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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Oh boy, they weren’t fuzzy. Some film outclass the clarity and sharpness of modern OLED, even when it was for B category low budget movies, just that most people watched a 4 week old piece of film in bumfuck middle of nowhere cinema. With a scratched up and badly calibrated focus lens and dirty and deteriorated film over a dirty screen.

    Anyways, the biggest problem that physical media solves is not the number of pixels, but the bitrate. Tons of information, specially about color, is lost to streaming compression. Pixel density equation means that the quality of what you see is rarely distinguishable between 1080p, 2k and 4k, depending on how far away you sit from the screen and how big it is. For the typical seating accommodation at home and commercial theaters, you won’t notice a significant change within FHD and UHD. However, you can definitely tell the difference between the 10Mbps 4k (down to as little as 2Mbps if your connection sucks) that you get from Netflix¹ and the steady 32Mbps that Blu-ray can give you.

    ¹: BTW, it doesn’t matter how fast your internet connection is, the data transferred can get to you at as high speed as you want, but the bitrate of the video file inside the container that the streaming services give you is usually hard capped rather low anyway.




  • Intelligence is not reduced to producing speech or complex reasoning. Hence why calling LLMs AI was always disingenuous.

    Intelligence is an extremely complex and multi factor phenomenon. With a wide range of definitions, dimensions and degrees. Your cat is intelligent, some ML models are very intelligent. But, so they are certain blobs of fungi rhizome. A cluster of neurons in a petri dish, and a few hyper specific automation scripts can also be intelligent. An LLM can display intelligence. But that doesn’t mean it is conscious or that it is AGI, or that it can be classified as a person.

    Those are all entirely different things.



  • dustyData@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldFacts
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    15 days ago

    Just want to remind everyone that the point of this scene is that Draper is an unstable and insecure man that is actually obsessed about how everyone around him are perceiving him, all the time. So this line is just stupid bravado, because he thinks the phrase projects the image he wants others to have of himself. He is lying because he actually thinks about what others think of him constantly. He works in advertising ffs.




  • Everyone complains about traffic, yet still buy cars all the time.

    An individual’s inability to alter the structural conditions that shape their decision making is not an indictment of said individual position on the matter. Hence why “vote with your wallet” is such a bad thought terminating phrase.

    Sure, people can vote with their wallets, but if there are no good options then the point is moot. It turns into a no buy, disenfranchising those without the privilege of previously accumulating a collection of games. It pushes them into the “you are not a real gamer anyway” territory.

    Thus, why it is always ethical to pirate video games. It is the only sensible choice for a have not. And it is the only choice left when “vote with your wallet” means there’s nothing ethical to buy.



  • In what I’ve seen, the best masons are on construction sites planning the work before hand. The inexperienced and newby masons mix mortar and carry bricks around. The top elder guys lead the prep work planing when and where stuff needs to be for what is being built. But once the machine starts mixing the cement all those guys do is lay bricks.

    They don’t shovel, they don’t mix mortar, they don’t carry materials. Just laying brick after brick until they run out of materials or the construction is done. It’s quite mesmerizing to see a good contractor working efficiently, rare but fascinating.



  • Traffic segregation, car free zones, public transport, lower speed limits, car size based taxing, stricter driver license conditions, three strike limitations, temporal license suspensions schemes, these are all measurements that would reduce car accidents just as much, and could be implemented within the next week anywhere at very low cost. It’s not a pipe dream, it’s a lack of political will.

    It doesn’t take several billion dollars of R&D onto a tech that will never work outside of 1% of the road network and could actually not reduce cars accidents at all once it faces real world conditions.

    If the goal is to reduce traffic accidents, this is the most expensive, slowest and inefficient way to do it.

    EDIT: Autonomous driving will solve traffic and traffic deaths as much as EVs are going to solve global warning. They are plausible lies that techno oligarchs use to distract from the real causes of the problems they purport to solve and are actually just new money funnels for the oil industrial complex.





  • Yeah, I don’t think you understand Calibre at all, because you are somehow annoyed by it. I get it. But there’s no e-reader on the market that supports Calibre. Quite the contrary, there’s a titanic effort from the Calibre team (it’s been several people since 2009) to reverse engineer support with every single e-reader and tablet in the market that should not be minimized. You’re also painting a picture as if somehow Calibre is the Windows of e-book and everyone hates it but is forced to use it, when in reality that is not at all the case. Yes, it has quirks and people have constructive criticisms, but calling a guy’s name “rough” is not positive criticism. Overall, most people appreciate and like Calibre for what it has achieved and enabled for readers all around the world.

    Again, it’s fine if you don’t like it, don’t understand it, and don’t want to understand it. But that doesn’t excuse insulting a person who actively is making your petty life a bit easier and free from corporate control. It takes a very weird person to feel like commenting negatively on someone’s name is somehow appropriate, it’s bully attitude. If that is all the criticism you can bring to a discussion of software, save it for yourself and stop replying. You’re all over this thread complaining, completely unprovoked like a little wuss. No one is forcing you to use Calibre, it just so happen that no one has done anything better, as you yourself admitted in another comment.


  • Good, so if you know what needs to be fixed it should be easy for you to make a new alternative, with modern web UX, self-hosting in mind and NO quirks whatsoever.

    Really, it’s so easy to insult those who are making solutions when you have never contributed at all. There’s constructive criticisms, but calling people who are fronting free labor for your benefit as nerd aliens is not it.


  • the devs thought it was ok to put it into their game

    That’s the point. They didn’t thought it was OK and didn’t.

    They could have just used stock textures as placeholders like developers have been doing for decades.

    That is exactly what they did, any texture left in the first version of the game was a mistake that was promptly fixed as soon as they noticed it. We have the advantage of judging four years later with new info something they did back then and have since corrected. Ethical considerations must include intent and context, and here there was definitely no intent to harm.