deathbird @ deathbird @mander.xyz

Posts

2

Comments

376

Joined

3 yr. ago

If you want to have a system which determines which people will or won't make terrible families, only permitting the former to reproduce, you want a system of social control. If children were delivered randomly by storks it would be something else. Aviation regulations? Avian regulations? Something like that I guess.

Not all social control is bad. Society and its institutions often limit what people can do. But of late we've mostly determined that restricting reproduction should be used sparingly, not defaultly, and I tend to agree.

I mean I guess not every aspect of eugenics was bad per se, but I'm not so sure about this level of social control.

Now that it interferes with me I'm against it. As soon as it's absence causes me any grief I'll be for it again.

Agree that BlueSky is trash, but it's more of a shitlib echo chamber. I agree though that the problem is largely intrinsic to the structure. Public microblogging and its consequences have been a disaster for humanity etc.

On the one hand, absolutely, human idiocy.

On the other hand, as a society it behooves us to think about how to stop idiots from hurting themselves and others. With IT, and in the context of corpo marketing hype, I am deeply concerned about politicians using AI or allowing AI to be used to do things poorly and thus hurt people simply because they have too much faith in the tool or its salesmen. Like, for example, rewriting the Social Security database.

Kinda sorta.

AI, or rather LLMs, can barf out a lot of passable text quickly. That can be useful as a starting point for something useful, if a human mind is willing and able to review and repair it. It's like having an idiot intern whom you can never really trust.

But the number of people who use LLMs in a way that reflects and understanding of their limitations is diminishingly small. Most people just don't assume that something that looks valid needs to be fully and critically reviewed. That's why we've had multiple cases of lawyers having ChatGPT write theis legal briefs based on hallucinated legal precedent.

If there's a place that you just can't stomach to shop because of how they treat their employees then I highly recommend you do not shop there. I was avoiding Walmart before avoiding Walmart was cool.

However...

Boycotts only really work when organized, towards an end goal. What was Walmart doing before, what is it doing now, what do we want it to do, and who's coordinating? That's how you change corporate policy through boycott.

If certain DEI policies are important enough to you to boycott when a company removes them then that's fine. I guess it's also worth asking what it is about any given program that makes it good enough for not, which companies should or shouldn't have it, why, and all that.

I'm not sure if the exact details, but based on what you're saying, that's a union busting technique. You strike for recognition of the union and to bring the company back to the table to negotiate the contract. If a company is raising wages in response to a strike that's generally an attempt by the company to show that they will "take care of you" without the union contract. Anything the company does to "help" in response to worker action other than adding it as a concession in the contract is an attempt to avoid having a concession in the contract.

Serious Sam 3 is an FPS distilled into its most essential parts, imo.

Minecraft. Still on 1.21.4. Need to build a storage building/system, but feeling a little blocked.

See this is that shit.

This is that shit.

Stop doing this.

There are plenty of things wrong with Elon Musk that are well documented in the public record by diverse and reputable sources that can easily be cited.

Do that, not this.

This is part of the reason why casual accusations of pedophilia have always disturbed me. Because it can lead even people who in most other circumstances would be considered pro-justice and pro-human rights into mini-Mengeles.

And I've seen people just throw out the accusation without even prompt or justification, just because they hate somebody (maybe for other good reasons) and want to see if it sticks. It's fucked up.

Then there's other cases like that one where that 18-year-old got jumped for being baited into going on a date with another 18-year-old, while under the impression that she was... at least 18. A couple of people posted about that already.

We'll know what the right answer was after it passes.

My Muller hand mixer was designed to break.

Feit light bulbs aren't worth it for any price less than free.

Come on in, the water is fine. The latest version of Ubuntu is like 24, so things have changed a lot, and for the better.

Get yourself a Kubuntu image, and give it a try.

Yeah I'm okay with the basic navigation options. The primary point is that man pages do look like they had written by someone who does not do technical writing. Whether that's someone coming from a law background, programming, or whatever.

It's not written for an end user who wants to know how to use the tools they have available. It will tell you what a command "does", sometimes, but it doesn't explain itself. It presumes a certain amount of pre-existing knowledge, or familiarity with the syntax of man writers.

For another example, the man for ls repeatedly lists options referencing "implied" entries without ever explaining what "implied" means in this context. It presupposes that the reader knows what that term means. I know what an implication is in an English class, and the antonym for "implied" is "explicit", but in a man page? No clue. Not like there's reference to or examples of "explicit" entries to contrast with "implied" entries. You just have to know what it means in context, or figure it out some other way.

I don't think you get what I mean.

I don't mean that man itself isn't functional, I mean the way most man pages are written isn't clear enough to communicate how to use the programs they refer to.

I'd include the man page for man in that, and I'd encourage anyone else to look at it from the eyes of someone who can follow written instructions and ask "How does this manual/help file compare to others I have read?".

So, for example, in the examples, it says:

man -a intro Display, in succession, all of the available intro manual pages contained within the manual. It is possible to quit between successive displays or skip any of them.

Those two lines are the only place within man's man page (at least the one you get from man man) that use the string "intro". What is an intro in this context? Guess you got to run it to find out.

What is -a for? About 200+ lines down there is a two sentence explanation.

The first sentence tells you how man normally behaves, saying: "By default, man will exit after displaying the most suitable manual page it finds." This sentence is unclear ("When does man exit after displaying the most suitable manual page it finds? When I run man ls I see the manual for ls on my screen until I press 'q' to 'quit' out of it.") and not immediately connected to the purpose of the flag/option.

The second sentence says: "Using this option forces man to display all the manual pages with names that match the search criteria." This is a lot clearer, and my only complaint about it can be that it's not the first sentence in the explanation.

Mostly true, but...

Replacing clip art, generic filler from Getty images, and other hand-crafted slop with machine-made slop for things like slideshows, YouTube thumbnails, and other applications where the image isn't meant to convey something actually existing from the primary content, that I think is fine.

Of course it should be based on free software (such as AGPL) and use only freely provided or public domain inputs.

Of course it shouldn't be used to misrepresent its outputs as produced by, authorized, or of people that it is not.

But what we have right now is an another sort of enclosure of the cultural commons, blended with plagerism-by-another-name. If there are already terms for this sort of misappropriation, I can't think of them right now.

See this is the (well, one major) problem with copyright.

Imaginary property for me ("AI" goons), not for thee (actual artists).

Tbf, most man files are not easy to understand. Between man, tldr, ArchWiki, and an occasional O'Reilly book I can usually get things done, but documentation on Linux still has a lot of room for improvement.