around is that I find that it scratches the same itch that Reddit used to. Glad to have you here.

“That said, people can put it in “recipe” format - a set of steps to be blindly followed without understanding - but even there you have some minimal foundational knowlegde required”

Something that’s quite interesting is that apparently one of the core components of how Latin and Greek used to be taught in fancy public schools (especially in like, Isaac Newton’s era) was that students would be made to copy out sections from classical literature (such as the Odyssey). Obviously this would be happening alongside lessons involving basic grammar, but I’ve seen some scholars suggest that this kind of blind repetition was a key component to the language learning, and that it may even be useful for learning languages in a modern context.

I’ve heard it’s gotten worse since Brexit

“Seriously people, if you’re a dev learn and get good at code reviewing”

It’s a useful skill, even outside of the context of cleaning up AI code. It seems to be universally the case that it’s easier to write code than it is to read it (which is why I sometimes find myself so baffled at my own code that I end up rewriting it again from scratch (good comments are a gift to future-You)).

I’ve been trying to get into contributing to open-source code recently, and it’s been a useful exercise in learning to understand other people’s code. It’s also been making me a more skilled programmer, because reading lots of code helps me to understand how things are typically done in a way that textbook learning can’t. It’s been especially useful to understand how large code projects are structured, given that most of my experience in writing code that’s used by other people has been in smaller, ad-hoc scientific contexts (e.g. writing a script that adds hydrogens onto the protein structures found in the protein database — by default, they’re not included, because it depends on the pH of the environment the protein exists in)

I like this response

I don’t know if I’m real, but I know that I feel sad if I think about people I care about being harmed. I think this is what Descartes was getting at with his “I think, therefore I am”. Because I can experience my own thoughts and feelings, I feel like I’m probably real, even if I don’t know if other people are. If I’m real, that means my care for my loved ones is real, even if I don’t know if they are real. Given that I can’t know whether they’re real or not, it doesn’t really affect my actions.

If I’m not real, and I’m just a simulated consciousness in a virtual world, then that also doesn’t affect things, because all I know is my own perspective. If the only reason why I care about my loved ones is that I’ve been programmed to, then I can’t really do anything about it. If the prospect of not being real hurts me so much, then I could kill myself, to “exit the game”, so to speak, but that would hurt my family. Caring about that is perhaps silly, given that this hypothetical would also involve them not being real, but I don’t think that makes a difference. I just know that I feel sad when I think of them being sad, and that’s one of the most real things I can comprehend.

I think of it sort of like how I think about a prospective afterlife. I’m agnostic, so I don’t actively believe in somewhere like heaven. We can think of heaven as being “the real world” to this hypothetically virtual one. I haven’t seen any compelling evidence to make me believe in heaven though, so whilst I’m open to the possibility that it exists, it seems that the most sensible thing is to focus on living as well as I can in this life. It’s all I can do.

Let yourself be cringe sometimes. Understand that learning how to be yourself is an active skill, as is learning how and when to wear a more socially appropriate mask (because “just be yourself” is overly idealistic advice that can end up being demoralising).

It’s okay to struggle. Adults will often tell teenagers that whatever they’re struggling with doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of it all, and that’s incredibly isolating to hear, even if it’s true. Certainly, the problems that I grapple with now are objectively far larger and weightier than what felt world-ending to me as a teenager, but what’s the point in emphasising objectivity when we experience everything through our own subjective experience?

My life is objectively more difficult than it was when I was younger, but despite this, I would never choose to go back and re-experience my teenage years. I was miserable back then, and as an adult, I relish the power that I have to make my own choices, even if that power comes with a whole host of responsibilities. I know it’s cheesy and trite to say “it gets better” (especially because that frames improvement as inevitable, which feels hollow), but for some people, it does get better — it did for me.

So let yourself be messy sometimes, and recognise that your struggles are valid, no matter what they are. It’s a lot of pressure to be your age — society seems to expect teenagers to know what they want from life, which is silly to me, given that many adults don’t know what they want. No matter how thoroughly you plan, there will be things you simply can’t plan for — some good, some bad. Give yourself space to grow, and you’ll make it easier for life’s surprises to be good ones.

And finally, the big secret about adulthood is that no-one really knows what they’re doing. Realising this is terrifying, but liberating. I might not always know how to best support you, and you might not know what help to ask for when you’re struggling, but we can figure that out together. Just try to hang in there — as a fellow human who feels overwhelmed by the world, I’m here with you.

One of the reasons why a solarpunk way of thinking is so appealing to me is that it challenges me to think about what we could do to subvert a dystopian scenario and build something better. After all, climate change is going to cause tremendous upheaval, even if the world collectively stopped making things worse. It’s a more humble way of thinking about a problem, because it isn’t built on the idea that we can be masters of the world, but instead need to learn how to understand ourselves as intra-acting within ecosystems

I’ve not heard of A Highland Song, but Outer Wilds is one of my all-time favourite games. I’m going to check it out; thanks for the recommendation

I realise that you weren’t actively making a recommendation, but that’s effectively what you’ve done. I love finding new stuff through organic conversations like this — we’re living in an era of endless slop content getting in our way, so I relish these small moments of connection with other people.

Regarding Elden Ring, I completely agree. The highlight of the game was the very beginning, when you first get into Limgrave. Fairly early on, I found the chest in the lake ruins that teleports you into Caelid, and it was such as awesome experience to feel so terrified. The world felt so huge