If you're in the US of A it's a regular fuckin' gauntlet to try to ensure your food purchases aren't loaded with corn syrup.

In the past when deciding between VPN (as in proxy) providers I went with Mullvad because their ToS and Privacy Policy was by far the shortest.

So just the same I now checked all the related links, copy-pasted all the text into Writer (to use as a simple word counter), and found that Cloudflare sits at 22,490 words while Porkbun at 22,554 (excluding contact info).
So that's not helping me make the decision.

The most commonly quoted average reading speed is 238WPM, so that's around 95 minutes each...
...after which I should remember enough to compare them. Or take notes.

Haven't we had enough yet? Can't we please just wake up tomorrow morning, and there be no more transphobia or any other forms of bigotry? No more corruption? And wealth be distributed fairly? The human species has a finite amount of time on this earth. Each human has a finite amount of time on this earth. Can we just put our feet down and say enough with the unnecessary drama?

I wasn't sure what to title this rant

So there's this actress from Finland named Seela Sella who died recently. A graphic has been going around depicting a bunch of animated characters she voiced in Finnish dubs of American films. Naturally, people don't bother to read and make comments that it's inaccurate because other actresses voiced these characters in English. And naturally, people need to explain to them what the post actually said.

There was this one woman I saw who was shockingly stubborn about this. She claimed to be from England after being accused of being American. She said she read the whole post and still insisted repeatedly that it's wrong because she didn't ORIGINALLY voice these characters. Nobody fucking said she originally voiced these characters, they said she voiced them in Finland. This woman kept insisting that the post was acting like the original voice actresses never voiced these characters. Absolutely nothing in the post denied that other people voiced these characters first!

Maybe she was just doubling down because she couldn't handle being wrong. But this fucking attitude that appreciating people who voiced characters in a language other than English somehow takes something away from the English speaking actors is the same attitude that makes people think "black lives matter" means "no other lives matter" and "happy holidays" means "fuck christmas". INCLUSION OF OTHERS DOESN'T EXCLUDE YOU!

This is the sort of person who might walk into a mall and see seven Christmas trees, three santas, and hear blaring Christmas music but see one fucking menorah and declare Christmas is being taken away! They just see all the Christmas shit as the norm and any deviation as "political". They see English language films as the only important ones and foreign translations as not mattering. Somehow saying she voiced these characters is seen as claiming she's the only one who did.

Maybe she would have understood the point people were trying to make to her if they brought up an example of the reverse. Millions of English speaking children's experiences with Pokémon were shaped by the cast of the English language dub. These actors are beloved by English speaking pokemon fans. That doesn't take anything away from the original Japanese actors. Finnish people know this actress as the voice of many beloved characters that shaped their childhood experiences. That doesn't take away from the original actors.

Now, to be fair, I can see an argument that these types of posts may be intentionally misleading. They know a lot of people aren't going to bother to read and are going to think this actress voiced the characters in the versions of the films they're familiar with. Maybe the makers of these graphics are trying to decieve. Or maybe they're just showing appreciation for hard-working actors that aren't American because not everything revolves around the Untied States

My old ('02) car pulls hard to the left and my mechanic has come back with 4000 in repairs that are worth doing before aligning it. Struts, cv boots, the alignment, and more.

The car has not been taken care of until I bought it, the body work is very rough. There's additional costs if I wanted to do work piecemeal - since they'd need to align multiple times with work spread out. So I just need to save to pay it in full. And this car takes premium fuel. At least I drive very few miles overall. But I'm in car hell USA and while my bike is capable for a lot, the car is a necessity for the future. Getting a less expensive and better condition vehicle could work. Still I hope by investing in repairs I can still save money compared to people with a car payment and massive loans. I own it outright after buying privately. Anyway fuck paying 4000 for this shit. I wish I could DIY it but I don't know jack and I don't have parts or even a garage to stay out of the elements.

So, allow me to preface by saying I love this show. Rewatched it a dozen times at least. It's smart, heartwarming, and deeply funny. Catherine O'Hara was a treasure.

But there is one scene that drives me up a goddamn wall every time I see it: David lip-syncing Tina Turner to Patrick.

Patrick had, earlier in the same episode, performed a beautiful acoustic cover of "Simply the Best" at an open mic. It's a lovely moment; Patrick is exploring his first relationship as a gay man, and David has a long history of painful relationships which gave him deep trust issues. This song both affirms Patrick's feelings while assuring David that he's safe and loved now. It's very touching, and I'm always drawn to how Moira watches them both, overcome with love.

So David feels like he has to reciprocate the gesture somehow, except he obviously doesnt have much of a clue how. Instead of, I dunno, coming up with anything romantic on his own, he decides to... lip-sync the same song to Patrick later in private.

There are two problems here. First, playing the same song twice in an episode invariably gets it lodged in my head. Second, and more relevant, is that it just feels like such a weak gesture. Imagine giving your SO a heartfelt gift which required a fair amount of effort and even bravery. Now imagine your SO returns the gesture by giving you the same gift, except without the effort and bravery.

Come on David, you couldnt come up with a single other song to express your feelings? Patrick just gave you a slew of gifts to win you back, too. Its not like this is the only gesture hes made. Yet it basically is the only one David makes.

The scene is supposed to be touching but it just irritates me.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. We'll talk about Ted next time.

Every time I boot into the game be like: PLEASE WAIT 2 HOURS WHILE WE RE-COMPILE SHADERS

they claim to hate capitalism but then get upset when they hear about someone using AI for malicious compliance on the job

they say they denounce wage slavery but their pee pees shrink at the thought that someone has used AI to automate their own work on the company dime and in turn reclaimed some of their personal day back

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/59270732

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/59270562

TIL “Rectangular Micro QR” codes exist (since 2022). IMO this will drastically improve our docs that use QR codes.

The standard is published here:

https://cdn.standards.iteh.ai/samples/77404/e103bf2d1f0d4162b34ca493efdaf9c4/ISO-IEC-23941-2022.pdf

The cons:

• no LaTeX pkg for rMQR
• no Debian pkg for rMQR (qrencode can do micro QR but not rMQR; OTOH, there is at least something - but non-Debian and only for obscure pkg managers)
• alphanumeric charset all uppercase - bummer!

Sadly, they fucked up again on this new standard by making all characters uppercase in the alphanumeric dataset. WTF? I have to say that’s even more mildlyinfuriating because the square QR codes have the same shitty limitation. Why didn’t they think this through? It would have been a good way to have small QRs that could be either all lowercase or all uppercase.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/75669828

I previously posted about how Beko kill-switched two of my washing machines to block me from using them -- to force me to throw them away. I happened to be on a site of an e-waste manager or something, and found this astonishing claim that Beko/Arçelik is:

“working together to build a sustainable cirular solution for the washing machines manufacturing industry”

If they want a sustainable circular economy, why not just publish their kill switch reset codes?

Sadly, the link ultimately just leads to a shitty youtube video (which I can’t access). But after wrestling with a dozen fully enshitified Youtube transcript sites, notegpt.io was at least willing to give me a fucking transcript. This is it, with my highlights:

00:01 have you ever wondered how your consumption of electronic Goods can be greener waste from Electrical Products also known as E-Waste is one of the fastest growing waste streams in the world with almost 57 million tons generated in 2021 the same weight as 5700 Eiffel Towers it is predicted this will rise to 74 million tons by 2030 with less than one-fifth of this officially collected for recycling it is an issue that needs addressing not only so that more is recycled but so that E-Waste is prevented in the first place 00:39 sea surveys aims to make electrical products that are more easily repaired refurbished and recycled the project focuses on four types of devices washing machines printers sensors that monitor network connections and televisions as part of this it is designing new business models and digital Concepts that reflect the principles of the circular economy and can be easily adopted by other product manufacturers across the world this will increase the lifespan of these products and reduce the waste they 01:11 create archilic a household appliances manufacturer is the industry partner for the televisions archilic joined the Cesars project to support our transition to Circular business models such as leasing repairing and secondhand sales being part of the project has enabled us to focus closely on one of our models of Television looking at all the specs of it from design through manufacture to the way it is both used and disposed of the outcome is a product with a much lower environmental impact the design 01:49 phase of a TV has been critical to the work that archilic has undertaken at this very early stage the different circular elements have been considered and integrated during the project the bank cover of the television was produced using 30 recycled plastic and it is planned that this will be increased to at least 60 percent in the future the use of the QR Code system developed by project Partners secularize enables artelec to track recycled components from the supplier to the production stage and also allows the 02:22 customer to access warranties environmental data and other product details 3D printed parts are available for the feet of the television and are aimed at enabling refurbishment at sites throughout the world as it allows the part to be printed locally refurbishment options and training materials are also provided leasing of the televisions to businesses has been successfully tested during the project and has resulted in archelec making plans to introduce leasing options for private consumers as well 02:54 scissors has an opportunity for archilic to look deeper into our Clarity and throughout our volume chain we will now see this experience and knowledge and see how we can apply it to a wider range of products visit c-serviceproject.eu to find out more about everything the team has done to achieve its goal

I posted a comment, complimenting a fellow artist and a commenter turned it into an ordeal. I ended up getting massively downvoted. Why tf do I even need reddit? It's much more friendly on Lemmy.

For context, I thought someones work was professional but they called themselves a beginner. I thought they could sell it. Most of the other commenters thought it was intermediate at best and told me I was stifling the skills of said OP by telling them they are professional. 'Why don't you let them grow their skill?' they proclaimed. SMH. I just wanted to give a compliment. Toxicity. I usually have good compliments for people to build them up.

What were they comparing it to. I still thought it was pretty professional. C'mon. That was ridiculous.

Rant over.

The actual process of coming up with alternatives and re-evaluating your goals is so tiring. And often my head is just blank but it's one of those things that you absolutely need to solve somehow. Maybe I'm thinking about it wrong?

They were started by an incest-baby and a bastard-child, driven by 2 jealous mothers, fighting over daddy's land. While Daddy told them God promised them the world.

Then kept recruiting other people into their argument.

For the down votes, what have I said that's untrue? If God is truth, then you must judge me by the truth of my words.

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.