Unpopular Opinion

I hate when people pretend that a owner owned and non- profit companies can never do any wrong.

If any company did something againest consumers, they should be boycotted till they fix their behavior or correct their mistakes.

It's like, one of the things I started seeing people giving a free pass for so long is paywalls and overflowing amount of trackers for news organizations.

I have no problem with companies that might provide some weekly or even monthly articles under a paywall, but paywalling every article is anti consumer. I also have no problem with companies that have a moderate amount of trackers, but I should not trade my soul to read articles, news websites need to choose carefully what to include on their websites.

If you gonna have all the trackers in the world, then at least raise the value of your product, for news that means license them under a free license(Creative Commons,...etc) so I actually get a article in exchange for allowing the trackers in your website. Otherwise, granting me a license to only look at the text in exchange is unfair.

I don't care what is the name of the company capitalist or not, paywalled content that restrict people ability to read is evil and ads that track the size of your underwear is evil and so the companies who do so need to be boycotted to change their behavior.

And then they utilize the followers to do their social marketing.

When you see someone talking about fighting the Deep State that's actually someone manipulated by the deep state. And that manipulated person helps mold society down the path that the deep state need to gain control.

Look at America. These anti deep state followers helped pave the way for trump to be elected, but Trump is deep state doing deep state things. They thought they were fighting the deep state but they elected and put in power a deep state puppet owned by criminals.

When CEOs say if they have to pay taxes they'll just raise prices instead of selling their 5th house people freak out.

When CEOs say they'll just raise prices if their industry is regulated instead of lowering their multi million dollar salaries, people freak out.

But when they say the exact same thing with tariffs, everyone just goes along with it.

Its the same thing. Corporations shouldn't be able to punish people to avoid making slightly less money.

A lot of people will disagree with me on this one. I've been a software engineer for 35 years now. I've worked at everything from tiny companies where I'm the only dev, to startups, to massive corporations with countless employees. And I've never seen anything like what's happening now.

There are four factors:

• H1-Bullshit. Never before have so many H1-B visas been allowed. And the number is only going up. For the uninitiated they're work visas that cap the amount the dev can legally be paid and chain them to their job so they can't quit. They're horribly exploitative and bring down everyone's paycheck.

• The software already built is good enough. Organizations already have either decade+ old software solutions in place or third party vendors that provide those solutions. There will always be bug fixes and maintenance but nobody is building new software from scratch anymore. The stuff that already exists is good enough at what it does that it isn't worth the investment to make something new. That means fewer devs are needed for writing that software.

• Destruction of the public sector. A LOT of unemployed and experienced devs are about to be looking for jobs. If you have less than 10 years of experience be prepared for finding a job to become nearly impossible. Even if the next administration takes a different approach it will take many years to undo just the damage that's already been done.

• AI. I actually don't think AI on it's own will be terribly destructive to the industry. It's a tool that will make devs more efficient and cause a slight drop in openings. But combined with everything else it's just one more factor hurting the industry.

When people ask me how to get into software development I tell them not to bother. I encourage you to consider it as well. The golden age of IT careers is over.

People today cannot go a moment without crying about how they've been ghosted by someone else. But they don't really think about relevance when it comes to gaining friends and maintaining them.

People are so easy to let go of someone because they haven't had a 'hi' from them in a couple days or a week. I think that's too petty. Are you meaning to say that people are not allowed to tend to things they find more important? To other people they may find more important than you?

All I ever ask from my friends is to at least talk to me within a year, something anything. Doesn't have to be on a constant basis, we'd run out of subjects and updates.

I always feel like people should evaluate friends based on relevancy. How much do they mean to you? What have they done recently that makes the friendship itself feel like it's gotten an update? Is the mutual bond still there?

Things like that. Simply throwing a fit because someone hasn't spoken to you in a day or even a few hours kind of suggests that maybe you're an insecure friend.

Other platforms too, but I'm on lemmy. I'm mainly talking about LLMs in this post

First, let me acknowledge that AI is not perfect, it has limitations e.g

• tendency to hallucinate responses instead of refusing/saying it doesn't know
• different models/models sizes with varying capabilities
• lack of knowledge of recent topics without explicitly searching it
• tendency to be patternistic/repetitive
• inability to hold on to too much context at a time etc.

The following are also true:

• People often overhype LLMs without understanding their limitations
• Many of those people are those with money
• The term "AI" has been used to label everything under the sun that contains an algorithm of some sort
• Banana poopy banana (just to make sure ppl are reading this)
• There have been a number companies that overpromised for AI, and often were using humans as a "temporary" solution until they figured out the AI, which they never did (hence the gag, "AI" stands for "An Indian")

But I really don't think they're nearly as bad as most lemmy users make them out to be. I was going to respond to all the takes but there's so many I'll just make some general points

• SOTA (State of the Art) models match or beat most humans besides experts in most fields that are measurable
• I personally find AI is better than me in most fields except ones I know well. So maybe it's only 80-90% there, but it's there in like every single field whereas I am in like 1-2
• LLMs can also do all this in like 100 languages. You and I can do it in like... 1, with limited performance in a couple others
• Companies often use smaller/cheaper models in various products (e.g google search), which are understandably much worse. People often then use these to think all AI sucks
• LLMs aren't just memorizing their training data. They can reason, as recent reasoning models more clearly show. Also, we now have near frontier models that are like 32B, or 21B GB in size. You cannot fit the entire internet in 21GB. There is clearly higher level synthesizing going on
• People often tend to seize on superficial questions like the strawberry question (which is essentially an LLM blind spot) to claim LLM's are dumb.
• In the past few years, researchers have had to come up with countless newer harder benchmarks because LLMs kept blowing through previous ones (partial list here: https://r0bk.github.io/killedbyllm/)
• People and AI are often not compared fairly, for isntance with code, people usually compare a human with feedback from a compiler, working iteratively and debugging for hours to LLMs doing it in one go, no feedback, beyond maybe a couple of back and forths in a chat

Also I did say willfully ignorant. This is because you can go and try most models for yourself right now. There are also endless benchmarks constantly being published showing how well they are doing. Benchmarks aren't perfect and are increasingly being gamed, but they are still decent.

Let me preface with, I really enjoyed the game and couldn't put it down but after beating the Outer Wilds base game, I have thoughts and I think this would get down voted to oblivion in the Outer Wilds group so here I am. This is just my experience but the game was sold to me as this inventive organic puzzle solving adventure where you'd stumble upon clues and solve puzzles but in reality it's a journal scrap hunting game. There are circular glyphs on every planet that tell you how to solve almost every puzzle. I spent 5 hours ignoring these glyphs cause I assumed they were nothing more than lore dumps but in reality they are progress gates. I assumed this game would work more like Animal Well where the game tells you literally nothing and you have to experiment with your tools and knowledge to solve puzzles but nope. I'd hesitate to even call this game a puzzle game, it's honestly more of a casual exploration game which there is nothing wrong with that, but seems more accurate.

yes i am an american.

but the general sentiments i see online about americans are wildly ignorant and it genuinely pisses me off how the global rising tide in fascism is == america in a lot of people’s minds. guess it’s just easier to engage in the same idiotic nonsense the fascists do than to engage in any critical thinking.

two primary points:

1. americans aren’t just fucking lazy and aren’t just “letting” things happen. some victim blaming bullshit if i ever heard it. it also very much demonstrates that despite your “european worldliness” you’ve never left your tiny village/corner of the earth and seen anything different in this world besides the one time you went to monaco as a teen. americans don’t protest for a variety of socioeconomic and political factors, not one of which is “they don’t give a shit.” most americans live in cities that are incredibly far apart from one another and, in the context of a single given city, usually pretty demographically consistent actually. a given city won’t vary much inside that city, but might be very different from another city. this means americans, limited by their lack of walking infrastructure and their cities being massively spread apart in a spatial sense, really can only choose to effectively spontaneously protest in their local city and neighboring municipalities. most people there already probably agree with you to a degree, it’s preaching to the choir. seats of political power here are hundreds of thousands of miles away from most people. it would be like, a literal fucking LOTR scale and size adventure for most americans to go protest their government. and this is intentional. that is why they don’t. not because they don’t want to. not because they’re ignorant. not because they’ve given up. it is because they physically, economically, and even rationally; just can’t do it. they’re as much a victim as anyone else. this is something being done to them, not by them.

2. this stupidly fucking ignorant notion that somehow americans are single-handedly responsible for western neofascism. guess what? for decades, you guys lazily sat and got fucking fat on corpo cheese too; it isn’t just americans who fell prey to this centuries spanning grift! europeans have exactly all the same problems with entrenched corporatism in their societies and feel too proud to notice it or do anything about it before the same things happening here happen there; except this time in an entirely homegrown sense instead of being imported from america. americans just, for better or worse, did capitalism more and better than anyone else in history. our collapse and reckoning happened to come first chronologically, for that reason. make no mistake, though, friend. we all have our hands in the collapse-pot. this is something much bigger than just a nation state or people. this is the end of nation states, the end of an existing world order. those who recognize this will do well in this life, those who don’t won’t.

sorry for my unhinged babbling rant i just got lots of feelings, ideas, and thoughts and nowhere to have discourse.

hope not to offend anyone. love all the european homies.

EDIT: at exactly 16 upvotes and 16 downvotes on this post rn. proud to have said something truly divisive lmao ;)

Reasons to just do away (I am not suggesting a government ban) on competive sports. Ex. basketball, football, baseball, damn near everything else. I wasn't always like this. Had a conversation with wife of a co-worker 20 some years ago and thought she was nuts. Funny how time and reconsideration can change a person outlook.

A huge waste of time. Unproductive except for large corporations and inflating players egos.

It reinforces division and us vs. them attitudes. Not unity and cooperation like what is needed today.

Add in b.s. like taking a knee during the anthem and men in womens sports, let's just do away with competive sports.

If you want to 'stick it to the man' of overpaid athletes and mega-rich sports conglomerates, please consider.

I now spend my sundays at the rifle range.

Not every student needs a rigorous scientific education. Not every parent will demand one. Not every public school will require or offer one. My claim is that Christians absolutely should. Likely other religions as well, I use Christian merely because it's what I'm most familiar with.

The mission of a public school is to graduate students intellectually fit to participate in civil society, which in my opinion does include at least a cursory understanding of evolution. At least enough to know how to look up the details later if needed. A Christian school must do similarly, but carries the additional objective of raising students confident in their faith, which requires a more detailed and rigorous treatment of the subject.

If you want your children to be able to defend their religious beliefs against scientific encroachment, then they better know exactly what science they're defending their faith from. Although evolution presents a credible alternative to a literal interpretation of Genesis 1, it isn't inherently incompatible with Christian education and doesn't prove atheism right. Even when the belief in evolution is optional, understanding the scientific basis for it is critical.

When Christian parents neglect their children's secular scientific education, they grow up to say stupid shit like, "If Darwin says we evolved from monkeys, they why are there still monkeys?" They'll think they cleverly debunked all the atheist scientists, even though neither Darwin, nor any evolutionist since, made that claim. This makes them a disgrace to their faith and to their educators.

As anyone who remembers the 90s/00s can remember, the internet was supposed to liberate us. Free access to information meant everyone would be educated and informed, and able to freely communicate and organize.

That's not what happened. Corporations turned it into a tool of oppression. Technology has never and will never save us from capitalism on its own. Since the early 1900s we've been capable of providing food, housing, and medical care to everyone but we don't. Technology cannot change that.

Social media is a particularly vile tool. It allows corporations to totally shape the reality of people who use it. To the point where people are so divided it's all but impossible to oppose the government.

Decentralized social media might be better, at least for now. But it's still removing the human element from our lives. Instead of talking to each other we create little echo chambers for ourselves. The Fediverse will not fix that.

The only real solution is to reject social media entirely. Which was happening, but now I fear decentralized social media is pulling people back in.

I haven't played since before Wizards started pushing Commander, at that time called EDH. I felt the Standard Format was a perfect setup to keep the game fresh and innovative while still making money, and the Legacy Format was perfect for the people who had cards that are no longer in Standard. I think the Commander Format killed a perfect system, and Wizards/Hasbro are just trying everything to make money and keep the game mostly unplayable with the licensed tie-ins.

I really cannot understand the fanfare of "warm weather" places like Texas, Florida, Arizona, Hawaii, and the Gulf Coast. I feel like society has a tendency to idolize warm weather destinations like those.

Even living in the northern, more continential parts of North America, I still feel like local meterologists have a pro-summer season bias.

In the late winter and spring local meteroligists would countdown the milestones to the "first day of spring", and the start of "baseball season". It's as if they are biased against mild or cold temperatures. They also make things like "putting on a light jacket" seem like a "chore". I feel like they tend to phrase it as "Don't forget that light jacket if you're going out tonight because the temperatures will drop tonight". Meterologists also seem to idolize beach and pool weather for some reason, as if it's something that is a "good lifestyle" somehow.

T-shirt and shorts weather is terrible. I hate it not being cold enough to wear long sleeved clothing. If it is too hot to wear school uniform or business clothing, then it is too hot, period. I cringe at schools and businesses that previously banned shorts that decided allow it as part of the "uniform" because it got so hot outside. Cold weather is just so much better. People just suck at putting on proper clothes when it gets cold. Unlike when it is cold, when it is hot, one can't just take off clothing within social norms as it gets hotter outside.

A lifestyle in a hot weather place seems like it would just be an awful way to live. Places that shutdown from 2pm to 5pm because it is too hot to do anything outside, wasting hours of daylight and delaying dinner after sunset waiting for the temperature to drop. Or having to get up at 5am to go outside for exercise before the temperature climbs to 32°C (90°F) by 10am. The idea that it is so hot and humid outside that people would need to take showers plus a change in clothing upon arriving at work in the office. It would seem so cumbersome and a terrible way to live in a terrible climate; whereas with winter one can just take off layers as needed. I don't understand society's obsession with beach and pool weather and wanting to go to the pool or beach. What is so good about the pool or the beach such that people idolize them so much?

I hate how ugly window AC units are, both from the inside and outside. They are eyesores to look at and can ruin the urban streetscape as well. They are large, bulky, take up space, and are uncomfortably loud. Come late May or early to mid June, it sucks having to guess how many comfortable days are left before the AC units need to go in.

The fact that air conditioning allows people to live and build major cities in otherwise miserable parts of the world is just a symbol of mankind's arrogance. ACs allows big oil to keep working class citizens forever hooked and dependent on the power grid to not die in the summer heat. Oh man, just wait for the heat index to reach 42°C (107°F) and wait for a blackout power outage to strike. Lots of people are in for a rude awakening as they find out of the consequences of depending on their ACs and living in such awfully hot climates. Unlike the summer heat, at least with winter there's clothes and blankets to put on to stay warm, as well as the fact that buildings trap heat better than radiating heat to cool off.

It's crazy to me how people tend to say "Canadians have a brutal climate", or "The weather in England and Ireland is awful and it sucks", in stark contrast to the idolization of Florida, Hawaii, Texas, and Arizona as places famed for their "warm" temperatures and "mild" climate. On the one hand, Florida and Texas have a heat index of 40-43°C (104-110°F) in the summer. On the other hand; Ottawa, Winnipeg, Toronto, Edmonton, and London England; each have summer daily maximums around 22-26°C (72-79°F); and it is hard for the temperature to reach 32°C (90°F).

Is it really worth living in an area where the heat index is 40-45°C (104-113°F) months on end, just because people can't stand a temperature of 3°C (38°F) in winter? Man, people are pretty crazy if they rather take a heat index of 42°C (107°F) in the summer; over a 3°C (38°F) winter temperature. The snow is perhaps a gift and reward for those who choose to live in an area with mild summers around 22-28°C (72-82°F), over a more brutal hot and humid climate.

Man, imagine a world without air conditioning. It would be so much better. Perhaps if AC never existed, people would not be living in terrible hot and humid climates. People would not be so harsh to look down on Canadian winters if instead, people had to treat summer heat a lot more seriously. It's crazy how people (or local meterologists) look down on even a temperature of 12-17°C (54-63°F); in stark contrast to the obsession and idolization with the beach, the pool, and wearing T-shirts and shorts.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/56276861

A lot of the “popular mean girls” don’t have friends besides their own group, so I don’t even know why they’re considered popular.

Especially when they promote and use it out of "moral motivation" to "fight against twitter/big tech". You're still using a platform owned by one company. They're not really decentralized. There's nothing stopping them to go down the same path twitter did. They're funded by some questionable investors... Or, to quote something I recently read: "BlueSky is decentralized in the same way Total Energies is a green company."

Fight big tech, yes, but know which platforms to use. And to counter all "but Mastodon etc. are boring": the more people making the shift to the fediverse, the less boring it gets.

Edit to add: "shame" might be a heavy choice of words, but I don't know another term haha (English not a first language and all that)

Ok so first off I don't mean that games are too accessible to people with disabilities or anything like that. This is more of a critique of how strategy games shows you the ramification of your actions, even before you do the action.

The main culprit are Paradox map games, there was generally a shift between HOI 4 and CK 3, that made the games more accessible to new players. In CK 3 you get the to know the exact results of all options of events with the minor caveat of when you only get the probability of results but even then you often get the exact persentages. Before you declare a war you get a full roundup of which allies will join either side, how many troops each side has and even a force comparison based on troop quality. When doing diplomacy you get an exact value of how likely the the other part is to agree to a deal, and if not how much more they must like you for it.

This is great in the sense that new players of the franchise don't get scared and overwhelmed. However, since they designed the game around all this info always being available, it's not really possible to play it any other way. This makes it nearly impossible to fail with a bit of experience.

The main thing this kills is immersion. I don't have to know who I ally with, nor what they're personality is, if I need them for a war I can just throw money at them until their "willingness" number is greater than 0. I don't need to study their force composition compared to mine, the game just says who's is better.

Imagine a game without these values being so open to the player. Choosing who to ally with wouldn't be just choosing the one with the biggest army, but choosing someone with the correct profile that you need. For example if you are planning to wage a lot of war then it's probably best to chose someone with a militarily aggressive personality and large army. However if you want to play tall, investing in your realm and avoiding war then you probably want someone callous that won't drag you into offensive wars, but still have your back incase you get invaded.

I've foucesed on CK 3 but this is valid of all recent Paradox map games. In Viccy 3 then you get to know if a factory will be profitable before you build it, you know exactly who and by how much someone has the advantage on a Frontline.

While these games are a lot more accessible, they lose the need for reasoning, deduction and critical thinking. You don't need to have initiative, just press the best options and play opportunisticly on the moment.

Scenario:

You're talking to someone, and you mention the treaty of versailles. They say "the what?" and you say "The treaty of versailles. You know, when Germany lost WWI and had to give up land and other military functions?"

and your friend just stares at you and says "......what?". So you say "Just google it."

Well your friend is an idiot. You should have seen that coming from the fact that they don't know basic history. Be that as it may, you're trusting your friend to use the most powerful search engine on earth to find things he doesn't know what he's looking for. So he searches "Treaty of her thighs"

Which for some reason returns THIS RESULT. No really, I was hoping it would return some porn result, and I could have made fun of that. But no, top result is an Ohio war. Which may be because I'M located in Cleveland, so google is like "You're searching for dumb shit, here have an Ohio war instead". But I can work with this to help prove my point.

So you told him to just google treaty of versailles, and he comes back talking about a war between native americans and white people in ohio in the 1790s. You see how wrong that went?

When you tell someone to "just google it", you're entrusting that the person you're talking to isn't a massive dumbass. That's a pretty tall stretch these days. I find most people are completely intolerable. We have all these PSA's that people need to tolerate other people for being different. Which never made sense to me. I don't give a shit that you're a different background than I am. I'm judging you for walking into an autozone and throwing bricks because they're out of blinker fluid.

My grandma taught me growing up "If you need to raise your voice to be heard, then nobody wants to hear what you have to say. If that's the case, you should reflect on why that is. Is it because you're wrong about everything you say, and people have figured that out? Maybe try NOT being wrong about everything you say."

And that's when I watched the family interactions as a kid a little more closely. My dad would yell over everyone, and growl and piss and moan and do everything he could to be louder than his sisters, while his mom is shaking her head. Meanwhile, if my grandma tapped her glass indicating that she was to speak, EVERYBODY shut the fuck up, and the room quieted to dead silence. She spoke at a normal tone, and everyone listened to every word. My dad, who has no self reflection, no ability to judge people or situations, or reality, just yells until he gets his way.....which even after he gets his way, still doesn't work out in the end because it was the wrong approach to start with.

So to trust someone like my dad to just google things for himself, instead of just googling it for him, and showing him the CORRECT results, is something that would lead to him being 1 bit smarter than otherwise would. Over time, enough of these bits would mean he's smart enough to start thinking on his own. THEN he can google on his own.

But right now, you're asking a nation who just elected trump by popular vote to think for themselves. And I'm at a point where I think that's just a bad idea. I think the collective average of society equates to a man who puts hammers in a box, and puts that box in the garage, high up on a beam, barely supported, directly over the space the car would pull in. Then when you get out of the car, and close the door, the air movement is enough to make the box wobble. The wobble is enough to make it fall. And it falls right on your head. Because you put it there. And you can't figure out why that happened.

That's what I think of society. That's where I think we're at, mentally. Partially because I've seen this exact scenario play out. And partially because I see these people in public, all day, you know the ones. The people who you wonder how they are able to walk properly without their brain short circuiting, and they fall more often. The people who breathe through their mouth. These are the average day to day people who are (somehow) living their life on their own.

And you want them to think for themselves, to make decisions which affect everybody else..........god dammit. Why did we give Americans the right to vote??? They shouldn't even be googling things by themself!

Most of the time, I read the “subscribed” feed, sorted by scaled. Maybe once a week or once a month I check what’s in the “all” feed, sorted by top of the week or something like that.

My opinion is, that this is the better way to see the stuff I care about, and it allows me to ignore all the stuff I don’t care about. I’ve seen many people say that you should read the “all” feed, but I just don’t seem much value in that. There are a few people who agree with me, but we appear to be a minority here, hence the unpopular part of this opinion.

Check comments for full describtion

So I finally had my first case of sleep paralysis and it was freaking awesome. Sure... horrifying... but awesome.

I've only ever heard people talk about it and always thought that it was just a meme but no, the way people describe it is pretty much spot on. Demon crawling up to you, not being able to move, yadaya, all the good stuff.

I always thought I couldn't experience sleep paralysis because I'm a side sleeper and this makes it even less likely.

To say "I don't scare easily." would be an understatement. Sure I get startled sometimes, but that's just instict taking over. I don't think I have experienced true irrational horror since I was a child. I'd say horror in general is just not part of our daily lives anymore. As someone who is into movie making, even horror movies don't really cut it for me, because I'm always thinking about the behind the scenes of each shot instead of actually being scared.

That's why I am so appreciative of a good nightmare. Its horror from the deepest darkest places of your mind, specifically tailored to you. It's the best private horror show you'll ever going to get. And for someone who's never really scared, that is worth a lot.

I'm only kinda disapointed of how my paralysis demon looks. I was hoping it would be some cute ghost lady, but it's more like a shadowy humanoid tentacle alien. Kinda like the mindflayer from Stranger Things but without any discernable features, just a shadow silouette.

Its kinda like finding out your Patronus is a crosseyed possum, I mean it gets the job done sure... but it's kinda not what I was hoping for.

Also it made a weird tribal "galagalagala" sound while approaching, which gotta say, not exactly the spookiest thing.

All in all 7/10 experience. Wouldn't recommend it every day, but every once in a while it shirley is fun.

I havent used any type of straw in quite some time. Plastic or paper.

They do nothing for me and I think they are one of the most pointless disposal food packaging items to exist.

Edit: there are many useful applications for straws I simply didn’t think about when posting this. Thanks for the commenters for pointing this out.

I hate people who treat them like some toys and fantasize about them. That makes me think they are in some sort of death cult. That they found socially acceptable way to love violence.

I would still get one for safety but it is a tool made for specifically one thing. To pierce the skin and rip through the inner organs of a person.

They can serve a good purpose but they are fundamentally grim tools of pain and suffering. They shouldn’t be celebrated and glorified in their own right, that is sick. They can be used to preserve something precious but at a price to pay.

... if it is confirmed someone died while using it. Especially when advising against chemotherapy and/or operations.