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OroPla

457 karma · joined August 6, 2026

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OroPla··on Pirating the Pirates
Nevermind the Commodore etc. who are preserved as abandonware. Remember FLASH games? They are mostly gone already. Even if you still have a copy, they can't be run anymore. There were some efforts made, but last I checked plenty of FLASH games still didn't work flawlessly.
OroPla··on How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments
I don't disagree that this is all useful to have. My point of contention is that the effort required is not worth the time investment if you are going to forget about it in a few years anyway because you never needed it in your daily life.

Our brains can't hold infinite amounts of data and a lot of information will become inaccessible if not used regularly. This is also why most of us do not speak twelve different languages, despite this being a supremely useful skill that is relatively easy to pick up compared to semiconductor physics.

OroPla··on How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments
Practicality. It's more convenient to read door and street signs, restaurant menus, name badges, ticket machines etc. etc. without going through a screen reader.

It's little effort for a large benefit. But anything you learn past middle school in formal education is a moderate to large effort for a small to neglectable benefit. And you'll forget it anyway if it is uninteresting and not useful in your daily life.

Anything interesting or useful in your daily life, you'll pick up by yourself even without formal education.

OroPla··on Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI
Haven't we been told the Earth is overpopulated for years? Seems a fair bet that the future will involve a whole lot of war and famine.

We're already slowly walking away from globalism. Nationalism is being fawned. It's taking a lot of time, but I'd say by the end of the 2030s we'll be having WWIII at the latest.

And at that time LLMs will be better decision makers than humans, I'd wager. So for now I'm expecting AI stuff to get funded at the expense of everything else.

OroPla··on Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI
Feels like the old "it's not piracy, it's copyright infringement".

It can't be plagiarism, since LLMs do not have ownership over their output. There's no attribution, because an LLM isn't a person.

And to be honest, I do not quite understand the need for attribution, either. Nevermind LLMs, I also don't know or care who made any of the memes I know and share. Neither do I know who wrote vim, grep, Firefox or who invented the jpg format. I don't want to know, either. It doesn't matter.

OroPla··on How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments
What is the point of learning something an AI can already do better than you? There are better methods of brain training.

The situation reminds me of what my teachers used to tell me. "Learning how to look up things in a book will be a skill you'll need all your live and you won't carry a calculator with you at all times when you are grown up." Both assumptions were proven wrong before I was even out of school.

If the only remaining value of education is "to become a well rounded person" then why waste your time on it? It used to be you went to university because that was the only place to get knowledge from. Which is also why it was dominated by the rich and powerful. These days university feels a lot like paper money. Everyone just pretends it has a real value and because everyone agrees, that's where the value comes from.

OroPla··on Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't
The bible also encourages sacrificing animals. It's a book full of contradictions, so no matter what you want to argue, you can find some choice quotes supporting your position.
OroPla··on Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't
It's not about reality, it's about moral philosophy.

Not eating meat, eggs and honey because you feel sad about animals is now considered a valid moral position called veganism instead of mental illness.

I'm not talking about science (which still seems undecided on whether eating eggs is good or bad), I've observed shifting attitudes that originated from the USA and wonder why people feeling sad for animals is now considered a good reason to not eat various types of food.

In many ways, veganism seems like a budding religion that is trying to get off the ground, but instead of asking whether you are ready to accept Jesus as your savior they ask if you are ready to feel sad for animals.

OroPla··on Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't
You joke, but plants are alive and have feelings, just like everything else that is alive. They have the ability to communicate using ultrasound and they can pick up your brainwaves and respond to them.

There's a plant that can change the shape it grows its leaf to match what other plant is around them - that includes copying artificial plants. So it has to be possible for a plant to "see".

OroPla··on California is chasing wealth that has feet
> the idea of being displaced at the end of your life out of the home you already paid off due to market forces you aren't even a participant in is actually widely unpopular even if it makes better economic sense.

Once you are old enough it makes a whole lot more sense to move to places designed to care for the elderly. Living alone in a huge house isn't good for your mental health and it isn't for your physical health, either, once you no longer have the energy to maintain it.

OroPla··on Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't
Can you articulate why suffering should be prevented?

Going with a religious doctrine, the existence of an all-loving, all-seeing, all-powerful God in a world full of suffering should tell you that suffering is a good thing, for if it wasn't such a God would prevent it.

OroPla··on Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't
Considering starving yourself to death on a deserted island rather than eating meat an acceptable moral choice and not mental illness. Sacrificing your life to save an animal. Taking actions detrimental to your own well being for the benefit of animals.

Suicidal empathy is when your feelings hurt more than your body, so you sacrifice yourself to feel good.

OroPla··on F-Droid 2.0
My bank tried to push an app, but I never installed it. I live in Germany.
OroPla··on F-Droid 2.0
I've tried $1000 phones before and found that they don't do anything different than my cheap phone, other than taking better quality pictures. But at least my cheap phone has an SD card slot and a headphone jack.
OroPla··on F-Droid 2.0
I don't want to pay more than $150 for a phone, though. And installing an alternate OS is a real hassle.
OroPla··on F-Droid 2.0
I don't think malware is the problem, as most malware comes directly via Google's ecosystem carried by ads. Just recently I had to uninstall some app from the play store since it tried to distribute malware through scary pop-ups and had it replaced with something from f-droid for someone I know.
OroPla··on F-Droid 2.0
> a device that holds your entire life, bank info, photos, etc.

I'd see it the other way around and say that a device running an operating system controlled by some company shouldn't hold your entire life, bank info, photos, etc.

OroPla··on Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't
> We live in a society which has traditionally silenced those voices. The USA, especially

It's a fascinating point of view, especially since it seems to me that this suicidal empathy originates from the USA. South Korea only recently stopped torturing and eating dogs due to international pressure. Japan still hunts whales. So does Norway. The Chinese couldn't care less, neither does anyone on the African continent. Muslims outright refuse to eat any meat that isn't "halal", which is a short way of saying torturing animals to death. There's this rumor going around the USA that India is full of vegetarians, which gets vehemently denied by Indians each time it gets brought up.

Of course, you can find a bunch of nutjobs talking about all kinds of nonsense in any society, see for example Scientology. But institutionally we didn't care for animals hundred of years ago. Cowboys used spores, which is kinda like using a blunt knife. Horses and elephants were used in wars. Dogs had to stay outside in their little dog house and weren't allowed inside. The list goes on and on.

OroPla··on Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't
What I find interesting about this whole discourse is that the lived experience of animals matters to people. At all.

Just a hundred, two hundred years ago we made the Elephant rifle, because a normal gun couldn't bring it down, but it was a fun sport to go out and kill just for the heck of it. No one cared about the animals.

It seems like we are living in an age of suicidal empathy and I'm not sure how we got here.

OroPla··on Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't
It used to be that kids as young as five year old were made to kill small animals like bunnies and chickens as a learning experience, but a bunch of people found this problematic so it isn't as common anymore.
OroPla··on Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't
Honestly speaking, yes.

I've seen plenty of videos from slaughter houses, mostly ones activists use to point at the cruelty going on inside, but it never made me feel uncomfortable.

OroPla··on Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
There have only been two changes I experienced in the past decades that felt meaningful:

(1) Removing the mouse from as many workflows as possible

(2) Switching to a tiling window manager, in my case i3

Everything else has just been various ways of shuffling things around with no benefit to anyone.

OroPla··on The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
As far as supporting creators (or rather rights holders) goes, whether you pirate, buy a used copy or use a library makes absolutely no difference.
OroPla··on The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
Of those 2930 albums, how many can you write down from memory and to how many songs could you sing along? Getting flooded with too much information in a short time isn't necessarily a good thing for your brain. It hurts attention span and memory formation.

The calculation might look like you derive value, but it could also accidentally impact your brain negatively long term.

OroPla··on List of references on Sony websites to players "owning" their digital games
Since when are people digital?
OroPla··on Backups Aren't Simple
I've currently got two 10TB, one 14TB and one 18TB drive. I don't think what you describe is as easy for me as you expect. I've got one backup in a different city and one in cold storage.

The sizes are all over the place because I only buy a new drive when I run out of storage and then just get the largest one within a reasonable cost. It has been cost prohibitive to mirror everything and current prices aren't encouraging. Neither is the rate at which HDDs get larger. I was kinda hoping for 100TB drives under $400 by 2025 back in 2014, but that hope has been shattered.

OroPla··on Japan's book scene is moving from bookstores to libraries
Don't we already have rehabilitation centers? I definitely think that you have to take homeless people being a nuisance off the streets against their will.

There's already plenty of invisible homeless people living out of a car that shower in the gym. They aren't a public nuisance and there should be structures where someone like that can get help from.

But the actual homeless problem are the drug addicts and beggars that are a public nuisance. There's no solution to that problem other than moving them against their will, is there?

OroPla··on Backups Aren't Simple
I do use btrfs, but I don't really understand how to use it to protect against bit rot. I tried to look into it at some point, but got overwhelmed. Did invest in two backup copies, one of them off site, though.

However, looking at prices, I can see one of those backups just being dismantled to be used as more storage.

OroPla··on Backups Aren't Simple
Bit rot was mentioned in the article, but then no solution was offered. I also haven't found a good solution, unfortunately. If you only have a couple of Terabytes you could create check sums of everything and then verify regularly, but I feel this approach doesn't scale very well if you have lots of data.
OroPla··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
Not sure if this is a good or a bad thing.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49419237

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