azertyfun

joined 1 year ago
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[–] azertyfun 4 points 3 days ago

Alternative wording:

30% of the electorate is actively pro-trump, 30 % of the electorate is actively anti-trump, 40 % doesn't give enough of a shit either way to get off their couch and vote.

Alternative alternative wording:

70 % of the electorate is pro-trump or ambivalent.

See, it's very easy to speak for non-voters. That's why anyone with half a brain discards their opinion entirely. So we have to assume 52 % of American voters support Trump.

[–] azertyfun 19 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Liquidation auction efforts, logically, should pursue the option that pays out the most money.

To whom?

The money is going to Jones's victims. The victims seem fine getting less money if it means InfoWars goes to someone who will destroy the brand rather than some conservatives who will pump money into it to further destroy their lives.

Typical American "justice". Only first world country where the death penalty is in vigor because "this is what the victims would want", but when a plaintiff looks like they might actually get a small moral win against fascists suddenly the Law is a dispassionate machine.

[–] azertyfun 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The Algorithm has been A Thing long enough to have impacted young adults during their formative years.

At 25 I'm barely old enough that I entered adolescence just as "youtuber" became a career for many people (around 2012ish). The Algorithm has been part of it all my teens though I witnessed it becoming increasingly eldritch throughout and teaching its final untethered form in the second half of the 2010s. Today's 20 year olds never knew anything else as they were 13 when elsagate was in full swing.

TL;DR how are your knees grandpa?

[–] azertyfun 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

The phonology of "moth" is just bad (not just subjectively but in a way that I'm sure linguists could pick apart). It's adjacent to "moist". That's the kind of name you give something you don't like, a name made to be spat out. Contrast to other monosyllabic names like "fly", a decidedly more despicable insect but with a much prettier name. Which one would be easier to use in a song?

Also I just checked and moths are butterflies, etymologically it's just that old Germanic peoples assigned a different name to the less colorful butterflies.

[–] azertyfun 5 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I didn't even know disliking moths was a thing until recently.

Guess why? In French they are called "night butterflies". It's just a nocturnal butterfly so of course it's brown, duh.

This feels like the Orca/Killer Whale debate again. Why do the English give such terrible names to animals like they're trying to give children nightmares?

[–] azertyfun 16 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Oh they definitely exist. At a high level the bullshit is driven by malicious greed, but there are also people who are naive and ignorant and hopeful enough to hear that drivel and truly believe in it.

Like when Microsoft shoves GPT4 into notepad.exe. Obviously a terrible terrible product from a UX/CX perspective. But also, extremely expensive for Microsoft right? They don't gain anything by stuffing their products with useless annoying features that eat expensive cloud compute like a kid eats candy. That only happens because their management people truly believe, honest to god, that this is a sound business strategy, which would only be the case if they are completely misunderstanding what GPT4 is and could be and actually think that future improvements would be so great that there is a path to mass monetization somehow.

[–] azertyfun 25 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Supervision doesn't have to be patronizing or demeaning. A 15 year-old isn't dumb anymore, merely ignorant and impulsive which does tend to make them shitheads but that's kind of a separate problem.

Most adults are shockingly bad at understanding and explaining their own thoughts and rationales, including to other adults. So when interacting with a teenager, they either throw their hands up or fall back on "shut up and do as I say" as one would with a 5 year-old.

That's where teens can be failed really badly by the adults around them because they are at an age where unlike children they are mostly/fully equipped to understand "adult" advice, and will not blindly follow orders anymore. But they also need way more advice, guidance and explanation than an actual adult. I think that's where the post is getting at. Don't forget that teens are kids, but don't treat them like they are subhuman or lacking in agency.

[–] azertyfun 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

My gut feeling was that a standard accessibility protocol doesn't exist yet, but that a Wayland extension is probably the solution.

Looks like I was right: https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the-wayland-native-accessibility-project/

However that's a recent proof-of-concept, so nothing generally available at this stage. Details would have to be ironed out, changes upstreamed, the protocol extension accepted, and every graphics toolkit would have to be updated to support the protocol. Seems like a very worthy goal to pursue though and it's great to see funds allocated for a11y.

I don't know how that would work with XWayland apps, but given how clunky that gets with stuff like fractional scaling I wouldn't get my hopes up. The sooner we can native Wayland all the things, the better. X11 must die, regardless of the feeling of the graybeards on the matter.

[–] azertyfun 10 points 1 week ago

I'm not a revolutionary and I disagree that the semantic difference is unimportant.

"The system must be destroyed" implies, assuming we're talking about national politics, at the very least a short period of very deep constitutional and institutional reform, but really refers to nothing less than civil war, violent revolution, and the systematic dismantlement of existing institutions from which proponents of such action generally assume that their preferred method of government will naturally emerge.

This is opposed to a belief that, flawed may they be, democratic institutions also act as safeguards against the tyranny of the majority as well as the tyranny of whoever has the most money/guns, and slow incremental change to these institutions is preferable to their dismantlement.

Of course everything in the world isn't so black and white. Nonetheless the existence of gray doesn't diminish the difference between black and white. "The system must be destroyed", by virtue of the violence it implies, is an extremist statement and different in nature to "the system must be fixed".

[–] azertyfun 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oh you completely misunderstand the modern fascist playbook. Putin Erdogan Orban or Modi don't usually ban semi-obscure shows outright. They use their near complete control of all major media to ensure these shows never become a major cultural hit in the first place (by not funding nor platforming them). Cult classics aren't burned, their meaning is just subverted; Star Wars isn't a critique of fascism, it was always an allegory for the Righteous Traditionalists (the Jedi) working against The Woke (The Empire). No-one quite knows what Tolkien meant with Isengard, surely no allegory there, but I can tell you The Shire shows how good the tradwife life can be so get back to pumping out kids and churning butter missus!

Slight deviations are tolerated of course. Who cares if the urban elites have some woke media. As long as they keep to themselves, it's just convenient to keep the intellectuals distracted. Just don't make the mistake of making a nationwide cultural hit that questions the official narrative a bit too directly, because that's when you'll find yourself accidentally defenestrated.

[–] azertyfun 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Uncut diamond is a good way to put it.

The scenario, world building, graphics, and acting are world-class. Combat was decent. Most side-quests were forgettable and clearly worse than the main quest. The open-world was mechanically massively underwhelming, especially considering TW3 came out five years earlier.

This game received a lot of love and took a long time to make, but failed to achieve in some key areas. CDPR didn't have the means to do what R* or Larian could, and that's fine. I can't help but feel that if these developers had put the same time and energy into a (semi) closed world à la Mass Effect or Deus Ex, not having to spend so much time filling in a huge open world map would have allowed them to make the whole game as tight and polished as the main quest stuff, and this could have been the best game of the decade or close to it. Only downside is it doesn't tick the mandatory "Open World" box for AAA games, but does anyone actually care if the RPG elements are good? Mass Effects fans would surely disagree.

[–] azertyfun 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Stop it with the sugarcoating. He's a fascist, a Nazi. He promises to inflict pain on others, and that's what's appealing to half of American voters. Not the "confidence". They get off on the hate and cruelty, whether they admit it or not. They are, in every literal sense of the word, textbook fascists. No need to make excuses for them.

 

Hi!

Kagi had a rough couple months on the PR side, and a comment from another Lemmy user arguing that they aren't using Google's index set me off... because I had just read a couple weeks ago on their own websites that they primarily use Google's search index.

Lo and behold, that user was "right": No mention of Google whatsoever on Kagi's Search Sources page. If that's all you had to go off of, you'd be excused for thinking they are only using their internal index to power their web search since that's what they now strongly imply. The only "reference" to external indexes is this nebulous sentence:

Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information [...]

... Unless one goes to check that pesky Wayback Machine. Here is the same page from March 2024, which I will copy/paste here for posterity:

Search Sources

You can think of Kagi as a "search client," working like an email client that connects to various indexes and sources, including ours, to find relevant results and package them into a superior, secure, and privacy-respecting search experience, all happening automatically and in a split-second for you.

External

Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek and Brave, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information like Wolfram Alpha, Apple, Wikipedia, Open Meteo, Yelp, TripAdvisor and other APIs. Typically every search query on Kagi will call a number of different sources at the same time, all with the purpose of bringing the best possible search results to the user.

For example, when you search for images in Kagi, we use 7 different sources of information (including non-typical sources such as Flickr and Wikipedia Commons), trying to surface the very best image results for your query. The same is also the case for Kagi's Video/News/Podcasts results.

Internal

But most importantly, we are known for our unique results, coming from our web index (internal name - Teclis) and news index (internal name - TinyGem). Kagi's indexes provide unique results that help you discover non-commercial websites and "small web" discussions surrounding a particular topic. Kagi's Teclis and TinyGem indexes are both available as an API.

We do not stop there and we are always trying new things to surface relevant, high-quality results. For example, we recently launched the Kagi Small Web initiative which platforms content from personal blogs and discussions around the web. Discovering high quality content written without the motive of financial gain, gives Kagi's search results a unique flavor and makes it feel more humane to use.


Of course, running an index is crazy expensive. By their own admission, Teclis is narrowly focused on "non-commercial websites and 'small web' discussions". Mojeek indexes nowhere near enough things to meaningfully compete with Google, and Yandex specializes in the Russosphere. Bing (Google's only meaningful direct indexing competitor) is not named so I assume they don't use it. So it's not a leap to say that Google powers most of English-speaking web searches, just like Bing powers almost all search alternatives such as DDG.

I don't personally mind that they use Google as an index (it makes the most sense and it's still the highest-quality one out there IMO, and Kagi can't compete with Google's sheer capital on the indexing front). But I do mind a lot that they aren't being transparent about it anymore. This is very shady and misleading, which is a shame because Kagi otherwise provides a valuable and higher quality service than Google's free search does.

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