CoderKat

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Well... I'm not surprised. Disappointed, but not surprised. We all knew this Supreme Court was not in favour of its citizens. The Supreme Court should have been stacked long ago. Leaving it be with its insane appointments just because stacking it might start a war with the GOP was a short sighted move, as the GOP is always going to play underhanded (that's how they managed to get so many SCOTUS appointments in the first place). Biden's insistence on trying to play nice with the GOP has always been his weakness.

This really sucks for those with student loans who were depending on this. We're already in an economically rough place for the kinds of folks who would have student loans. Inflation has been sharp in recent years and wages have not kept up. In my field of tech, layoffs have been widespread and new grads would be the most severely impacted (they already struggle to get hired and now they're competing against an increased number of experienced people).

As an aside, it's also a shame that lawmakers have not managed to pass a law for this debt relief. My understanding is that the strike down is specifically because it's not a congress passed loan forgiveness. But congress isn't willing to do the right thing (not in enough numbers to pass a law, anyway).

CoderKat, 10 months ago

It's not in kbin. It's a Microsoft Office form (similar to a Google Form or Strawpoll).

CoderKat, 10 months ago

I filled it out, but let's discuss in the comments because filling out a one sided form isn't as fun as being able to have a multi sided discussion.

I personally find biological immortality super appealing. Despite the word "immortality" in it, it actually just means you can live as long as you want, which takes away many of the downsides to immortality that often get discussed. Since I'm not religious, I don't believe in any kind of afterlife, so scientific advancement letting me live longer is the only way I can avoid death (which I'm afraid of). And more than just avoiding death, I want to avoid being a frail senior whose quality of life is severely diminished.

That said, for me, I ranked the positive advancements with the disease prevention, medical advancement, and QoL above simply extending human life. I think these all do of course go hand in hand. But fewer people dying young is better than fewer people dying old. Dying young is really tragic, because there's so much of life you won't have experienced. Similarly, the big issue with growing old is age related diseases, which impact your quality of life. At a certain point, Alzheimer's and dementia seem worse than death. I feel conflicted because I don't want to die but if I had a disease like one of those, it seems like I'd no longer be myself and it's unlikely there's any hope for recovery before the disease eventually kills me. There's also the fear that perhaps I would be myself, but feel trapped inside a body, constantly confused and afraid by what's going on, which sounds horrible.

On the negative impact side, by far my biggest concern is imbalance in access to this immortality. My fear is that regular folks (including myself) won't have access but billionaires will. That's worse than not having immortality, since billionaires are generally terrible people and not who we want living longer. Overpopulation is a bit of a concern, but one that I think we can eventually solve. e.g., with social changes to expectations about having kids, automation improvements to reduce our need for people to work, and eventually moving beyond just living on the surface of earth. Wealthy nations already have a declining birth rate, anyway. As well, I'm a bit skeptical about true biological immortality, as opposed to, say, extending life on earth for a good chunk of time, but eventually moving to a digital afterlife, where overpopulation is less of a concern.

I didn't know how to answer the regulation question. I think most things need some level of regulation, but the options were "strict regulation" vs "unrestricted", neither which sound right to me. As well, regulation would likely be completely situational. e.g., obviously safety is a vital part of any form of medical treatment. We shouldn't be reducing any existing regulation there. But I certainly don't want research into the area to be unnecessarily held back. For a large part, I see this as no different from researching a cure for any other disease. Aging can be viewed as a disease.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Agree. I added something like that in the "other negatives" box. There's that saying, society advances one funeral at a time.

I like to think that myself, I'm very good at being open minded and adapting to the times (though honestly only time will tell). But I know many people don't do that. This is clearly evident in electoral polling as well as polls for social issues (eg, US 2023 support for same sex marriage is 89% among 18-29 but only 60% among 65 and older).

Perhaps social changes could help with this problem. Clearly older folks can still change because the stat I just quoted was far worse in the not too distant past. Maybe our problems are with how we run news media or how we basically write off old folks as unlikely to change. Maybe it's because our society focuses on education being something you only do when young and you're never really expected to go back to school after that. Maybe we need to better teach empathy from a young age? Maybe us losing religion will make the biggest difference.

Maybe we don't deserve this kinda advancement yet. To quote one of my favourite parts from the show The Orville:

Technology and societal ethics have to progress hand in hand, each one supporting the other incrementally. Anything else is begging for disaster.

• a member of an advanced, "space communism" version of humanity, talking to someone whose species has not yet advanced to the same point and wondering why they don't share their advanced tech with less advanced people.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

They don't even try to hide their close friendships with developers.

I guess it wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that the PCs clearly cannot separate business from friendship, too. We do need development in the province. But not at the cost of the Greenbelt. Nor do we need things like selling off highways or healthcare for profit.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Yeah, to be clear, MediaWiki is open source and also has alllll sorts of really cool extensions. You also already can download the entire contents of Wikipedia.

I think this desire to federate everything is going too far. Most things don't benefit from this and in fact just become over complicated. If you can host a regular copy of a site easily... that's frankly most of the benefits there.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Live service games, MMOs, gatcha games, and many hardcore multiplayer games are the worst for this. They love to waste player's time on some repetitive grind because they want players to keep playing their game. They usually have either microtransactions (often for cosmetics) or a subscription.

Personally, I love MMOs, but I try to avoid playing any grindy content (or at least as long as I don't think I'll genuinely enjoy it). So I'll usually play a game for a few months (they're really big games) and then quit for years, if not permanently (I have a bunch of MMOs I intend to someday return to, but have not yet).

Single player games are generally much better at being genuinely fun. Especially story driven games. I also love open world games because you largely get to make them your own. It's perfectly valid to beeline the story missions if that's all you care about. Or you could do just the side quests. Or you could additionally explore like crazy. e.g., with Tears of the Kingdom, you really can ignore most of the shrines and largely focus on the story quests. None of the side quests are necessary, either. You don't have to explore the depths except for a tiny few places for the story. The vast majority of sky islands can be ignored. But I personally had a lot of fun exploring, so I explored nearly everything and loved it (except most of the depths -- they were way too big, empty, and repetitive).

Some people don't like long games, though. And that's fine! There's tons of short or more streamlined games out there that you can have fun with. e.g., The Last of Us is a fantastic one. The sequel is about 24 hours long for the story and it felt like it flew by in the blink of an eye for me cause I was having so much fun.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

If you use WSL or some other flavour of Bash (anyone else remember Cygwin?), that's allowed!

(The Windows command line feels so awful by comparison. PowerShell, I admit, actually seems quite nice. Though I can't be bothered to learn it when literally every other system I use uses Bash or a slight variation of Sh.)

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Good. Some people will try to phrase this as a bad thing because yes, you will pay more (eventually, anyway -- article says they don't expect "any real bite until around 2025"). But we should be paying more given the environmental damage that burning this fuel causes. We should not be effectively subsidizing oil companies by paying the cost of their negative externalities.

If anything, I think there should be even more than this. We should have Norway style taxation on fuel. They have a massive savings fund that massively dwarfs our own closest equivalent.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

And that's just what the Parliamentary Budget Office predicted. The article also has another prediction:

"There's a zero per cent chance it would be worse than what the Parliamentary Budget Office is saying," said Wolinetz, who predicts a cost impact of under 10 cents a litre by 2030.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

I also can't stand the fact that smokers can take unlimited 'breaks' whenever they please just to come back stinking up an entire room with their smoke.

That feels like a workplace problem. Why would a workplace give them unlimited breaks? And why would nonsmokers not be allowed comparable breaks? This feels odd to me. My recent jobs have been ones where nobody is micromanaging my time, so anyone can take whatever breaks they want. As long as productivity doesn't obviously suffer, nobody cares. My past jobs in retail didn't allow smokers to take extra breaks. They'd get the same breaks as everyone else (for an 8 hour shift, that meant a 30 min lunch and 2 x 15 min coffee breaks).

CoderKat, 10 months ago

To be honest, I rarely noticed the votes tally. I think the bot just applied a flair to the post eventually? It wasn't that relevant to me. I could see from the comments what the top posts were saying. For most posts, it's usually obviously leaning in one direction, anyway. I always went to the comments for the discussion and drama, anyway.

I do think the existing voting options are good. And think that all top level comments should contain either a clear vote or INFO, because I think the sub doesn't really work if people aren't voting in some way.

One rule of perhaps interest is the not accepting your judgement rule. I'm not sure if I care for that rule in the late subreddit. On the surface, it makes sense, since why post here if you're not going to accept the judgement? But I think we have to be honest here. The sub exists because it's amusing. The cases where OP doesn't accept their verdict can be quite dramatic and fun in a certain sense. That seems like it's conductive to the true goal of the sub. Also, I'd rather have an OP that argues against everyone than one who never replies (especially when there's so many requests for info).

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Unsliced? Greatest thing since never.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

I think the main way that could be achieved is if Kbin and Lemmy had a convenient "upload video" option that actually uploaded the video to peertube. Convenience is king. Back before Reddit offered image and video hosting (and you'd usually upload to a site like imgur instead), there'd constantly be people commenting that they didn't know how to upload their content.

That said, I'm personally cautious of PeerTube. Hosting small images is one thing, but video is something else. I don't really understand how PeerTube will keep running if it gets too much usage. Presumably, like most of these sites, it will depend on donations. I don't know if that will cut it for hosting video. My fear is that it'll be fine with low usage but as soon as it gets too high usage, we might see it going down (and taking a ton of content with it).

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Does anyone know what special equipment includes? (I asked this last time but don't think I got a response.)

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Honestly, I'd suggest just leaving it be and waiting for an eventual feature change. I don't think it's scalable to be manually requesting all these kinds of changes from the (sole?) admin and this isn't particularly critical. I think Ernest has a lot on his plate just maintaining and developing this site.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Truly terrible and I'm glad that nobody died. I wonder why the attacker hasn't (yet?) been charged with attempted murder?

Some people in the class tried to stop what was happening, while others fled the room, he said.

Those people who tried to stop the attacker are very brave. Kudos to them!

CoderKat, 10 months ago

No, Who's on first.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

That's the part that keeps me from doing it. While portability is nice, I have a really great desktop with an ultra wide. That ultra wide in particular is what makes PC gaming really great for me. I think I'd only use it on longer trips, which isn't that often.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

That is the best part and honest one of the best parts of gaming in general.

Kinda reminds me of burning the weed fields in Far Cry 3.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Terrible. And while we don't have enough details at this time to do anything but guess, I wonder if incel and anti-feminist rhetoric had an impact here. Gender studies as a subject is heavily loathed by those types, sometimes to the degree of wishing violence on them.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

I really hope that lawmakers and AI companies can clear this up soon, because I think AI art could be a massive thing for gaming. In particular by generating small variances so that the world doesn't feel so copy paste.

For example, consider a map with a large office building (like in the game Control). There's so many assets needed to avoid feeling copy paste. You'll notice if the game reuses the contents of whiteboards, which isn't realistic. In real offices, we can expect every single whiteboard will likely have different contents (with the exception of blank ones). They probably will have lots in common, but they wouldn't be exactly the same. A human creating dozens of hundreds of unique whiteboards isn't a very good use of time, especially if we're talking about one of many minor assets that aren't even meant to be paid close attention to. An AI, on the other hand, could generate the many variations we'd expect to see. We can even have a human design a couple and ask the AI to make similar ones.

This isn't even all that new. We've had procedural generation (which is not AI) of stuff like height maps and trees for ages now. But we're finally able to generate entire textures (and perhaps eventually entire 3D models) very easily and while fitting into a specific theme.

Finally, for indie games, developing art can be a major challenge. There's countless programmers who want to make games and are good programmers, but they're not good artists. AI generated art could help make being a one person dev more viable. And even when the dev is an artist, it could simply save them a lot of time on what's a very time consuming part of game dev. eg, AI would be good at generating the profile pictures of characters that RPGs often show during dialogue.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Some degree, I think is imported from the US. Let's be honest, US news dominates our internet more than Canadian news. I have to go out of my way on sites like this (or formerly reddit) to see Canadian news. I would actually say I am more familiar with American politics than I am Canadian politics (which isn't to say I'm unfamiliar with Canadian politics, but rather that I'm really familiar with American politics despite not being American). That means the current US culture war, which is very heavily attacking trans people and anything gender non conforming, is being a heavy influence on Canadians right now.

But that's only "some degree". We aren't blameless. While it's nice that we have a PM that has a mostly pretty great on gender matters (no matter your opinion on Trudeau for his other faults, I think we can all agree he's very progressive on LGBT+ topics), that only goes so far. Canadian news media often leans right (and we're currently seeing a risk of the Toronto Star being acquired by a right leaning US media company). Pierre Poilievre has been stoking these alt right flames. And now we have a bill that is going to see more people using US media because Canadian media won't be found on Google search. And that's because of our own, badly written bill (it should have been written just so that sites couldn't copy/summarize most of the story without sending clicks to the original site, but for whatever reason they instead wrote it as requiring payment to link to news at all!).

CoderKat, 10 months ago

More things happening over the weekend: https://www.therecord.com/news/waterloo-region/things-to-do-in-waterloo-region-canada-day-weekend-june-30---july-2/article_a1ce8d0d-5757-5824-9bda-7ec16bdd91a6.html