Jigsaw Trolley Problem
chaos @ chaos @beehaw.org Posts 0Comments 89Joined 2 yr. ago
chaos @ chaos @beehaw.org
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I'm not saying they were right, I would've voted to impeach too, I'm saying it will have zero effect on the world so there isn't much sense in getting upset about it.
Honestly, I don't care. It's not like anything was ever going to happen on this front anyway. I'm sure they figured this was a free opportunity to show voters that they don't always toe the party line.
More specifically, they're borrowing the more mathematical meaning of variables, where if you say x equals 5, you can't later say x is 6, and where a statement like "x = x + 1" is nonsense. Using "let" means you're setting the value once and that's what it's going to remain as long as it exists, while "var" variables can be changed later. Functional languages, which are usually made by very math-y people, will often protest the way programmers use operators by saying that = is strictly for equality and variable assignment is := instead of == and = in most C-style languages.
Some states do it this way. Other states do it all electronically (fewer now than in the past, thankfully). Other states do it all on paper and do the counting with offline counting machines, then spot check some precincts at random. Some do it by mail entirely on paper.
And that's the big reason why this line of inquiry is nonsense. The entire country showed a huge shift to the right, not just the swing states or the states that are more vulnerable. That's 51 entirely separate election systems that you'd have to manipulate, make sure public information about the election matches exactly, and also not go so far that any independent exit polls show anything fishy either. The scale of conspiracy to do it in even one state, make no mistakes, and have no one leak is hard to believe. Doing it across the entire country? You're going to need a lot more than "I feel like the numbers are fishy" to be convincing. The conservatives were wrong when they said 2020 was rigged, and anyone saying 2024 was rigged is equally wrong.
Do you think there's any reason to believe that these tools are going to continue their breakneck progress? It seems like we've reached a point where throwing more GPUs and text at these things is not yielding more results, and they still don't have the problem solving skills to work out tasks outside of their training set. It's closer to a StackOverflow that magically has the answers to most questions you ask than a replacement for proper software engineering. I know you never know if a breakthrough is around the corner, but it feels like we've hit a plateau for the foreseeable future.
It's very good for navigating and editing text quickly, and fantastic for situations like "I need to do the same thing 100 times" with things like macros. Coders are frequently opening a big, complex file, jumping around it a lot, changing big and small parts of it, and doing repetitive tasks. For something more like writing out thoughts for an email, editing them slightly, then being done with that text forever, there aren't as many advantages, you're spending most of your time in "insert" mode which is effectively "normal text editor that people are used to" mode. That said, it's one of those things where when you do get used to it and start to enjoy it instead of being frustrated by how different it is, you start wanting it wherever you have to type anything.
Love a language that doesn't care if you're using inputs to get outputs or using outputs to get inputs
They also took away the ability to specify your answer separately from the answer you were looking for from others, so now it's just "did you say the same thing." Which doesn't make any sense for some questions, like "do you prefer a partner that is a) taller than you, b) shorter than you, c) doesn't matter", if you both picked A or B, you aren't a match for this question!
I think you're thinking of SerenityOS (although it isn't actually a Linux):
Beehaw's been holding back because they want to switch to Sublinks, and going past 0.18.4 would've made migration harder. But Sublinks has been slow to be ready and it's getting untenable to wait much longer, so they'll be upgrading to the latest Lemmy sometime. I'll be happy to finally switch to the actual app version of Voyager when they do, for now I've been self-hosting the last version of the web app that worked.
It's the same rule, "fair use". Copyright isn't absolute, it needs to strike a balance between "give creators control of their thing" but also "people deserve to participate in our collective culture."
Making a one-off drawing of a character and not trying to make money off of it likely checks the fair use boxes (it's an explicitly fuzzy system, so a trial would be needed to say for sure if it's fair use or not). Whether the training set for a generative AI system is fair use or not is still an open question, but many feel that it can't be, as it's operating on a massive scale (basically every image ever created by humanity) and has the potential to eliminate the entire industry of humans selling the art they create, which copyright is supposed to protect. Ghibli isn't going to be harmed by someone drawing a picture of their characters for a meme. It could be harmed by another company making money off of mass production of knockoffs of their style which were created with thousands of unauthorized copies of their direct artwork.
Yeah, they're probably talking about nulls. In Java, object references (simplified pointers, really) can be null, pointing nowhere and throwing an exception if you try to access them, which is fine when you don't have a value for that reference (for example, you asked for a thing that doesn't exist, or you haven't made the thing yet), but it means that every time you interact with an object, if it turns out to have been null, a null pointer exception is getting thrown and likely crashing your program. You can check first if you think a value might be null, but if you miss one, it explodes.
Kotlin has nulls too, but the type system helps track where they could be. If a variable can be null, it'll have a type like String?, and if not, the type is String. With that distinction, a function can explicitly say "I need a non-null value here" and if your value could be null, the type system will make you check first before you can use it.
Kotlin also has some nice quality of life improvements over Java; it's less verbose (not a hard task), doesn't force everything to belong to a class, supports data classes which are automatically immutable and behave more like primitive values than objects, and other improvements.
They could organize protests, they could help workers unionize, they could put their necks out and disrupt things, they could do anything besides stand by and say "oh no, this is so bad." They have a gigantic megaphone and the ears of almost half the country, their power isn't limited to the votes they have or don't have. I want them to be making plans that are bold, plans where they feel a need to account for "how do we make sure this doesn't turn into an outright riot though," the things you'd do if you actually believed the rhetoric about Trump being a threat to democracy.
Fellow former popes, you mean, by reading this message you hereby excommunicate yourself.
I'm bitterly clinging to my iPhone 13 mini, because I suspect it's the last phone I'll ever actively enjoy. I went along with bigger phones when that became the trend and decided I didn't like them, and the mini line was such a relief to go back to. Once it's no longer tenable, I'll probably just buy a series of "the least bad used phone I can find" because I know I'll be mildly frustrated every time I use it.
I'm still using an iPhone mini and I haven't experienced any bad layouts, broken websites, or any difficulty like that. It has the same resolution of the biggest iPhone I've ever had (iPhone X) so things are smaller, which would make it a poor fit for someone with poor vision, but for me it's an absolutely perfect phone. It's frustrating to know that the perfect phone for me could easily exist, and yet Apple will refuse to make it for me. I'll be stuck with phones I don't like for the rest of my life, it seems.
It's the last one, the "wait a day" option and the "pay $20" options aren't equivalent. If it's still a day away from viability, it isn't viable yet, but if it's $20 away, it is. You may be of the opinion that waiting a day isn't a big deal, or is only $20 worth of hardship, but that's not your choice to make for others.
You'd think ending a doomed pregnancy would be a simple matter even for pro-lifers, yes. They often don't consider the issue, or assume that it'll always be clear-cut and obvious in every circumstance, or worry that any exception will be used as a loophole.
I can't believe this word doesn't seem to have made it into any part of this thread, but I think you're looking for viability: the point where a fetus can live outside of the womb. This isn't a hard line, of course, and technology can and has changed where that line can be drawn. Before that point, the fetus is entirely dependent on one specific person's body, and after that point, there are other options for caring for it. That is typically where pro-choice folks will draw the line for abortion as well; before that point, an abortion ban is forced pregnancy and unacceptable, after that point there can be some negotiation and debate (though that late into a pregnancy, if an abortion is being discussed it's almost certainly a health crisis, not a change of heart, so imposing restrictions just means more complications for an already difficult and dangerous situation).
I see this as an accessibility problem, computers have incredible power but taking advantage of it requires a very specific way of thinking and the drive to push through adversity (the computer constantly and correctly telling you "you're doing it wrong") that a lot of people can't or don't want to do. I don't think they're wrong or lazy to feel that way, and it's a barrier to entry just like a set of stairs is to a wheelchair user.
The question is what to do about it, and there's so much we as an industry should be doing before we even start to think about getting "normies" writing code or automating their phones. Using a computer sucks ass in so many ways for regular people, you buy something cheap and it's slow as hell, it's crapped up with adware and spyware out of the box, scammers are everywhere ready to cheat you out of your money... anyone here is likely immune to all that or knows how to navigate it but most people are just muddling by.
If we got past all that, I think it'd be a question of meeting users where they are. I have a car but I couldn't replace the brakes, nor do I want to learn or try to learn, but that's okay. My car is as accessible as I want it to be, and the parts that aren't accessible, I go another route (bring it to a mechanic who can do the things I can't). We can do this with computers too, make things easy for regular people but don't try to make them all master programmers or tell them they aren't "really" using it unless they're coding. Bring the barrier down as low is it can go but don't expect everyone to be trying to jump over it all the time, because they likely care about other things more.
For the rest, well, there isn't even actually a question, I suspect you'd open a door and pick a box and hope that you've got a gold ball to pick, and it's not clear that he's following Monty Hall rules and always opening a bad door, but I think knowing which ball got thrown would make the rest of the odds fall into place.