I lived in a small city (~30k) in the middle of rural texas growing up, and our main wildlife was deer, squirrels, possums, foxes, armadillos, javalinas, and birds, although we also had the occasional ratsnake or raccoons or skunks.

We didn’t really have fruit trees, but we did have plenty of pecans and several gardens of all kinds of veggies, a fig tree that never seemed to bloom, and some assorted berrying bushes.

We never experienced these plagues of infrastructural damage and diseases and hurt pets (4 cats and 2 dogs in total) that you describe. Idk where people get these horror stories from.

I suppose it can happen, but that’s probably in areas where such a yard is the only safe space for wildlife and people don’t live with nature as a daily part of their lives.

I s2g cityfolk act like getting brushed up against by a non-domesticated critter will give them an instant prion disorder.

You think we own shit? Lawns are the landlord’s landscaping equivalent of white paint: inoffensive but dull and useless

I did read the commit, and I loved the part where Andreas Kling said:

This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.

As his reason for dismissing it. Because the commiter was trying to use idiomatic language for a builtin account. But it must be “politics” because pronouns amirite.

That also ignores all the other points brought up about his questionable values.

I don’t feel guilty for not participating in the cancel culture of the internet.

There is no such thing as cancel culture. This is what the Free Marketplace of ideas allows: “your ideas are shit and I won’t support you and I will let others know.” That’s not “cancel culture,” that’s just how society fucking deals with toxic ideas that harm communities.

As somebody who also identifies as LGBT

Then put the bare fucking minimum into acting like you’re part of a marginalized community, and stop rushing to defend online chuds who support that marginalization from being critiqued. Seriously weird simp behavior.

The biggest issue I see is that most of the tech is someone’s IP. If it’s not patented, it’s copyrighted or trademarked. Otherwise, it should be a doable PoC with old parts and a barebones firmware. I don’t need my FOSS printer to contend with Xerox, I just need it to poop out a page when I hit print.

I’d also love to see a FOSS page description language that could dethrone Adobe’s PostScript and HP’s PCL as the standards.

Here’s the study directly in PDF form

The issue is that he’s politically polarized into believing that the word “they” is inherently “political.”

It’s great to hear he doesn’t partake in dehumanising others for their past behaviour/statements

1. Calling someone out for doing shitty things isn’t “dehumanizing,” you fucking disingenuous hagfish.

2. All documented behavior is necessarily in the past. Do you mean we must assume he’s changed based on no evidence? Or is their some magical timeframe beyond which certain beliefs must have changed?

If you’re feeling attacked by people calling out Andreas Kling and Brendan Eich for their irrational prejudice against people who aren’t straight and cis… Good! It means you have enough self-awareness to realize you fit that category too, so now you have the option to change that. Or you already have made that change, but still feel guilty about who you used to be—in which case I, a LGBT, give you permission to stop feeling guilty and move on with your life! Just stop jumping to defend assholes with paperthin excuses that sounded good when they were brought up in their “apolitical” echochambers

Unfortunately—99.999% of the time—“apolitical” just means “I haven’t taken the time to consider my deeply held values and how they show through in my day-to-day life and I want to stop hearing from people who challenge my worldview,” not “I would like to not have this space devolve into discussions about governance nor economics” (which is also a political statement when you consider it’s a community leader saying no one is allowed to question how they govern the community).

E.g. why the fuck are pronouns “political”? Just because certain pundits have vilified anyone who uses less common ones to refer to themself? That just means any topic is potentially political, and all it takes is some asshole making the community you and your loved ones belong to part of their political agenda for your PR to be dismissed. “Sorry, that kind of usecase is common among Straight White Males™, and I don’t want this project to be made unnecessarily political.”

Some people have no self-reflection, and it shows when they say shit like this. Only a matter of time before Kling claims people calling him out for being rightwing “pushed” him into the rightwing (because he realized the values he aleady held aligned with theirs, but lets conveniently forget to mention that part).

Just use one of the FOSS front-ends: https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends?tab=readme-ov-file#youtube

Yet another micro-celebrity whose 3 section wikipedia page has one third of it dedicated to “Sexual misconduct allegations”

The absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence

Actually, Stacy, that’s exactly what it is

Pedophilia has a longstanding history in the music industry. Priscilla was 14 when she met Elvis, Lori Mattix admitted to sleeping with rockstars as early as 14, Sable Starr admitted to doing so when she was 12, both were part of an infamous group dubbed the “baby groupies,” it was so prevalent that it disgusted Danny Elfman into writing “Little Girls” about the record execs he had witnessed participating in pedophilia. There’s at least a dozen examples I could pull from recent times just off the top of my head, but they’re all more niche and less likely to catch people’s eyes.

Phones abaolutely do listen, but not to audio via the mic. When Apple and Google tell you they respect your privacy, they mean they don’t harvest data directly from a live feed of the mic nor camera; they still scan your files in some cases, and they harvest your browsing history, and read your text messages metadata, and check your youtube watch history, and scan your contacts, and check your location, and harvest hundreds of other litttle tiny data points that don’t seem like much but add up to a big profile of you and your behavior and psyche.

So your friend was at a pub quiz with a couple dozen other people, and his phone knew where he was and who was nearby. A statistically significant portion of the people there were not privacy conscious and googled “Lord of the Rings runtime” or something similar. All that data got harvested by Google and Apple, and processed, and then the most recent and fitting entry from some master list of customers’ sites’ articles was pushed to all their newsfeeds.

Humans don’t understand intuitively how much information is being processed through nonverbal means at any given time, and that’s the disconnect large companies exploit when they say misleading things like “noooo, your phone isn’t listening to you.”

But it’s totally not privacy invasive, because at no point along the line did a human view your data (/s)

there’s actually aword for this type of mixed idiom: malaphor

Wait, how does that work? It seems like it should take the same energy to melt it either way.

presumably they mean using something besides your body heat to melt it

That’s more of an turn-of-phrase, no?

Is that a Mark Fischer quote?

“Take the Blue Pill and the gradual slide into fascism stops accelerating for four years while the current hellscape becomes the status quo, take the Red Pill and buckle the fuck up as we hyperspeed into fascism”

That interface is called a manual or tutorial, and there are many better ones than neural networks

AI isn’t stupid because it doesn’t possess any intelligence to begin with, the term “AI” is just a marketing misnomer.

Language Models are essentially really advanced Markov Chain generators. Once you understand that, you’ll realize why your question is like “I keep asking these water mills to make me a cup of coffee, but they all taste like dirt”: wrong tool for the job, it just happens to be tangentially related.

You’re also asking if there’s a way to precisely word a request so that the computer will do what you want it to do. Luckily for you, there is! It’s a trick that’s been around for ~60 years and it’s called “programming languages”

that chicken was an animal that was raised in war-crime conditions and killed on a conveyor belt of death where it watched as its kin in front of it were stunned and then drowned.

That cheese comes from a cow who was fisted in the ass by a farmer so they could inseminate it (a process many would describe using an upsetting term beginning with the lettee ‘r’, were it done to humans), only to havw the resulting child ripped away from it before they could bond so that her milk, intended for her child, could be extracted by a cold machine and sold to humans.

Probably not the best examples to use in this situation.