I think it's just jabbing at our early assumptions about dinosaurs seemingly lacking much in the way of bulk. We used to interpret them as these ultra-skinny weirdly mummified looking things rather than the plumper creatures many of them probably were.
The idea is that aliens find skeletons of animals we're more familiar with and come to the same kind of wildly mistaken conclusions about them that we might have if we'd found rabbit skeletons without having first hand experience of modern rabbits.
What is this shady, unsubstantiated, posted yesterday ass random github repo trying to encourage people to compromise their email security and why is it worth posting?
Element really needs to get push to talk. It's an incredibly basic feature to be missing, and for me personally and I'm sure others the lack of it is a deal breaker.
How can someone be guilty of acting as an agent of China but not guilty of conspiring to act as a foreign agent? 🤔
GIMP is honestly fantastic. My workflow goes draw in GIMP, import to Inkscape to convert pieces to vector, then bring them into Godot where shaders get applied. I would rather draw in GIMP than any other program. I find drawing in Inkscape super awkward in comparison. GIMP is pretty no-frills, but it does the job. I prefer it over Photoshop. With Darktsble I've found it useful for importing high res raw images for textures too.
I don't know why people hate on it so much. It's all about using the tools you're comfortable with.
JK Rowling is definitely totally harmless, though, and we're all obligated to separate the art from the artist, and the populatity of Harry Potter has literally nothing to do with her social clout or ability to push her ideology.
This headline is bullshit. The correct headline would be "Americans now face 245% Trump tariff on Chinese goods". No need to spread misinformation about how tariffs work.
Once I sat in a field listening to Victor Wooten and whistling along with him. On a fence nearby was I think a brushed shouldered blackbird? Brushed shouldered something. It started singing with me and doing a little dance. Eventually it even started syncopating its part. Like, you could see it waiting for the timing to be just right for each note. On key and everything. Went on for about half an hour.
Birds are cool.
Honestly, this may be one of the concepts that it would be better to bring to people once they've already found some kind of leftist solidarity. If you take someone steeped in right-wing rhetoric and the first hurdle you put in front of them is expecting humility and understanding before you even give them a reason to want to understand? I don't think that's a terribly effective approach.
If the first thing I say to a cis person is that they have privilege that I lack because I'm trans, I'm doing a few things right out the gate that probably aren't going to get them to listen. First, I'm highlighting the separate categories that we're in rather than the unified categories that we're in. Second, I'm asking them to defer to my experience of the world and to show sympathy and understanding before I even attempt to win them over. Third, I'm asking them to start from a place of humility before I've shown that I can be trusted with the very vulnerability that I'm requesting.
I find it's much easier to look for common ground first and foremost. Find the ways that they have to struggle and recognize that struggle. Show them that I have some of the same exact struggles that they do. Often this comes down to health, finances, or other experiences that are more universal. It doesn't even necessarily have to be a shared struggle, it can be a shared interest. But whatever it is, the first step has to be highlighting affinity. There's a reason people talk about the weather, because we're all in it together. Rain falls on everyone.
Once they see that we're not so different, they tend to be much more willing to hear the stuff that's outside their experience. You might even be able to highlight patterns like the interplay of intersectional privilege. But if you try to start from there? Good luck.
Complain about traffic. Complain about the price of eggs. Hit enough of those universals and they won't be so skeptical when you bring something that requires them to stretch a bit to the table.
Our problem, I think, is that we've largely got the cart entirely before the horse.
Too low. I should not be able to personally afford a whole ass ton of excess greenhouse gasses for the same price as my car insurance.
That's what I was thinking. Maybe they're just Community fans.
.. Should we be pinching our nipples at their AI?
Car free rhetoric like this is often as not nonsensical and ablist. It's one thing to want to reduce traffic and give people options other than driving. That's great. But what a lot of people seem to mean by "car free" is less accessibility for locals and people with disabilities.
For example, I live in a college town. Our public transit is abysmal and we don't have anything like a subway system. We have buses that will bring you to the mall or to other cities and towns in the area, but they don't run frequently enough to be a replacement for personal vehicles. Parking, for people who actually live and work in the area, is an absolute pain in the ass because we get a lot of tourism and people from neighboring areas flock here for our restaurants and shops.
For a while now there's been talk about eliminating on street parking downtown. There has been no suggestion about adding parking anywhere to make up for this or restricting any of the existing parking to be resident-only. So if you live downtown? I guess you'll just have to walk across town to get home, or even drive around in circles until the shops close and people drive their cars back to the suburbs.
It's already rough parking close to home if you live on main street, and much of the existing parking requires walking uphill. We have a single parking garage, which typically gets full when we have a snow storm because the entire town is expected to park there or get towed unless they have a driveway.
This won't have much impact on the upper middle class home owners who are largely the ones pushing for it. It will definitely have an impact on the working class people paying out the nose to live in the available rentals downtown in a place where so many of what might have been affordable apartments a decade ago are now airbnbs.
Increased walkability is great when it's well thought out. But when it's not? It's literally just a form of gentrification that lets those who push for it feel superior to the working class people who pay the price for it in commutes, physical labor, and reduced access.
I had two, and they were very different.
In the late 90s I came out as bisexual. It was honestly pretty uneventful. Anybody who would have had a problem with it had clocked me as queer long before I started exploring my sexuality. Don't get me wrong, I lived in a shitty, backward town and went to a highschool that several shitty backward towns sent their kids to. It definitely sucked for me, but it had been bad for a long time before that. The people who cared about me though? They continued to care about me.
In 2018, though, I came out as trans and started hormones about 6 months later. I lost what had been some close friends. Some were overtly transphobic and at this point either refuse to acknowledge my existence at all or literally glare daggers when they see me. Many others just drifted away. Some people have accepted me and treat me the same as they ever did, a few I feel if anything maybe a little closer to. Some people are still mostly friendly, but will sometimes misgender me, as though they don't dislike me but want to imagine me the way I used to present myself.
With family it was maybe a little awkward and some get it more than others, but it's been alright. One of my uncles still deadnames me sometimes, and while my Dad and I are fairly close for him being on the other side of the country, I don't think he's ever actually used my name. It was awkward with my Mom at first, but she's supportive of my transition now and it's become kind of the least of our worries.
The most difficult part, other than having lost people, is strangers and acquaintances. I never know who's going to suddenly throw their bigotry in my face or who's going to treat me differently the moment they get a good look at me. I think for the most part I'm pretty good at pushing past a lot of people's biases and letting them see me as a person. I usually find it easy to just be real with people and develop a rapport quickly. But with some people, nothing I could ever say or do will make a difference. There are some businesses I avoid like the plague because of the way they treat me, and others where I worry about certain people who work there but get along with others. Voice chat in video games gets kinda rough sometimes. I'm still working on my voice training and it's always kind of nerve wracking talking to someone I meet online in vc for the first time, wondering if their impression of me is going to suddenly change.
Being trans sometimes it feels like coming out never ends. It happens again every time a new person sees me. Like, they look at my clothes and hair, then they look at my face and my shoulders and they start doing math in their head. Or I open my mouth and it's a little more bassy than they expected or I'd like it to be. I've had laser hair removal, I've been on hormones for years and had some major changes, and my wardrobe at this point is all skirts and dresses, but I can tell that most people are clocking me pretty quickly. Not to say I don't think I look good or don't look femme. Thankfully I always looked a little androgynous without facial hair. But enough of the signs are there that you can see it clicks in people's heads.
Honestly, though, I own it. I am who I am, I'm proud of the progress I've made, and my body has changed substantially to the point that I'm much more comfortable in it. There are things I'd like to change, but I think that applies to most women. I wouldn't go back for anything, even when people are being shitty.
When I say bot farms I don't mean literal LLMs. I mean people hired or forced to work in a call-center type environment where their day is spent disseminating propaganda and sewing meaningless conflict. Often using multiple sockpuppets. Some are working for hostile governments, some are working for companies. They try to sway elections and influence public opinion to strengthen their allies and weaken their enemies. They're all over the place.
I mean, honestly, they make it incredibly obvious. The idea that we somehow can't tell is just a tactic they use. We can both smell it on them. Why pretend we can't?
I've been saying this for months and I'll keep saying it. These people aren't genuine users. They're a combination of bot-farm workers and useful idiots. There's a reason their perspectives don't reflect those of actual human beings that we meet and talk to out in the world. Because they're literally just hired to demotivate us.
I trust the content I see on Beehaw and Lemmy in general less and less as the months go by, because it's inundated with this shit to the point that it's clearly being targeted to demotivate any resistance. It's literally flooded with messaging designed to make us feel hopeless and helpless.
Thank you for this. There has been far too much of people utterly ignoring the hard work that people have done against authoritarianism in the US and the actual impact it's had. Lemmy seems to be inundated with people insisting that nothing anyone can do could possibly help and the no one has ever done anything meaningful to resist, and that's just bullshit. It's some terminally online doomerism and it's the last thing we need.
Frankly, it's complicity. It needs to be called out and opposed, and you're doing good work by not mincing words here.
People who pull this shit day in and day out are as much a part of the problem as the MAGA idiots, both in their constant attempts to undermine any and all resistance and very likely in getting us into this situation in the first place.
We need to stop tiptoeing around them and throw their bullshit back in their faces. It's fucking shameful, and they should be embarrassed to be such spineless bootlickers.
Tompato!!!
Potamto!!!
That's quite possible. This administration has shown that it doesn't care about the rule of law. However, that's a far sight from the justice system bending over and letting them.
It's important to be precise about what's happening right now and not to give up and admit defeat. There's a world of difference between "this is bad, we have work to do" and "we're absolutely cooked and have zero hope". Trump's administration wants you to give up. They want you to decide the fight is over before it's even properly begun. Don't do them the favor of making it easy.
How do we shift power to the state level? Can we break up the US?
With each one of Trump's announced appointments, it looks like the situation in the Federal government is getting worse. Even before the gutting of our Federal agencies occurs, we're still dealing with the court system stripping away sound policies both at the highest levels and in backward districts, often seeming to come down to a decision by a single judge in Texas.
So what can we do in states that actually want to make things better to either work on our own or even begin to pull away from the decision making of the backward parts of our country that keep making these decisions for us? How can we act without their input? How can we pull back the money that blue states that are doing well funnel into red states that could scarcely afford paved roads without our tax dollars? Is pulling out of the US or creating a smaller state-to-state coalition to consolidate our collective financial power reasonable or possible?
In Massachusetts we have a ballot initiative process, but it takes
Want to impact the election? Tell your friends to vote!
Two decades of field experiments on get-out-the-vote tactics suggest that impersonal tactics, like mass emails, have only a modest or negligible effect on voter
Using the formulas from corollary 1 of Aronow and Green [2013], we find that untreated compliers have an implied turnout rate of 66.88%, whereas treated compliers have an implied turnout rate of 78.48%. Given the high base rate of voting among compliers in this study, it is interesting that friend-to-friend appeals elevated turnout so profoundly.
The results of this study suggest that simply talking to your friends, even just through a text message, is far more likely to get them to go out and vote than organized but impersonal voter mobilization. If you want to secure the outcome of the election, text or call your friends about it, especially your friends in swing states. Moreover, encourage them to do the same. If a text will increase their voter participation, it'll probably also get a decent number of them to send a similar text themselves.
Gloom and doom is not going to win the election. Endless panicked articles are not going to win the election. People going out and vot
Anyone Else Noticing Increasingly Conservative Commentary from Outside Instances?
In the past few weeks I feel like I've seen a lot more conservative comments being posted on Beehaw. Where before it seemed like occasionally some dazed right-winger would wander through now and then, it now seems a bit more like they specifically show up to any thread that brushes up against one of their pet issues.
The most recent example I've noticed is around the stuff with the Ladybird devs being weird about being asked to use inclusive pronouns, but it seems like a pattern.
Has anyone else noticed this? Any thoughts on a course of action other than blocking them all individually or reporting particularly grievous examples?
I really would be disappointed to see every single thread here slowly inundated with pettiness and hate.
Android Dialer App Recommendations?
For years I was using Drupe, but they've thoroughly enshittified. What used to be a sleek, extremely functional dialer app with a fantastic UI has become a slow, ad-filled sack of garbage with a still pretty good UI.
A few months back I had enough and I switched to FOSS Dialer. The biggest thing on my radar was looking for something that isn't prone to being turned to adware garbage for a quick quarterly profit, so it seemed like a good fit.
But in the past few months I've probably made more accidental calls in a single week than in the years that I used Drupe. It's super obnoxious. Click once, and I call some random person. When I open my phone it literally just starts at the top of my contact list.
Drupe was great because I could arrange which frequent numbers I wanted to use in which order along the left side of my screen and calling or texting just required me to drag it over to a spot on the right side of my screen. I could call people without looking at my phone, I hardly e
Streaming Video Discord Replacements for Linux?
I've been looking more seriously at making a permanent switch to Linux, as I don't plan to ever upgrade to Windows 11. I'm currently running a dual-boot with Ubuntu Studio, and I've been trying to piece together everything I need to move my regular usage over.
I think I've got enough of a grasp of Jack at this point to replace Voicemeeter, which was one of my big hurdles. The next, though, is Discord's incomplete functionality.
For those who don't know, audio doesn't stream with screen sharing over discord on Linux. I do a lot of streaming with friends, so we kind of need this functionality.
I know it's possible to run a discord client on Linux that fixes this problem, but given that it's technically against the ToS, I don't really want to risk my account. I have a bunch of stuff set up for game servers, including all sorts of webhooks and ticket tool configurations and the like, so it isn't really worth risking.
I know there are some VLC plugins I can use to stream video file
Hallucinated AI Dependencies as Vectors for Attack
Simply look out for libraries imagined by ML and make them real, with actual malicious code. No wait, don't do that
Archive Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240330224149/https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/
This is fascinating. I've certainly seen AI hallucinating things like imaginary functions in gdscript. Admittedly, it does it a lot more with gpt3 than with gpt4 on a subscription, which is consistent with what 3 vs 4 has access to, but I'm sure the problems apply in a lot of other use cases that might have not had the benefit of more recent documentation.
I suppose it's not surprising that a number of larger entities have been falling prey to this, as they keep trying to inappropriately jam AI into their production lines where it's incapable of doing the job. Pretty clever vulnerability to find, though.
Ultimately, this is probably a good thing for human coders, imo. The more LLMs demonstrate that they're not effective without robust human intervention, the better.
My New Favorite Site - Guitar Scales
I love this thing. Pick a key, it shows you where the scale is. One octave or whole fretboard, with notes or without. This makes learning scales and just picking a scale and composing in it so much easier!
Getting Back Into Music
A couple of months ago I started looking at composing some music for a game I'm working on. I started fiddling around with DAWs with just mouse and keyboard and a few weeks later I picked up a little 2 octave MIDI-keyboard to make it a little easier. That lead to diving into music theory, which made me want to pick up a bass.
A few weeks later and a couple of cheapo guitars, and I feel like I've found an essential part of myself. I could literally sit here playing bass until my arms go numb. I don't even have my audio interface or an amp yet, I'm literally just playing it dry, and I'm absolutely in love. I can't wait for my interface to get here so I can start putting down just like, some bass lines and some simple power chords with some distortion.
It's incredible how cheap it is to pick up a couple of instruments now and just dive right into music. With all the stuff on various instruments and music theory out there, why not? Nobody's going to gasp in awe at the quality of my p
Chat GPT Did NOT Like My Memory Test
I was trying to do a memory test to see how far back 3.5 could recall information from previous prompts, but it really doesn't seem to like making pseudorandom seeds. 😆