V17's recent activity

  1. Comment on Epic Games reportedly pivoting to “AI first” game development model in ~tech

    V17
    Link
    Every big corporation is going to do this, nothing is surprising here. And it's probably going to work too, if not now then soon. I have to respect Sweeney for just being open with his plans no...

    Every big corporation is going to do this, nothing is surprising here. And it's probably going to work too, if not now then soon.

    I have to respect Sweeney for just being open with his plans no matter what others think, because this is not nearly the first time. Doesn't mean I agree with him, but I find this approach refreshing. His Lex Fridman interview is also quite interesting if you have a long drive coming up.

    12 votes

  2. Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech

    V17
    Link Parent
    You omit a major issue. When Adobe is an industry standard, you need to be able to work on Adobe projects because at least sometimes that's what you get from others and that's what you are...

    You omit a major issue. When Adobe is an industry standard, you need to be able to work on Adobe projects because at least sometimes that's what you get from others and that's what you are expected to ship. So if you want to use an alternative, it needs to support all the major Adobe features and their file formats.

    Out of the three listed Photoshop alternatives the only one that can pretty much do that is Photopea, and I don't blame anyone for not wanting to use an in-browser javascript application for everyday work. Affinity has poor .psd compatibility and GIMP is not an alternative at all.

    Also for some things the alternatives genuinely are not good enough. Affinity Publisher is great and I much prefer it to Indesign because I do basic things and Indesign is slow as shit (though the new, free Affinity is not fast anymore either), but Indesign has many features that the competitors simply do not offer and that someone whose work is not on junior level like mine is going to use.

    4 votes

  3. Comment on Why is there no word for please in the Nordic languages – are their speakers simply more direct, or is politeness expressed in ways outsiders may not immediately recognise in ~humanities.languages

    V17
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    dtto in Czech

    There aren't too many contexts where you could use "please" where bitte wouldn't work in German, are there? Plus it serves as "you're welcome" and it's even more polite because it can be done preemptively.

    dtto in Czech

    3 votes

  4. Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech

    V17
    Link Parent
    The dude who's building Tine seems to be very smart and doing things in seemingly quite sophisticated ways, so I don't doubt that there are multiple gateways to prevent some sort of subversion,...

    Does it just do what it’s told or does it actually have some concept of a product vision in mind that it’s trying to hold to?

    The dude who's building Tine seems to be very smart and doing things in seemingly quite sophisticated ways, so I don't doubt that there are multiple gateways to prevent some sort of subversion, but I don't know how resilient they are and I'd assume nobody really does for sure.

    Anecdotally I've been working on a fully vibecoded videogame for the last few weeks and a longterm goal/vision is a part of multiple docs files that the agents read every time they start working on something, and usually they make the right decisions, or at least decisions that are not wrong based on that. And I am definitely not experienced in working with agents, this is my first non-tiny project.

    3 votes

  5. Comment on Facilities betting big on low-cost, 100-hour iron-air batteries in ~enviro

    V17
    Link
    Damn, that is pretty huge. I think it's still too expensive to make large scale solar into a firm energy source, but it would certainly make it more viable.

    Damn, that is pretty huge. I think it's still too expensive to make large scale solar into a firm energy source, but it would certainly make it more viable.

    3 votes

  6. Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech

    V17
    Link Parent
    Plus the situation with Photoshop has more to do with being the industry standard and therefore necessary to use in the pro field, and having other features of the creative cloud, not necessary...

    Plus the situation with Photoshop has more to do with being the industry standard and therefore necessary to use in the pro field, and having other features of the creative cloud, not necessary being the best for most people, so this is not that much of a game changer yet. Most pros will likely need to use the actual thing anyway for now (!), to ensure maximum compatibility, avoid chasing creative cloud fonts etc., and non-pros or people who don't need to collaborate with others often already do just fine with Affinity or Photopea.

    But I'm telling you if we get something like Solidworks or even Fusion360, that's going to be a game changer even in this state.

    Also I already use an app that's afaik 100% vibecoded, it's called Tine and it's a Rust rewrite of Logseq, a personal knowledge management app, which achieves feature parity in selected areas and it works great so far. I reported a bug, it was fixed in a day and included in an update 4 days later. Claude communicated with me in github issues on behalf of the owner.

    9 votes

  7. Comment on Recommend me music similar to that of Tool? in ~music

    V17
    Link
    I'm going to add another "band that doesn't really sound like Tool" because it reminded me of Tool in some ways. However depending on what things you like about Tool, you may not enjoy this at...

    I'm going to add another "band that doesn't really sound like Tool" because it reminded me of Tool in some ways. However depending on what things you like about Tool, you may not enjoy this at all.

    Wolf People were an English psychedelic progrock-folkrock band, and although I generally really dislike folk and folk rock, their album Fain sounded to me a bit like some English folk version of Tool. Your mileage may vary, but I think it's a great album, if you don't insist on the raw metal drive that is present on earlier Tool albums.

  8. Comment on How to get into motorsports? in ~sports.motorsports

    V17
    Link
    What about rally? Not exactly the question, I know, but I also don't care about motorsports and I find rally to be quite exciting because of how much more extreme it feels. Flying through a pine...

    What about rally? Not exactly the question, I know, but I also don't care about motorsports and I find rally to be quite exciting because of how much more extreme it feels. Flying through a pine forest on a narrow road at 150 km/h is crazy to watch.

    1 vote

  9. Comment on The return of phones with physical keyboards? in ~tech

    V17
    Link Parent
    I am conflating predictions (because the predictions in old SwiftKeyX worked incredibly well) and autocorrect, but the issue is the same. The autocorrect regularly either doesn't know the word...

    I am conflating predictions (because the predictions in old SwiftKeyX worked incredibly well) and autocorrect, but the issue is the same. The autocorrect regularly either doesn't know the word that I'm trying to type or offers three different incorrect words. I think the user dictionary may have a fixed size that's way too small for me, that's the only explanation I can imagine.

    12 votes

  10. Comment on The return of phones with physical keyboards? in ~tech

    V17
    Link Parent
    I envy you. I don't know if it's because I type in two languages or because I have an above average sized vocabulary in my native language, but I hate this way of typing, it sucks. I use Swiftkey...

    maximize the amount of letters you can vomit and let autocorrect take the wheel. It actually works pretty well.

    I envy you. I don't know if it's because I type in two languages or because I have an above average sized vocabulary in my native language, but I hate this way of typing, it sucks.

    I use Swiftkey on Android, and I remember when, more than a decade back, it would allow you to give it access to your gmail account and facebook chats, which from today's point of view sounds like a complete privacy nightmare, and it would build a custom autocorrect/prediction dictionary (extending the general one) based on your vocabulary and your specific style of writing. Best thing I've ever used. That was the only point in time when I was genuinely satisfied with my phone's text input method.

    It only lasted a few years before both Google and Facebook blocked that feature, and since then the custom dictionary is never able to keep up with me for some reason. No matter how long I use it and add new words, it's never enough, I still have to spell words out all the time, and once in I while I misspell something which then gets saved into the custom dictionary and I have to remove it next time I type that word. Other keyboards do not seem to be any better.

    I hate typing on my phone, and I think it has degraded my written language, though likely not as much as reading shit on social media instead of actual books.

    I am in fact so unhappy that I am considering vibecoding an alternative of the old custom SwiftkeyX custom dictionary that you build on your own corpus, as an extension to some open-source keyboard. The problem, aside from it being a lot of work with unclear results even as a vibecoded project, is that I'm not sure if it's possible to get an archive of your facebook messages (even as a GDPR request), since it uses end to end encryption. Emails would surely be possible, but I only use emails for specific types of communication, so that would be much less useful

    17 votes

  11. Comment on Anyone have any ketogenic diet stories? in ~food

    V17
    Link Parent
    Definitely do that. I haven't personally done carnivore or keto but I have spent some time reading up on them and talked with several acquaintances who did keto because I have a chronic illness...

    My cholesterol is probably higher, but I havnt got bloodwork done yet

    Definitely do that. I haven't personally done carnivore or keto but I have spent some time reading up on them and talked with several acquaintances who did keto because I have a chronic illness related to the gut microbiome and I was considering it. I have learned two important things. First is that the effects of keto seem to plateau and in some people seem to be temporary (for one of my friends it took just a year until she started getting worse again health-wise). Second is that the effect these diets have on your arteries is likely tied to genetics - some people do not have issues and others get properly fucked in ways that are not reversible if they do it long-term without checking their bloodwork. The second group is not large, but its existence is a good reason to take this seriously.

    All in all I think that right now Ozempic may be a method with a better risk vs benefit ratio than carnivore or keto. As someone else in the thread said, once you stop being obese your overall health is likely to improve.

    And, you didn't ask, but if you want some inspiration for a diet that is mostly long-term sustainable (some caveats are mentioned in the paper) and very likely to help you lose weight and fix your biomarkers, both in the blood and the gut microbiome, I can recommend the NiMe Diet - basically some gut microbiome scientists mapped what pre-industrial tribes in Papua New Guinea eat, translated the overall food types, macronutrients and prebiotic compounds into a diet that you can realistically buy and cook in the western world, and tested it on volunteers who normally eat an average western diet. The results were remarkable, and they seem to be in tune with more basic microbiome research, but they were only tested in the short term. But the research has been published for free in easy to understand format and it includes actual recipes.

    One of the interesting things is that everyone on the diet lost weight despite eating the same amount of calories as before. And the nice thing is that this is not an either/or, you can use this for parts of your diet, which the author acknowledges.

    3 votes

  12. Comment on Jon Watts is our ‘Star Wars: Episode X’ director in ~movies

    V17
    Link Parent
    Well no, that's what I'm saying. Like OP I would prefer if Star Trek rights owners just let it die instead of doing with it what they have been doing. I actually think Star Wars may have been...

    Well no, that's what I'm saying. Like OP I would prefer if Star Trek rights owners just let it die instead of doing with it what they have been doing. I actually think Star Wars may have been doing better than Star Trek in the last decade, there have been some bad and completely unnecessary movies but some of the shows were supposedly decent and nothing in the current Star Trek universe even approaches Andor.

    1 vote

  13. Comment on Jon Watts is our ‘Star Wars: Episode X’ director in ~movies

    V17
    Link Parent
    As a fan of Star Trek I feel you you're greatly overestimating people's tastes. That said, at least we got Andor.

    As a fan of Star Trek

    1. I feel you
    2. you're greatly overestimating people's tastes.

    That said, at least we got Andor.

    12 votes

  14. Comment on Mindful posting in ~society

    V17
    Link Parent
    I don't think it's just about influencers, I think organic online content can be just as important. I don't view people just posting online or bloggers as influencers. I just used those words...

    And I don't think influencers at this level particularly "influence" the election.

    I don't think it's just about influencers, I think organic online content can be just as important. I don't view people just posting online or bloggers as influencers.

    To be clear, I'm not talking about how debates "looked" or "felt"

    I just used those words because I personally haven't seen any of the debates or read about them, but I was writing that from the assumption that you're correct about them, I wasn't trying to imply that it's just subjective.
    Anyway.

    I don't really care about the same core question as you because I'm approaching it from a different angle. I appreciate everything you wrote and I read it. I just do not think this article is relevant, nor do I agree with its take as I feel it plays into a narrative I disagree with fundamentally.

    I am interested to know where the fundamental difference lies. I assume you care about election results, so is it that your line of "doing this just to increase the chance of winning elections is not worth it" is located elsewhere and this is over it? Do you think it's not going to help anyway? Or is it a different thing?

    1 vote

  15. Comment on Mindful posting in ~society

    V17
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I think that's a bad analogy, but maybe it's because we see the purpose of the article differently. I see the article as a part of online discourse that is on its own not going to help these...

    Again, it would be like if in economics, they tried to change inflationary expectations by telling people to spend less.

    I think that's a bad analogy, but maybe it's because we see the purpose of the article differently.

    I see the article as a part of online discourse that is on its own not going to help these elections, but that may be a part of some larger shift which happens over time. And I think it's entirely possible that this change is going to happen, in fact I think it's slowly happening already, because in this case it's not necessary to change the spending habits of the majority of the population, it's just necessary to change what discourse is perceived as dominant despite coming from a small minority of people.

    This has already happened in the past, it's how the described type of discourse became so strong - part of it was a chilling effect of throwing around accusations of racism, sexism, ableism and other forms of bigotry, but it pretty much happened one blogpost/twitter post/opinion article at a time. There's no reason why it couldn't happen again in a different direction, and the whole trend may realistically shift the outcome of elections in the future.

    From that point of view it's a worthwhile article, but maybe I should have been more specific initially that this is how I see it, not as "the article is definitely going to change people's behavior and shift the outcome of this specific election".

    You will never live in a world where Libs of Tiktok doesn't have any content. Never - it's impossible.

    True, but in a situation where the discourse shared by Libs of Tiktok is viewed as fringe and not seen as somewhat dominant in online spaces and some strongly liberal media, its impact is going to be much smaller. The research I found confirms that there is a sizeable gap between what people believe are the mainstream opinions in each party and what the real average opinions are or what the diversity of opinions within the party is, so the online discourse does seem to have a real effect .

    1 vote

  16. Comment on Mindful posting in ~society

    V17
    Link Parent
    Imo the research I talk about elsewhere in the thread supports that the article has some validity. One blog post is unlikely to change anything, but then again, it's just a blogpost, what else to...

    Imo the research I talk about elsewhere in the thread supports that the article has some validity. One blog post is unlikely to change anything, but then again, it's just a blogpost, what else to use it for but to get your ideas out. Thinking like that would pretty much mean not posting anything anywhere.

    Sometimes more people spread a similar opinion at a similar time (I bet that is the case with this one) and once you get over some critical mass, it definitely does have real influence on human behavior. The result isn't necessarily that those who do what the author preaches against change their opinions, it sometimes seem more like a different group of people gets a voice and becomes dominant in the public discourse for a while instead.

    1 vote

  17. Comment on Mindful posting in ~society

    V17
    Link Parent
    We seem to be talking over each other to some degree. I agree that Libs of Tiktok is evil. But that's beside the point. Libs of Tiktok sadly exists and my opinion on it is not going to change the...

    We seem to be talking over each other to some degree. I agree that Libs of Tiktok is evil. But that's beside the point. Libs of Tiktok sadly exists and my opinion on it is not going to change the result of elections. For me the important question is: is there any evidence that the author is right and doing what they tell people to do can help democrats win? With the US and the geopolitical situation being what they are this unfortunately affects me more than in the past, so it is something I care about as well.

    I spent some time looking it up, because surely there is data that would shed some light on who's more likely to decide elections: non-voters mobilised by being say more ideologically explicit, or undecided moderates swayed by being more controlled and moderate. I'm not sure if this is how you specifically would describe the conflict, but that's roughly what I've seen multiple times from others in various contexts, so that's what I went with. Of course reality is not binary like that, but some relevant data should exist.

    The way I understand the data that I've seen, I think it supports what the author of the article says to some degree, though it is more complicated.

    Eligible non-voters are a big group that can and does sway elections, but they're very heterogenous, which is evidenced for example by the fact that their preferred candidates (those who care) differ in each election. In 2020 their preference was 46:35 Biden:Trump, whereas in 2024 it was 40:44 Harris:Trump. source, pew research

    The reasons for their non-voting however do not seem to be hiding some sizeable group of people for whom democrats are not left enough, the biggest reasons were not believing that their vote matters, disliking politics and not caring about the outcome: pew research again

    There is some research on US moderates, and while there is some debate on whether "moderates" is the right description and their opinions often cannot be described on a single left-right axis, it does claim that there is a sizeable group of people who can be swayed to either side.

    However, different research also claims that direct persuasion (campaigning, debates etc.) of undecided people is not particularly efficient, which would correspond with how the debates with undecided voters looked to you, and quite often the actually undecided people who can decide an election are deciding not just who to vote for but also whether to vote at all. So undecided/eligible non-voters overlap, and the way I understand it the ones in the overlap are likely more important.

    There is some interesting research on the characteristics of moderates. Most commonly they tend to be younger, poorer and less educated, and so they also include the classic "working class" combination that has been leaving democrats over the years: people who are economically somewhat left, but socially conservative. The interesting part is that not just moderates/undecided but even many republican voters are actually economically somewhat left, if asked about specific economic policies and not about "redistribution" etc. in general.

    Generally research on whether moderate candidates or more strongly partisan/more extreme candidates are more successful show that moderates tend to do better, with one big exception - voters tend to value perceived competence and experience a lot, which explains why for example Bernie is so popular. The problem with strongly ideological candidates is that they tend to mobilize more people in the opposite camp than their own. (for example here)

    My hypothesis on the cause of the whole conflict is that one part of democrat voters sees democrats are sending moderate candidates and losing, so obviously being moderate doesn't work, whereas another part of democrat voters sees some of the strongly ideological discourse that happens online and concludes that their side is being too ideologically extreme which dissuades moderate voters. Some research shows that the latter is likely true, for both democrats and republicans, that there is a gap between what people assume is the average/most common opinion/ideological position vs what it really is, on both sides the reality is more moderate than people think. The evidence is not particularly robust here though. There is however pretty strong evidence that americans tend to significantly underestimate the diversity of opinions in each party - this does not directly support specifically the "online discourse makes people thing their party is much more radical than it really is" problem, but it does directly say that if a person bases their opinions on what they see online, it's highly likely that they do not realize their/the opposite party is in reality much more broad and diverse in its opinions.

    I have not found any direct evidence for what the author of the article says, but I think it is mechanistically supported by the above. There doesn't seem to be a significant highly partisan group that would be dissuaded from voting by democrats being more moderate, if we omit the fact that candidate quality and experience can and often does matter more than ideology. There seems to be more evidence for the existence of a group of people who either are genuinely around the center or who are economically left but not socially left, and for the fact that the way you present your policies to them matters a lot. And there is some evidence for the theory that being more strongly ideological is likely not a good thing as it mobilizes strongly partisan people on both sides.

    4 votes

  18. Comment on Wikipedia's list of the best video games: how many have you played, and what's missing? in ~games

    V17
    Link
    Some of the very old arcade games aren't that fun played on PC, but are super fun in the original cabinets. For example Missile Command uses a huge (like 6 inches in diameter) and heavy trackball...

    Some of the very old arcade games aren't that fun played on PC, but are super fun in the original cabinets. For example Missile Command uses a huge (like 6 inches in diameter) and heavy trackball to control your aim, you control it with your whole palm, it has significant inertia, and it gives the game a sense of urgency that's fun as hell and you completely miss it if you play it with a mouse or a keyboard.

    Similarly Asteroids and Battlezone on an actual vector display are cool as shit, much cooler than emulated. (though I remember having a lot of fun with bzflag when I was younger)

    I feel like with the later, more standardized arcade cabinets and with consoles it usually doesn't matter as much (apart from the whole CRT vs LCD issue), but with those old, non-standard arcade cabinets the construction is a big part of the fun.

    As for how many I've played, the answer is too many, but while the old part of the list seems to be pretty solid, post 2005 or so I disagree with many of the games on the list.

    11 votes

  19. Comment on Mindful posting in ~society

    V17
    Link Parent
    This is true, but it would have never worked that well if it didn't have a large number of social media takes that are genuinely hard to digest for even a moderate person, let alone hateful...

    I mean Libs of Tiktok also lies about and harasses people, intentionally targeting them for that harassment.

    This is true, but it would have never worked that well if it didn't have a large number of social media takes that are genuinely hard to digest for even a moderate person, let alone hateful people.

    It's weird to describe that as successful while saying "actually be nicer and more normal" instead of "you should lie and harass people".
    It's weird how the strategy is always to appeal to the worst folks rather than pointing out how awful the worst folks are

    The point of the post is "think about how your posting affects the people who matter in elections". You're probably not going to convince the undecided moderates to join your side by being hateful. I also do not, at all, think that undecided moderates are awful people. Even people swayed by something like libs of tiktok don't have to be. I know several people aged 60+ who know absolutely nothing about culture wars, are generally kind and vote not ideally, but not terribly, and when they see selected ultraliberal culture war takes from social media, they're horrified.

    absolutely targets vulnerable people as the "problem" rather than, again, the liars and the harassers

    The point is that "what is right" and "what gets votes" often doesn't overlap and you don't get the luxury of fixing legislature to slightly improve the former unless your side wins elections.

    But it's mostly preachy

    Sure, I'll give you that, but at the same time I've seen similar takes in the past and the reception always seems to be hostile enough that I don't blame the author for writing it anyway. I live across the pond, so my point of view is necessarily limited, but it seems like a genuine issue, like there's a sizeable group of leftists who consistently refuse to accept that a large portion of the population just doesn't care about politics as much as they do, but they're not necessarily bad people and due to the two party system, there's no other option but to have many of them on your side if you want to win.

    4 votes

  20. Comment on Mindful posting in ~society

    V17
    Link
    I am genuinely baffled by how controversial this seems to be. All the author is saying is: if you write stuff publicly, think of who your audience is the elections are coming and it would be a...

    I am genuinely baffled by how controversial this seems to be.

    All the author is saying is:

    • if you write stuff publicly, think of who your audience is
    • the elections are coming and it would be a very good thing if the democrats won
    • the people who decide the elections tend to be the currently undecided ones
    • undecided people probably don't share your strong opinions, that's why they're undecided, so keep that in mind when posting
    • unless you know that the above isn't true for your audience, in that case just do whatever you think is best for the goal

    I see absolutely nothing wrong with any of that, on the contrary in fact. MAGA online campaigns thrive on using real posts and opinions which, taken out of context but otherwise unedited, seem genuinely insane to your average undecided voter (or a right winger of course, but not necessarily, often even just a moderate center-leftist). This is why Libs of Tiktok was so successful, it did exactly this. Saying "maybe we shouldn't give them ammunition at least for a few months before the election" seems like a completely rational reaction.

    7 votes