lvxferre

lvxferre, 5 months ago

Musk being an assumer (note how he’s vomiting certainty on future events) doesn’t surprise me a tiny bit.

lvxferre, 5 months ago

Translation:

• when you’re walking alone
• don’t you ever feel
• like being observed?
• [God saying] you bloody paranoid

lvxferre, 6 months ago

Oh “great”, more crap between Ctrl and Alt.

[Grumpy grandpa] In my times, the space row only had five keys! And we did more than those youngsters do with eight, now nine keys!

lvxferre, 6 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

One potential regression that I see is that the current generative models are abandoned, after being ruled as “infringing copyrights” by multiple countries. The tech itself won’t disappear but it’ll be considerably harder to train newer ones.

The most problematic part is however if one of them survives; likely Google. That would lead to a situation as in your second paragraph.

lvxferre, 6 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

It’s less complicated than it looks like. The text is just a poorly written mess, full of options (Fedora vs. Ubuntu, repo vs. no repo, stable vs. beta), and they’re explaining how to do this through the terminal alone because the interface that you have might be different from what they expect. And because copy-pasting commands is faster.

Can’t I just download a file and install it? I’m on Ubuntu.

Yes, you can! In fact, the instructions include this option; it’s under “Installing the app without the Mullvad repository”. It’s a bad idea though; then you don’t get automatic updates.

A better way to do this is to tell your system “I want software from this repository”, so each time that they make a new version of the program, yours get updated.

but I have no idea what I’m doing here.

I’ll copy-paste their commands to do so, and explain what each does.

<span style="color:#323232;">sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/mullvad-keyring.asc
</span><span style="color:#323232;">echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc arch=$( dpkg --print-architecture )] https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/stable $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mullvad.list
</span><span style="color:#323232;">sudo apt update
</span><span style="color:#323232;">sudo apt install mullvad-vpn
</span>

The first command boils down to “download this keyring from the internet”. The keyring is a necessary file to know if you’re actually getting your software from Mullvad instead of PoopySoxHaxxor69. If you wanted, you could do it manually, and then move to the /usr/share/keyrings directory, but… it’s more work, come on.

The second command tells your system that you want software from repository.mullvad.net. I don’t use Ubuntu but there’s probably some GUI to do it for you.

The third command boils down to “hey, Ubuntu, update the list of packages for me”.

The fourth one installs the software.

lvxferre, 6 months ago

In response to such critiques [concerning the decline of quality], Reddit spokesperson Rathschmidt said he did not “know of an industry benchmark for scoring content quality”.

My sides went into orbit. It’s a Reddit spokesperson acting like the worst of the Reddit userbase: being passive aggressive and using appeal to ignorance, at the same time.

lvxferre, 6 months ago

I think that the RHEL example is out-of-place, since IBM (“Red Hat”) is clearly exploiting a loophole of the GNU Public License. Similar loopholes have been later addressed by e.g. the AGPL and the GPLv3*, so I expect this one to be addressed too.

So perhaps, if the GPL is “not enough”, the solution might be more GPL.

*note that the license used by the kernel is GPLv2. Cue to Android (for all intents and purposes non-free software) using the kernel, but not the rest.

lvxferre, 6 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

They were women. Not minor female children.

At least accordingly to this link, the trend for dial-painters was to be teenagers. Some started as early as their fourteens. It makes sense considering the 1920s, when adult women were expected to stay at home and take care of children, not to be part of the workforce. So odds are that “radium girls” is accurate, because most of them were not adult women.

Wikipedia, and the sources that Wikipedia is relying on, are also rather consistently calling them “Radium girls”. This is clearly a fixed expression, that shouldn’t be decomposed like you’re doing.

And even if we disregard both things above (we should not), your “small correction” boils down to “I’ll vomit an «ackshyually» to boss the other user around on language usage, disregarding what they say to whine about how they say it”. This is simply not contributive.

lvxferre, 6 months ago

Who said that the word doesn’t haue “u”?

<span style="color:#323232;">Was that my Father that went hence so fast?
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Ben. It was: what sadnes lengthens Romeo's houres?
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Ro. Not hauing that, which hauing, makes them short
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Ben. In loue.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Romeo. Out.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Ben. Of loue.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Rom. Out of her fauour where I am in loue.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Ben. Alas that loue so gentle in his view,
</span>

Romeo and Juliet, foglio I, around verse 170

…good enough for Shakespeare, good enough for me. No need for a fifth letter!

---

I’m half-joking with the above, but the word did use to be spelled with “U” instead of “V”. Past then both were taken as the same letter. [/trivia]

lvxferre, 6 months ago

[some are] convinced that rock music is evil and will lead people to engage in witchcraft and draw pentagrams all over their home.

I think that it’s pretty safe to say that at least some people around you are stone-cold fundamentalists. This sort of discourse doesn’t come from non-fundamentalists.

That said as stupid as “rock is [from the d]evil” claim is, I don’t think that it’s rooted in racism. Instead I think that it’s because some values often followed by rock bands, singers and fans clash directly with some values of Christianity.

Note that some sort of percussion pops up in almost every musical style, across the eras.

Slaves. They created the guitar

This was already addressed, but… come on, acoustic guitars are from Middle Ages Iberia, and they backtrack all the way into the lutes of the Ancient Egypt and Anatolia. (Probably. It’s so old that the origins are hard to determine.)

lvxferre, 6 months ago

Android File Transfer for Linux. Here’s the release note from the OP.

lvxferre, 6 months ago

That’s practically what happened with Siegfrieda (my cat) and me.

Long story short: a stray hid herself in my garage. She was beaten, bleeding and pregnant, so I rushed her to the vet. “I don’t want another pet, we’re going to fix her up and find her a new home.” Seven years later, she’s still here.

lvxferre, 6 months ago

A lot of times you don’t need to buy containers, you can reuse the ones where your food came from.

For example inside my freezer there are three ice cream pots, but none of them has actual ice cream - it’s tomato paste, chickpeas, cat food. In the past I’ve also reused margarine and requeijão pots to store leftover food, as makeshift planters, etc. The requeijão pots even worked as drinking glasses in my uni times.

lvxferre, 7 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

I love how it pokes fun at an ackshyually, and then proposes a monophyletic clade for arseholes.

…at the end of the day herpetology studies tetrapods minus the ones that ornithologists and mammalogists called dibs on. You’ll see the same in medicine - vets treating all animals, except the species that physicians said “NOPE, I GOT THIS ONE”.

lvxferre, 7 months ago

Based on a game* I think that the root issue is that there are multiple bottlenecks, unavoidable for the drivers, like turning or entering/leaving lanes, forcing them to slow down to avoid crashing. Not a biggie if there are only a few cars, as they’ll be distant enough from each other to allow one to slow down a bit without the following needing to do the same; but once the road is close to the carrying capacity, that has a chain effect:

• A slows down because it’ll turn
• B is too close to A, so it slows down to avoid crashing with A
• C is too close to B, so it slows down to avoid crashing with B
• […]

There are solutions for that, such as building some structure to handle those bottlenecks, but they’re often spacious and space is precious in a city. Or alternatively you reduce the amount of cars by discouraging people from using them willy-nilly, with a good mass transport system and making cities not so shitty for pedestrians.

*The game in question is OpenTTD. This is easy to test with trains: create some big transport route with multiple trains per rail, then keep adding trains to that route, while watching the time that they take to go from the start to the end. The time will stay roughly constant up to a certain point (the carrying capacity), then each train makes all the others move slower.

lvxferre, 7 months ago

1. The person says “I don’t know” fairly often. It shows that the person is not quick to draw conclusions, based on little to no information; this is gold, it means avoiding a lot of personal drama where they could blame you for things that they assume that you did.

2. They’re generally on the same page about common acquaintances as you.

lvxferre, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Luigi	Yoshi
Scared of ghosts	Eats ghosts for breakfast
Gives Mario trouble	Gives Mario a ride
Started out as "Mario for those who can’t play as Mario"	Designed from the scratch as a character
Uses synthetic green dyes in his clothes to LARP as an environmentalist	Has his own self-sustainable island, is naturally green
Weirdo in a costume	A MOTHERFUCKING DINOSAUR

Mama should disinherit Luigi and adopt Yoshi in his place.

lvxferre, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

5. We don’t talk about Reddit here. Except when we do.
6. [De]federation is srs bizniz.
7. Seize the means of production computation.
8. People from that instance over there are bad.

lvxferre, 7 months ago

I won’t mention the rest of the text because I’m not interested enough on the discussion to do so. I’ll focus on a single thing.

On the science side it’s a human from the moment of conception.

What should be considered a human being or not is prescriptive in nature, because it involves ethics. Science - i.e. the scientific method - does not give a shit to prescriptive matters; science is descriptive, it’s worried about what happens/doesn’t happen. For science it doesn’t really matter if you call it a human, a tissue, a wug or a colourless green thing sleeping furiously, as long as you’re unambiguously and accurately describing the phenomenon being studied.

As such, no, science itself doesn’t really tell you “when it becomes a human being”.

[From another comment, after being asked for source] pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33620844/

The only thing that it “proves” is that the author (not “science”) is referring to foetuses (from nine weeks after conception [not zero] to 16 weeks) as “children”. And it certainly does not back up your claim that [ipsis litteris] “On the science side it’s a human from the moment of conception.”

And no, “The growth and development are positively influenced by factors, like parental health and genetic composition, even before conception.” does not prove it either, given that the author is solely mentioning conception as a time of reference.

---

Sorry to be blunt but the way that you referred to science sounds a lot like “I’m ignorant on science but I want to leech off its prestige for the sake of my argument”. If you don’t want to do this, here’s a better approach:

• Show how certain actions generate certain outcomes. Science will help you with this.
• Explicit the moral and ethical premises that you are using, to judge said outcomes as good/bad. Science will not help you with this.

It’s also a nice way to avoid a fallacy/stupidity called appeal to nature (TL;DR: “[event/thing] is natural, so it’s good lol lmao”), that often plagues discussions about moral matters like abortion.

lvxferre, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Fun fact: strawberry was admitted to the psychiatric yard once pepper and cucumber joined the berry club.

lvxferre, 7 months ago

Just to add random info/trivia: it’s interesting to note that this mess between “botanical fruit” and “culinary fruit” is largely language-dependent. In Portuguese for example it doesn’t happen - because botanical fruit is “fruto” (with “o”) and culinary fruit is “fruta” (with “a”).

So for example, if you tell someone that cucumber is a “fruto”, that is not contentious; you’re just using a somewhat posh word if you aren’t in a botanical context. And if you tell the person that tomato is a “fruta”, you’re just being silly.

Berry has no direct equivalent. If you must specify that the fruit comes from a single ovary, you call it “fruto simples” (lit. simple botanical-fruit), as opposed to “fruto múltiplo” (multiple fruit - e.g. pineapple). Popularly people will call stuff like strawberries and mulberries by multiple names, like “frutinhas” (little fruits) and the likes.

lvxferre, 9 months ago

My top 3, in order: cooking onions and garlic together, then baking bread, then making curry.

lvxferre, 11 months ago

Note that a fallacy is a reasoning flaw; sometimes the goal might be to trick you, indeed. But sometimes it’s just a brainfart… or you might be dealing with something worse, like sheer irrationality. That said:

• look for the conclusion. What is the point that the writer is delivering? (Note: you might find multiple conclusions. That’s OK.)
• look at what’s being used to support that conclusion. What is the core argument?
• look for the arguments used to feed premises into the core argument. Which are they?

Then try to formalise the arguments that you found into “premise 1, premise 2, conclusion” in your head or in a text editor. Are the premises solid? Do you actually agree with them? And do they actually lead into the conclusion? If something smells fishy, you probably got a fallacy.

Get used to at least a few “big” types of fallacies. There are lists across the internet, do read a few of them; you don’t need to memorise names, just to understand what is wrong with that fallacious reasoning. This pic has a few of them, I think that it’s good reference material, specially at the start:

https://www.pesec.no/content/images/size/w1460/2020/03/School-Of-Thought---Fallacies-Poster.png

In special I’ve noticed that a few types of fallacy are really common on the internet:

• genetic fallacy - claiming that an argument is true or false because of its origin. Includes ad hominem, appeal to nature, appeal to authority, ad populum, etc.
• red herring - bringing irrelevant shit up as if it supported the conclusion, when it doesn’t matter. In special, I see appeal to emotion (claiming that something is false/true because it makes you feel really bad/good) all the time.
• oversimplification - disregarding key details that either stain the premises or show that they don’t necessarily lead to conclusion. False dichotomy (“if X is true, Y is false” in situations where both can be true or false) is a specially common type of oversimplification.
• strawman - distortion of an opposing argument into a way that is easier to beat. Again, notice that “intention” doesn’t matter; only that the opposing argument isn’t being addressed.
• moving goalposts - when you counter an argument, the person plops another in its place, without acknowledging that it’s a new argument. Often relies heavily on ad hoc (making stuff up on the spot to shield an argument)
• four terms - exploiting multiple meanings associated with the same word to create an argument like “A is B¹, B² is C, thus A is C”.

There are also some “markers” that smell fallacy for me from a distance. You should not trust them (as they might be present where there’s no fallacy, or they might be absent even when the associated fallacy pops up); however, if you find those you should look for the associated fallacy:

• “As a” at the start of a text - genetic fallacy, specially appeal to authority
• "Trust me" - red herring, specially appeal to emotion (once you contradict the argument there’s a good chance that the other will create drama because you didn’t blindly trust them, so the whole thing boils down to “accept this as true otherwise you’ll hear my meltdown”).
• “I don’t understand” followed by a counter-argument - strawman. Specially common in Reddit.
• “Actually” - red herring through trivia that is completely irrelevant in the context.

lvxferre, 11 months ago

Normalise Roman style tunics. The whole thing is just a rectangle with a slit (for the neck) and sewing (for the sides), with two optional sleeves, and fastened to the waist with a belt, it doesn’t get simpler than that.

Also undyed clothes becoming a thing. What’s wrong with raw colours?

lvxferre, 11 months ago

Evolution as a concept; not just biological. The fact that you can explain the rise of complex systems with just three things - inheritance, mutation, selection. It’s so simple, yet so powerful.

Perhaps not surprisingly it’s directly tied to what OP is talking about cellular automata.