OMG Free AI-Free content! You shouldn't have

Good luck with the midterms! I'm supposed to be studying for some myself...

I think it was the first time I audibly gasped in a theater. The color of the screen and thus the room going almost completely dark, then, in an instant, being flooded with the pale light of that collision coupled with the small details of the rubble made for one of the prettiest theater experiences I've ever had.

Granted, I don't go to the theater much. But I've seen all of the star wars movies from Revenge of the Sith in theaters on release, and this way by far the one that got the most emotions out of me from sheer color work and composition.

::: spoiler spoiler

or, at least, good emotions…

fuck lining up an ancient dagger with a 50-year old piece of wreckage, btw :::

Interesting read, but boy does this journalist have a ... different read on things than I do.

People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we're nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win.

IMO it's the exact opposite; we talk about this because we want the best protocol to win, this time, while knowing full well that usually it doesn't.

Of course search was broken because all OSS social tools must have one glaring lack of functionality.

My understanding is that search on the microblogging side of the fedi is intended to be "broken" (from the view of someone expecting a Twitter-style search); hashtags are for opting-in to global discoverability whilst without them your posts are intended to be stumbled upon and/or passed around rather than sought out.

If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland. We’re not tough enough as a people to survive in Greenland, much less “take it over”.

I doubt that trump supporters cheering on the USA throwing their weight around like the world's bully-in-chief would be receptive to such a message.

I can't tell if I'm just too deep in the fedi-culture weeds, or if the article really is confidently ignorant.

Labeling the AfD as far-right is clearly wrong when you consider that Alice Weidel, the party’s chairwoman, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? I beg to differ!

Fuck you. There were gay Nazis. There are gay neo Nazis today. Fascism cares about power more than any internal consistency. The moment those gay Nazis are no longer useful to their higher-ups, they'll be disposed of.

When will someone with more reach than I, a random internet commenter, start saying this shit to his face?!?! The people who are swayed by his bullshit rhetoric are not coming here to read our takedowns, and I can't tell if I can expect them to read the counter- and response op-eds...

The background trend, unfortunately, is of the far right slowly but surely gaining votes. We pushed them back to third place today, but they still almost doubled the number of representatives they'll be sending to parliament (from 89 to the projected ~130 for today's elections).

• In 2002, Jacques Chirac won against the far right with 82% (to the far right's 18%).
• In 2017, Macron won against the far right with 66% (to the far right's 34%).
• In 2022, Macron won against the far right with 58% (to the far right's 41%).

IMO it's largely a consequence of the center-left and center-right (Hollande, Macron) completely abandoning the working class, and demonizing the left whilst cozying up to the far-right (mostly Macron, though Hollande definitely slid right over his term).

Artificial Intelligence Image

For some reason it's hilarious to me that the person who made this flyer felt the need to specify that the ClipArt-level illustration, placed next to 3-4 pictures of the kid the flyer is complaining about, is not, in fact, an actual image of the kid.

I really despise how Claude's creators and users are turning the definition of "skill" from "the ability to use [learned] knowledge to enhance execution" into "a blurb of text that [usefully] constrains a next-token-predictor".

I guess, if you squint, it's akin to how biologists will talk about species "evolving to fit a niche" amongst themselves or how physicists will talk about nature "abhorring a vacuum". At least they aren't talking about a fucking product that benefits from hype to get sold.

I wish I could set aside my convictions and care for others to make money this easily.

“If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked fr fr,” he wrote.

Get cooked, fuckface. nihilist racist pieces of shit

Great job on Politico's part, though.

Stuff like this deepens my impression that all advertising should be burned in a fire.

I know that's impractical, but the damage it does to society is hard to stomach.

The issue isn't just local. "This is predicted to cascade into plunging property values in communities where insurance becomes impossible to find or prohibitively expensive - a collapse in property values with the potential to trigger a full-scale financial crisis similar to what occurred in 2008," the report stressed.

I know this isn't the main point of this threadpost, but I think this is another way in which allowing housing to be a store of value and an investment instead of a basic right (i.e. decommodifying it) sets us up for failure as a society. Not only does it incentivize hoarding and gentrification while the number of homeless continues to grow, it completely tanks our ability to relocate - which is a crucial component to our ability to adapt to the changing physical world around us.

Think of all the expensive L.A. houses that just burned. All that value wasted, "up in smoke". How much of those homes' value is because of demand/supply, and how much is from their owners deciding to invest in their resale value? How much money, how much human time and effort could have been invested elsewhere over the years? Notably into the parts of a community that can more reliably survive displacement, like tools and skills. I don't want to argue that "surviving displacement" should become an everyday focus, rather the opposite: decommodifying housing could relax the existing investment incentives towards house market value. When your ability to live in a home goes from "mostly only guaranteed by how much you can sell your current home" to "basically guaranteed (according to society's current capabilities)", people will more often decide to invest their money, time, and effort into literally anything else than increasing their houses' resale value. In my opinion, this would mechanically lead to a society that loses less to forest fires and many other climate "disasters".

I have heard that Japan almost has a culture of disposable-yet-non-fungible homes: a house is built to last its' builders'/owners' lifetime at most, and when the plot of land is sold the new owner will tear down the existing house to build their own. I don't know enough to say how - or if - this ties into the archipelago's relative overabundance of tsunamis, earthquakes, and other natural disasters, but from the outside it seems like many parts of the USA could benefit from moving closer to this Japanese relationship with homes.

Per statistics, 70% of developers prefer dark themes. Being in the other 30%, that question always puzzled me. Why?

Have you tried asking any of them?

And I think I have an answer. Here’s a typical dark theme: [...] and here’s a light one: [...] On the latter one, colors are way less vibrant.

Does the author not understand that a lot of us code in darker environments where the light background of most light themes either sears our retinas or forces us to turn the monitor brightness so far down that everything becomes a shade of grey?

Fuck you I won't do what you tell me

Fuck you I won't do what you tell me

Fuck you I won't do what you tell me!!!!!!!

Those that wear ties are justified

For wearin the suit, you're the chosen white

There was a big storm around 2009 in the south west of France (where there are a lot of pine tree plantations); an entire generation of trees ended up looking like this.

Basically, strong continuous winds flatten very young trees without killing them. They then keep growing, with a permanent kink in trunk, near the base such as these. Not great for sawing into planks, but they work just fine to make paper and agglomerate.

It's incredible how resilient trees are!

Kinda disappointing.

The article is really trying to sell us, the reader, that using Linux without knowing how to use the command line is not only possible but totally feasible. Unfortunately, after each paragraph that expresses that sentiment we are treated to up to several paragraphs on how it's totally easier, faster, and more powerful to do things via thé command line, and hey did you know that more people like coding on Linux than windows? Did you know you can do more powerful things with bash, awk, and sed than you ever could in a file manager?!

FFS vim and nano are brought up and vim's "shortcuts" are praised... in an article on how you can totally use Linux through a gui and never need to open up the command line.

Who is this written for? outside of people who not only already use Linux but are convinced that using any other OS is both a moral failing and a form of self-harm?

IMPOSTER

amogus

The materials were also chosen with an eye on reducing maintenance and repetitive tasks for the yacht's staff, so traditional materials like teak decks and wooden handrails are out, and composite alternatives are in. The diesel-electric power plant works alongside a battery storage system that allows Leviathan to operate for long stretches with no emissions, and it also features an advanced wastewater treatment system.

On the one hand, it's nice that mr Newell seems to be reducing the footprint of their luxury yacht above and beyond most of what I have heard happens in the rest of the luxury yacht industry. On the other hand, I shudder to think of what the footprint for the manufacturing of this custom-designed, one-of-a-kind luxury yacht looked like. Not to mention 'composite' usually means some sort of plastic, so now there'll be one more thing spewing microplastics directly into the ocean...

For clarity's sake: I have been daily driving Linux, specifically ArchLinux, for the past 9 years, across a rotation of laptop and desktop computers. I do almost everything in the command line and prefer it that way.

I still think if you want people to try Linux you need to chill the fuck out on getting them to use the command line. At the very least, until they're actually interested in using Linux on their own.

Does this mean blue whales are on the way out, given the lower amount of krill in the oceans nowadays, or have they just stabilized at a lower population? I imagine human whaling practices have muddied the data, but I'm ignorant as to the extent.