Grzmot's recent activity

  1. Comment on My favorite mouse costs less than USD 10 in ~tech

    Grzmot
    Link Parent
    Fair warning, these sites usually just grade the product the highest that gives them the best affliate deal. But yeah, buying appliances sucks.

    Usually you can go to a few recommendation sites and find a brand/model pattern

    Fair warning, these sites usually just grade the product the highest that gives them the best affliate deal.

    But yeah, buying appliances sucks.

    1 vote

  2. Comment on Why are there so many rationalist cults? in ~life

    Grzmot
    Link Parent
    The problem, as with everything, is that "not trusting the government" is is a very broad range, going all the way from "people shouldn't need driver's licenses to drive a car" type libertianism...

    The problem, as with everything, is that "not trusting the government" is is a very broad range, going all the way from "people shouldn't need driver's licenses to drive a car" type libertianism towards "maybe we don't need 15 regulations and expensive certifications every 5 years for mundane screws".

    At the risk of sounding like an elightened centrist:tm:, a lot of the sauce is finding the sensible out of all of these opinions and ideologies and slapping them together into something that works for you. Of course, centrists then also falls for the trap of extremists where they think that harmful opinions are okay as long as they're expressed nicely.

    6 votes

  3. Comment on Why are there so many rationalist cults? in ~life

    Grzmot
    Link Parent
    Smarter than ≥95% of the population is a pretty bold statement, given that in western nations, ca. 10 to 20% of the populace is university educated.

    Smarter than ≥95% of the population is a pretty bold statement, given that in western nations, ca. 10 to 20% of the populace is university educated.

    7 votes

  4. Comment on Why are there so many rationalist cults? in ~life

    Grzmot
    Link Parent
    Honestly, I don't think Taylor's take on this is exclusive to rationalists. I think this is something that came up with the internet, and was later super-charged by social media's recommendation...

    Honestly, I don't think Taylor's take on this is exclusive to rationalists. I think this is something that came up with the internet, and was later super-charged by social media's recommendation algorithms: it gave people the ability to build their own global echo chambers, because finding like-minded people has become so damn easy.

    While this has also lead to a lot of good, the bad side of it is that people automatically become less trusting of institutions, because they spend so much time on their phones, getting pushed sometimes borderline propaganda which entrenches them further in their beliefs.

    People are inherently lazy, like all animals. It is rare for us to seek out material that challenges us all the time. It is much easier for us to accept a new fact that fits in with our own mental model of the world. Recommendation algorithms coupled with the fact that our attention has been monetized means that there is a ton of money being made by people sliding down the extremist pipeline. There is simply a lot of people who are not smart enough to understand that the only reason they accept some fact given by a stranger on the internet is that they already agree with it.

    Like with all things, governments were way too slow to react and education has lost multiple generations to this, and the problem is that public education is an institution, which is going to have a hard time reviving the idea of trusting in institutions among those who don't trust in them.

    6 votes

  5. Comment on Seeking records for children in ~music

    Grzmot
    Link
    Vinyls are an enthusiast niche, so I think you'll be very hard pressed to find stuff that is made specifically for kids. I would instead recommend to broaden your search and just focus on music...

    Vinyls are an enthusiast niche, so I think you'll be very hard pressed to find stuff that is made specifically for kids.

    I would instead recommend to broaden your search and just focus on music that is child-safe according to what you want. That being said, that can be a wild range. My brother is raising his 2 year old daughter on Slipknot lol, but her primary language also isn't English, so the explicit language is not a problem.

  6. Comment on Nihilistic online networks groom minors to commit harm. Her son was one of them. in ~tech

    Grzmot
    Link Parent
    Interesting! For me it's the opposite, those internet friends are what got me through dark times. I'm fairly certain I would not be here if I didn't have them back then and we've even met up IRL a...

    Interesting! For me it's the opposite, those internet friends are what got me through dark times. I'm fairly certain I would not be here if I didn't have them back then and we've even met up IRL a couple times now. I crossed an ocean to attend a wedding, for example.

    Overall I do agree it's healthier to live your life with a healthy present in your real, actual life.

    3 votes

  7. Comment on Nihilistic online networks groom minors to commit harm. Her son was one of them. in ~tech

    Grzmot
    Link Parent
    At risk of repeating myself, because I've told this story before on Tildes; I went through something similar. I was a bullied kid and teenager for a good portion of my time in school, and it...

    At risk of repeating myself, because I've told this story before on Tildes; I went through something similar. I was a bullied kid and teenager for a good portion of my time in school, and it resulted in me finding online friends and turning video games into my main hobby. Years of my teenage life consisted of coming home from school, responding to my mom asking "How was school?" with "Good." and vanishing into my room to play video games.

    When Gamergate got big from 2014 onwards, I got into it through reddit, and spent a lot of time keeping up to date and having opinion on a culture war developing on a different continent. In retrospect, a huge waste of time. In retrospect, I also realised how easy it is to develop opinions on things that fit "the group's" opinion because they are "your people". I still have the same reddit account, and if you go back far enough, you'll find my comment somewhere arguing that "The USA does not have a gun problem, but a mental health problem." aka the classic NRA dogwhistle trying to avoid blaming guns for America's gun problem. I don't even live on the American continent by the way.

    Incidentally, getting out of that environment is both simpler than you think and more difficult. To me it was a combination of factors: The intense bullying phase of my school career ultimately lasted for only like 4 years, and the last 4 years of school in mostly a different class were fine. Not great, I didn't make friends, but I was left alone at least. In the last years of school I also got my first girlfriend, got outside, touched grass, that sort of thing. It made me realise how profoundly unimportant all that nonsense was, and how much of it I just believed because I was fed lies and I just wanted to belong. At the same time I was exiting Gamergate, which had rapidly turned into an alt-right radicalization pipeline, it also turned up the heat when Trump joined the playing field in 2016. The most radical break was when I left school and got into uni in a different town, which finally allowed me to make actual friends that don't live in other countries. By then I had abandoned keeping up with drama reddit threads for years because I just didn't have time.

    Notably, at no point in this pipeline was I actually ever challenged about my beliefs in a direct fashion, which afaik is not a thing you're supposed to do anyhow when deprogramming folks. It's not that people were actively avoiding challenging me, I think a lot of this stuff was just contained in my internet persona and rarely bled through into real life. I basically challenged myself years down the line in university when I realised more and more how completely fucked everything had been and that the only reason I was ever in there and said and believed those things because I was desperately trying to belong, which is a common thing in radical groups.

    10 votes

  8. Comment on The web could be so much more beautiful in ~tech

    Grzmot
    Link Parent
    This is one of the most hilarious videos I've seen in a long time. Thank you very much for sharing!

    This is one of the most hilarious videos I've seen in a long time. Thank you very much for sharing!

    2 votes

  9. Comment on Life and death aboard a B-17, 1944 in ~humanities.history

    Grzmot
    Link Parent
    I completely agree. It felt like they really wanted to show off the Tuskegee Airmen but didn't really have an idea of how to do it? If they wanted to establish them more as characters, then they...

    I completely agree. It felt like they really wanted to show off the Tuskegee Airmen but didn't really have an idea of how to do it? If they wanted to establish them more as characters, then they should have gotten the first pilot cast locked up in a POW camp sooner. I think that's the consequence of wanting to do too much. No character really had time to shine.

    1 vote

  10. Comment on The web could be so much more beautiful in ~tech

    Grzmot
    Link Parent
    The typographic rivers which are part of this explanation are avoided due to hyphenation. Mind you, it's not perfect. If you try it out on this page, you'll see that the first line of the second...

    The typographic rivers which are part of this explanation are avoided due to hyphenation. Mind you, it's not perfect. If you try it out on this page, you'll see that the first line of the second paragraph in the post has very large white spaces, which happens because the monospace code segments are not broken up over multiple lines.

    But to me the occasional appearance of such a line trumps having to stare at every line being ugly.

    1 vote

  11. Comment on NASA won't publish key climate change report online, citing 'no legal obligation' to do so in ~enviro

    Grzmot
    Link
    Either Trump got to them or someone doesn't want to lose their job, considering what happened to the bureau of labor statistic head.

    Either Trump got to them or someone doesn't want to lose their job, considering what happened to the bureau of labor statistic head.

    25 votes

  12. Comment on Life and death aboard a B-17, 1944 in ~humanities.history

    Grzmot
    Link Parent
    Planes are really just a combination of moving forward at high speed and looking up at a certain angle. Because weight slows you down, you have to make them as light as possible, which means they...

    Planes are really just a combination of moving forward at high speed and looking up at a certain angle. Because weight slows you down, you have to make them as light as possible, which means they largely end up being fragile tubes with engines and wings attached. It doesn't take much to take them out of the sky.

    I think I know what show you're referring to: Masters of the Air. It was a decent watch, but very very Hollywood. Also it felt like they had no idea what to do with the plot fairly early onwards.

    4 votes

  13. Comment on The web could be so much more beautiful in ~tech

    Grzmot
    Link Parent
    Yay! I picked up the extension "Stylus" and put exactly that p tag in there so it gets applied to all websites automatically now. This is great.

    Yay!

    I picked up the extension "Stylus" and put exactly that p tag in there so it gets applied to all websites automatically now.

    This is great.

    3 votes

  14. The web could be so much more beautiful

    ~tech Ask
    Back in high school when I was writing essays, my teacher always demanded to use justified text, because simple left aligned or right aligned text looked ugly. Even back then as a totally...

    Back in high school when I was writing essays, my teacher always demanded to use justified text, because simple left aligned or right aligned text looked ugly. Even back then as a totally rebellious teenager, I agreed with her. Print has used it for hundreds of years, why shouldn't we?

    The web has always resisted this development because it was difficult. Yes, the css property text-align: justify exists, but browser were always missing the crucial functionality of hyphenating words. That led to very ugly justified texts and so called "rivers" of whitespace because the spaces got so large. Begrudingly, I got used to it.

    I was surprised to learn that all major browsers support the new hyphens css property since late 2023. This one adds exactly that crucial functionality. I was stunned and immediately tried it out and oh look, the web is so much more beautiful now.

    You can try out yourself here on Tildes! Just right click a comment, click "Inspect" and then when the dev console pops up, add

    text-align: justify;
hyphens: auto:

    to p, which stands for the paragraph html tag and in which all text posts are rendered on Tildes.

    It looks so much better! But I do wonder why it hasn't spread around more in the web. Am I the only one? Am I nitpicky? I feel like the improvement is stark and very good for functionally no extra work. I even installed a browser extension which augments a website's css so I could automatically do it on most websites.

    31 votes

  15. Comment on Spotify announces 9% price hike for individual plan subscribers starting from September in ~music

    Grzmot
    Link
    I doubt it will take long for the other streaming services to pull even on price. It will maybe take a couple months up to a year to try and reel in any budget conscious folks, but it'll happen.

    I doubt it will take long for the other streaming services to pull even on price. It will maybe take a couple months up to a year to try and reel in any budget conscious folks, but it'll happen.

    6 votes

  16. Comment on My classroom will be AI-free this fall in ~humanities

    Grzmot
    Link Parent
    That's a really interesting way to work! I do fear that it might not be very scalable, so for larger universities I'm not sure how well this would go. I would appreciate smaller class sizes, but...

    That's a really interesting way to work! I do fear that it might not be very scalable, so for larger universities I'm not sure how well this would go. I would appreciate smaller class sizes, but at the same time, that's very easily said but not so easily done.

    1 vote

  17. Comment on After Steam, indie videogame store itch.io has also delisted erotic content in ~games

    Grzmot
    (edited )
    Link
    Similar as with Steam, itch.io came under pressure from payment providers to remove erotic content. The source of this is a campaign by NGO Collective Shout, which lobbied payment providers like...

    Similar as with Steam, itch.io came under pressure from payment providers to remove erotic content. The source of this is a campaign by NGO Collective Shout, which lobbied payment providers like Visa and Mastercard directly to pressure Steam to remove games that offend the NGO or leave the platform: https://www.collectiveshout.org/open-letter-to-payment-processors

    As an enjoyer of the occasional NSFW game, this all sucks. It sucks especially because Collective Shout is a notable sex-negative NGO with ties to Christian conversatives. They tried to get Detroit: Become Human banned from shops for depicting violence against women. They are not your friend.

    57 votes

  19. Comment on My classroom will be AI-free this fall in ~humanities

    Grzmot
    Link Parent
    IDK where you're from, but in my country the burden of proof is on the professor to prove that you're cheating. It's one of the aspects that makes genAI so problematic: Beyond the student...

    there's the potential for accusations of cheating with it and he's concerned about how to defend himself if he gets accused of using it by a professor.

    IDK where you're from, but in my country the burden of proof is on the professor to prove that you're cheating. It's one of the aspects that makes genAI so problematic: Beyond the student forgetting an obvious As a generative model, I... in the text, it's quite difficult to prove anything.

    4 votes

  20. Comment on Marvel plans to recast the X-Men and (eventually) Tony Stark after ‘Avengers: Secret Wars,’ but ‘reboot is a scary word,’ says Kevin Feige in ~movies

    Grzmot
    Link Parent
    You must have missed the post credits scene where Valery Legasov went "It's uranin' time." /s Really, I was looking for examples of very high quality shows.

    You must have missed the post credits scene where Valery Legasov went "It's uranin' time." /s

    Really, I was looking for examples of very high quality shows.

    4 votes