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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure if the writer of this article is familiar with Dutch politics, but nothing unusual is happening. Unlike in the US, where one party wins am absolute majority, we have a system where you need to form a coalition. And this is obviously a whole political game, with parties kinda pretending they don’t want it just to have a better bargaining position. This formation process has taken months for as long as I can remember, and personally I don’t feel like it’s going particularly badly for them.

    I still think the coalition of PVV, NSC, VVD, BBB will happen in some way or another. But the other parties do want the PVV to make clear that some of it’s plans are just not going to happen. Wilders is aware of this, and suddenly seems a lot more reasonable than I’m used to (though obviously still far-right). Ideas like a Nexit or a full immigration stop are just not executable, so they’ll have to be toned down.



  • Baudet is definitely on the edge yeah. Obviously there somes a moment where you shouldn’t tolerate the intolerant and a democratic society shouldn’t protect the undemocratic in the name of democracy. Up until now I don’t think either of them has done enough to deserve that tho. Randomly calling for a politician to be killed, even as a joke, is in my opinion still bad taste. It’s not the way I’d want Dutch politics to go, even for those who I disagree with. Violence and hate only creates more violence and hate


  • This is not a joke that is very appropriate though. In the early 2000s a politician similar to Wilders was killed for his opinions. Another (even further) right-wing politician was assaulted twice in the past few months, and Wilders himself hasn’t been able to go anywhere without bodyguards in the past few years. We’re still a democracy, Wilders should be able to say things without getting constant death threats. Unlike the US, things are not yet as polarized here. To me it feels like the comedian made a very inappropriate “joke”, even if I also absolutely despise Wilders




  • Obviously this is a privacy community, and this ain’t great in that regard, but as someone who’s interested in AI this is absolutely fascinating. I’m now starting to wonder whether the model could theoretically encode the entire dataset in its weights. Surely some compression and generalization is taking place, otherwise it couldn’t generate all the amazing responses it does give to novel inputs, but apparently it can also just recite long chunks of the dataset. And also why would these specific inputs trigger such a response. Maybe there are issues in the training data (or process) that cause it to do this. Or maybe this is just a fundamental flaw of the model architecture? And maybe it’s even an expected thing. After all, we as humans also have the ability to recite pieces of “training data” if we seem them interesting enough.



  • I’m Dutch and afaik right-wing media doesn’t play a role. The reason is quite simple, it’s because the previous coalitions lead by the neoliberal VVD have consistently fucked everyone who isn’t rich (and even some who are). Especially the crises that they’ve caused have completely eroded trust in the previously big parties. Some of these issues I’ll lost below.

    In the northern province of Groningen houses started getting damaged die to earthquakes caused by government-funded natural gas extraction. The whole country got rich of of this for decades, but when the people of Groningen needed money to repair their homes they sometimes had to fight for years to get anything.

    The tax agency started incorrectly marking people as fraudsters for claiming certain benefits, which often put these people in debt for thousands of euros. This has ruined the life’s of hundreds of people, yet the government initially just ignored it. While these people lost everything they had, the government seemed to do everything it could to avoid paying or helping. At some point they did start paying and pretending to help, but for many victims this was simply too little to late.

    And then there’s plenty of other issues that erroded trust as well. Years of ignoring “the nitrogen problem” until it was too late and lead to all kinds of issues. The farmers (who are the biggest cause of this issue) suddenly become the target of the government, which they obviously didn’t like. This caused huge protests and the rapid growth of parties like the BBB and probably also the PVV. And there’s also a housing crisis, where buying houses is impossible.

    In short: the previous normal coalitions kept fucking up, until people seemingly had enough. There were other alternatives to the PVV, but apparently voting on a right -wing extremist who has all the ideas is easier than voting left-wing for many people here. I hope the damage stays limited, but this is truly a dark day for our country.


  • As a Dutchman, I’m kind of shocked. The battle seemed to be between the previous largest party VVD, the new NSC party and the labour/greens fusion. Then the PVV suddenly surged. Apparently a lot of people who weren’t sure yet ended up going with the PVV. Out of the 4 largest parties we have 3 that are right-wing and/or conservative. The PVV is far-right (though hard to place), the VVD is a neoliberal party, and the NSC is closer to the centre but also quite conservative. We’re entering dark days…



  • Since some other good recommendations were already made, I’m gonna put something a bit different here: Tooth and Tail. It’s not a classic RTS, and you can’t really micro your units like in other RTS games, but it’s fun and fast paced. Games only last 15-ish minutes at most and the gameplay is relatively simple. It’s 2D so it probably also runs on anything from smart toaster to supercomputer.


  • gerryflap@feddit.nltoLinux Gaming@lemmy.worldRTS recommendation
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    8 months ago

    As a casual RTS player I never really liked SC2 too much, at least in multiplayer. It’s one of those games where you get instantly punished when you don’t play optimally. In AoE or Supreme Commander or something I can at least build a base in peace for a while before I get absolutely destroyed.

    Edit: I agree with forged alliance though. It runs on Linux and is an awesome game. Great sense of scale, and also nice for casual play


  • I don’t know how it runs on Linux, but as a casual AoE fan it’s in my opinion the best AoE game. It stays true to its roots, but basically does almost everything just better. Units can stand on walls, civs all play different, graphics are fine, and it maintains the AoE feeling that made all the older games good.


  • I use mostly pure GNOME on my PC. The missing system tray is very annoying, though I really don’t care about the missing dock or desktop icons. I start programs by searching for them, not by clicking on a desktop icon or in a dock. That’s my preferred method. And the alt+tab menu of GNOME is nice enough to find anything when I need it, together with having workspaces to organize everything.

    I tried KDE, but it just felt more messy to me. For instance, I tried to move the bottom bar to the side of my screen, accidentally moved something on the bar itself, and then everything looked off and I couldn’t figure out how to get it back. It all felt a bit janky and unrefined. On some systems I also use i3, but that’s only for productivity. For daily use I prefer GNOME, where everything just seems to work.


  • As someone with a huge intrest in machine learning, it kinda pains me to see all this empty hype. All the buzzword fetishists seem to have picked AI as their next big thing, without properly understanding what it does. Most businesses don’t need AI. For them it’d be a huge money and time sink. They could maybe benefit from existing tools like Copilot or ChatGPT, but they don’t need their own AI features in their apps. Once their post-nut clarity kicks in and they find out how much money they’ve wasted on something that was barely useful to their products, they’ll probably start hating AI for their own mistakes.

    AI/ML is a very cool and useful tool. But most products don’t need AI currently. It’s not worth it in most cases, appart from maybe using off-the-shelf solutions that are easily Integrated.