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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Yes, and people do do it. It’s just incredibly difficult to do it even for relatively simple programs, and the more complex the program is, the more exponentially hard the reverse engineering will be.

    The problem is not necessarily turning it into code, since many decompilers do it already for you nowadays. The issue is understanding what in the world the code is supposed to do. Normally, open source code would be commented and there would be documentation, so it’s easy to edit or build on the code. Decompiled code comes with no documentation or comments, and all the variable names are virtually illegible.

    It’s sometimes easier to build something new than to fix what’s broken, and this would be one of those cases where it’s true




  • Not gaslighting, and from what you seem to describe, doesn’t appear to be manipulative either. She just seems to be angry. Not to say that you can’t be both angry and manipulative, but I don’t see clear intent for her to try to guilt trip or gaslight you.

    Gaslighting would be if she lied and said that she sent you a message when in fact she didn’t. i.e., lying with the intent to make you question your judgment and perception

    Guilt tripping would be if she pressured you into giving her a gift as compensation for ignoring her message. i.e., taking advantage of someone’s feelings of guilt to get them to do something for you.

    I don’t see any lie, and I don’t see hee trying to extract anything out of you. Worst case interpretation, she’s being a bit petty. Best case interpretation, she’s scared of being alone outside.

    I noticed your final paragraph, and I would be cautious in general about saying that someone who’s trying to convince you that their anger is justified is automatically manipulative. That’s kind of just how anger works. People think that their anger is justified. Otherwise they wouldn’t be angry. Manipulation occurs when you start to feel like you are being used for their own motives.

    Either way, you should probably talk to her about it. It seems like she thinks the issue is more severe than you appear to think, and that is something that should be discussed with her



  • Not a paleontologist, but I think it’s a mix of both wrong information being spread back then and also new info being discovered.

    I’m pretty sure people knew that birds were dinosaurs for a while, but people just liked the idea that dinosaurs were monstrous lizards. Giant monsters just capture the imagination in a way that giant birds can’t.

    And then paleontologists started finding fossils that had imprints of feathers still on the body, and it became really hard to ignore that dinosaurs were a lot more bird-like than people would like to believe.

    My impression has generally been that once dinosaurs started to be viewed as bird-like, people started to see them as animals rather than as monsters, and that just kinda snowballed into dinosaurs becoming more and more bird-like


  • Contramuffin@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.worldDisable windows updates
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    4 months ago

    Windows comes with a secret option to turn off updates with group policies, so you don’t need to modify anything or use a script. It works just fine for me. No updates (unless I manually click update).

    The option for automatic updates is several layers deep in a nested menu tree, and I don’t fully recall what the path to get there is. But you should be able to find it online.







  • I’m not sure I understand the analogy. A lot of annoyances that people regularly deal with on computers are either intended mechanisms to stop human bad actors or unintentional bugs passing off as features. You can’t really say the same about demons.

    I suppose you might be talking about ritualization, or the idea that the people who build protocols are so removed from the people who follow them, that the people who follow the protocols don’t know why they do the things they do, but only know that bad things happen if they don’t follow the protocols.

    But even then, the analogy seems somewhat strenuous, since the point of occultism is exactly to try to study demonology and understand how to work with demons - ie, to try to understand why the protocols are the way they are.

    If you wanted to talk about ritualization, there are significantly more apt comparisons. Most examples of culture or religions could be argued to be practical protocols that ended up gaining momentum and becoming more spiritual than they initially were.



  • Duolingo is just a tool, I think. You can’t rely on it entirely to learn a language. And especially you have to take an active role in learning when using duolingo. I’m using it to learn Japanese, and I think I’m picking it up somewhat decently.

    But what I do is that I don’t look at the word banks when translating, and when there’s a listening activity, I don’t look at the text on the screen. I just try to follow entirely based on what I hear. I always say the Japanese out loud, and I try to form sentences in Japanese by forcing myself to think in Japanese (as opposed to thinking in English and then translating the words into Japanese). And, of course, use other resources to figure out the nuances of the grammar and the vocabulary!

    I think if you view duolingo as a way to get more practice with the language, it’s actually a fantastic resource. You just can’t rely on it as an exclusive learning tool

    Also, the Japanese that’s spoken in anime isn’t really colloquial Japanese or really even the same Japanese that duolingo covers. Heavily exaggerated example, but it’s a bit like asking someone to translate Shakespeare when someone is learning English. There will be some words that they can pick up, so your children might be able to get the gist of what’s being said, but the tone and wording isn’t really the same.

    Not to mention, Japanese is spoken really quickly. Iirc, it’s one of, if not the, fastest languages spoken, when measured in syllables over time. You would find better success with asking your children to translate if you find a Japanese speaking online personality who is known to speak slowly and clearly. Hololive is actually pretty good on this front


  • Isn’t that just a government job with extra steps? I thought the point of UBI is that it’s meant to be, you know, universal.

    As a side note, people have this tendency to think that government programs must be means-tested. That is, there must be a criteria that is met before someone is eligible for the program. Same with your assumption in the post - you assume that it must be better to add a stipulation. There seems to be this natural skepticism that if there is no criteria, people will take advantage of the program. I want to challenge that skepticism.

    Adding criteria for eligibility inherently means the government must establish a bureaucracy for checking that the criteria is met. This has two notable downsides that people tend to not consider. First, it causes an applicant to wait longer before they can hear back from the program. With existing programs, it sometimes takes months before someone hears back. This ends up discouraging anyone from applying, even if they meet all the criteria. After all, what’s the point of receiving aid in 3 months if you need the aid now?

    Second, it causes the cost of the program to increase. A bureaucracy is difficult to maintain. The more money that is spent on checking for eligibility, the less money that people in need will get. And what is the work that such a bureaucracy will do anyways? How does it benefit society to hire someone to say that people’s needs aren’t “real enough” to get government aid?

    Which leads me to a third, additional point - it’s morally questionable to require people to meet a certain criteria before they can receive aid. To put it in another way, why do you feel like you need to gatekeep other people’s needs? If a person says they’re struggling, why should anyone say that they’re not struggling enough?