• 1 Post
  • 229 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle


  • I think that taking a hard-line “policy” on something is inherently stupid. Everything has nuance, and having very strong, rigid opinions about the hot-button issues of the day doesn’t make you smarter or better than those that are more apathetic.

    I’m generally pro-choice, but I fully understand why many people have issues with abortions and I don’t really blame them for wanting to outlaw the practice. I’m in favor of SOME increased gun control, but I also think that people are wayyyy too obsessed with guns in general. There are other things that kill a lot more people than guns but nobody’s freaking out about those. So honestly I think there isn’t much to be gained here by trying to make guns harder to buy, or taking people’s guns away, or whatever.



  • I had a wiener dog that absolutely SLAYED moles like it was his job. Seriously, I bet he killed more than a hundred over a few years. I guess it kind of was his job, wieners are bred to hunt burrowing animals like that. Dachshund is German for “badger hound”.

    Anyway, he got a little older, fatter, and lazier, and we also moved to an area with tougher soil, so his mole slaying days were over (we thought). But then we got a young German Shepherd, and he figured out that he could find the mole (his downward pointing ears made him good at that), start digging the hole, and then stand back and let her take over. Then after she did all the hard work of grabbing and killing the thing, he would steal it from her and come present it to us very proudly.

    He wasn’t a terribly bright dog, so I was really impressed when he started doing that. The German Shepherd was way smarter than him by any measure, but I think she didn’t care that he was taking credit for her kills. She was just having fun helping him. Both excellent dogs, I miss them a lot.




  • I think what you’re talking about doing is quite difficult, and there will be a lot of obstacles in your way. You’re proposing:

    1. Circumventing the API fees, which is something that ChatGPT would definitely not like, and they will make it as difficult as possible. You’re not the only one trying to avoid paying for this very popular service.

    2. Crawling the entire contents of each page with a bot, which is another thing that websites do NOT want you to do. There are only a handful of RSS readers that do this, and they’re paid, closed-source, proprietary apps. And even those probably don’t work on certain websites.

    I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that you have chosen a very difficult path here. If you’ve never developed an app before, start with a smaller, simpler project.



  • PeachMan@lemmy.onetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlwhats 'wrong' with seed oils???
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Obviously there are various forms of sugar in a lot of things, it’s just a carbohydrate. My point is that there is zero reason to ever ADD sugar to any food, period. It is not an essential nutrient and it does not add anything beneficial other than flavor. It only promotes tooth decay, diabetes, and eventual organ failure. Yum.


  • Yep, that’s the main problem with all the buzzword substances that diet culture is obsessed with: fat, salt, carbs, etc… All of those are fine in moderation, but the problem is that the processed garbage that the average person eats for lunch contains a RIDICULOUS amount of those things.

    Not sugar, though. Sugar is just bad for you, full stop. 😆









  • This is utter nonsense. First, let me point out that this is an ad for Surfshark, a VPN company. They’re trying to sell you their service by scaring you.

    Second, their methodology is absolutely useless, it’s an easy and very common way to come up with a clickbait article like this. They’re just looking at app store permissions, and assuming the app with the most permissions is bad and the one with the least permissions is good. Which is utter nonsense, it might be that the apps with more permissions NEED those permissions because they have more FEATURES.

    I could make a “language learning” app that ONLY asks for the audio recording permission, and then sell audio recordings of my users to the highest bidder. But Surfshark would praise my literal spyware as “privacy-focused” because it only needs one privacy permission!

    The way to ACTUALLY do this properly would be to fully audit each app, find out WHY it’s asking for additional permissions, go over the full privacy policy, and do some packet captures to figure out when the app is phoning home to send data, and what servers it’s connecting to. Contact the app owners, ask them why exactly their app needs each permission. Consult some experts.

    But that’s too hard for Surfshark, they just want to write a scary article so that they can sell you a VPN that doesn’t really make you safer on the internet.

    EDIT: You know why I dropped Surfshark? They started bundling a “virus scanner” in with their “privacy-focused” VPN client. So my “privacy” tool wanted to scan all my files all of a sudden? GTFO.