millie

joined 2 years ago
[–] millie 9 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

I know that when I'm playing cards in a dress that's melted into my skin, with my favorite half-bracelet draped over my wrist, I love to intimidate my opponent by flashing them two face cards. Who wouldn't be shaken by the Kinmb of Back of Card and the Quing of 21s? Especially when I've already played my oversized red card.

[–] millie 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Rocker it's evolving!
Rocker evolved into..

[–] millie 2 points 4 days ago

This is what happened with plastic bags in some stores in the US. We passed plastic bag bans and while in a lot of cases the result was a combination of low-quality paper bags and legitimately reusable plastic totes, in the past couple of years some places have started giving out plastic bags that are way thicker than the ones we used to have and just calling them reusable. Like, yeah, they're strong enough to be reused, but that definitely doesn't seem to be the norm. We just ended up with single-use plastic bags that literally use more plastic.

[–] millie 3 points 4 days ago

I picked up a projector on sale for $50 on Newegg, usually I think they're like $80 or something. Only problem is, I don't know how to get the dust out of the inside of the projector lens. I've tried spraying canned air into the cracks around it, but it didn't work. I even took the thing apart intending to wipe it down myself, but I couldn't figure out how to get to the back of the lens.

Still, for $50 it's not too bad. The little bits of dust are kind of annoying, but they're not in focus and it's pretty alright for watching movies.

[–] millie 6 points 5 days ago

He saw Civil War and thought it looked cool.

[–] millie 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Considering that it also extends to charging stations, that some of the Teslas are privately owned, and that people have been doing things like shooting at dealerships? I'm thinking not.

[–] millie 12 points 5 days ago (5 children)

Quite the pattern. Notice how once something happens a few times, it becomes a normalized course of action. In a month or two we went from not hearing about this at all to seemingly many people across the world jumping in specifically on lighting things on fire. There have been some other approaches too, but burning things down seems to be an increasingly common response.

It's interesting to see how specific kinds of resistance become sort of a behavioral trend. A few people lead by example and suddenly it starts to snowball. I wonder what other kinds of similar situations we'll see play out over the next few months.

[–] millie 2 points 1 week ago

Do you think we're past the point of reboots having to do cell phone jokes? I hope so. They stink.

[–] millie 5 points 1 week ago

We literally would not be in this situation if it wasn't for Hilary Clinton. Imagine what the timeline where Bernie Sanders just finished his second term must be like. I want to go there.

[–] millie 2 points 1 week ago

I've honestly had the same thought, but then I look at the attitudes of the people involved and their implementation of what they're doing and it's hard to assume anything other than stupidity and malice. I don't think Trump or Elon are capable of that sort of strategy, and if they are they're two of the best actors on the planet. I really don't think they're nearly that intelligent or talented at actual deception. They're certainly reckless enough, but I don't buy that they're anything other than dangerously stupid.

I wouldn't be remotely surprised if that's been the motivation for some of their supporters, though. There may well be people in the world who feel that pulling the pendulum as far into a shitstorm as it will go will create enough of a counter-swing to be worth the immediate results, and that may well have affected their voting. It seems like a pretty foolish gambit for anyone who has to live through it, though, and pretty heartless to boot.

If, on the other hand, the acceleration and counterbalancing is just a natural occurrence? A way to get from point A to point B with the least possible action? That doesn't sound totally crazy to me at all.

But, like, there doesn't need to be someone sneakily manipulating politics and capitalism for that to happen. Hopefully we do learn from what's happening and what's already happened enough to make some of the same sort of societal improvements much of Western Europe and the United States saw after WWII, preferably sooner than they did with a lot less damage in the mean time.

We do seem to be in a similar situation and have a similar opportunity to change things as a result once people actually get the ball moving. Assuming we do actually get the ball moving.

[–] millie 7 points 1 week ago

Mozilla seems to be doing fine to me. Most of the people complaining about them don't give any indication that they themselves are doing anything particularly helpful either.

[–] millie 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

One thing I notice about my childhood memories is that the context is very different. There are things that I obviously didn't understand in the way I would as an adult, which I think is part of why we end up unpacking and recontextualizing childhood experiences as we grow older. But our earliest memories are obviously going to be formed with far less context and understanding of circumstances than even those formed just a few years later.

It makes me wonder if the issue isn't the storing of memory, but the lack of meaningful context to fit them into the way we process things as adults. Like, say I had memories of someone speaking a language I didn't speak at the time, but later learned. What are the chances I'm going to catch onto their individual words well enough to parse them years later once they have context to give them meaning? I'm guessing pretty low.

25
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by millie to c/politics
 

With each one of Trump's announced appointments, it looks like the situation in the Federal government is getting worse. Even before the gutting of our Federal agencies occurs, we're still dealing with the court system stripping away sound policies both at the highest levels and in backward districts, often seeming to come down to a decision by a single judge in Texas.

So what can we do in states that actually want to make things better to either work on our own or even begin to pull away from the decision making of the backward parts of our country that keep making these decisions for us? How can we act without their input? How can we pull back the money that blue states that are doing well funnel into red states that could scarcely afford paved roads without our tax dollars? Is pulling out of the US or creating a smaller state-to-state coalition to consolidate our collective financial power reasonable or possible?

In Massachusetts we have a ballot initiative process, but it takes years to get it together to get a question on a ballot, and by then we're likely to be much further down this road.

What can we do today? How do we petition our representatives to pull us out of this absolute mess as much as possible? How do we maintain the protections, freedoms, and quality of life that our own local and state governments and the voters that put them into power have signaled their desire to secure in the face of a Federal government where RFK decides the health care policy and Elon Musk literally gets his own meme department?

 

Using the formulas from corollary 1 of Aronow and Green [2013], we find that untreated compliers have an implied turnout rate of 66.88%, whereas treated compliers have an implied turnout rate of 78.48%. Given the high base rate of voting among compliers in this study, it is interesting that friend-to-friend appeals elevated turnout so profoundly.

The results of this study suggest that simply talking to your friends, even just through a text message, is far more likely to get them to go out and vote than organized but impersonal voter mobilization. If you want to secure the outcome of the election, text or call your friends about it, especially your friends in swing states. Moreover, encourage them to do the same. If a text will increase their voter participation, it'll probably also get a decent number of them to send a similar text themselves.

Gloom and doom is not going to win the election. Endless panicked articles are not going to win the election. People going out and voting will, and you, person reading this, have the power to get more people to go vote.

It will do more than a century of posting on Lemmy would.

 

In the past few weeks I feel like I've seen a lot more conservative comments being posted on Beehaw. Where before it seemed like occasionally some dazed right-winger would wander through now and then, it now seems a bit more like they specifically show up to any thread that brushes up against one of their pet issues.

The most recent example I've noticed is around the stuff with the Ladybird devs being weird about being asked to use inclusive pronouns, but it seems like a pattern.

Has anyone else noticed this? Any thoughts on a course of action other than blocking them all individually or reporting particularly grievous examples?

I really would be disappointed to see every single thread here slowly inundated with pettiness and hate.

 

For years I was using Drupe, but they've thoroughly enshittified. What used to be a sleek, extremely functional dialer app with a fantastic UI has become a slow, ad-filled sack of garbage with a still pretty good UI.

A few months back I had enough and I switched to FOSS Dialer. The biggest thing on my radar was looking for something that isn't prone to being turned to adware garbage for a quick quarterly profit, so it seemed like a good fit.

But in the past few months I've probably made more accidental calls in a single week than in the years that I used Drupe. It's super obnoxious. Click once, and I call some random person. When I open my phone it literally just starts at the top of my contact list.

Drupe was great because I could arrange which frequent numbers I wanted to use in which order along the left side of my screen and calling or texting just required me to drag it over to a spot on the right side of my screen. I could call people without looking at my phone, I hardly ever called the wrong number or accidentally dialed someone, and it was really comfortable and easy to use. If it hadn't turned to a bloated piece of crap I'd have used it forever.

So my question: is there anything more along the lines of Drupe in terms of UI that is at least not at the moment packed full of ads, slow as hell, and collecting all sorts of data? I've kinda had it up to here with FOSS Dialer.

 

I've been looking more seriously at making a permanent switch to Linux, as I don't plan to ever upgrade to Windows 11. I'm currently running a dual-boot with Ubuntu Studio, and I've been trying to piece together everything I need to move my regular usage over.

I think I've got enough of a grasp of Jack at this point to replace Voicemeeter, which was one of my big hurdles. The next, though, is Discord's incomplete functionality.

For those who don't know, audio doesn't stream with screen sharing over discord on Linux. I do a lot of streaming with friends, so we kind of need this functionality.

I know it's possible to run a discord client on Linux that fixes this problem, but given that it's technically against the ToS, I don't really want to risk my account. I have a bunch of stuff set up for game servers, including all sorts of webhooks and ticket tool configurations and the like, so it isn't really worth risking.

I know there are some VLC plugins I can use to stream video files, but that doesn't help if I'm trying to stream a game or my DAW.

Has anyone found solutions that work for them? The easier for the person I'm streaming to, the better.

59
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by millie to c/technology
 

Archive Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240330224149/https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

This is fascinating. I've certainly seen AI hallucinating things like imaginary functions in gdscript. Admittedly, it does it a lot more with gpt3 than with gpt4 on a subscription, which is consistent with what 3 vs 4 has access to, but I'm sure the problems apply in a lot of other use cases that might have not had the benefit of more recent documentation.

I suppose it's not surprising that a number of larger entities have been falling prey to this, as they keep trying to inappropriately jam AI into their production lines where it's incapable of doing the job. Pretty clever vulnerability to find, though.

Ultimately, this is probably a good thing for human coders, imo. The more LLMs demonstrate that they're not effective without robust human intervention, the better.

14
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by millie to c/music
 

I love this thing. Pick a key, it shows you where the scale is. One octave or whole fretboard, with notes or without. This makes learning scales and just picking a scale and composing in it so much easier!

19
submitted 1 year ago by millie to c/music
 

A couple of months ago I started looking at composing some music for a game I'm working on. I started fiddling around with DAWs with just mouse and keyboard and a few weeks later I picked up a little 2 octave MIDI-keyboard to make it a little easier. That lead to diving into music theory, which made me want to pick up a bass.

A few weeks later and a couple of cheapo guitars, and I feel like I've found an essential part of myself. I could literally sit here playing bass until my arms go numb. I don't even have my audio interface or an amp yet, I'm literally just playing it dry, and I'm absolutely in love. I can't wait for my interface to get here so I can start putting down just like, some bass lines and some simple power chords with some distortion.

It's incredible how cheap it is to pick up a couple of instruments now and just dive right into music. With all the stuff on various instruments and music theory out there, why not? Nobody's going to gasp in awe at the quality of my pair of Glarrys, but it's plenty to get my fingers moving and let the music find its way out.

Anyway, that's really all. I'm in love with bass and with how accessible music is. I kind of want to try violin. Or like, maybe a shamisen. I feel like instruments used to be so prohibitively expensive, even on the beginner end, and that seems to be much less the case now. Like, it also certainly seems like you could easily spend as much money as you might feel like spending on music stuff, but I actually feel like I can pick some different stuff up and try things without like selling my organs.

While we're here, any recommendations for resources on getting further into music theory or composition? There's so much out there, I'm sure there's some great stuff I haven't even brushed up against yet!

 

I was trying to do a memory test to see how far back 3.5 could recall information from previous prompts, but it really doesn't seem to like making pseudorandom seeds. 😆

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