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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Slippery slope fallacy. We know that consumption of real CSAM might increase frustration and lead to pursuit of real crimes. However, we don’t have the same level of evidence for illustrations or sex dolls. It’s a massive blind side in the scientific literature. It’s very hard to study.

    Despite this, the number one risk factor still remains unsupervised access to minors. Regardless of whether the abuser consumes abuse media or not.





  • There was this cool initiative by a professor who is a friend of mine. He would give a pretty standard homework, but then the additional instructions were to complete said homework using an LLM. Then, the students would have to write, by hand, an analysis of all that the LLM got wrong, or could’ve done better. They then proceeded to discuss their analysis in class. Participating in the discussion with actual meaningful arguments was half of the points, the other half being the quality of the handwritten analysis.

    It was more work, but at least the fuckers quickly appreciated that the machine was actually shit at doing their homework, and even if it could pass, it would be with the bare minimum. It also pruned the students who actually wanted to learn from the slackers who were just wasting their parent’s money.


  • Reputation is such a strange phenomenon. XP was considered a disaster at launch. It took them years to repair everything that didn’t work.

    The rollout of 64 bit architecture support was so sloppy that people were holding on to old hardware so as to not have to install the x64 version of XP. The premiere of the NT kernel meant that nothing had drivers, most software wasn’t compatible yet. DirectX 9 broke half of old games compatibility. There were also two entirely different versions of the shell with dramatically different start menus. Some versions didn’t support multi core CPUs.

    Not to mention that XP actually spans three different OSs. Upgrades were just a reinstall wizard of the OS.

    It wasn’t until the end life of XP and the launch of Vista that people started to cling to XP SP2 and its reputation switched due to a mix of nostalgia and fear of the much worse launch of Vista.





  • dustyData@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    10 days ago

    Inkscape? Maybe.

    Gimp is not a drawing software, so it makes sense it doesn’t have a dedicated “draw complex geometric figures” tool by default. It does have a shape selection tool. Anyways, it all depends on what you’re trying to achieve. Krita is for painting, gimp is for image manipulation, inkskape is for vector graphics. Paint.net is a weirdo that does everything but doesn’t do any of those things well enough.


  • Wait, you read a CEO statement and believed her? Watch as everything she said turns out to be false. This is an old corporate tactic, put women in power positions just to push them under a bus. Her job is to kill Xbox and take the fall. Microsoft doesn’t want a gaming division anymore. This is why all they do is shutdown studios. They only got in because they feared Sony consoles would compete as cheap computers on the corporate market. It was never meant to go this far.


  • Oh boy, they weren’t fuzzy. Some film outclass the clarity and sharpness of modern OLED, even when it was for B category low budget movies, just that most people watched a 4 week old piece of film in bumfuck middle of nowhere cinema. With a scratched up and badly calibrated focus lens and dirty and deteriorated film over a dirty screen.

    Anyways, the biggest problem that physical media solves is not the number of pixels, but the bitrate. Tons of information, specially about color, is lost to streaming compression. Pixel density equation means that the quality of what you see is rarely distinguishable between 1080p, 2k and 4k, depending on how far away you sit from the screen and how big it is. For the typical seating accommodation at home and commercial theaters, you won’t notice a significant change within FHD and UHD. However, you can definitely tell the difference between the 10Mbps 4k (down to as little as 2Mbps if your connection sucks) that you get from Netflix¹ and the steady 32Mbps that Blu-ray can give you.

    ¹: BTW, it doesn’t matter how fast your internet connection is, the data transferred can get to you at as high speed as you want, but the bitrate of the video file inside the container that the streaming services give you is usually hard capped rather low anyway.



  • You know this saying in ICT: Everyone has a development environment, a lucky few also have a separate production environment.

    I witnessed it first hand on IBM, three in the morning, troubleshooting a database problem for a big client. Engineer writes up a script to try and solve the issue, I was the systems operator. Tells me to just run it on the mainframe.

    “Wait, was this tested at all?”

    “Client authorized it, they just want the downtime gone. Send it.”

    So I just ran an untested script that fundamentally changed everything on the production database, written by a sleep deprived engineer that just wanted to go back to sleep. Granted, it worked, that one engineer was an old rockstar who had been with the client for over a decade. But the next three weeks were dedicated to tiptoeing around the changes of this one script and testing everything, in production, to make sure that the solution was viable long term and it didn’t break anything unseen. We all knew better, but everyone agreed and did it anyways.



  • In what I’ve seen, the best masons are on construction sites planning the work before hand. The inexperienced and newby masons mix mortar and carry bricks around. The top elder guys lead the prep work planing when and where stuff needs to be for what is being built. But once the machine starts mixing the cement all those guys do is lay bricks.

    They don’t shovel, they don’t mix mortar, they don’t carry materials. Just laying brick after brick until they run out of materials or the construction is done. It’s quite mesmerizing to see a good contractor working efficiently, rare but fascinating.



  • Traffic segregation, car free zones, public transport, lower speed limits, car size based taxing, stricter driver license conditions, three strike limitations, temporal license suspensions schemes, these are all measurements that would reduce car accidents just as much, and could be implemented within the next week anywhere at very low cost. It’s not a pipe dream, it’s a lack of political will.

    It doesn’t take several billion dollars of R&D onto a tech that will never work outside of 1% of the road network and could actually not reduce cars accidents at all once it faces real world conditions.

    If the goal is to reduce traffic accidents, this is the most expensive, slowest and inefficient way to do it.

    EDIT: Autonomous driving will solve traffic and traffic deaths as much as EVs are going to solve global warning. They are plausible lies that techno oligarchs use to distract from the real causes of the problems they purport to solve and are actually just new money funnels for the oil industrial complex.