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merc

@ merc @sh.itjust.works

Posts
10
Comments
3686
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Being Trans Isn't Normal or Part of Nature...or is it...?

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  • go to Scotland and there it is masculine.

    I wouldn't say that. In Scotland wearing a skirt is still seen as feminine. Wearing a very special kind of skirt is seen as masculine in certain contexts. If you're wearing a kilt, a sporran (the purse thing), knee length socks, the right kind of shoes, etc. it's definitely a masculine style of dress. But, without all the accessories it's more ambiguous whether it's male or female. And if it's not a tartan at all -- say a miniskirt, that's definitely still feminine in Scotland.

  • Being Trans Isn't Normal or Part of Nature...or is it...?

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  • Right, that's my point. Since we don't know anything about the thoughts of seahorses or about seahorse society, we can't apply labels like "trans" to seahorses, the only thing we know about is their biology, so sex, not gender.

  • Being Trans Isn't Normal or Part of Nature...or is it...?

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  • Not if you go to a church where they still do the Latin Mass.

  • Being Trans Isn't Normal or Part of Nature...or is it...?

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  • Isn't this confusing sex and gender?

  • And that's final

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  • Shouldn't it be:

    My plathtic vampire fangth thtay ON during thekth.

  • Valheim player keeps building Dollar Generals despite friend begging them to stop: 'I do not want to play Valheim with Greg anymore'

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  • Whoosh.

  • Anyone else about ready to give up on tech?

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  • Yeah, I mean, that's the only part of farming that actually seems interesting to me. It's not that it makes me want to do it, but I'm curious about tractors using GPS to sow seeds then plow a field. But, John Deere tractors seem even more enshittified than most tech right now.

    But, that also emphasizes your other point. To make farming less labour intensive and require less expertise, you can now buy really expensive farming equipment with the latest tech that makes certain aspects of farming easier. But, that equipment is extremely expensive.

    Farm work used to be done by slaves. In the US, once slaves were freed, many continued to be farmers because that's all they knew how to do, and it wasn't a job that anybody else wanted to do. Now farming has diverged in 2 directions, on one end there's the (white) farm owner, or upper tier farm worker who owns million-dollar pieces of equipment with all kinds of modern tech. On the other end there are farm workers, who are often illegal immigrants, or at least immigrants on very restricted visas who work the toughest jobs for almost no money. And, both jobs suck.

    The suck of the farm worker's job is obvious. Back breaking labour in terrible weather for almost no pay. It's a job that nobody with any options would choose to do.

    The farm owner's job sucks too. You're at the mercy of the weather, and that weather is only getting more unpredictable as the climate changes. You have to invest in extremely expensive equipment just to have a chance, so you might have millions of dollars in assets (harvesters, livestock, land) but your average cashflow is only in the low 6 figures, and in bad years it can be negative. You don't own your own seeds, you "own" your tractor, but need John Deere's approval for your own repairs, and you're kind-of tied to the land.

  • You could convince evangelicals that AI is bad by saying it's converting children to satanism or making them gay

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  • She doesn't use facebook, just conspiracy forums.

  • Anyone else about ready to give up on tech?

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  • Not in the slightest.

    But, where I used to super interested in cutting-edge tech stuff, I'm now extremely jaded. I used to actively seek out news on new tech companies / projects because it genuinely felt like there were a lot of problems out there to be solved, and tech was solving those problems. These days it seems like tech often is the problem, and it's never going to be solved because they have the DMCA, Section 230, trillions of dollars, and the entire apparatus of the state ensuring that their shitty tech keeps getting in your way.

    The thing is, I still like tech. I can't imagine living in a world without it. Whenever I see these memes about people wanting to become farmers it amazes me, because farming sucks. I don't like the great outdoors, the indoors is far greater. I can appreciate non-digital tech. An internal combustion engine is a really cool gadget, for example. And, I'm happy to do my own bike maintenance. But, real world things are greasy, loud, and inelegant. It amazes me when people claim to like record players instead of good quality digital media. It's amazing how record players work, but they're still terrible, outdated things that objectively produce a less accurate sound than a good digital file. I still prefer technology, preferably digital technology. I just don't like the stuff that makes up 95% of the Internet these days.

    It sounds like you really feel the same way, because:

    get a dumb phone

    That's tech.

    a CD player

    Also tech.

    check out books, movies, music, and games

    I'm pretty sure any movies and music you check out from the library in 2025 will be digital, that's tech.

    Have you found ways to reconnect with technology?

    If you don't like it, don't reconnect. Become a farmer or a fisherman or whatever makes you happy. But, I'm not going to join you. I may be veering a lot more towards DIY tech, and offline things than I used to. But, to get me to abandon technology you'll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.

  • You could convince evangelicals that AI is bad by saying it's converting children to satanism or making them gay

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  • My ultra-religious mother "heard from someone" that AI "is the devil" so she wouldn't use it. That's great. Unfortunately, it made her really scared of everything. She was super anxious because AI was in the news all the time.

    I really don't want her to use AI, because she already has such a hard time distinguishing fantasy from reality. But, I still had to try to explain to her that LLMs are just fancy auto-complete, and how often they get things wrong to reduce her stress level. I hope she continues not to use them, but now I hope she just shakes her head and sighs when someone else uses one, instead of thinking they're letting evil into their bodies.

  • Wikipedia owner signs on Microsoft, Meta in AI content training deals

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  • My guess is that this was necessary because the AI companies already downloaded the offline versions of Wikipedia. But, they think they can one-up their competition by having "fresher data" so they either hammer the download servers and download the 25 GB full offline version multiple times a day, just in case it changed. Or, they might crawl and scrape Wikipedia so they get the data before it makes it into the daily offline version, or something.

    It wouldn't be hard for Wikipedia to provide them a feed of the changes going to the Wikipedia database so they get the data as fresh as it can possibly be. Plus, doing this most likely reduces the antisocial behaviours that the AI companies would otherwise engage in to get their fresh data. Win, win. Even if it sucks to give these AI companies a win.

  • Wikipedia owner signs on Microsoft, Meta in AI content training deals

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  • Um... it does what?

    Anyhow, not only is AI scraping (not scrubbing, that's something completely different) Wikipedia, the Wikipedia licenses allow the AI companies to use the materials. Wikipedia content is licensed CC BY-SA or GFDL. So, while Wikipedia could try to block the scrapers, they can't block the companies from using the content as long as they comply with those (very open) licenses. And, really, this is part of how I want Wikipedia to be used. Not necessarily to train up chatbots, but I want it to be a freely available, freely usable source of knowledge for the world. I like it that it isn't knowledge that's hidden behind some firewall. And, if chatbots are going to be trained on the contents of the Internet, at least we know that some of the training data will be good, factual knowledge, not memes, lies, propaganda, etc.

    So, while I'm not happy with anything where data is being sold to the AI companies, in this case I'll try to get over my knee-jerk reaction and see it as a good thing. Wikipedia gets paid for something that was already freely available, and maybe the jazzed-up autocomplete will more frequently autocomplete from a good source.

  • Valheim player keeps building Dollar Generals despite friend begging them to stop: 'I do not want to play Valheim with Greg anymore'

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  • If there's more than one, is the plural Dollars General?

  • Digg launches its new Reddit rival to the public

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  • Reddit existed long before Digg died, and was so much better before the Digg refugees streamed in.

  • Closing programs

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  • Apple laptops are typically extremely good when it comes to sleep and suspend.

    A major advantage of having a very small range of hardware you have to support is that it's pretty easy to test all possible combinations and make sure they work well together. As far as I'm concerned, Apple has been, and probably always will be the undisputed champion of doing this right.

  • Huh?

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  • One of my personal gripes with TV and movies is when the main characters go to a dance club, or a strip club, and have a conversation at a normal volume level. You can always tell from the look of the places that they're the kind where you have to shout into the ear of the person next to you to have a hope at being understood.

  • Huh?

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  • It's interesting that the first pubs were just that -- people's homes where a certain room was open to guests.

  • Huh?

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  • In one place I worked, the ambient sound was so loud that not only did everyone wear headphones, but the best way to chat with someone who was 3-4 desks away was to type to them while continuing to listen to whatever you had on your headphones. Of course, the place was so absurdly loud because the management insisted on an open office plan with everyone in the office so that we'd more easily be able to chat informally to foster new ideas.

  • This is Jehan Pages, the top developer behind GIMP, a free open source photo editor. Adobe executives hate Jehan. Because of his hard work, Adobe lost millions of dollars

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  • Ok, but you're wrong.

  • Nearly a third of Canadians believe U.S. may try to invade Canada: poll

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  • Unfortunately, even if they didn't succeed, it would be horrible for everybody involved, especially the invaded country. Trump is definitely the type who would wipe Winnipeg off the map if some Winnipegger killed someone important.