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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)WE
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  • Survivor by Chuck "Fight Club" Palahniuk.

    After Fight Club I went on a spree of reading this guys work. Survivor was the last of his written before the Fight Club movie made it big. It was also released a couple of years before 9/11 which killed its chance of being made into a movie.

    I think it highlights how being passive in the world isn't enough to avoid doing bad things. You have to make your own choices to avoid a bad result. Interesting story structure and has some dark comedic moments too.

  • I agree. I've introduced it to a number of people and I find it's a bit of a litmus test for me. If they come back with "that's just stupid" I know they're missing a sense of play that comes with messing with the rules of life.

    We lost DA far too early, but he left us a wonderful gift.

  • You need to meet it's bigger brother, the swan.

    Where I live we get white swans, Canadian geese, and Egyptian geese. Egyptian are smaller and absolutely fine. Canadian will get angry and tell you to fuck off Swans are 50% bigger and will run you out of the county.

  • At university I had an introductory C course where one assignment was to write a program that searched a 4x4 array of booleans for groups of cells set to true. Groups had to be rectangles, powers of 2 in width and height, and could wrap (i.e. they could go off the right edge and back on the left edge). We had to submit our programs by e-mail and printed form one week later. The prof. marked the paper versions and the TA ran and tested the digital. One slight problem, if you used the university owned printers, they charged for print outs. A few pence per page to cover costs and stop people abusing the rather nice high quality printers the computer faculty had.

    I'd always enjoyed programming and whilst C was new to me, using another language wasn't a big problem. As I worked on it I realised the problem wasn't as straightforward as I first thought, but I spent a few hours on it that evening and had a solution I was happy with.

    Penny was a student on the course whose approach to academia was memorization. She didn't consume, process, and apply concepts. She just remembered them. Her favourite subject was maths. While the rest of us were struggling to derive some formula, she'd have just committed the process to memory.

    Penny was complaining a lot on this programming assignment. She didn't understand why the assignment was so hard for an introductory class. I didn't judge. I know some people find programming hard, but I didn't feel I could help her much without jeopardising my own mark. There's only so much uniqueness in a small program and if she just copied my solution we'd both get penalised for plagiarism. I did mention to her the cases I'd found tricky to get right was when two groups overlapped. If one group completely covered a smaller one you'd only report the bigger one, but if not you'd report both groups.

    I heard, through her boyfriend, that that week had involved many long evenings working on this assignment, but she turned up at the next class solution in hand. Obviously stressed, she carried a pile of paper of several hundred pages. She had written a program that consisted of an if-statement for every possible group size and location. About a hundred different possible groups. Each condition written with constant value indices into the array. To cope with the overlapping groups problem, checks for smaller groups also checked that no larger group also covered this area. No loops. No search algorithm. Just a linear program of if-statements.

    Apparently debugging this has been a nightmare. Cut and paste errors everywhere, but when I'd told her about overlapping groups aspect it had blown her mind. There always seemed to be a combination she hadn't accounted for. Multiple times she thought she was done, only to find a corner case she'd missed. And just to kick her when she was down, she'd paid for multiple printouts, each one costing about £10 only to find a problem afterwards.

    This consistent A grade student who sailed through everything by relying on her memory had been broken by being asked to create an algorithm rather than remember one. She got credit for submitting a solution that compiled and solved some cases, but I doubt the professor got past the first page of that huge printout.

    Penny had worked really hard for that D.

  • So I think, but I'm not sure, this is for group chats. Group chats are only encrypted to/from the server because the server broadcasts the message to each recipient. As the messages are unencrypted on the server, they can feed them to LLMs.

    This is different to Signal. On Signal it's your phone encrypting each copy of the message before sending to each recipient individually.

  • Ok... ...a blanket ban on a set of protestors.

    What's the legal criteria to say somebody is a member of an organisation like this? Do they have to have a membership card to be banned from protests? It's poorly defined and easily becomes anybody who turns up at a pro-palestinian protest. At that point you have banned protests on the subject.

    Hold individuals accountable for their actions. Don't police people's views or their desire to express them.

  • I don't know.

    The response against Israel was more successful, but from what I can see the US base attack seemed less "we can hit you when we choose to" and more "this is all we can muster right now".

    Didn't scream "restrained strength" to me.

  • He's a member of the cabinet and so should know the government position. He can also state if UK forces acted in any part of the operation (e.g. refilling).

    The decision may not be his but he should be enacting the effect of the decision. It's absolutely reasonable to ask him.