abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

YouTube isn't "going away". What could happen is a lot of people switch to something better.

Just like a whole bunch of people have switched to Lemmy, which is better than Reddit. YouTube would still exist, at least for a while, just like Reddit still exists.

I wouldn't recommend it. If checking if someone else has finished work first is too much to ask, dealing with passwords/two factor auth/etc isn't gonna go down well.

Yes there's software for this, but I think you can keep it simpler than that.

Just tell them to create a new spreadsheet every day (possibly by creating a copy of yesterday's spreadsheet). Obviously name the files by date. With a new directory for each month.

Also, it sounds like they don't have good backups. Help them with that.

Take the car to a mechanic you can trust and get a qualified opinion from someone who has actually seen your car and the damage.

Smash repair places often charge excessive amounts of money and your car might be repairable somewhere else for a fraction of the cost.

I would much rather buy a second hand car which was a little older than I might like, than have to drive a car which has been in a serious accident.

The last time our car was repaired under insurance, our car slightly brushed against the rear bumper of another car at about 2km/h (carefully reversing out of a tight parking space). It left a scratch on our car that wasn't even deep enough to reveal metal - only the clear coat on top of the paint was scratched - the actual colour paint was undamaged. Seriously we have worse scratches elsewhere on the car from minor misshaps (e.g. we have a 3 year old... sometimes he plays near the car). Also the plastic headlight protector fell off and needed to be glued back on.

If we didn't need to do an insurance claim to fix another scratch just as minor on the other car, I wouldn't have even bothered fixing it. A bit of a polish with wax and it'd buff right out but we wouldn't even bother since the car has a dozen scratches. And who needs a headlight protector anyway? Previous owner of the car's decision to install that, I would've just taken off the one on the other headlight.

But we did need to involve insurance, and the smash repair company is incentivised to get as much money as they can out of every repair... So they charged $12,000 to fix it. The car was valued at $14,000 so it was almost a write off.

When someone posts on Discord, they will often get an answer within seconds. I don't recommend or use Discord, however I absolutely do recommend every project use a realtime chat service of some kind.

With GitHub or a forum it's likely to be overnight if you get a response at all. That fundamentally changes the type of content people are willing to post.

Projects should eventually have a website and an issue tracker and a chat service and an email address and a mastodon account. But you don't need to create all of them at once...

And a chat is always where I start. In fact I usually start discussing my idea in a chat room of some kind before I've even decided to start work on the project at all. 99% of the time the discussion ends with me deciding it's not a good idea.

It'd be pretty trivial to hide upvotes on list pages and show a reply count instead. That doesn't seem like it would be a difficult feature for almost anyone to contribute to Lemmy and it would certainly change the incentives.

Also, it'd make it impossible to upvote from the list page which would be a good thing in my opinion.

Do you often refer to people you oppose politically as ‘these people’

I don't oppose them politically, I oppose them because they are antisemitic. And it has nothing to do with race. There are plenty of people of my own race (german, by the way) who are even worse.

Being antisemitic is not a political position. Just so we are perfectly clear, anyone who commits antisemitic acts is a criminal in Australia. I fully support the right to protest and I'd be happy to sit down and have a conversation over a meal with most of the people at the protest and would gladly do what I can to help them. My own grandfather has described what it was like when he was a teenager and all his relatives and friends were killed in a single night of death and destruction when his home city was bombed, and my heart goes out to the people going through that now and friends and families of those people. But no, I won't tolerate antisemitism.

The title should be "the person who reported a vulnerability denies it's existence."

Honestly emacs is pretty decent for almost every text related task

With emphasis on "pretty decent". Personally my bar is higher than that...

This. Foam is awesome and it's what I use.

Also I really like how it's just a folder full of documents so if I need something that foam can't do (like a proper spreadsheet with formulas) I can just use another product for that and save the file in the same folder alongside my Foam notes.

The only thing is it's not a complete package. You do need to combine it with other VSCode extensions and a sync platform. Also VSCode doesn't run (well) on a phone.

Numbers are for Cairns, stats are offical QLD Police numbers form their Online Crime Map. Feel free to look it up yourself - but on September 17th for example, there were 94 offences (that was the highest number in the last 3 months - if you go back further it doesn't give daily totals).

24,822 offences int he last 12 months.

The most common crime is theft (26 of those on the 17th), the second most common is assault (13 on the 17th). And they are probably under-reported (I know I haven't reported all of the times I've been a victim of theft or assault... what're the police going to do about it? Nothing. They'll just interview me and that's all - I've only reported incidents where I needed it for an insurance claim).

Population of Cairns is hard to estimate with any accuracy, since covid has resulted in both a mass exodus and a mass influx of people at the same time. Rentals are damn near impossible to find here, so the "influx" has definitely been larger than the "exodus".

I've seen population estimates anywhere from 160k to 200k, and all from reliable sources (like the council). My hunch is it's probably towards the higher end of that.

Paywalled for me too (or rather, it requires "registration" which is basically the same thing - I'm not opposed to paying for a good article but I am opposed to giving them my personal details).

So, in my regional QLD city, the inner city (keep in mind, it's a small city) has between 50 and 100 serious crimes committed per day. As a local, my experience is if you call 000 there's a serious risk the police will all be responding to a more serious crime and yours won't get a response at all - they'll turn up hours later or the next day and ask you to fill out some paperwork. Things are literally out of control.

And it's crystal clear, if you look at the actual numbers (not the media headlines), that there has been a radical increase in youth crime over the last several years. Forget the 1900's... I'm talking about just five years ago juvenile crime rates were drastically lower than they are today.

I totally agree that the media's reporting on the issue sucks... but at the same time the issue is very very real.

Despite a very successful and peaceful rally, the media has reported on a tiny fringe (we estimate less than 20 people) of vile antisemitic attendees who showed up to the opera house for an event unrelated to the demonstration we organised.

Sorry, but the fact there were "vile antisemitic attendees" means it was not a "successful and peaceful" rally. It's a miracle nobody was injured and it could easily have been a catastrophe.

It's not enough to tell those people they are not welcome at the rally. It's not enough to "ask them to leave". They need to be blocked from taking part and by force if necessary... the organisers don't need to be directly involved in that work, but they do need to collaborate with police.

The reason outlined is pretty clear - the organisers of this rally are refusing to work with police to make sure the protest is run peacefully. The police clearly said they need more time to plan their side of the protest, and a police presence is absolutely required for an issue as emotionally charged as this one.

Why didn't they just delay the protest by a few more days? Refusing to do so is a massive red flag - police almost certainly won't be able to keep things under control. It's going to get ugly.

GitHub Copilot is extremely useful. It also runs pretty much on every key stroke and programmers make a lot of keystrokes throughout the day...

It's a useful enough tool that people would be willing to pay more, but at the same time it's not using an advanced AI model. It uses an older (and now deprecated) model that I'm pretty sure a high end computer (even some laptop) could provide similar output without any cloud service, using open source / freely available models.

My feeling is Copilot needs to either lower their price or improve the quality of the product if it's going to survive. And I suspect they're going to do the latter one.

The other factor not discussed here is the hardware we use today for this task isn't really designed for it. The GPUs most datacentres run AI models on are designed for graphics, not AI, and the algorithms mostly just need huge amounts of fast memory. I'm sure soon there will be dedicated hardware specifically designed for large language models with less compute cores and more memory. They'll likely also run at lower clock speeds and use less power/generate less heat/etc.

Just because companies are losing money right now doesn't mean they will be in five years time.

I took the alternate route and put myself in the middle of the city. Can’t fuck with me as much when there are fewer metres involved.

Which city though?

For example, in some European cities I've visited (and struggled with a wheelchair) the "ground" floor is commonly about waist high off the ground, with a basement beneath that floor, and properties might be too small (e.g. homes that are about the same width as a typical Australian bedroom with no front yard and no side yard either - shared walls with the houses next door). There's literally not enough space for a ramp up to the ground floor or down to the basement, and you can't add an elevator because the building was built 200 years ago and you're not allowed to ruin the history of the area by making structural changes.

It's, obviously, easy enough to find a home for yourself in those cities that is wheelchair friendly... but all your friends and family won't do that and 90% of the businesses won't be wheelchair compatible either. Shopping, in those cities, means the person in a wheelchair waits out on the footpath while someone else goes into the business to buy stuff for them.

Animal welfare and the well-being of the planet are two reasons to be vegan. Some people care about both... scratch that, every decent human being cares about both including people who are not vegan. You can, for example, be a person that loves cats and doesn't want the amazon to be destroyed without being vegan.

Anyway, some people are vegan for those two reasons. Some are vegan for only one of them. And some are vegan for a combination of other reasons.

Such as "I will get sick if there's butter in this cake" or "meat is too expensive" or "I follow a religion that says not to kill animals" (which is not the same thing as "animal welfare"). Or maybe someone is a manager at a restaurant, and they're sick of one in ten customers asking "can you make this dairy free?" so they added a vegan label to everything on the menu that is vegan. Or maybe they just want "leather" gloves that can handle frequent exposure to water (vegan leather performs better in wet conditions).

I'm probably missing some. There are lots of reasons someone might want to discuss "vegan" topics.

“AI” was not designed so consumers could see what it would look like to have Abraham Lincoln fighting a T-Rex without having to pay artists for their time.

Sure... AI can do that... but it can also be used for "here's photo of my head with trees in the background, remove the trees".

I could also do that as a human, but it'd take me hours to do a good job blending my hair into a transparent png without a green tinge. AI can do it in seconds.

Just because a tool can be used to do useless things, doesn't mean the tool is useless.