That’s… a good point. When I make communities, I usually try to err on the side of more general rather than more specific (just because Lemmy doesn’t have quite the userbase of… that other site we never speak the name of), so in this case, I probably should have thought to name it in a way that limited it to just COVID.

But now, I’ve up and named the community. I’d be fine with making it clear in the sidebar that consciousness about the spread of other diseases is entirely welcome, but I don’t think I can change the name (like, the URL) of the community.

But, honestly, I’m also down with just making a whole new community and deleting this one. And, to be fair, I haven’t looked to see if a community like that already exists.

Followup question.

“As opposed to what?”

If everyone is “insane”, what would a “not insane” person look like if one hypothetically did exist?

All but you?

Good stuff. If I’m being honest, I’ve kindof felt a bit “out of the loop” on general “news” since quitting Red…acted. I’m glad to see more news here, and Democracy Now! is a fantastic news source.

Not to say I only ever come to Lemmy for news. I do visit news sites sometimes, and Democracy Now! is one of my most preferred sources. Still, though, it’ll be good for DN articles to show up in my Lemmy feed.

By George, I think OP’s got it.

“A friend”, huh?

I’ll let you him know when I figure it out.

Just my guess here, but…

The desktop/laptop sort of form factor is associated in people’s minds with unlocked bootloaders. People expect to be able to install Linux on them if they want to. Tablets, game systems, and other sorts of consumer electronics, not so much. I’m thinking Microsoft will do what it can to push hardware manufacturers and the software industry as a whole more in the direction of the kinds of devices that consumers already expect to be locked down like tablets or game systems that are “streaming” game systems. And that way, the bootloader will prevent folks from switching to Linux.

Anything to shorten it sounds good to me.

So say we all.

In the U.S., a few years ago, GOP Senator Josh Hawley, one of the speakers who helped incite the January 6th insurrection, introduced a bill to make the term of Copyright 28 years with optionally one renewal for an additional 28 years.

And, it’s so weird to me that I could agree with him on anything really.

Mind you, he introduced that bill in an effort to punish Disney for being too “woke”. And the bill didn’t go anywhere. But I’d let the MAGA nuts use such a bill as an opportunity to crow for a few minutes about their victory over strong woman protagonists or whatever if it got us more reasonable copyright terms. (And honestly that’s too long, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the bullshit we have now.)

Also, fuck Sonny Bono.

Not in the U.S… For work-for-hire, It’s 95 years after publication. For works owned originally by a lump of flesh, blood, and bone, it’s 70 years after the author’s death.

I’m being trolled and I ain’t even mad.

Be serious, please

I just got this too. Using old Reddit (the realest Reddit (which still isn’t saying much)) got rid of the banner and allowed loading all the content.

I don’t know about you, but I sort all my fruit according to tanginess.

Hwi Noree: Yes

I’ll let you know.

If you like that, I highly recommend perusing the Hacker Jargon File, home of such gems as:

• wetware - [prob.: from the novels of Rudy Rucker] 1. The human nervous system, as opposed to computer hardware or software. “Wetware has 7 plus or minus 2 temporary registers.” 2. Human beings (programmers, operators, administrators) attached to a computer system, as opposed to the system’s hardware or software. See liveware, meatware.
• splork! - [Usenet; common] The sound of coffee (or other beverage) hitting the monitor and/or keyboard after being forced out of the mouth via the nose. It usually follows an unexpectedly funny thing in a Usenet post. Compare snarf.
• bag on the side - [prob. originally related to a colostomy bag] An extension to an established hack that is supposed to add some functionality to the original. Usually derogatory, implying that the original was being overextended and should have been thrown away, and the new product is ugly, inelegant, or bloated. Also v. phrase, “to hang a bag on the side [of]”. “C++? That’s just a bag on the side of C …” “They want me to hang a bag on the side of the accounting system.”

Yeah, I think it’s smart to be making an MVP that’s just the engine with plugin support. I think you’ll need a minimal reference mod at least to show how you’d go about making a proper mod that’s actually a “game”. It’s totally valid for that minimal reference mod to be really minimal. Like, more of a testing tool than a “game” per se. Use stick figures. Or even worms or something.

Once you’ve got something that can support mods that other folks could make, folks can jump on board and help if they want to. If not, you can start focusing on a mod that’s an actual “game” later, if you’re still able and willing to continue working on the project.

Importing from Sims games is pretty cool. I’d definitely be interested in that as a feature. But if that was never supported, that’d honestly be fine as well.

If someone wanted something that was “true” to the Sims games, they could make a mod. There was a mod for Luanti called “Mineclone2” (that I think has renamed since, but I don’t recall what to) that was a relatively faithful reproduction of Minecraft in Luanti. Someone could do that if they wanted to. Especially if what you’re building (“SimGine”) get a pretty active modding community like Luanti has.

…can’t seem to differentiate between real vs what’s on the screen…

Speak for yourself.

So many places I could start when answering this question. I guess I’ll just pick one.

It’s a bubble. The hype is ridiculous. There’s plenty of that hype in your post. The claims are that it’ll revolutionize… well basically everything, really. Obsolete human coders. Be your personal secretary. Do your job for you.

Make no mistake. These narratives are being pushed for the personal benefit of a very few people at the expense of you and virtually everyone else. Nvidia and OpenAI and Google and IBM and so on are using this to make a quick buck. Just like TY capitalized on (and encouraged) a bubble back around the turn of the millennium that we now look back on with embarrassment.

In reality, the only thing AI is really effective as is a gimmicky “toy” that entertains as long as the novelty hasn’t worn thin. There’s very little real world application. LLM’s are too unreliable at getting facts straight and not making up BS to be trusted for any real-world use case. Image generating “AI”'s like stable diffusion produce output (and by “produce output” I mean rip off artists) that all has a similar, fakey appearance with major, obvious errors which generally instantly identify it as low-effort “slop”. Any big company that claims to be using AI in any serious capacity is lying either to you or themselves. (Possibly both.)

And there’s no reason to think it’s going to get better at anything, “AI industry” hype not withstanding. ChatGPT is not a step in the direction of general AI. It’s a distraction from any real progress in that direction.

There’s a word for selling something based on false promises. “Scam.” It’s all to hoodwink people into giving them money.

And it’s convincing dumbass bosses who don’t know any better. Our jobs are at risk. Not because AI can do your job just as well or better. But because your company’s CEO is too stupid not to fall for the scam. By the time the CEO gets removed by the board for gross incompetence, it’ll be too late for you. You will have already lost your job by then.

Or maybe your CEO knows full well AI can’t replace people and is using “AI” as a pretense to lay you off and replace you with someone they don’t have to pay as much.

Now before you come back with all kinds of claims about all the really real real-world applications of AI, understand that that’s probably self-deception and/or hype you’ve gotten from AI grifters.

Finally, let me back up a bit. I took a course in college probably back in 2006 or so called “introduction to artificial intelligence”. In that course, I learned about, among other things, the “A* algorithm”. If you’ve ever played a video game where an NPC or enemy followed your character, the A* algorithm or some slight variation on it was probably at play. The A* algorithm is completely unlike LLMs, “generative AI”, and whatever other buzzwords the AI grifting industry has come up with lately. It doesn’t involve training anything on large data sets. It doesn’t require a powerful GPU. When you give it a particular output, you can examine the algorithm to understand exactly why it did what it did, unlike LLMs which produce answers that can’t be tracked down to what training data went into producing that particular response. The A* algorithm has been known and well-understood since 1968.

That kind of “AI” is fine. It’s provably correct and has utility. Basically, it’s not a scam. It’s the shit that people pretend is the next step on the path to making a Commander Data – or the shit that people trust blindly when its output shows up at the top of their Google search results – that needs to die in a fire. And the sooner the better.

But then again, blockchain is still plaguing us after like 16 years. So I don’t really have a lot of hope that enough average people are going to wizen up and see the AI scam for what it really is any time soon.

The future is bleak.

I’m a big fan of jq. It’s a domain-specific language for manipulating JSON data.

ImageMagick is like ffmpeg but for images.

inotify-tools has command-line utilities that can be used in a Bash script or a Bash one-liner to make arbitrary things “happen” when something “happens” to a file or directory. (Then the file is opened or written to or renamed or whatever.)

I probably should mention rsync. It’s like a swiss army knife for copying files from one place to another. And it supports “keeping files syncronized” between two locations.

Of course, there’s tons of stuff that you pretty much can’t talk about Bash scripting without mentioning. Sed, awk, grep, find, etc.

Also, I totally relate about the terminal giving more dopamine. I kinda just hate going on a point-and-click adventure to do things like image editing or whatever. To the point that I’ve written a whole-ass domain-specific-language to do what I want rather than use Gimp. (And I’m working on another whole-ass domain-specific-language to do a traditionally-GUI-app sort of task.)