ryan

@ryan@the.coolest.zone

I admin the.coolest.zone, the coolest site on the net for online social engagement.

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ryan,

Maybe if you remembered to put Jupiter back where it belonged after you were done with it, it wouldn't be lost now, hmm?

ryan,

Real answer: these are actually real languages! They're just conlangs, or constructed languages, instead of natural languages. The major problem with conlangs generally ends up being the limited vocabulary, but the grammar foundations are usually solid.

I actually really like Klingon as a language because it was intentionally designed to be alien, and specifically to be very Klingon. Most languages are Subject-Verb-Object (like English and other Western languages) or Subject-Object-Verb (like Japanese or Hindi). Klingon, however, is Object-Verb-Subject - it's very direct with the emphasis placed on the target of the sentence, which makes sense with the Star Trek world and Klingon culture.

Fun fact, Klingon has at least one native speaker - some guy raised his daughter to speak Klingon as well as English. (I'm not a fan of this - on one hand, learning multiple languages from an early age is a huge leg up in being able to learn more languages in the future, but on the other hand Klingon is entirely useless as a primary language given its structure and the few other people who speak it.)

ryan,
  • you <3
  • caffeine
  • caffeine
  • if I don't get my coffee I will either die or kill
ryan,

There is a Light Gary on your right shoulder and a Dark Gary on your left. They don't provide any great moral advice, but damn do they love to argue about the best hiking trails.

ryan,

So this is actually an interesting term. Looking it up from Wikipedia...

The term "sideload" was coined in the late 1990s by online storage service i-drive as an alternative means of transferring and storing computer files virtually instead of physically. In 2000, i-drive applied for a trademark on the term. Rather than initiating a traditional file "download" from a website or FTP site to their computer, a user could perform a "sideload" and have the file transferred directly into their personal storage area on the service.

The advent of portable MP3 players in the late 1990s brought sideloading to the masses, even if the term was not widely adopted. Users would download content to their PCs and sideload it to their players.

So as applied to phones it originally meant a particular type of download and install - rather than installing directly to your phone from an app store, you have somehow obtained the file on your PC, transferred the file to your phone, and then installed it. In that context, downloading an APK directly to your phone and installing it would not be sideloading.

However, semantics have shifted somewhat and now it's used generally to refer to any install that isn't directly from an app store of some kind, and requires downloading an actual package file and then installing it.

ryan,

Important context autotldr missed:

The incident happened when the engineer was programming the software that controls the robots, which cut car parts from aluminium, The Information reported.

Two of the robots were disabled, but a third was inadvertently left on. As it went through its normal motions, it caught the worker in its claws.

Yikes, that should be checked multiple times before someone gets close to the clawed aluminum cutting robot. Failure of process, I suspect.

ryan,

"client side validation is fine, nobody's gonna open up the dev console"

ryan,

Devil's Tower is apparently not even a volcano according to science, but "but was injected between sedimentary rock layers and cooled underground. The characteristic furrowed columns are the result of contraction which occurred during the cooling of the magma." source

Anyway, science can be wrong, assume everything is a volcano until proven otherwise. Devil's Tower? Volcano. The hill outside your house? Volcano. Your dog? Believe it or not, volcano.

ryan,

Oh, you "know", eh? Sounds like we got a scientist over here, boys! Let's get him!

(But seriously: I added that bit because I went and looked it up myself based on your post, and I thought it was interesting and other readers might also find it neat. One of those TIL things.)

Why does Gboard replace spaces with characters I add between words?

For example, if I type out a sentence and decide I want to add asterisks around a word for emphasis, why does Gboard replace the space between the previous word and the emphasized word instead of just adding the new character? Is this added functionality for something I just don’t understand?...

ryan,

Ok, so I use Gboard and it doesn't seem to do that for me, it leaves existing spaces alone. Here are my settings:

Under Text Correction I have enabled:

  • Show suggestion strip
  • Auto correction
  • Auto capitalization
  • Double space period
  • Proofread

Everything else is disabled, so maybe try toggling things off and on and seeing whether the behavior changes?

I also have two keyboards I switch between: English (US) and हिन्दी . I'm unsure whether having multiple language keyboards changes how the base functionality works.

ryan,

20 inches

doubles in length

takes off my robe and wizard hat Nah I'm good.

ryan,

Wow damn I only wish I had those urban planning skills. My cities all turn into sprawling traffic-congested nightmares.

ryan,

Boo, uncool. Shouldn't have announced it at all if it were that unfeasible.

I realize that letting people outside Tumblr read Tumblr posts means losing ad revenue on new users, but keeping Tumblrites on Tumblr and allowing them to bring in Mastodon/Lemmy/pixelfed posts would keep the existing users more glued to the platform (more ad revenue). I guess they're gunning for new users primarily.

ryan,

The matchmaking feature is kind of cute. For some reason I thought Tinder was a hookup app and not a dating app. Has that changed or was I just always misinformed?

When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media (bfi.uchicago.edu)

Those findings are crazy. I’ve never been social media addicted, been into luxury or general show-off brands (I pay extra to not look like I’m an advertisement… for anything but metal bands), so I don’t really know much about those issues.

ryan,

Asbestos is strong, cheap, has great fire insulation, sound insulation, heating insulation, fire protection, and resistant to water. What a wonderful building material! It wasn't until later that we discovered the health hazards (or, maybe they were known but it only became widely and publicly known later, I'm not sure).

ryan,

Separately, to answer your question... It's generally been assumed I suppose, if a product is invented and people use it, that means it's providing some positive impact. Like asbestos did initially.

What this research says is that there are products that make the users' lives worse, and would be even worse than that if they didn't because their peers are using the products and they would be left out.

Like, the ideal scenario for happiness might be if Tiktok didn't exist, but since it does it's now a choice for school aged kids between "using Tiktok and absorbing harmful messages" and "not using Tiktok and feeling left out and possibly being ostracized by their peers". The very existence of some products cause usage simply because it's the least bad option of using/not using.

ryan,

AI is absolutely taking off. LLMs are taking over various components of frontline support (service desks, tier 1 support). They're integrated into various systems using langchains to pull your data, knowledge articles, etc, and then respond to you based on that data.

AI is primarily a replacement for workers, like how McDonalds self service ordering kiosks are a replacement for cashiers. Cheaper and more scalable, cutting out more and more entry level (and outsourced) work. But unlike the kiosks, you won't even see that the "Amazon tech support" you were kicked over to is an LLM instead of a person. You won't hear that the frontline support tech you called for a product is actually an AI and text to speech model.

There were jokes about the whole Wendy's drive thru workers being replaced by AI, but I've seen this stuff used live. I've seen how flawlessly they've tuned the AI to respond to someone who makes a mistake while speaking and corrects themself ("I'm going to the Sacramento office -- sorry, no, the Folsom office") or bundles various requests together ("oh while you're getting me a visitor badge can you also book a visitor cube for me?"). I've even seen crazy stuff like "I'm supposed to meet with Mary while I'm there, can you give me her phone number?" and the LLM routes through the phone directory, pulls up the most likely Marys given the caller's department and the location the user is visiting via prior context, and asks for more information - "I see two Marys here, Mary X who works in Department A and Mary Y who works in Department B, are you talking about either of them?"

It's already here and it's as invisible as possible, and that's the end goal.

Unity cancels town hall over reported death threats (www.theverge.com)

The Unity pricing debacle has taken an unfortunate, dangerous turn. In a new report from Bloomberg, the company has reportedly canceled a town hall meeting due to what the publication called credible death threats. According to Bloomberg, Unity CEO John Riccitiello was set to address employees Thursday morning, but the...

ryan,

Unfortunately, Unity has no way to tell legitimate installs from pirated installs, as far as I have read. This means someone with a massively pirated game who has just broken the $200,000 revenue barrier could potentially be on the hook to pay Unity more money per install than they've even made.

ryan,

TLDR: It’s broken, but It’s still a fun and enjoyable platform!

Very true. It's a lot more stable than it was even a couple months back - I used to upgrade my instance and run into constant problems, and now I can happily git pull without destroying everything.

From a user perspective, a lot of the issues you encountered early on were due to a couple factors - kbin.social was dealing with more traffic than it could handle, and the developers of lemmy added a sneaky thing that would specifically block kbin user agents from being able to federate out to lemmy instances, leading to constant error logs and issues.

I would say that, aside from platform stability, the biggest looming threat on the horizon is spam. Think about email (the original federated message system) - nobody even thought about the possibility of spam when developing email, spam exploded in the 90s, and currently spam control is managed by whichever email platform you're on rather than by the protocol itself, as well as a sort of trust system where newly registered domains are more likely to be seen as spammers. The Fediverse needs to take lessons from email and start implementing the same sort of controls before the issue becomes unmanageable.

ryan,

key companies in the video game sector

Press X to doubt. Didn't Google try this sort of thing with Stadia already? Why is Netflix spending money on becoming a video game company? Are they trying to justify the price increases?

Neopets is promising a ‘new era’ with an improved website and fixed Flash games (www.theverge.com)

Neopets, the virtual pet website launched in 1999, is promising a “new era” with an improved website and fixed Flash games. They will launch a new unified website on July 20th to fix issues and bring back over 50 Flash games using the Ruffle emulator starting July 25th. A new Neopets mobile game called World of Neopets is...

ryan,

"oh shit we drove away our core user base by making our site actively hostile and it turns out the end result of that is no money"

It's interesting that they plan to just milk remaining nostalgia rather than move forward by converting games to HTML5, etc., as that indicates no new games. Or, being more optimistic, maybe the plan IS conversion and new games but this is a stop-gap?

Neopets has changed hands so many times. I was there from the beginning, when it was more of a weirdly British satire site (the original Bruce was not a penguin FYI), and watching everything unfold has been so weird.

ryan,

However, like PlayStation Plus, you’ll only have access to those games that you claim as long as you’re subscribed to the service.

Not a fan of these subscription services that don't let you keep what you've already claimed. I would vastly prefer a subscription service that allows access to discounted games or something, and then if you cancel you still can access whatever games you have bought. But, then again, I'm a known games packrat - maybe for the duration of time one might reasonably use the Quest, this shakes out to still be valuable? How often do regular users go back to old games?

ryan,

So, the physical release is just... actual garbage? Like sure, someone may proudly display it in their bookshelf or whatever, but then, it eventually becomes trash, and there's no reason to keep any of it because there's no physical copy of the game which can be resold or even borrowed out to friends?

That's not a "physical release", that's a piece of merchandise, as useful as a Funko Pop.

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