rogue_cricket's recent activity
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Comment on Trans Day of Visibility in ~lgbt
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Comment on Reddit will implement human verification to tag and combat bots in ~tech
rogue_cricket Link ParentI really genuinely think the only way to actually prevent massive floods of bot accounts is to sell accounts for like, $5. Obviously this would not work for reddit and it introduces an entirely...I really genuinely think the only way to actually prevent massive floods of bot accounts is to sell accounts for like, $5. Obviously this would not work for reddit and it introduces an entirely different monetization scheme that is at odds with advertising and personal information gathering goals, but the only sites I've seen fend it off are niche ones like this with invite systems (that could probably be exploited by an enthusiastic actor if someone had the will to, it's just that there's no will to) or ones that charge people money upfront. I'm becoming more amenable to the second, honestly.
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Comment on Doomers in love in ~life
rogue_cricket (edited )Link ParentI felt the same way. I suppose part of it is that I’m just, uh, not heterosexual, so in this I am largely an outside observer. In the gay community there’s often a kind of meme of “are the...I felt the same way. I suppose part of it is that I’m just, uh, not heterosexual, so in this I am largely an outside observer.
In the gay community there’s often a kind of meme of “are the straights ok?” which is employed when we encounter too-enthusiastic conformity to heterosexual or gender stereotypes, to the point of being unhealthy or causing distress. An example might be joking about trapping someone in an unwanted marriage or a man refusing to add anything to a black coffee that he doesn’t enjoy because black coffee is “manly”.
Anyway, reading this article (which I wasn’t big on) made me feel like these straights are absolutely not ok. I could feel the lack of sincerity in a lot of it, in the way that men and women talked about each other. It was all so, so, deeply unromantic. It would have made me pity them, if so many of them weren’t openly misogynistic and thus essentially the architects of their own suffering & the suffering of others.
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Comment on I hope you don't use generative AI - an essay about my experience offering an open-source tool in ~tech
rogue_cricket Link ParentI think I mostly agree with this, honestly, although some might say that a prompt is some expression of humanity. A lot of the the time my beef with someone saying "I used AI to produce this art"...I think I mostly agree with this, honestly, although some might say that a prompt is some expression of humanity.
A lot of the the time my beef with someone saying "I used AI to produce this art" is actually the I, though.
Like - let's say I find a webstite that allows me to create custom engraved wood signs. I write "LIVE LAUGH LOVE" in the request area, I pick a font, and then I send off my request to some workshop to get it laser cut into a board of wood. Many humans and tools alike are involved in the process of creating the product: there's me, who initiated the request. There's the creator of the font, of course. There's the maker of the application that converts the vector font into instructions for a CNC machine, there's the operator running the machine, and there's the CNC machine itself.
Is my LIVE LAUGH LOVE sign art? I am leaning on the side of "no" (though I could be convinced), but what I'm more sure of is that in this process I would not be its artist even though I initiated the process of its production. Certainly the programmer that wrote the application that converted the font is not the artist of the result and certainly the CNC operator isn't either and the CNC machine isn't. The designer of the font is an artist, but their involvement in the process of the final product is removed from it by time, and all everyone else in this stack did was leverage their existing work.
So, that's how I see generated AI content intended to be aesthetically pleasing or entertaining. It's laser-cut LIVE LAUGH LOVE sign. It fills visual space. Maybe there's some art somewhere in the process, but the artists are the people who created the original material. There is no artistic contribution from the tool itself, from the programmer of the tool, or from the person who pressed the "MAKE IMAGE" button.
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Comment on New York Times quiz: Who’s a better writer: AI or humans? in ~tech
rogue_cricket LinkI went with the premise of it (marking preference rather than trying to identify the source) and preferred the human writing in all cases. There was always something more interesting about it to...I went with the premise of it (marking preference rather than trying to identify the source) and preferred the human writing in all cases. There was always something more interesting about it to me. The closest was science writing, but the phrase “soaring feeling” won me. I thought it was more evocative.
I’ve always insisted that I dislike AI writing and often rankled at the implication that it was any good and I am glad that I haven’t made myself a liar here. People who talk about it like it is just a matter of grammar and technical correctness irritate me, there’s something about the lack of intentionality that becomes extremely apparent to me.
One thing that diminishes the value of these “gotcha” AI versus Human quizzes to me is that a lot of the problems with AI writing only become truly apparent over the course of longer passages or with repeated exposure anyway.
Is it strange that I think the fact that it can produce a mass volume of writing actually makes the quality of the writing worse, to me? I am not talking about the oft-discussed problem of it consuming its out output like a dog eating its own vomit, but rather the fact that it floods the zone with “content” generally.
A thing always exists in its context. A big part of my enjoyment of art is its novelty. By creating an environment that is saturated with writing that all reads the same the value of any individual piece is significantly diminished. So to me, anything that can produce something at this speed and volume with little human effort is ontologically unappealing. It will always create the circumstances that make it boring through its ability to produce high volume, and that is even besides the fact that the mechanism of its function is based around the averages of existing content already.
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Comment on What are your food aversions? in ~food
rogue_cricket LinkI cannot be the only raisin-hater here...I cannot be the only raisin-hater here...
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Comment on Hi, how are you? Mental health support and discussion thread (February 2026) in ~health.mental
rogue_cricket Link ParentThank you, I am doing as well as I can be considering the circumstances, I think. In many ways - especially socially - my life is really the best it has been in a while. I have been trying to...Thank you, I am doing as well as I can be considering the circumstances, I think. In many ways - especially socially - my life is really the best it has been in a while. I have been trying to embrace the problems in a sense.
As for the business thing, I have considered it! I am at a point where I am pretty confident in being a capable human generally and I actually do technically have a business that I created to do contract work with a company I used to be an employee of. That’s the work that ended. So it’s been on my mind to maybe just… keep using that business.
I have a few loose ideas but where I am right now, I want to finish a personal project before I consider where to go next.
I feel you on the defeatism though. I haven’t even gotten rejections yet. It’s all just being ghosted. It’s hard but not the torture I went through after being laid off last time, which I think is a matter mainly of attitude and having positive feelings about the work I had actually done for the contract. Being “rejected” with a layoff really did a number on me psychologically and that’s at least no longer a factor.
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Comment on Hi, how are you? Mental health support and discussion thread (February 2026) in ~health.mental
rogue_cricket Link ParentI do in fact have ADHD. I am the typical late-diagnosed woman, I did paradoxically better at performing academically when my life was at its most stressful and did well enough on tests to make up...I do in fact have ADHD. I am the typical late-diagnosed woman, I did paradoxically better at performing academically when my life was at its most stressful and did well enough on tests to make up for never being able to do my homework. Removed from structure I struggled greatly with under-stimulation and task initiation. The worsening of the attention economy also did not help things.
The way I'm tracking was inspired by browsing self-improvement and self-help subreddits - though not in a positive way. I found those places extremely irritating. Something I understood quickly was that the bulk of its users fall into one of two categories: people who are struggling and who are in no real position to give advice, and people who are trying to extract money out of the first group.
The sheer volume of poorly-hidden ads, ChatGPT-written posts about how some system or another changed the person's life, bait that purported to be about discussion but "subtly" encouraged users to check the profile of the poster or DM them for their blog or gumroad PDF or vibe-coded app honestly really got to me. I got angry! And then the more I thought about it, the more I realised that really these apps mostly give the illusion of progress and productivity: they're much like a video game in the sense that they rely on initial novelty and the dopamine produced by the 'fun' of planning and imagining. But the reality of follow-through is something that an app fundamentally can't help me with. Every single calendar system, fancy to-do-list, or thought organizer I tried eventually calcified into a monument to my inability to remain consistent.
I knew the problem was with me, my dopamine regulation, my ideas about discipline and motivation and perfectionism, and the underlying problems that make me want the distraction to begin with. I started with what I felt to be my core issue, and that was that I kept starting over, and told myself I'd do something that would never have a real failure state and that it would be built up and loose and not over-regulated. And almost out of spite I decided to use only the tools that were already available to me on my phone, free and ad-free. Notes, to-do list, spreadsheet, calendar, alarms and timers.
I started from an empty spreadsheet and thought about the stuff I wanted to track and built it up in increments. It is messy and unexciting on purpose. I am avoiding problems of taxonomy with it by just putting in the date, the broad category, and a note with every entry. Everything goes in one big bucket and at 8PM every day I have an alarm that reminds me to check it and think about how my day went - if I have a good day, it takes me two minutes to pat myself on the back, and on a bad day I extend kindness to myself and try and figure out what happened and why and what I can do to make things easier tomorrow. This I think started a mindset shift of really working with myself instead of trying to impose on myself, figuring myself out.
From there it's really just... experimenting. Things that have worked on me:
- Goals defined in ways where I always make progress (e.g., rather than "work out on THESE days", where I can miss a day and feel upset about it, my goal is "exercise 150 times" and at the end I will give myself some kind of prize)
- Reducing friction to its absolute minimum, and making this a throughline in my life generally: my environment should always work for me and make my life as easy as possible. I just bought a bunch of sheet organizers that dispense like a tissue box for instance, because I hate folding them and found that was causing me to procrastinate on washing and putting them away.
- Separating decision-making and follow-through. When I encounter something that needs to be done but can't be done in the moment (or that I don't want to do in the moment even, lol), I write down in my calendar WHEN I will do it and what decision I have made about it if any. I don't put it in an unorganized to-do list, I find that just clutters me mentally. Like... right now I have a pile of items to donate in my home in my living room. I have in my calendar that I will donate them on Monday afternoon. If it were just on my to-do list, I'd wait until I 'felt like' doing it and they'd sit there stressing me out potentially indefinitely. Now I can look at them and be fine.
- I watch videos about psychology and wellness occasionally although I do so with a very critical eye. I usually relax with one in the bath once a week or so. Anything that gives me an idea or a sticks with me goes in a "wellness-reminders.txt". I have many little mantras and they do genuinely help me to remember the things I am trying to embody when I am struggling.
I could go on, honestly. I've already gone on quite a lot already though, and what works for me is not necessarily going to work for you. But the core principle is really that I am building and negotiating with myself, not taking the "shoulds" of things from anywhere else. I am tentatively optimistic about being able to maintain this basically indefinitely.
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Comment on Hi, how are you? Mental health support and discussion thread (February 2026) in ~health.mental
rogue_cricket LinkWelp, I’m unemployed. Again. This time it was simply the planned end of the work, not a surprise layoff, though. I have significant resources available, so I am not in a hurry, but I would still...Welp, I’m unemployed. Again. This time it was simply the planned end of the work, not a surprise layoff, though. I have significant resources available, so I am not in a hurry, but I would still like a job and I find the process of finding one to be utterly contemptible. It really makes me squeeze right up against the white collar performance that I find extremely grating. LinkedIn is, for me, basically the Torment Nexus.
But compared to the last time I was unemployed I am doing much better, at least. I have found a way of organizing time that has worked for me for a month and a half so far, and this one feels different than other systems I have tried because it’s not really a system that I am imposing on myself. It is one I am building out by determining what works by experimentation and refusing to create hard rules for.
I am still mentally ill or whatever, but I am definitely in a phase where it feels manageable and I am remaining functional, at least for now. For example, my house is kind of clean. It took me a month and a half to catch up to a good baseline while dedicating a certain amount of time every week to the project, but I feel I’m there now and now I can start tackling the dark corners of my storage areas. I feel much the same about my emotional cleanliness.
Other than that I have a solid relationship, I am having lots of fun experiences with my friends, I am exercising my attention span with books and a coding personal project and learning how to draw, I’m exercising regularly. If it weren’t for the job stuff and the political environment I would be feeling the most optimistic I’ve felt in a long time.
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Comment on /r/politics moderators in ~tech
rogue_cricket Link ParentA moderator can only remove comments in a way where it would show [deleted] for everyone, so you were accusing them of something that is not possible for them to do. Proof that the comment was not...A moderator can only remove comments in a way where it would show
[deleted]for everyone, so you were accusing them of something that is not possible for them to do. Proof that the comment was not publicly visible is not proof that a particular person or group was responsible. The comment was shadowbanned by either an admin or by reddit's overarching auto-detection system. Unless the person you were talking to was a site admin (rather than just a subreddit moderator) they were not gaslighting you, they genuinely have no mechanism to interfere with the visibility of your comment in that way.I hope you weren't rude to them based off your own incorrect assumption.
This is why being a reddit moderator sucks. A vast majority of reddit users do not understand reddit. This is reddit's fault rather than the individual, really.
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Comment on /r/politics moderators in ~tech
rogue_cricket (edited )Link ParentYeah, I moderate a subreddit of about 50k folks and a discord with a few thousand people and a lesson I've learned the hard way is that it's generally better to be kind of blunt and heavy-handed...Yeah, I moderate a subreddit of about 50k folks and a discord with a few thousand people and a lesson I've learned the hard way is that it's generally better to be kind of blunt and heavy-handed upfront. It sucks, but letting things slide for fear of looking unfriendly or draconian has INVARIABLY resulted in much worse situations down the line.
I would genuinely rather not be doing it a lot of the time, but the space I moderate is a safe space for many people and is one of the very few trans-friendly spaces for the topic. I want it to exist and for it to exist as it does it requires this kind of work.
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Comment on Unseeable prompt injections in screenshots: more vulnerabilities in Comet and other AI browsers in ~tech
rogue_cricket Link ParentMy feeling is that it simply doesn't have the ability to hold a broad enough context for anything of reasonable complexity or uniqueness. It codes like it is trapped in tutorial hell, perhaps...My feeling is that it simply doesn't have the ability to hold a broad enough context for anything of reasonable complexity or uniqueness. It codes like it is trapped in tutorial hell, perhaps because - well - it basically is, isn't it? It consumes a lot of tutorials and all it can do is remix and reproduce them, copying the snippets and mimicking the confident tone of tutorial-writers.
Humans can also struggle with this facsimile of understanding when starting out and doing too many guided tutorials, but the difference is that a human can internalize feedback and reassess its approach fundamentally and an LLM, by its nature, cannot. It has one approach that it can keep trying over and over. But even then, in my experience, every failure -> correction -> recovery cycle simply degrades the quality of the code further: the opposite of what tends to happen when a human is correcting its understanding.
Anyway, I'm bitter right now because I've been going back and forth on a PR for an absurd amount of time with a colleague who is supposed to be learning stuff in the domain I'm an expert in, and clearly he's just using AI to generate code based off my suggestions rather than reading and understanding them. He has wasted hours of my time.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
rogue_cricket LinkI’ve been playing Necesse, a sandbox survival building game that is like if Terraria had a baby with Rimworld. Create a settlement to attract NPCs, or go hunting for them in the wild or bribe them...I’ve been playing Necesse, a sandbox survival building game that is like if Terraria had a baby with Rimworld.
Create a settlement to attract NPCs, or go hunting for them in the wild or bribe them to join from their own villages. Attend to the needs of the NPCs - including furnishing a house and giving them a varied diet - and they will do assigned work using a system that isn’t as indepth as Rimworld (of course, since that isn’t the game’s focus) but still pretty impressive. For instance, I have a system of sorted chests that all my settlers do all the work of organizing, leaving me all the time in the world to do the fun cave diving and boss hunting parts. They can gather resources, process them, and even fight.
I can see it becoming a new obsession for me. You can build traps and tripwires and logical machines with gates, have multiple settlements with stations and minecarts between them. There’s multiplayer. One of my problems with Terraria was that I wasn’t a fan of the side scrolling for building, but Necesse is top down. It is really good!
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Comment on I tried to protect my kids from the internet. Here’s what happened. in ~tech
rogue_cricket LinkThis is something I wish there was a good solution for. I am involved with a queer community that involves adult content, including sexual content, and as a result of a schism involving...This is something I wish there was a good solution for. I am involved with a queer community that involves adult content, including sexual content, and as a result of a schism involving transphobia I ended up briefly moderating a discord server that was basically the equivalent of a lesbian bar. People would flirt there, discuss sexual topics frankly, and some folks even lived close enough to each other to meet in person.
We had an age verification system but there was at least one incident where someone who was under eighteen successfully lied about their age to get in, and I heard stories from other folks talking about how when they were kids, they’d do the same thing. They’d admit to lying about their age online as young as thirteen or fourteen, pretending to be eighteen, engaging in adult oriented spaces with adults. This is so scary!
I think children don’t understand how awful it is to do this. They’re curious, and defiant, and they believe that if these systems are for their protection then they should have the freedom to opt out of being protected. But in my situation, I understood that adults needed to be protected too. Especially at a time where queer people are already demonized unfairly and accused of harmful deviancy, and where surveillance is getting more extreme, having a minor in an adult queer space is an awful look and a huge potential risk for every adult there. Of course the child is also at risk, but it really is a terrible and uncomfortable situation for literally anyone who isn’t a creep.
Of course any age verification system that isn’t privacy focused is also a huge risk, and no government or company in the world right now would pass up the opportunity to collect a huge amount of private data because we exist under surveillance capitalism. Between the two options I think it’s better for society to fight against any system that has such a massive potential for the abuse of freedoms. But I wish there was something.
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Comment on Social media probably can’t be fixed in ~tech
rogue_cricket (edited )Link ParentI was also uninterested in the study beyond this point basically. So you're telling me that when you train the Reproduce-Trained-Behaviour machine on data from interactions in existing social...I was also uninterested in the study beyond this point basically. So you're telling me that when you train the Reproduce-Trained-Behaviour machine on data from interactions in existing social media and then put the Reproduced-Trained-Behaviour machine in an environment that is a little different from our existing social media, the Reproduce-Trained-Behaviour machine continues to reproduce the behaviour it was trained on? Wow, you don't say! I mean, what else would it possibly do?
LLMs are not capable of the novelty required to actually get meaningful information out of a study like this. LLMs used as a proxy as humans for a study that really should be psychology is actual madness. It's slop. Why even bother?
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
rogue_cricket LinkI've been playing an obscure browser MMORPG, HighSpell. It's basically a clone of Runescape classic but I've found it kind of enjoyable. http://www.highspell.comI've been playing an obscure browser MMORPG, HighSpell. It's basically a clone of Runescape classic but I've found it kind of enjoyable.
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Comment on Disney reportedly planning full reboot of the Indiana Jones franchise in ~movies
rogue_cricket Link ParentI’d like to add my own 4… I had never seen the original Indiana Jones movies until I recently went through all of them at the insistence of a friend as part of a group activity. I had caught parts...I’d like to add my own 4… I had never seen the original Indiana Jones movies until I recently went through all of them at the insistence of a friend as part of a group activity. I had caught parts of them on TV but that was it.
The thing that struck me most about them was how fun and sexy they were in a… messy way that you don’t really see any more. It’s definitely more of an overall aesthetic appreciation than me getting the vapours over young Harrison Ford - I’m a lesbian, for the record, haha - but the overall feel was warmer, softer, and moodier in the older adaptations than the new ones even.
I don’t think any big media companies have an appetite for that aesthetic any more and haven’t for a very long time. I don’t know. There was something extremely charming about it.
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Comment on I need advice, which laptop would you buy now? in ~tech
rogue_cricket Link ParentI'm also a converted MacOS fan. I used to have the impression that it was more restricted compared to Windows in terms of my personal control over the device and I do not believe that is true any...I'm also a converted MacOS fan. I used to have the impression that it was more restricted compared to Windows in terms of my personal control over the device and I do not believe that is true any longer - although it's still arguably true when comparing iOS to Android. Still, their approach to privacy and the sharp decline of the quality of Google and Microsoft by comparison finally brought me over basically entirely. Among those three I think that Apple is just the company that I have the most trust in. It's not exceptional, it's just that the other two are worse.
It also helped that I frequently did development on Macbooks for work and got a free M1 laptop as a consolation prize for being laid off in 2023 (hooray). I just recently replaced my phone with an iPhone 16 because I am currently dead-set on completely de-Googling my life (nearly finished) and I enjoy how the phone and laptop function together even if I miss some features from my Samsung.
I would love to be able to do more with Linux and have experimented and worked on it in the past and it's just... not quite there for me yet. Ideologically I love it and I hope that SteamOS allows me to replace Windows completely very soon for gaming. I am so, so sick of Microsoft.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
rogue_cricket Link ParentFor readers who are fans of Danganronpa I just want to give a STRONG! recommendation for a game called "of the Devil". It takes a lot of inspiration from Danganronpa as well as from Ace Attorney....For readers who are fans of Danganronpa I just want to give a STRONG! recommendation for a game called "of the Devil". It takes a lot of inspiration from Danganronpa as well as from Ace Attorney.
You play as a woman named Morgan who serves as a public defense attorney in a cyberpunk world defined by intense surveillance. Private security collaborates with the government so there is a massive unified network of cameras filming just about every street corner for the state. Personal phones have always-on cameras that not only track their users, but will automatically upload footage they passively gathered if the user was within a certain radius of a crime scene. The internet is, of course, tightly monitored and controlled. Rather than the setting being cartoonishly evil and authoritarian it's more... uncomfortable. And given the nature of things, there are now very few crimes that the state isn't able to score a conviction on.
Morgan has a penchant for gambling and so a lot of the mechanics are themed around poker. It's got the familiar information-gathering phase (where you gather "chips" that serve double duty as your life meter) and then a kind of "show down" phase which doesn't necessarily take place in court but during which you argue your point and try to put the information you gathered together. The poker theme is cute: like if someone comes to you with a challenge that you suspect is a lie, you can either "call" their bluff, or "fold" and move on... sometimes your goal isn't so much to win as it is to lose as little as possible. On the other hand, you can also "raise" on certain challenges that you are confident about, betting more of your chips. (You get little cosmetic rewards with them at the ends of the chapters, so there's an bit of an incentive to having more of them.)
I find the writing really good. It's more grounded and serious than both Danganronpa and Ace Attorney, but it definitely has its moments of humour, too. Morgan in particular is a really interesting character to me.
The prologue is free on Steam! So if this sounds intriguing to you you should pick it up and then DON'T LOOK ANYTHING ELSE UP ABOUT IT until you've beaten it. It's one of those games where spoilers can really affect the experience of playing it, I think.
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Comment on Cloudflare is down causing multiple services to break in ~tech
rogue_cricket Link ParentI actually thought it was me, because I just started a new job as a website reliability engineer...I actually thought it was me, because I just started a new job as a website reliability engineer...
I hope it's OK for a comment from a cis ally here too. I spent some time that day looking for cool new trans artists to add to my list (this year the standout new-to-me artist was Octo Octa, a DJ from New Hampshire whose vibes are immaculate) and sent a few messages to my trans friends. I used to have a silly little tradition of sending them $20 each, but could no longer do so because in the last two years my employment situation has been a trash fire (which is bad) and I have made MANY more trans friends (which is great).
I feel very strongly about my trans allyship. I was raised in an extremely Christian household where it was not safe for me to come out as gay, so I grew up extremely repressed. When I escaped my home I ended up literally joining a gay circus and I met many wonderful queer people, including many trans people, who helped me navigate the entirely new world I had found myself in. They kept my baby queer ass safe with advice and general looking-out, prevented me from getting into too much trouble, and maybe most importantly showed me that it was possible to live authentically and be happy, and be loved, and to have fun, and to define success how I want to define it.
Anyway, trans rights, and trans joy, and trans love, and trans liberation - I'll do what I can to bring all of it about. The world is so much better with trans people in it. Love y'all to pieces.