Most animals don’t use verbal communication. As an analogy, most humans don’t use sign language. Imagine if someone wanted to create a human translator that recorded what humans do with their hands and translate them into meaning. There would be a lot of noise there because most humans don’t talk with their hands, so most of it would be ascribing meaning that isn’t there. Sometimes the person is just itching their back, or just doing the dishes, etc, not trying to say something. Similarly, most other animals vocalise for other reasons, not because they want to make a specific sound to communicate something.

It’s their attack dog in the SWANA region. As Biden said, if Israel did not exist the US would have to create an Israel.

I don’t think I’m familiar with the term. If it just means inherited wealth, though, I’m afraid that’s a thing everywhere there’s private property.

You know that there are countries where the majority of people are Black (ie all of Africa…), or majority of people are Asian (ie all of Asia…), or majority of people are Hispanic (ie LatAm… not to mention that “Hispanic” is not a racial category in LatAm—there are white settlers, indigenous people, Black people, etc in LatAm too), right? You know that non-white countries also colonise and plunder, and may have colonial wealth from that (eg Japan)? You know that inequality and class exist in these countries and some families will be wealthy for the same reason that families are wealthy in majority-white countries? And you know that white supremacy is not the only racist system in the world—in a place where Hindu nationalism is the order of the day, for example, being a brown Hindu is not going to cause you disadvantages in society.

Maybe eating foods that have high water content like cucumbers, watermelons, etc? Or if you find a non-water beverage more enjoyable than water, drink that—all beverages contain water.

Plenty of people use git hosting to host non-code, like documentation, books written in markdown/LaTeX, etc. I personally use git to maintain a few personal wikis.

Different git forges will have different rules about what content they allow. GitHub definitely allows non-code. I’ve seen Codeberg repos be used for non-code too. Codeberg’s only requirement is that you only host free (as in freedom) content, so I suppose for non-code that means using an appropriate CC licence for example. I can’t imagine any of the popular git hosting sites taking issue with someone hosting their book, unless you’re hosting, like, the whole of Wikipedia or something.

Statistically it’s rare for an adult to be 120cm tall, therefore there exist no adults who are 120cm tall. Statistically it’s rare for someone to be in government, therefore there are no politicians in the world. Statistically it’s rare to be an astronaut, therefore astronauts don’t exist.

And all the examples I mentioned are far more rare than simply self-taught people working in the field they taught themselves. Majority of the friends I have in programming jobs are self-taught with no formal education beyond high school (if that). It’s of course highly dependent on field, and the market is saturated enough with CS graduates now that getting a programming job without a degree is going to be pretty hard, but my point is that it depends on the labour market. Some labour markets don’t care about a piece of paper declaring you went to school. There’s other ways to fill your CV and prove you have a skill.

Who said this person was on the “left”? In any case, who cares. I don’t care about winning people over to the “left”. I’m a communist, and history has shown that proletarian revolutions aren’t primarily composed of politically active “leftists”, socialists, etc. Revolutions are made by working class people acting out of self-interest, whether or not they’ve attained a socialist/communist consciousness (and often times, they haven’t).

Donations.

I don’t find subscriptions too offensive, however any kind of restriction of the flow of information (e.g. by paywalling it) implies its enforcement. What are you going to do about people bypassing the paywall? Even if you only responded by patching whatever allowed them to bypass the paywall, you’re either going to have to let up eventually, or get into a protracted cat-and-mouse game with paywall bypassers. And you don’t want to end up on the side of the people who want to gatekeep information.

So that leaves us with the possibility of having a subscription that’s not stringently enforced—in which case it is just a recurring donation anyway.

Of course, this discussion is limited to the scope of “what would a news outlet do without changing anything about society”—but the decent news outlets do also try to change things about society. Within capitalism, things like UBI would make it much easier for free journalism to exist. And of course this problem goes away entirely with capitalism.

I don’t agree. LLMs are by design probabilistic. Chainsaws aren’t designed to be probabilistic, and any functionality that is probabilistic (aside from philosophical questions about what it is possible to be certain about, YKWIM) is aimed to be minimised. You’re supposed to be able to give the same model the same prompt twice and get two different answers. You’re not meant to be able to use a chainsaw the same way on the same object and have it cut significantly differently. You’re inherently leaving much more to chance by using LLMs to generate code, and creating more work for yourself as you have to review LLM code, which is generally lower quality than human-written code.

Not comparable at all. Power tools work deterministically. A powered chainsaw is not going to have a 0.1% chance of chopping a completely different tree on the other side of the forest. Of course accidents happen; your hand can slip. But a proper comparison would be if you got a computer to look at a large number of powered chainsaws and then generate its own in CAD based on what it’s seen, and then you use that generated power tool. Which, for something as potentially dangerous as a powered chainsaw, you most likely wouldn’t want to do, and would want to have careful human oversight over every part of design.

If you haven’t already, I recommend Watchtower (nickfedor fork—the original is unmaintained) which automatically pulls updates to Docker containers and restarts them. Make sure to track latest, although for security updates, these should be backported to any supported versions so it’s fine to track an older supported version too.

Notesnook notebook with whatever info I need to be able to administrate the system. e.g. what different ports are used for and why the firewall policies are what they are, sometimes write-ups after a troubleshooting session, etc.

The Notesnook instance is self-hosted too, but if the server goes down, the notebook will still be available locally.

Over the weekend.

I don’t see small talk or whatever as a sign of a lack of interest in someone. Sometimes there’s nothing that deep going on to talk about.

Thunderbird is a K-9 reskin. They’re the same app. People pick based on what icon and app name they want I guess.

Where did I say or imply that Mexico and Spain were the only countries?

Spain has a distinct accent if you are a Spanish speaker. If you don’t speak Spanish, it’s likely you wouldn’t know the difference between different Spanish language accents.

You’re in the US. Mexico is next door and speaks Spanish. A much higher proportion of Spanish speakers in the US are from Mexico than from Spain, which is across the ocean. If you were in France and identified as a Spanish speaker, many more people would think you were from Spain.

There’s a lot of hardware enshittification, eg removing a lot of commonly used ports from laptops. Also I don’t like the form factor of all these Macbook rip-offs.

I haven’t noticed similar issues with desktop computing, but for laptops, I do prefer older laptops.

Also, so many older devices go to e-waste when they’re perfectly usable. I like to salvage devices when other people don’t want them anymore.

Nothing, just using the latest FreeTube. Are you up to date? They’ve pushed out a few releases recently to get around new YouTube trickery. Your VPN server might also be blocked; I’ve had luck with Mullvad’s Swedish servers lately.

No, afaik every alternative frontend that still works with age-restricted videos works by letting you sign in with a Google account (which defeats the point). I’ve tried a few.

I just make an account for just the age-restricted videos. FreeTube still works for me for non-age restricted videos (if it doesn’t for you, try changing VPN countries a few times—also you need to restart FreeTube every time you change VPN servers, otherwise it doesn’t work from the new server, idk why).