Spyke

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Schools in America apparently have their own army recruiter

I went to highschool and university in the US - I was lucky that I got a scholarship and that covered pretty much all my tuition costs.

But I had a friend, one year older than me, who joined and served in the US army for something like 2 years just so he could get his university costs covered and to save some money for living expenses.

It may not be intentional, but the high cost of higher education is an excellent recruiting tool for the US military.

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For those thinking of going back to reddit. Gaze upon this comment section and reconsider.

I think the fewer number of people, compared to reddit, on Lemmy combined with the fact that it's not nearly as well known, plays a huge advantage to the quality of the comments. Not that there aren't people like that here either, but I feel like the more popular a platform, is, the more it gets filled, proportionally, with people trying to make witty, shitty, pointless remarks that are often clickkbaity and avoid actual discussion, all in the interest of just getting more imaginary points.

Also the process of "enshitification" (not a term I made up, look it up if you hadn't heard of it) has already started taking place on reddit due to its popularity.

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Hey, I'm new to GitHub!

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"I went to the farmer's market but they didn't sell me a complete meal, only all these fucking plants. They think everyone's a cook, and expect to know cooking, but i'm not and I don't. Make a fucking meal and give it to me! Stupid fucking smelly farmers" -- that's how that sounds

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Script kiddies

I agree that github is for developers or people who at the very least don't mind learning a bit of development and getting their hands dirty. The poster demanding an exe is quite entitled - and also from what I understand the repo he is referring to is a python repo, so there normally wouldn't be an exe, it'd just be run via a python command.

There's a bigger problem here, which is that technical skill in newer generations is also decreasing - as someone on reddit had once said "I'm a millennial and I'm doing tech support for my parents as well as my children". A generation raised on tablets and phones have gotten the false impression of being tech savy, when their actual technical skill is using end products.

Expecting every github repo to provide you with something you just click-and-run is overlooking the complexities and reality of how code is. By it self that isn't a problem, but the entitlement it takes to publicly and arrogantly post that on a public forum is astounding and counter-productive to people who work on those small repos.

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doorbells have rules

Way too many people, especially Americans, have a gun-slinger complex. They're looking for an excuse, any excuse, to use their guns, and feel like they're "heroes". These people are dangerous and the antithesis of what gun owners should be - responsible and careful. This ain't the "well regulated militia" mentioned in the constitution, this is angsty, angry, insecure people with issues trying to act tough by shooting someone.

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Captain Planet!

The only sad thing about Captain Planet was that it taught me that if you point out the wrong-doings of the rich and powerful, there will be correct action taken by the authorities to right the wrongs and to punish those responsible. The truth is much sadder imho.

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Yay! The system is fixed!

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In the US if you give a politician money in exchange for voting against a bill, it's illegal (it's called "quid-pro-quo" in lawyer terms)

But if you just donate money to the politician, his family, or his campaign, without requesting anything - and then he "coincidentally" happens to vote against the bill which you didn't want, it is perfectly legal.

Basically, many politicians are regularly doing something clearly unethical and corrupt in a technically "legal" way.

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Google apologizes for ‘missing the mark’ after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis

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You don't do what Google seems to have done - inject diversity artificially into prompts.

You solve this by training the AI on actual, accurate, diverse data for the given prompt. For example, for "american woman" you definitely could find plenty of pictures of American women from all sorts of racial backgrounds, and use that to train the AI. For "german 1943 soldier" the accurate historical images are obviously far less likely to contain racially diverse people in them.

If Google has indeed already done that, and then still had to artificially force racial diversity, then their AI training model is bad and unable to handle that a single input can match to different images, instead of the most prominent or average of its training set.

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boomers

As I have gotten older I have become more angry and cynical. But I'm very much more anti-conservative now than I was before, which in the US would be more left leaning, but honestly I never thought of myself as that, I just thought that I was being rational.

But being rational these days is literally being anti-conservative, because of how conservatives are banning books, attacking LGBTQ+ people for just wanting to be themselves, denying global warming even exists, and yes, letting the rich get richer by being corrupt and cutting taxes for them.

Though I also have some views that might make someone very left leaning think I'm against them (for example I do believe that some words shouldn't be viewed as bad when not meant as personal attack against disabled people, like retard or fat or obese; and I also think people are allowed to choose their pronouns and in most cases I will respect it, but some people are just doing it for shits and giggles, not seriously actually considering themselves as what they choose). It's easy to think someone who disagrees with those views as I do that they might be conservative, but I am far, far from it.

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For those thinking of going back to reddit. Gaze upon this comment section and reconsider.

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lol @ the exact percent

But no, I don't think shitposts by themselves are actually the problem. I think the problem is when when there's so many people dedicated to making shitposts that serious communities with serious discussions start getting overwhelmed with shitposts, and when there's so many people who are only interested in shitposts that they upvote those shitposts to the top, often downvoting anyone who might offer a contrarian non-funny opinion.

or IDK, I'm mostly speculating based on personal experience.

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boomers

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Nah, I bought a house 3 years ago. I still hate how inaccessible the housing market is, how shitty conservatives are towards other people and how much they deny science. Owning property doesn't magically make one conservative. Fuck conservatives, fuck the rich.

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STOP USING GITHUB

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A lot of people associated with Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) have major objections to GitHub. Here's one summary: https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/

But the TLDR; version is roughly:

  • Your source hosted on GitHub is being used to train AI, and you are possibly giving up rights to algorithms you may have written (IANAL, and AI training is a fuzzy topic at the moment)
  • GitHub itself is proprietary, closed-source software, while they claim to be pro-FOSS. Aside from not being in the spirit of things, closed-source means you also don't know what happens with your code/data once up upload it.
  • Microsoft has a history of being anti-FOSS, while some people will say it's been changing, I think many are still rightfully concerned what their future decisions regarding GitHub might be, especially if they are a near-monopoly.

Alternative do exist, and some like codeberg.org are specifically open sourced, and pro-open source, so many people are pushing to move hosting away from GitHub and onto other options.

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STOP USING GITHUB

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Fun fact, Linus has said that he has named both of the major pieces of software he has authored after himself - Linux and Git.

Git is a somewhat old British slang insult for someone stupid/childish.

So GitHub is then .. a hub of gits.

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Hey, I'm new to GitHub!

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The point, which you missed, is that going to github, a source code hosting service, to look for downloading executables for your specific platform - is like going to a farmer's market to try and get a ready made meal. You're at the wrong place, and it's not meant for you if that's what you're looking for.

Github is fairly user friendly, but it's users are developers.

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Vending machine error reveals secret face image database of college students

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80 steps too far down the capitalism ladder

This is the result of capitalism - corporations (aka the rich selfish assholes running them) will always attempt to do horrible things to earn more money, so long as they can get away with it, and only perhaps pay relatively small fines. The people who did this face no jailtime, face no real consequences - this is what unregulated capitalism brings. Corporations should not have rights or protect the people who run them - the people who run them need to face prison and personal consequences. (edited for spelling and missing word)