• 17 Posts
  • 263 Comments
Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: August 24th, 2019

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  • I just recently learned that Methyl anthranilate, the artificial grape flavoring, also repels birds and is used heavily by the agro industry nowadays. I imagine because of all the other products they also use they don’t need the birds around anymore.

    You can also use old cd-roms tied to a long-ish string btw, the sparkling makes birds stay away.


  • he locked up a lot of people during the cultural revolution sometimes for quite arbitrary reasons

    He was not the one who signed arrest orders or ran trials though, a lot of different people were involved in that. You can’t blame Mao as an individual for stuff that other people did. You can’t run an entire state with just one person.

    the backyard steel and culling of the sparrows

    Nobody in the 60s knew about the importance of sparrows in agriculture. Not even in the West. I think it’s easy to say “oh well duh of course don’t kill the sparrows” but who here among us is an actual farmer? Who here knew that sparrows ate more bugs than grain before it was told to them? I can barely grow a plant, I have no room to judge others when it comes to growing food.

    I just didn’t find it to be very relevant to me

    I’m an adult in Europe and I find Mao’s writing to be both relevant and applicable. But there is Mao the general and Mao the chairman. By the end of his life he was definitely saying some stuff that I don’t think even he believed in. But theory is an all encompassing body, and that is true in all fields. One couldn’t read one physics paper about gravity and then say “now I know how to launch a rocket to the moon”. I opened up my copy of the red book randomly and here’s one:

    “Take the ideas of the masses and concentrate them, then go to the masses, persevere in the ideas and carry them through, so as to form correct ideas and leadership – such is the basic method of leadership”

    It makes perfect sense to me, but that’s also because I have the associated baggage to understand what he means there and how that fits in not only to more of Mao’s writings but also in regards to other figures, the ‘best practices’ if you will of organizing.

    I also found it really interesting that deepseek would refuse to answer any questions on Mao

    The deepseek devs want it to be mainly used for math, coding, and other STEM applications for lack of a better word. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact personally I think people should stop using LLMs as oracles so much and focus them on tasks instead. Deepseek produces great results (and all for free with no rate limits) if you give it some code to start with, because it needs proper framing of the project to avoid trying to overdo it. I usually start with chatGPT, have it do the first working version of the code, and then switch it to deepseek to finish it, and it works almost perfect on the first try.



  • I use that one and (on Firefox):

    • Improve Youtube - allows you to customize how youtube looks and behaves. There’s a lot of options, one example you can do is hide shorts in recommendations but not necessarily the shorts page, prevent autoplay, prevent 2 videos playing at once (if you play one in one tab other videos in other tabs will auto pause back and forth)
    • Youtube search fixer - doesn’t really redo the search algorithm but it removes all that “watch again”, “people also liked” etc crap. again, customizable.
    • Unhook - I think I needed that one on top of Improve youtube for something that Improve didn’t do. It’s much simpler than Improve but will also hide useless shit that improve doesn’t get.
    • Youtube anti-translate - stops auto-translating titles with the shitty machine translations that make you think the content is in another language than it really is.
    • Clickbait remover for youtube - this is super important. It allows you to recase titles to remove the shitty clickbait like “you won’t BELIEVE how THIS happened” into “You won’t believe how this happened”. It will also remove the custom thumbnail and load a thumbnail from the beginning/middle/end of a video. Kind of primitive as the title only works when browsing videos, but the thumbnail remover is top tier.
    • Youtube nonstop - removes the “are you still watching?” popup on desktop that pauses the video. Fuck you youtube, I’ll waste all your bandwidth.
    • I also have Enhancer for Youtube but I’m not sure what I use it for now. It loads a mini player on desktop when you scroll down to the comments which is pretty nifty, but not super necessary either. Improve has a lot more options and easier to find too.

    And of course, ublock origin to stop ads on all websites, including youtube. uBlock is one of the only ad blockers that bypasses the youtube limitations - if you get a popup telling you to disable adblock or get youtube premium, ublock will put a stop to that.

    Wish they all kinda got merged into just one plugin but it works! It’s also ludicrous that we have to grab so many workarounds to get a tailored experience. Even just 10 years ago the experience was much better on that website.






  • I don’t even know if there’s even SEO to speak of still after they brought an update ~2022 where the top results are dominated by the usual big websites (mainly wikipedia, britannica, and tons of mainstream media). It’s like no matter what I look for it’s the same websites. Video game? Steam page. Movie? IMDB. Current events? Al Jazeera (for some reason lol), BBC, Guardian, etc. What is even the point of a search engine if it’s only going to redirect you to e-commerce products (this is also a big one I forgot about, every image search now is products you can buy) and the top 10 visited websites in the world. I can also do a search on imdb directly.

    And if you type a common word that is also the name of a movie good luck finding anything but the movie. It used to be better and it bothers me that younger people will grow up in a world where me saying this will sound like I’m rambling about nostalgia or something because all they will have known is shitty search engines, but no, it used to work perfectly well!!


  • And we know how Google works internally. Employees have to prove themselves worthy of being promoted by their bosses and to do that they have to submit projects. This is why they do seemingly senseless changes like the YouTube UI that seems to change every 6 months, or completely redoing an experience that worked just fine and making you relearn it. If they didn’t, they’d have nothing to show their bosses and they would get fired - this is documented.

    You can do super important maintenance stuff but that’s not what they like to see because it’s not showy enough, so you redo the UI with round instead of square corners and also add a bunch of metrics to the new UI to track how people use it and then they can pull some stats that looks good when they type the report out, and hopefully not get sacked at their next review. Employees are always looking for stuff like that to do because of this system.

    Its a bunch of bullshit upon bullshit just to satisfy each other’s need for bullshit.

    Im glad that on prolewiki at least we design for the reader and nothing else, and I think it shows.