Not quite a direct answer, but I feel like this world view is linked to seeing art primarily as a commodity rather than a way to express emotions.

With expressive art, it doesn’t particularly matter whether you write the millionth poem in a standard rhyme scheme and meter, so long as what you express comes across.
But commodity art is explicitly ‘clean’, it does not carry a message or at least not a particularly complex/interesting message.

And then, yeah, suddenly you ask yourself why would someone look at this particular drawing of a dragon, when there’s been a million drawings of dragons before.

Glad that assert_matches!() is finally stable. Pulling in a dependency for that functionality never felt good, nor having to provide an elaborate format-string every time, just to get more information than “should’ve been true, but was false”…

Alt+F3 can also work (possibly in addition to Alt+Space)…

Yeah, up to a month ago at $DAYJOB, it was sacrilegious to insinuate that perhaps we shouldn’t be using AI for every goddamn brainfart.

But the finance folks always win in the end, and now there’s more and more mails being sent to all employees, which do mention the costs of AI. No one has officially said yet that we should be mindful of our usage, but that’s definitely coming.

Seriously, though, when you work in IT, you constantly use VPNs as basic infrastructure, just to connect devices into larger networks. It is such a fundamental technology that the Linux kernel – the core of the operating system – ships an implementation (WireGuard).

Trying to regulate that is akin to regulating cables. Sure, cables can be used to access things you might not want. But good luck writing a law that prohibits the use of cables only specifically for the things you don’t want, without being so complex that it results in tons of bureacracy for all kinds of organizations.

And even then, it would necessarily lead to legitimate use-cases being prohibited, because you often cannot, and really should not be able to, see the traffic that users send over the infrastructure you provide them.

Yeah, differentiating between multiplications vs. divisions and additions vs. subtractions doesn’t make sense, because they’re the same thing respectively, just written differently.

When you divide by 3, you can also multiply by ⅓.
When you subtract 7, you can also add -7.

There is one quirk to be aware of, though. When people notate a division with a long horizontal line, that implies parentheses around both of the expressions, top and bottom.

I also always find the minimalism vs. maximalism debate interesting for usability. Lots of minimal designs are so flat that you can’t tell a button from a label or icon.
At the same time, iOS’ new Frutiger theme regularly confuses me with its transparency, e.g. yesterday I saw that the silent-mode notification had a ➋ inside. It was centered and everything. Then the notification went away, but the ➋ stayed, because it was from an app icon behind.

I wish, we could throw out the bad eye candy, like transparency, while keeping the good parts, like 3D buttons and such. I feel like this kind of neo-brutalist UI design isn’t the worst direction to go in:

(This particular example isn’t perfect, like the buttons are flat, while there’s useless shadows around the boxes. But yeah, could just move those shadows to the buttons and it would still look fine.)

Yeah, my mum is like that. She’ll readily tell you that you can put dandelion into salad, but also considers it a weed.

She’s also always very concerned what the neighbors think of our lawn (not that she ever asked), and one time she told me we had to mow the lawn, because dandelions are growing on there. When I told her that dandelions are flowers and that I think flowers look better than bland green, you could really see that she never even thought about it this way.

Servo company? It’s an open-source project underneath the Linux Foundation. The Servo Shell source code seems to be here: https://github.com/servo/servo/tree/main/ports/servoshell
It probably wouldn’t be too difficult to compile it yourself, if you really want it.

However, you have to mind that it’s damn near impossible to build a browser from scratch that supports the majority of web standards at this point. Servo does not do so. Most webpages will not be usable on it.
That’s the reason why they don’t care to provide a general-purpose browser interface. Because Servo is only useful at this point when only a specific webpage or specific set of webpages needs to be displayed.
So, generally when it’s embedded into hardware or into a software application, where the user does not have a URL bar to type arbitrary addresses into, and where the webpage to display can be specifically crafted for Servo.

Hitler followed a vegetarian diet, not a vegan diet.

He was also prescribed a meat-free diet by his doctor and it was useful for his public image to show himself as loving animals, so it’s highly debated how much of it might have been from some genuine moral conviction.
Not least, because it would make no fucking sense when he’s slaughtering people in the millions at the same time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_and_vegetarianism

Okay, but just to be clear, the problem is not that it can’t do a timer. The problem is that it claims to be able to and even produces a result which looks plausible. It means, you cannot trust it to do anything that you can’t easily verify. If they could fix that overconfidence in a year, it would be much better.

Can certainly also see why it got named that… 🙃

I’ve been wondering, if you could combine LLMs with a logic programming language like Prolog. The latter is actually able to reason through things, you “just” have to express them in Prolog facts and rules.

Well, from doing a quick online search, I’m most certainly not the first person to think of this, which does not surprise me at all…

https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/116335209525412306

Yeah, and the worst part is that submitting the PR is trivial. You just offload the reviewing work onto the maintainer and then feed the review comments back into the AI. Effectively, you’re making the maintainer talk to the AI, by going through you as a middleman, a.k.a. completely wasting their time.

I don’t feel like these positions are at odds with one another, unless you become active in reducing the number of humans, of course.

Like, you can uplift and protect people by stopping them from killing their environment, because you recognize that people are an invasive species that will do that.

I always thought openSUSE’s package manager zypper has quite a few neat ideas:

• It offers two-letter shorthands for subcommands, so zypper install→ zypper in, update → up, remove → rm.
• When it lists what packages it will install or remove, it will list them with the first letter highlighted in a different color, kind of like so: fish git texlive
  This makes it really easy to visually scan the package list, and since it’s sorted alphabetically, it also makes it easier to find a particular package you might be looking for.
  And while there’s separate lists for packages to be added vs. updated vs. removed, they also color those letters in green vs. yellow vs. red, so you can immediately see what’s what.
• When it lists items (other than packages), it prints an ID number, too.
  So, zypper repos gives you a list of your repositories, numberered 1, 2, 3 etc., and then if you want to remove a repo, you can run zypper removerepo 3.
• When you run a zypper search, it prints the results in a nicely formatted table.

Documentation: https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/tumbleweed/zypper/

It’s likely a bug: https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild/-/work_items?show=eyJpaWQiOiIxNzYiLCJmdWxsX3BhdGgiOiJyZWxhbi9mZW5uZWNidWlsZCIsImlkIjoxODY5NDI0MzF9

Personally, I’m waiting to see what the devs say, but if it gets on your nerves, you can hide the notification in the Android settings.
I’m just not sure, if it is maybe needed again at a later point, which is why I’m holding off.

Wikipedia seems to do a decent enough job defining it:

Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in democracy, separation of powers, civil liberties, and the rule of law.

But basically, my point is:

• If your government represents the people, then it is possible for your people to elect authoritarianism, especially if they are unhappy, like the meme describes, and/or when there’s foreign nations trying to destabilize the system.
• If your government does not represent the people, then it is likely to devolve into authoritarianism on its own, because individuals or individual groups will want to assume all power and limit the rights of others.

Basically, my opinion is that politics is a constant work in progress, no matter the political system.

Both of you could’ve simply named the political system that you think is magically immune to being overthrown, while somehow not being authoritarianism itself.