senko's recent activity

  1. Comment on Megathread for news/updates/discussion of Russian invasion of Ukraine - March 11-13 in ~news

    senko
    Link Parent
    Reportedly it flew over Romania and Hungary before entering Croatia and nobody did anything (either warning or intercept attempt). This poses a question how well the sky over eastern NATO members...

    Reportedly it flew over Romania and Hungary before entering Croatia and nobody did anything (either warning or intercept attempt). This poses a question how well the sky over eastern NATO members is actually watched.

    Unsubstantiated rumors say Hungarians saw it but could not be bothered to inform Croatia. If true, that's even worse.

    There's talk about a second one being spotted in eastern Hungary but is still unaccounted for.

    4 votes

  2. Comment on Billie, Lorde, Lizzo: Pop stardom has never seemed less aspirational in ~music

    senko
    Link
    As Bill Murray famously put it:

    As Bill Murray famously put it:

    I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it.
    There's not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job.

    3 votes

  3. Comment on What shortages have you noticed recently? in ~talk

    senko
    Link Parent
    Yeah, just heard from friends looking to buy a new car: 6 to 10 month wait, with possible further delays (used to be 2-3 month wait this spring, for the same car, manufactured in the Czech republic).

    Yeah, just heard from friends looking to buy a new car: 6 to 10 month wait, with possible further delays (used to be 2-3 month wait this spring, for the same car, manufactured in the Czech republic).

    3 votes

  4. Comment on The explosive rise of Zoom is creating big opportunities for startups, which are raising millions to build apps and integrations in ~tech

    senko
    Link Parent
    If they are happy with (some of what is in) those terms, that's just fine. Integration with Zoom is a great value add for a lot of productivity/collab software these days, and on the tech sidethe...

    If they are happy with (some of what is in) those terms, that's just fine. Integration with Zoom is a great value add for a lot of productivity/collab software these days, and on the tech sidethe API is just fine.

    I just didn't like the strings attached.

    3 votes

  5. Comment on The explosive rise of Zoom is creating big opportunities for startups, which are raising millions to build apps and integrations in ~tech

    senko
    Link Parent
    I didn't want to be contractually obligated. What usually happens with "failed" features is you do get one or two people using it, so you can't just turn it off but it's a drag (you have to...

    I didn't want to be contractually obligated. What usually happens with "failed" features is you do get one or two people using it, so you can't just turn it off but it's a drag (you have to support/maintain, make sure it doesn't break).

    3 votes

  6. Comment on The explosive rise of Zoom is creating big opportunities for startups, which are raising millions to build apps and integrations in ~tech

    senko
    Link
    Story time: I run (ran - just exited) a collaborative tool SaaS and we wanted to integrate with Zoom (have people launch Zoom meetings from our app, stuff like that). Had everything done and...

    Story time: I run (ran - just exited) a collaborative tool SaaS and we wanted to integrate with Zoom (have people launch Zoom meetings from our app, stuff like that).

    Had everything done and tested, spent about three person-months on it. Finally, wanted to go live to production and just needed to fill out some forms and accept dev ToS, and then we bailed. The terms are ao draconian I don't know how anyone would sign that.

    For example, you agree to provide support of up to 2 years after the date when you publish the app to their marketplace, no matter if you stopped publishing it im the meantime. There were other rather strict terms but this one stuck in my mond as nonsense. This looked geared for heavy enterprise grade integration, not something you want to try out, make a few api calls and see if users like it, nowhere near like when you integrate with twitter, facebook or similar APIs.

    6 votes

  7. Comment on The empty spectacle of Wonder Woman 1984: The disappointing sequel highlights not only the dire state of the live-action superhero genre, but the dire state of Hollywood filmmaking as a whole in ~movies

    senko
    Link
    This review is all over the place. I don't get what the author didn't like. The story? The direction? She did think the actors did great at least. After reading this, I'm not sure if the film is...

    This review is all over the place. I don't get what the author didn't like. The story? The direction? She did think the actors did great at least.

    After reading this, I'm not sure if the film is so bad that basically everything sucks, or that the author wanted more than a typical Hollywood blockbuster and was disappointed.

    7 votes

  8. Comment on AMC warns it’ll run out of cash in January, calls out Warner Bros.’ shift to HBO Max in ~finance

    senko
    Link
    Considering how the movieplex chains snuffed out most small cinemas, I don't think I'll be shedding a tear for them. How's that ruthless capitalism working for you guys?

    Considering how the movieplex chains snuffed out most small cinemas, I don't think I'll be shedding a tear for them.

    How's that ruthless capitalism working for you guys?

    19 votes

  9. Comment on The Mandalorian | S02E06: The Tragedy in ~tv

    senko
    Link Parent
    The weird staff looks like the Tusken Raider staff, which would make sense since he had to survive for years on Tatooine.

    The weird staff looks like the Tusken Raider staff, which would make sense since he had to survive for years on Tatooine.

    5 votes

  10. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    senko
    Link
    Picked up Hades (on Switch) on a whim. While I played some FTL and Everspace, I'm not big on rouglelikes. But wow, Hades blew me away. I actually like dying! I rarely feel frustrated because...

    Picked up Hades (on Switch) on a whim. While I played some FTL and Everspace, I'm not big on rouglelikes.

    But wow, Hades blew me away. I actually like dying! I rarely feel frustrated because whenever I fail I get excited to experiment with a different setup - and the story progresses bit by bit each time.

    Where Everspace and FTL got me annoyed and frustrated at dying, which ultimately drained the fun out of it, Hades makes me itch to try just one more time (and feel good about it).

    I've spent about 50 hours in the game so far and feel like I'll be enjoying it for at least that much more. Then there's interesting content on YouTube with people disccussing setups, tips&tricks, where I spent at least a few hours watching as well.

    9 votes

  11. Comment on The Mandalorian | S02E05: The Jedi in ~tv

    senko
    Link Parent
    I am a teeeny bit disappointed that Ahsoka would refuse to help with Gorgu (agree on the name not seeming a fit), but then deciding to pass the buck to some other Jedi. From the rest of the lore...

    I am a teeeny bit disappointed that Ahsoka would refuse to help with Gorgu (agree on the name not seeming a fit), but then deciding to pass the buck to some other Jedi. From the rest of the lore (which I'm not terribly familiar with, tbh), I could understand why she would be hesitant, but this still looks kinda...lazy, dunno.

    Haven't watched Clone Wars (never got in the mood for it and it's been on my todo list for ages), but I loved Rebels. I think for the fact that (at the start) it's completely separate storyline that stood on its own two feet, slowly buildt the world and starts intertwining in interesting ways with the rest of Star Wars canon. Heartily recommended - if Clone Wars is half as good I'll be a very happy fan.

    Not to spoil, but there was a decent amount of Ahsoka in it. Thrawns involvement was significant but relatively small show-duration-wise. As a fan of pre-Disney SW...ahem, I mean Legends... it was fun seeing the old/new Thrawn in action.

    4 votes

  12. Comment on Modern IDEs are magic. Why are so many coders still using Vim and Emacs? in ~comp

    senko
    Link
    I grew up with Joe (Joe's Own Editor), switched to Vim for syntax highlighting after a few years. Many years whence, after beign dragged from Linux VT into X kicking and screaming, and after a few...

    I grew up with Joe (Joe's Own Editor), switched to Vim for syntax highlighting after a few years. Many years whence, after beign dragged from Linux VT into X kicking and screaming, and after a few false starts, found Sublime Text.

    In parallel, moonlighted on a few jobs requiring VS (C#) and Eclipse (J2SE, Android).

    About two years ago started serious effort to switch to Pycharm (Python, JS) and then IntelliJ (Python, Kotlin, JS, Go).

    Having used all of the above for extended period of time, I'm most comfortable in Sublime, for the following reasons:

    • all IDEs I used are pretty slow compared to editors like Sublime or Vim, all that magic in the background eats up enough CPU cycles to noticably affect interactivity
    • same for memory - IDEs (and VSCode) are huge memory hogs; IntelliJ/Kotlin + Gradle + webpack devserver + two browsers (chrome, firefox) + a few other unavoidable hogs (slack, sigh...) routinely brought my 16G RAM laptop to its knees - look, it adds up, okay?
    • I never actually warmed up to all that magic touted by big IDEs and thankfully managed to avoid projects where that'd be inevitable, so tje cpu/memory/cognitive load was too much of a price to pay for something I rarely used
    • no language is a second class citizen
    • I don't have to fight with IDE to recognize my build environment and to pull up correct dependencies for autocompletion/typecheck/its magic
    • haven't stuck with Vim throughout cause I love how easy it is to set up project structure / tabs / layout with Sublime, it's well integrated into the graphical environment, and it's just enough visual user-friendlyness for me

    Nowadays I use Sublime (w/ just a few basic plugins) on my machines and vi/vim when SSHd (or when writing git commit messages in command line).

    3 votes

  13. Comment on What are your thoughts on piracy? in ~talk

    senko
    Link
    These won't really be answers to your prompts, but your question(s) prompted a train of thought and here's a coredump: I view piracy as a way to not play a stacked game. The game being the set of...
    • Exemplary

    These won't really be answers to your prompts, but your question(s) prompted a train of thought and here's a coredump:

    I view piracy as a way to not play a stacked game. The game being the set of copyright laws and regulations and the scarcity economy they prop up. I believe the game is stacked against both the consumers and the individual creators, to the benefit of big corporations.

    This is not to say I believe everything should be free or that artists shouldn't be paid (or should subsist on donations or welfare). However, the amount artists/actors/creators get paid and how much the consumers must pay are pretty un-correlated, when you look at it.

    Consider Spotify. I happily pay my Spotify subscription, however artists get a miniscule amount of what I pay. Spotify doesn't take a large cut either (there are some analysts that believe their margins are too small to be able to run a stable company) The labels and distributors gobble it up.

    Or look at movies - say, Avengers: Endgame. Hugely popular movie, stacked with stars, no expenses spared. Budget $356m, revenue $2798m. That budget includes what gets paid to everyone, from screenwriters and artists to guys driving the trucks with the equipment. The budget is almost a rounding error on the revenue, and the profits don't go to the artists.

    Combine this with an extremely long copyright duration (70 years after the death of an author, or 95 years after publication if it's work for hire) and you see the vast majority of the price consumers must pay never gets to the creators.

    So, with the main argument that piracy, disincentivizes creators to create, the above examples show that it has way less negative effect than current media industry setup, and nobody seriously suggests that should be criminalized. In the age where distribution cost is basically zero and discovery/curation is usually done by other players (Spotify, Facebook, TikTok, what have you), the media industry should be replaced by something more lightweight, that will include people getting access for free in some cases, but still generate more revenue for the artists. Napster -> iTunes/Spotify is a great example of this trend. You were a criminal if you listened to music for free through Napster. You can now do the same, legally, on Spotify or YouTube (with ads, or just pay a few bucks if you're annoyed by the ads). The war against piracy is a brutal attempt at fighting this (slow but inevitable) change.

    Or look at software. In my country, Microsoft is so entrenched in government institutions that I regularly get officiall government documents in XLSX or DOCX, that I need to edit and send back. Nothing except MS Office can render it properly in full complexity. And this is for things where PDF forms would more than suffice. Now, in order to do mandatory communication with govt/tax authorities/etc, I must use MS Office and I must pay for this, although I have no need for Office otherwise. I don't think that's fair. (Things are a bit better now with online MS Office version, but that's completely thanks to Google Docs finally putting pressure on MS).

    Also, thinking about abandonware and region lockouts. If the rights holder has no interest in allowing me to buy something - if there's literally no way to access it legally - then I don't see how there could possibly be any harm done by people pirating it. I don't mean from a legal standpoint - I'm sure lawyers can make a case and IANAL - but thinking through logically: if the only harm done by piracy is by denying the rights holder some amount of money, and the rights holder will not sell at any amount (ie. doesn't want your money), then there's no harm done.

    Both abandonware and region lockouts exist because there's a legal quagmire to determine who should get paid and who could distribute and people just don't bother with setting up a legal way of accessing. These are problems that copyright as we know it now created. If people would be free to "pirate" stuff they can't buy, nobody would need to worry about it.

    "Piracy" itself is a loaded word that ignores complex details and effects of dysfunctionality of our current copyright system.

    30 votes

  14. Comment on Email sucks in ~tech

    senko
    Link Parent
    While there are a lot of email-SMS gateways, it's not based on email (MMS might be more inspired by it, though a quick web search didn't find the link). SMS was designed to use spare signalling...

    While there are a lot of email-SMS gateways, it's not based on email (MMS might be more inspired by it, though a quick web search didn't find the link).

    SMS was designed to use spare signalling capacity in cellular network, when people noticed that short instant messages might be useful (size determined from postcard/telegram analysis). It used 140 bytes specially encoded so they could carry up to 160 characters in one of a few coding pages.

    Another fun fact, Twitter's original 140 character limit was to allow use via SMS (with 20 chars reserved for person's handle in DMs).

    6 votes

  15. Comment on How are schools preparing in your country? in ~health

    senko
    Link
    Also to clarify, the school system in Croatia is extremely centralized - you can think of an entire country as being a single school district. So marching orders come from the top and the...

    Also to clarify, the school system in Croatia is extremely centralized - you can think of an entire country as being a single school district. So marching orders come from the top and the individual schools have some small leeway in implementation.

    4 votes

  16. How are schools preparing in your country?

    ~health Ask (survey)
    Primarily non-US, as there's been a lot of discussion for various places in the States. In my country (Croatia, EU), nobody knows anything, including the government, and the school year starts in...

    Primarily non-US, as there's been a lot of discussion for various places in the States.

    In my country (Croatia, EU), nobody knows anything, including the government, and the school year starts in three weeks. With the govt change this summer, and the new ministers enjoying their summer vacations, they only created a "task force" last week, which only met today for a few hours and concluded "there are challenges ahead". The minister in charge "thinks" schools will start normally, and "thinks" masks won't be required, with no straight answers or plans.

    Teacher associations, individuals, parent groups have been calling for development of some kind of strategy for weeks (as a tourism-powered 2nd wave hit us), but there doesn't seem to be any sense of urgency on the part of govt.

    This leaves parents (we'e gor one kid in primary school, other in kindergarten) in total fog, there's no way to prepare. Our family is better placed to handle this due to grandparents around to help and flexible schedule (self employed), but the online school from this spring was a disaster and I don't see a chance of the fall doing any better.

    Even with preparations it would be hard, right now looks like it's going to be a disaster.

    How is your country (not) coping with these challenges?

    (edited to clarify the school year start)

    7 votes

  17. Comment on At a loss for words: How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers in ~humanities

    senko
    Link
    Phonics is all good and well until a person at the train station tells you to switch trains at "Lester" (England) and you spend half an hour at map trying to find the damn city. That (true)...

    Phonics is all good and well until a person at the train station tells you to switch trains at "Lester" (England) and you spend half an hour at map trying to find the damn city.

    That (true) anecdote aside, as someone whose native language has 1:1 mapping to sounds, our English teachers always used to tell us "just memorize it", but you do start seeing patterns soon and at some point, after you know enough of a vocabulary, you form a kind of an (incomplete) mapping in your head.

    5 votes

  18. Comment on TV Tuesdays Free Talk in ~tv

    senko
    Link
    Binged on Space Force (Netflix) and loved it. Wasn't a fan of The Office (mockumentary + cringe situations format just didn't sit with me at all) so was a bit apprehensive here, but the show...

    Binged on Space Force (Netflix) and loved it. Wasn't a fan of The Office (mockumentary + cringe situations format just didn't sit with me at all) so was a bit apprehensive here, but the show nailed the comedy (slapstick + situational + geeky) vs seriousness (underlying themes merit examination), plus I'm interested in the current spaceflight advances.

    After going through a few movies from the Studio Ghibli catalogue, continued my anime fix by watching Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (yes yes, late to the party for all of these :) So far, lives up to the hype!

    4 votes

  19. Comment on Has your local climate gotten noticeably warmer in your lifetime? in ~enviro

    senko
    Link
    Yes (inland Croatia, but mostly Mediterranean climate). Summers aren't noticably hotter - subjectively, they might even be slightly less hot (or I'm just better at hiding beneath ACd rock)....

    Yes (inland Croatia, but mostly Mediterranean climate).

    Summers aren't noticably hotter - subjectively, they might even be slightly less hot (or I'm just better at hiding beneath ACd rock).

    Winters, tho: each winter there's noticably less and less snow. There was virtually none to speak of this winter. Winter temperatures were pretty mild compared to 10ish years ago.

    I also noticed the seasons slightly shifted. Winter was some 2 months "later" than usual, and if I didn't know the date and only looked at the weather, I'd say we're in the middle of the spring right now.

    5 votes

  20. Comment on What have you been watching / reading this week? (Anime/Manga) in ~anime

    senko
    Link
    GITS SAC 2045 on Netflix. Terrible, utterly disappointed. I don't mind the animation style at all (tho that's the best I can say about it), but the (un)connectedness of the story and failed...

    GITS SAC 2045 on Netflix. Terrible, utterly disappointed. I don't mind the animation style at all (tho that's the best I can say about it), but the (un)connectedness of the story and failed attempts at depth were really disappointing. What really killed it for me is the cliffhanger ending.

    On the other hand I powered through all Castlevania seasons recently (again Netflix) and I was pleasently surprised. I expected it to be a thin ripoff of the game IP (wasn't familiar with the lore at all) but the plot, action and themes were interesting enough to want to binge it all.

    2 votes