[-] millie@beehaw.org 3 points 2 days ago

Mushrooms are pretty loud talkers, tbh. Just gotta listen to the right ones. 😂

[-] millie@beehaw.org 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

This is the problem with spending millions of dollars on games and focusing on profitability over actual quality or expression. Video games are fundamentally an art medium. You can choose to make some uninspired cash grabbing trash, and can even make a whole company built around that and make profit. But are you going to make a great game that way? Probably not.

You'd be better off with half a dozen people with passion and a comparatively minuscule budget. You might have to scale back from ultra realistic graphics and massive explorable areas with dozens of voice actors, but I don't really think that makes games any better anyway. A little 2d rpg with really basic pixel graphics can put a big project to shame if it's made with passion and emotion.

[-] millie@beehaw.org 2 points 4 days ago

I kinda like it. It's better for some shows than others, but like, look at Curb Your Enthusiasm. It would pop up every now and then, only to fade back into the aether for a few years, then come around again. It never felt forced, or like it wasn't within its own continuity when it came back. Some time just passed, and that was alright. I feel the same way about Red Dwarf. It comes, it goes, it comes back again. We love it.

You can't force it. It's one thing if delays are because of studios or rights holders blocking creators from getting their work out, but if it's part of the natural process? The process is the product, and sometimes good work needs time to percolate, or ferment, or whatever metaphor you want.

Don't try!

[-] millie@beehaw.org 20 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

It seems like a pretty good survival strategy for a species to routinely produce a number of different sorts of constituent organisms in order to have the tools ready to be more adaptable to varying circumstances. Considering how much humans specialize their routine behaviors and the way in which we work together both consciously and through larger interconnected systems, it isn't surprising to see a variety of strategies to process information, make decisions, and communicate with one another. Thinking outside the status quo creates opportunities that can independently either succeed or fail of their own applicability and ability to be executed. If everyone is looking for the same things, they're likely to miss a lot. Even if many of those arrangements don't produce the desired result, they can be a valuable exploration for new resources and strategies.

It seems an extremely dire mistake in these circumstances to label one particular mode of thought the ideal and reject all contradiction as dysfunctional or useless.

[-] millie@beehaw.org 53 points 1 month ago

Too much thinking.

The right doesn't care about accuracy, but they will pretend to to keep us busy. To counteract it, we can't spend our time engaged in good faith arguments of carefully considered wording. We need to beat them on that flippant energy that shows we won't take their bait and we know we're right, so we don't have to prove it.

Weird is perfect for that. They don't want to be weird.

Now when they turn it around and try to call us weird? Then is the time to say 'hey, that's cool! I'm happy to be weird!' and literally not worry about the contradiction at all.

They picked an arena where they can't beat us. Let's meet them there.

24
submitted 1 month ago by millie@beehaw.org to c/politics@beehaw.org

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.

80
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by millie@beehaw.org to c/askbeehaw@beehaw.org

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.

[-] millie@beehaw.org 105 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Who cares? It's run by reactionary incels, transphobes, and racists. https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/07/03/serenityos-and-ladybird/

7
submitted 2 months ago by millie@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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.

[-] millie@beehaw.org 59 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I think when people think of the danger of AI, they think of something like Skynet or the Matrix. It either hijacks technology or builds it itself and destroys everything.

But what seems much more likely, given what we've seen already, is corporations pushing AI that they know isn't really capable of what they say it is and everyone going along with it because of money and technological ignorance.

You can already see the warning signs. Cars that run pedestrians over, search engines that tell people to eat glue, customer support AI that have no idea what they're talking about, endless fake reviews and articles. It's already hurt people, but so far only on a small scale.

But the profitablity of pushing AI early, especially if you're just pumping and dumping a company for quarterly profits, is massive. The more that gets normalized, the greater the chance one of them gets put in charge of something important, or becomes a barrier to something important.

That's what's scary about it. It isn't AI itself, it's AI as a vector for corporate recklessness.

[-] millie@beehaw.org 69 points 3 months ago

The laws of quantum mechanics are confusing, predicting that particles are also waves and that cats are simultaneously alive and dead.

Okay, so, like, that's punchier writing than the actual truth, but how am I supposed to buy anything else about physics in the article after that? The level of oversimplification of relatively commonly known concepts does not give me confidence that the rest won't be pop sci drivel.

13
submitted 4 months ago by millie@beehaw.org to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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.

58
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by millie@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by millie@beehaw.org to c/music@beehaw.org

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!

[-] millie@beehaw.org 66 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Corporate metrics are so fucking divorced from the creation of any actual value that it's baffling that it's legal. It's an economic wildfire and everybody just stands around throwing fuel on it in the name of 'growth'.

You know what cares about nothing but growth? Cancer.

[-] millie@beehaw.org 56 points 7 months ago

Anybody else feel like Lemmy is like 60% Russian trolls lately?

[-] millie@beehaw.org 71 points 8 months ago

I think that if we defederated, Lemmy would be much worse off for it. I think we'd also be a lot slower, and I'd be checking it a lot less.

Beehaw brings something to Lemmy that Lemmy really needs. It's leftist, but it's also very compassion-focused, and we kind of lack that elsewhere. The rest of the otherwise kind of similar communities largely lack the spirit of getting along in good faith that I see here.

Like, what other community do you ever see people responding to hostility by reminding people where they are and it actually mattering? People seem to largely respect the space. Not to say it doesn't ever have a need for moderation, it clearly does and y'all do a great job, but with that moderation it manages to be an exemplary space.

It would be a shame for Lemmy to lose that positive influence and that good example. And it would leave the more lefty-leaning options kind of.. meh.

But it also really helps to bulk out the experience of using Beehaw. We don't get that many posts, so it's nice to be able to go to subscribed or all instead of just local. It'd definitely be a bummer to lose that.

Anyway, I think you're much closer to your goal than you might see while you're on the moderating and administrating end. You see all the nasty stuff up close, but we get to see the result. And compared to the rest of the internet, it's an oasis.

19
submitted 8 months ago by millie@beehaw.org to c/music@beehaw.org

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!

167
submitted 9 months ago by millie@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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. 😆

[-] millie@beehaw.org 91 points 1 year ago

I spent way more time than was warranted digging into this completely petty drama.

Eris seems to have been widely blocked and defederated for using the word 'based' and for thinking ubuntu.buzz was about linux. I'm not sure what kind of perspective makes that a priority, but it certainly doesn't seem to be one based in compassion or world experience. Half the people I've met who use the word 'based' have nothing to do with 4chan, they're just young. The first time I heard it was in reference to Mark Bunker during the Scientology protests in 08. Which, while certainly connected to 4chan, I don't think can really be cast in the same light as all the Gamergate crap and everything that came after.

Defederation is an important feature, and people should be able to defederate from whoever they want. What isn't okay, though, is people going out of their way to propagate pettiness as much as humanly possible. Eris seems a little rough around the edges, but I also get the impression that the folks interacting with her in all the overly dramatic nonsense I just read are not acting in remotely good faith. They resemble a twitter mob looking for somebody to hate on, taking zero interest in understanding or nuance. No thanks.

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millie

joined 1 year ago