I agree, this is important to emphasise. I don’t want to ever slip into the mindset of dehumanising Trump in the same way that him and his allies dehumanise people like me, because I think that drive to so thoroughly otherize political opponents is a key driver of fascistic thinking. Having empathy for people like Trump (and those that follow him) doesn’t excuse their actions or beliefs, but I think it’s important

Now I’m thinking about an ex-programmer supervillain who does this as her big foray into supervillainy

Thanks for this comment, I hadn’t thought about it this way before. I had realised about how being gay is framed as a thing you do rather than a thing you are, because I have a friend who is an ex-benedictine monk, and they explained about how their vow of chastity meant they were basically “one of the good ones”. A large part of why they left was because their rhetoric was “everyone has sinful desires in them and turning away from those is an important challenge”, but the unspoken part was that his gayness made his desires extra bad, like there was just some innately bad thing in him.

And of course they would apply this same logic to gender. As you say, it makes more sense when you try to see it from their angle. I think that’s important to do if we hope to ever refute them

You’ve got to be careful with rolling your eyes, because the parallelism of the two eyes means that the eye roll can be twice as powerful ^1

(1) If measured against the silly baseline of a single eyeroll

I read this article a few months ago that I found quite interesting: Original link Unpaywalled link

The manufacturer in this blames the DEA, and whilst I don’t trust a pharmaceutical company to do anything other than ruthlessly maximise profits, in this case I’m inclined to believe this depiction of the DEA as the overly persnickety bad guy (because I have even less reason to trust the DEA)

I think the “Moved from Jekyll to Hugo” dot has an implicit catchment area around it, which includes people who don’t technically fit that description, but they’re close. I’ve used neither Jekyll nor Hugo, but the fact I understood that archetype meant I felt pulled in by the gravity of that point.

Yeah, I’m super salty about the hype because if I had to pick one side or the other, I’d be on team “AI is worthless”, but that’s just because I’d rather try convincing a bunch of skeptics that when used wisely, AI/ML can be super useful, than to try talk some sense into the AI fanatics. It’s a shame though, because I feel like the longer the bubble takes to pop, the more harm actual AI research will receive

Eh, it depends on what we count as “AI”. I’m in a field where machine learning has been a thing for years, and there’s been a huge amount of progress in the last couple of years[1]. However, it’s exhausting that so much is being rebranded as “AI”, because the people holding the purse strings aren’t necessarily the same scientists who are sick of the hype.

[1] I didn’t get into the more computational side of things until 2021 or so, but if I had to point to a catalyst for this progress, I’d say that the transformer mechanism outlined in the 2017 paper “Attention is all you need”, by Google scientists.

Your comment reminded me of this https://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/

I think I mostly just wanted to be in the "so rich I never have to think about money again. Growing up super poor left its marks on me and now even though I am relatively secure and comfortable, I still have a background anxiety about whether I’ll have enough.

There’s an instinct within me that screams that I shouldn’t share resources with other people unless I’m sure I have more than enough for myself. If I indulged that instinct, that would mean that in a situation where there’s enough for everyone, I’d feel most comfortable with 3 or more shares, because then even if I gave away one of my shares to someone else, I’d still have what I need, plus some buffer. There’s a reason I work very hard to not indulge that instinct though, because I don’t want to hoard at the expense of other people like me.

Like I say, it’s just part of a wish of not having to think about money at all. I had some very rich friends in uni, and sometimes they’d shop in places where the clothes didn’t have price tags, the kinds of places where if you had to ask, you couldn’t afford it. I envied the fact that they didn’t have to think about money more than I did the material luxuries they could afford

The thing is that that was how Google became so big in the first place. PageRank was a cool way of trying to filter out the garbage and it worked real well. Even my non techy friends have been getting frustrated with search not working like it used to (even before all this Gemini stuff was added)

I’m glad for people like you, because I’ve spent a good chunk of my life desperately wishing to be in that club, and then another chunk being sad that I wouldn’t be able to be. I was miserable and latched onto something that I believed would alleviate it, but I nowadays definitely think I’m happier not being in that club.

The words it chooses to capitalise is funny. For all the training on online stuff, it doesn’t get that it should be calling you a fucking IDIOT for even asking such a BASIC question about grilled cheese!

I personally don’t have nearly as much of a problem with that than I do with Reddit making AI deals. I’m still not keen on the idea of having anything I interact with being scraped for training AI, but aside from only interacting in closed wall spaces that I or someone I trust controls, I can’t change that. That’a not great for actually interacting with the world though, so it seems that I need to accept that scraping is going to happen. Given that, I’d definitely rather be on Lemmy than Reddit.

And this way, who knows, maybe we’re on our way to the almost utopian “open digital commons”

I was talking to a friend recently about this. They studied medieval English and aren’t especially techy, besides being a Millennial with techy friends; I said that merely knowing and using the term LLM correctly puts their AI knowledge above the vast majority of people (including a decent chunk of people trying to make a quick buck off of AI hype)

I think people like your father make bank because even though new programmers could learn COBOL, that wouldn’t be enough for them to be able to fulfill the same niche your father and other established COBOL programmers occupy; any programming language has a disparity between “the proper way to do things”, and the kind of kludges you see in the field, but few have the kind of baggage that COBOL does, in terms of how long it’s been around and having things built on top of it.

I love REFind. I spent ages faffing around with a fedora/arch dual boot when I was trying to learn how it all worked; when I got sick of learning things the hard way, REFind had my back and gave me a straightforward solution

Truly cutting edge stuff, we’re on the forefront of culture here on Lemmy.

You comment gives me vibes of “I don’t do heroin because I know I’d get addicted”. I say this as someone who is currently flirting with distro hopping. I wouldn’t call myself a distro-hopper yet, but I’m certainly en route to that

I learned about this a while ago and meant to check it out, but forgot to. Thanks for the reminder!