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phatskat

680 karma · joined July 1, 2023

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phatskat··on The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
> People who failed so spectacularly that the country became the rape capital of Europe and has more crime than El Salvador today.

> the rape capital of Europe

I’ve read that this is because Sweden changed how rape is counted - instead of multiple votes instances within the same relationship being counted as “one rape”, each instance of non-consensual intercourse is counted individually.

> and has more crime than El Salvador today

I couldn’t find any reliable data here other than Sweden’s homicide rates are a little higher than historically, but still pretty low. And the comparison to El Salvador is off the mark in general because the murder rate there has fallen dramatically from where it was historically.

phatskat··on Can you see three trees?
They should! It’s genuinely nice. I know to some this all probably comes off as corny and to that I say: I hope those folks can hug a tree someday, it’s nice.
phatskat··on Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark
What bullying? The forum banned the user and DMCA notices removed the content, seems fine to me and an actual reasonable use of DMCA.
phatskat··on Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark
I wanted to drop some of my favorite bits about sovereign citizens here, but honestly most of what they believe requires a lot of explanation to really grasp. A quick glance of this seems a good place for the curious: https://www.sog.unc.edu/sites/www.sog.unc.edu/files/Sov%20ci...
phatskat··on Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
Do they have a choice?

Obviously one choice is “just don’t participate” but for anyone that _will_ participate, the choice is pretty much to tolerate it.

phatskat··on Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
I’ve never once given a second thought to declining the “opportunity” to upgrade to Netflix 4k - nothing I want to watch requires that kind of quality because none of that content is necessary to begin with. We’ve been considering axing some subscriptions and Netflix is on the top of the list already - I can get my baking show from the highs seas and stranger things is done
phatskat··on Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
Right, this is the only reason I’d go for one if I ever had a reasonable opportunity. My Bravia is a nice TV, it’s solid in many respects, but the UI pushing ads and generally being unstable makes me not enjoy it.

It’s wild to think people can pay $2000 for the pleasure of seeing ads whenever they turn on their television (even in “apps only mod”), not to mention, I never have and will never enable the mic on the remote because fuck that, Google.

Tbh, Google TV may be one of my least favorite and most insidious Google products.

phatskat··on Five monitors on a Commodore 128 [video]
I feel like the long dashes in comments as dividers is something I’ve seen more in machine-generated code, eg templates, WYSIWYG editors, etc. No doubt I used to be pretty l337 back in my day, and I think I’ve seen it more from tools.

I wonder if AI training sets have some bias towards the way the “peers” wrote code.

phatskat··on How many of the 170k English words do you know?
I was, as was gp, confused by “complacent” as I haven’t typically used it or thought of it to include a smugness and immediately went to the ol’ Google only to find that “smug” appears in Oxford Language’s* definition as well. The key though is “smug or uncritical”, so while smug may not be typical for some it does make sense now that I have that added knowledge.

And iirc “gauche” had more than just “socially awkward” in the correct answer but speeding through it again I didn’t get gauche as a word. That said, something gauche, to me, has always been something glaringly “not ok” in a social sense so again, that tracks. Oxford Language defines it as

> lacking ease or grace; unsophisticated and socially awkward.

Which is closer to the quiz’s definition and again, tracks with my internal thinking of the word’s use.

> Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia

Was just plain fun - as soon as I saw the “fear of long words” I was like of course that’s it

*I mistakenly put “Merriam Webster” the first time around - while MW doesn’t include the word smug itself, the 1.b definition is simply “self-satisfied”

phatskat··on Can you see three trees?
I’ve done this both on and off psychedelics, and both are lovely experiences.

I also dated someone who wasn’t a particularly “crunchy” hippy type, but she did like to randomly hug trees on our walks to show appreciation. I do it now too, there’s something oddly calming and connecting about it - it may look weird, but that’s par for the course for me as it is

phatskat··on I found 10k GitHub repositories distributing Trojan malware
It doesn’t need to be profitable if it’s cheap - political manipulation by unsavory parties is worth a cheap botnet if it means they can keep power and keep grifting.

I will agree with a sibling up there that the political part is pure speculation, and I’d guess anyone running a moderately sized botnet is open to use for any nefarious purposes if the price is right.

phatskat··on Law Enforcement's "Warrior" Problem (2015)
There’s not much to back this up, at least that you’ve included as reference.

The bigger issue that comes to mind and that you can actually look in to is the practice of teaching police departments about “Killology”. This is (or was) a kind of seminar that taught departments this mindset of “everyone that an officer interacts with is a potential threat”. Add this to the “super criminal” bs that was popular in the 80s/90s, the constant right-wing fearmongering about dangerous criminals in blue cities, and the militarization of police, and it feels more like they’ve been primed for violence from the power structure more-so than any actual threat from the public.

phatskat··on Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M
The answer to immigration, for those that view it as a problem, is to make the places people are leaving more desirable to stay: social welfare, sustainable energy, affordable food and housing, and security - both physical and financial. The US has been trying hard to make itself undesirable for immigrants (suddenly, after decades of turning a blind eye in exchange for cheap labor), instead of focusing on helping to make the living situation in south America more tenable.

It’s kind of what we get for completely wrecking the global south tbh - the number of democracies we overthrew, the drug cartels we propped up, the damage we did is finally coming to bear fruit and it’s just as sour as the soil we tilled.

phatskat··on A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center
Yep, and even when the majority of protests don’t turn violent, the media does an amazingly good job of making it seem like they did. I remember multiple family members posting about, and even talking about in our group chat, how multiple US cities were on fire and essentially war zones in 2020.
phatskat··on A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center
It seems more like you’re exhibiting “redditor behavior”. Ostensibly, the comment you replied to was about TFA, and you replied flippantly with a statement of fact “you can’t walk to a data center” when the discussion is about an article related to a data center in a residential area. They didn’t pull a “gotcha”, you got got by your own ignorance of the topic at hand.
phatskat··on Apple WWDC 2026
The average user might see a Siri-AI + Spotify integration as “I can ask Siri to make me a playlist”, while under the hood, Spotify would have access to _all_ of the user’s data and the ability to act upon installed apps. I can understand wanting to have better privacy controls in place before allowing that - will Apple do it is the question.

As far as the backup software, the analogy doesn’t hold for me: there’s an expectation that it will have access to your hard disk. There’s also an expectation that you can disconnect your internet and still back up your hard disk - can’t exfiltrate data if you’re offline.

phatskat··on Apple WWDC 2026
That’s how I read this too - I specifically use Apple because I can get what I need to done with little hassle, I can routinely use the same phone for _years_ and not even think about upgrading (my last upgrade was “forced as my iPhone was stolen), and I have a much higher confidence in Apple not being crappy with my data vs Google.

I know there are alternative phones that are more open, and I recognize that the level of ease and comfort I get from a big name phone requires some of those trade-offs. Linux was my desktop of choice and probably would be again if my employer allowed it, but I don’t necessarily want to deal with all the tiny sharp edges of Linux on a mobile device.

phatskat··on Apple WWDC 2026
I personally would never have thought to go the Domain route, so I suppose you technically -can- have a local user but they don’t seem to surface the option.
phatskat··on EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices
That was a fun bit of trivia I learned from Balatro - the Gros Michel has a one in six chance of being destroyed after a round. However, if it is destroyed (the game displays Extinct! when it perishes), then the Cavendish can appear randomly in the shop and has a one in one-thousand chance of being destroyed.
phatskat··on EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices
I’ll never miss an opportunity to plug a very relevant Behind the Bastards - at this point it feels like an Xkcd for Very Bad Things, but I digress - [Part One: The Deadliest School in History](https://open.spotify.com/episode/2N77mwUI0pDOBOP6gIknkU) does a pretty good job of covering the School of the Americas

They also have a few on Bernays because of course they do

phatskat··on Show HN: Performative-UI – A react component library of design tropes
They did - their list wasn’t all related to _your_ post, other than to say the site is “perfect” to them, after which they enumerated the reasons including “does not require JavaScript”
phatskat··on Show HN: Performative-UI – A react component library of design tropes
At first I had a good chuckle of “this really encapsulates the tropes, even down to being React” and the more I scrolled through the components, it looks like a very serious library - lots of knobs to turn and consideration for various implementations!
phatskat··on Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to Its New AI Assistant
People keep telling me it’s why we even have C-level folks at the top!
phatskat··on Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to Its New AI Assistant
Everyone likes a beer analogy (almost as much as CS teachers love car analogies!) so I’ll try and do one that applies in the way I _think_ GP intends:

Brewers want people to want beer, and to perhaps puritans, that desire could appear as “addicted”. However, brewers don’t want addicts - liver failure, destitution, death, are all things I doubt a brewer wants to see in their consumer base because you can’t drink if you don’t have a liver, don’t have money, or don’t have life.

Did I, as a child, think my dad was addicted to alcohol because I saw him drink everyday? I did, that’s the appearance it gave. Was he? Not to the clinical point of addiction, technically - he functioned, maintained relationships and a job, and wasn’t more than occasionally emotionally abusive. He fit the type of customer GP seems to talk about - appearing to be addicted but not wholly, truly addicted.

phatskat··on Theseus: Translating Win32 to WASM
If you haven’t seen it, @jart’s Actually Portable Executable does just this - it’s definitely got a long ways to go (iirc it only supports CLI apps), but it’s fascinating to see a method of building binaries that can execute across various architectures and operating systems.
phatskat··on DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
It’s been infuriating to see it shoved everywhere in the corporate stack - Teams, Outslook, Jira, GitHub, etc. and since tools are all company-mandated, the best I can do is continuously ignore or say “not now”, but one day Teams will rollover on a forced software update and I’ll have no choice but to “let” CoPilot schedule meetings in an app that already consistently warns that I’m in a different time zone despite all of us being east coast (I’ve checked so many settings, and even with another single coworker who has checked his we see the warning).

My company is also heavily pushing AI, which is worrisome but no surprising - part of my goal for the coming year is to showcase using AI in a productive and innovative way, can’t wait.

Eventually my Google Nest Minis will stop asking me to try Gemini and force me to, and they’ll all get binned unless I can find a firmware replacement which I doubt is out there, and then I’ll get deep into HomeKit and local voice recognition for turning the lights on and off and setting timers because that’s literally 99% of my use-case, and I’m sure Gemini would fuck it up.

phatskat··on A few interesting modern pixel fonts
There was a talk at a Linux conference a while back relating knitting to programming and I’ve yet to watch it because the audio on YT wasn’t great but it’s on my list.

I find knitting very soothing, and it also scratches the same itch as programming.

phatskat··on Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back
And it’s one that already affects Google’s AI results, whether intentional or not. 9/10 if a Reddit thread or scraped StackExchange clone’s search result is in the top of the list, the AI answer pretty much parrots it.

This has led to many a “that doesn’t sound right” when looking things up with friends, or odd technical questions that have serviceable information available but not at the top of results.

phatskat··on Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
I’d wager the money from lobbies and companies like Intuit more than make up for it.

Also, republics are “anti-tax” in word and pro-tax in practice, as is the American way. When it comes to particularly republicans, anti-tax is code for removing social safety nets. They want taxes if it pays them, or pays the right contractors, or funds the military etc but when those tax dollars could go to social welfare they suddenly think it’s time to trim the fat.

phatskat··on DOS Zone
Cave Story is in my Mount Rushmore of games, bookmarking this for later! Very curious to see how the controls map out and work. Good job, and keep it up :D
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