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merc

@ merc @sh.itjust.works

Posts

10
Comments

3488
Joined

3 yr. ago

9h ago

The size of Portugal compared to Spain
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merc @sh.itjust.works 9h ago
This Azores erasure will not stand.

9h ago

Fucking based

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merc @sh.itjust.works 9h ago

Exactly, so this wouldn't make things any worse.

9h ago

Except that no country is likely to take him up on that suggestion because they're afraid of how the US would react. Cuba's already heavily sanctioned, so they have less to lose. Maybe nothing to lose.

22h ago

Fucking based

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merc @sh.itjust.works 22h ago

Imagine if they focused on creating tools that could jailbreak iOS devices, John Deere tractors, HP printers, etc. I bet they could sell that as a service. What could the US or American companies do to stop them? They could be Disenshittification Island.

1d ago

Facts

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merc @sh.itjust.works 1d ago

I remember looking at some point, and Gnome had roughly 4x the number of developers that KDE had. If you want the best (most stable, most well tested, most feature full, etc.) programs, you basically have to use some Gnome programs. That was one of the deciding factors that pushed me to go with Gnome. If I was going to have to use Gnome programs anyhow, and they worked best with Gnome, then I thought I should use Gnome. My experience was that Gnome programs don't really play well with KDE, but that KDE programs generally work OK on Gnome.

I really like the customizability of KDE, but I like many of the defaults of Gnome. Unfortunately, if you don't like some of Gnome's defaults, it's real pain in the ass to change them. Personally, even though I liked a lot of Gnome's defaults, I absolutely hated some other ones. If it weren't for extensions there's no way at all I could use it. Luckily, some of the biggest misfeatures are so widely recognized that there are dozens of extensions to choose from to fix them. OTOH KDE's customizability led to some issues too. I remember having some weird interactions between things because settings A, B and C don't necessarily work well together. But, at least those settings are built into the desktop environment, and you're not relying on some random dude's hobby project for a critical system setting.

At the moment, I'm pretty happy with Gnome, and most days it just gets out of my way and lets me do what I want to do. That's something I never ever got with Windows. It was always a pain in my ass. And, it's something that was only ever 90% true with OSX. Great defaults, but that last 10% is a real pain in the ass. Gnome's extensions let me get much closer to 100%. I have to admit though, that I do dread the day that I have to upgrade it and all the extensions break.

1d ago

Shocking

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merc @sh.itjust.works 1d ago

It strikes me that an artist privately owning his tools and materials independently of any others is closer to "the workers owning the means of production" than anything anyone calling themselves communist have ever accomplished.

Except when that artist buys the supplies on the free market for themselves and then for that artist to own them as private property.

The communist way is for the artist to join an artist collective, and for their art supplies to be supplied (free of charge of course) by whoever it is that makes art supplies. That artist might use some of the communal supply of art equipment that the artist collective collectively has access to. If the collective doesn't have whatever art supplies the artist wants, they'd have to make a request to whoever produces art supplies to produce something for them, which might arrive in a few months, assuming the request was approved.

between the two systems, capitalism or the free market economy or whatever you want to call it hands literally all of society to the elites slower than "communism" does.

IMO that's the key distinction. It seems like communism assumes people are fundamentally altruistic, and doesn't really have mechanisms to channel people's selfish drives. As a result, it gets corrupted much more quickly. Capitalism might suck a lot more in its ideal form than communism in its ideal form. But, it seems to do a better job of channelling people's greedy and selfish interests, so it's more resilient to the elites taking over completely. Communism is great in theory, but just doesn't seem compatible with the realities of humanity. Capitalism in theory is somewhat unpleasant, but at least it kind-of works.

1d ago

Yeah Why Are They

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merc @sh.itjust.works 1d ago

You clearly have no idea how fact checking works in journalism. They couldn't make that claim.

1d ago

Yeah Why Are They

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merc @sh.itjust.works 1d ago

That doesn't work when the details are fuzzy, for example, this paragraph:

House Democrats Wednesday released a small batch of emails that appear to suggest President Donald Trump knew more about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of underage women than he has acknowledged.

https://theweek.com/politics/house-democrats-release-epstein-emails-trump

You couldn't say "Trump knew more about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of girls 11-14 than he has acknowledged". That suggests that the emails that were released referenced those specific ages, which they don't.

1d ago

Yeah Why Are They

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merc @sh.itjust.works 1d ago

I'm sure I can find you a bunch of articles where there's no sign they're trying to minimize what happened but they happen to use that term. I just think English is tricky. What term do you think they should be using?

1d ago

YSK Your smoke detectors should be replaced every 7-10 years

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merc @sh.itjust.works 1d ago

Aaaaaaaand let me tell you, I had a sleepless night last night knowing there were no detectors installed.

This seems really weird. Smoke detectors are important, but the odds of a fire any given night are incredibly low. To me, replacing a detector would be a chore I'd get to within a week, and I definitely wouldn't lose sleep over it.

1d ago

Car Wash Test on 53 leading AI models: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

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merc @sh.itjust.works 1d ago

I'm pretty sure Google's AI is fed by the same spider that goes out and finds every new or changed web page (or a variant of that).

As soon as someone writes an article about how AI gets something wrong and provides a solution, that solution is now in the AI's training data.

OTOH, that means it's probably also ingesting a lot of AI generated slop, which causes its own set of problems.

1d ago

Car Wash Test on 53 leading AI models: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

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merc @sh.itjust.works 1d ago

It's not literally guessing, because guessing implies it understands there's a question and is trying to answer that question. It's not even doing that. It's just generating words that you could expect to find nearby.

1d ago

Car Wash Test on 53 leading AI models: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

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merc @sh.itjust.works 1d ago

3 in 10 people get this wrong‽‽

Maybe they're picturing filling up a bucket and bringing it back to the car? Or dropping off keys to the car at the car wash?

1d ago

Car Wash Test on 53 leading AI models: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

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merc @sh.itjust.works 1d ago

It's also the case that people are mostly consistent.

Take a question like "how long would it take to drive from here to [nearby city]". You'd expect that someone's answer to that question would be pretty consistent day-to-day. If you asked someone else, you might get a different answer, but you'd also expect that answer to be pretty consistent. If you asked someone that same question a week later and got a very different answer, you'd strongly suspect that they were making the answer up on the spot but pretending to know so they didn't look stupid or something.

Part of what bothers me about LLMs is that they give that same sense of bullshitting answers while trying to cover that they don't know. You know that if you ask the question again, or phrase it slightly differently, you might get a completely different answer.

1d ago

too many creators not enough destroyers

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merc @sh.itjust.works 1d ago

In the absence of content destroyers, I'm happy to settle for content selectors, like OP.

1d ago

Yeah Why Are They

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merc @sh.itjust.works 1d ago

It is a really weird thing to say, and you can still find a lot of articles that use the term "underage women". But, it's not like articles that use that term are necessarily trying to apologize for Epstein or minimize what happened.

I think the problem is that they want to use the term "underage" because they want to clarify that what happened wasn't legal. The proper term for an "underage woman" is a "girl". But, unfortunately, "girl" is also used with adult women. So, saying "Trump had sex with some of the girls" doesn't really clarify what happened. And, the term "underage girls" is also bad. That's the kind of language you might find from someone like Megyn Kelly trying to draw a distinction between sex with an 8 year old vs. sex with a 15 year old.

1d ago

Yeah Why Are They

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merc @sh.itjust.works 1d ago

You were flooded with articles about inundation? I bet using that term resulted in a flood of comments on those news pages.

1d ago

Too Many Cooks (short film)

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merc @sh.itjust.works 1d ago

Too Many Cooks was the best thing to just start watching without any expectations. Even having someone say "hey, you should watch this" sort of ruins it.

1d ago

Get your State of the Union Address bingo card right here!

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merc @sh.itjust.works 1d ago

Ok, I'll be the one to nitpick. American-style bingo cards are 5x5, one for each letter in BINGO.

It doesn't really matter, except that the middle square is normally a free square, which is an opportunity for a joke. Like, "this is so guaranteed to happen, you just get it for free". So, "Trump does accordion hands gesture" or something.

1d ago

Also, in my state, all the drivers are the worst

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merc @sh.itjust.works 1d ago

There's a big difference between drivers who only drive in rural areas and drivers who drive in crowded rush hour traffic in big cities. And, different big cities have their own challenges. As a visitor, trying to navigate LA's freeway hell was awful, and the drivers who were used to it were not at all accommodating. But, I think LA drivers would find driving in Boston and its Masshole drivers to be hell, because it's all about squeezing down narrow streets that come from a time before automobiles.