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wishthane

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wishthane ,

I totally agree with that. I’ve also found Google worse about being influenced by SEO tactics (probably just because it’s targeted for that) and so you get bogus results like GeeksForGeeks that are often really poorly written and irrelevant, sometimes even wrong, up at the top.

wishthane ,

I agree with that - iOS looks good but Android is actually more functional to get stuff done in. Though, caveat being whose Android - some vendor customizations are horrifying

US transportation head says no grounded Boeing 737 Max 9 planes will return to air ‘until it is safe’ (www.theguardian.com)

The US transportation secretary announced on Wednesday afternoon that no grounded Boeing 737 Max 9 would return to service “until it is safe”, after Alaska Airlines announced the cancellation of all flights on its 737 Max 9 planes at the direction of the Federal Aviation Administration....

wishthane ,

Being able to read Chinese characters, I had a really hard time seeing your name as you intended it…

wishthane ,

I can’t see it anymore for some reason - it doesn’t mean anything really but I remember the first character being 毛 which is hair haha

wishthane ,

Anthocyanins are responsible for the color and they act as a pH indicator, changing color from bright red in acid to bright blue in basic solutions. Soil acidity could have an impact on their color at harvest, but it also really depends on how you use them. If you put them raw in a salad, they’ll probably turn quite red regardless, but it’s also quite common to find them as a purple color.

wishthane ,

Wow that is a terrible translation haha

wishthane ,

Especially early on in the Iraq war it was considered anti-American to be critical of it. Of course, that doesn’t have the kind of baggage that anti-Semitism has, but I do think it’s being used in exactly the same way, and it’s just conveniently more effective because of the very real history (and present) of anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish violence. Where as (settler) America isn’t exactly an oppressed people

wishthane ,

You have to shoot big if you want to get anything close to what you want - it’s a basic principle of negotiation

Texas power plants have no responsibility to provide electricity in emergencies, judges rule (www.kut.org)

Almost three years since the deadly Texas blackout of 2021, a panel of judges from the First Court of Appeals in Houston has ruled that big power companies cannot be held liable for failure to provide electricity during the crisis. The reason is Texas’ deregulated energy market....

wishthane ,

Or they just can’t leave for one reason or another – moving is tough

wishthane ,

Also so many sites that haven’t given in to the ad content farm / have found it to not be worth it are now just putting up paywalls… which I’m okay with in principle, but in reality I can’t afford to subscribe to 20 different sites I only read occasionally

There’s going to need to be a new model of revenue sharing somehow at some point. I wouldn’t mind paying for one subscription that gave me broad access, but the problem then is the control that gives whoever collects the money (e.g. YouTube Premium)

A firm providing AI drive-thru tech to fast food chains actually relies on human workers to take orders 70% of the time (www.businessinsider.com)

A firm providing AI drive-thru tech to fast food chains actually relies on human workers to take orders 70% of the time::Presto Automations recently admitted that most of the orders taken by its AI drive-thru chatbot are actually assisted by off-site human workers.

wishthane ,

It’s true in a capitalist system for sure. Automation causes fewer people to be responsible for more profit, so fewer people see the benefit of it. Capitalists argue it will just cause prices to fall, but a) to what, if many people can’t find a stable job, and b) prices are quick to rise but slow to fall, nobody wants to take a loss on what they paid for/forecast, and businesses implementing this tech certainly aren’t expecting to have to lower prices. Less money getting you more value increases the value of money - also known as deflation, and something economists avoid as it’s quite painful.

Automation itself can be good for humans though. I don’t think people should be stuck doing a bullshit job nobody really needs just because we don’t want to eliminate a job. Our goal as human society should be for people to have more and more choice over how they spend their own time. Even if we eliminate basically all necessary work from human existence, creative works have intrinsic value to the people who create them at the very least, and often value to many other people as well - AI will never eliminate that even if AI becomes very creative itself.

Mandatory work should be something we try to eliminate, and replaced by people generally being able to choose to do whatever they want within reason. This is not something that makes any sense in a capitalist system, so rather than attacking automation and keeping capitalism just because that creates a more equal income distribution, we should be working toward replacing capitalism with something better, and automation is a part of getting there.

wishthane ,

Refused to invent the engine? This is a new conspiracy to me

wishthane ,

Yup, that’s how I see it too. I don’t like seeing ads, the creators do at least get more money, and the actual value I get out of YouTube is pretty high

wishthane ,

And ironically screwing it up by still supporting European settler colonialism?

wishthane ,

It’s still something you can argue should be done even if it’s not currently politically feasible. Things don’t always stay politically unfeasible, but they usually don’t get pushed in that direction by people not making that argument in public.

My utopian take would be that Israel should become fundamentally secular, remove references to being a ‘Jewish state’, grant all Palestineans citizenship and full rights, and perhaps change the name - a lot of people would say that should just be called Palestine, but frankly I think a compromise of Israel-Palestine or some other completely new name would be fine too. End the colonialism & apartheid, everyone who’s there lives in peace, people who had to flee during previous wars get to come back.

I don’t know that we’ll ever see that, but it probably is much more unlikely if we don’t try to convince people that it’s a good idea.

wishthane ,

The typical English name for that is Canaan. There’s a lot of history surrounding that name in the Bible (OT, so shared by Jews, Christians, and somewhat accepted by Muslims too) and a lot of it not positive. I don’t think a lot of people would appreciate that association even though it’s likely based on myth.

Personally I don’t really see that Palestine is a bad name as it’s really just a name for the region and the only baggage it has is quite modern; Zionist Jews might prefer some acknowledgement of the land as Israel and so it would be tough to get them to accept something that doesn’t include that IMO

wishthane ,

Bard doesn’t truly think, it’s just going to be reflective of the most commonly written perspective in its source material

wishthane ,

The idea that the atomic bombs directly caused the surrender of Japan is contested, actually. It’s more likely that they created an urgency in what was already looking like a losing battle. The difference in that situation is that Japan wasn’t fighting a war of resistance at any cost against the US, they were fighting as part of an alliance on one front of a world war. In that case it is very real that troops lose morale, civilian casualties become too great, and loss of military assets make victory look unlikely, and then surrender looks attractive by comparison. But I think in the case of popularly supported resistance to colonizers, that threshold is quite high - people feel quite strongly about revenge and are convinced of the justice of their cause in that situation, so the brutality of their colonizers isn’t likely to do anything other than strengthen their resolve.

Frankly, I actually think the atomic bombing and firebombing campaigns would be considered war crimes if they happened today. It’s really weird that people justify it so much by how horrible the Japanese state was at the time - tons of innocent civilians, including lots of children, died horribly, and it was 100% anticipated, and in the case of the atomic bombing, they did it twice, knowing that. You can’t justify your own actions by the crimes of your enemy.

wishthane ,

Israel’s strikes are the most targeted fucking strikes you’ve ever seen a military do, and they actively warn the people in those buildings with everything from roof knocking to a phone call.

That doesn’t even make sense. If the point is to destroy Hamas assets and people, there’s no sense in tipping them off about it. So either they’re doing that and destroying people’s homes for no reason, or they’re not actually doing that.

It’s not actually possible to take out military targets like that with air strikes in a “clean” way. Obviously the only reason they don’t go in on the ground with IDF soldiers if they actually have legitimate targets instead is because the lives of Palestinean civilians are less important than the lives of Israeli soldiers, and they know that air strikes don’t lead to any casualties on their side.

wishthane ,

So which is it, are they being allowed freedom of movement into Israel to work with identification, or you don’t want them in because they’re terrorists who threaten to kill civilians?

All I’ve seen is that some people were allowed in and out, but it isn’t exactly a porous border, identification requirements are strict, getting the necessary approval and documentation is difficult in a place without a functioning state. And you can’t just make rules and distance yourself from the consequences of them just because people are unable to meet the requirements of those rules, you have to actually look at what the effect is.

wishthane ,

Hamas doesn’t exist in a vacuum though. Most people don’t just wake up one day and think “hmm, terrorism sounds good to me today!” There’s always going to be a minority of people who end up having extremist views and committing violence, but a functioning state is able to keep those people under control. The fact that Netanyahu has no motivation to make the situation better is directly what causes this situation where people help Hamas out of desperation. They can’t wait for Israelis to get their act together and elect someone who is strongly motivated to make life better for Palestineans, they see that they have to live on the other side of a wall where only they have to deal with that level of poverty and violence on a regular basis and it’s unfair. If you put yourself in their shoes you’d get it too. That’s not a justification at all, it’s just empathy for their situation.

I can also empathize with Israelis who want revenge. People in Israel expect safety and don’t think of their country as a war-zone. It’s easy to think of the problem as entirely one-sided when you don’t have to deal with it, but it’s just not the case.

Some Walmart employees say customers are getting hostile at self-checkout — and they blame anti-theft tech (www.businessinsider.com)

Some Walmart employees say customers are getting hostile at self-checkout — and they blame anti-theft tech::When Walmart’s anti-theft self-checkout tech alerts an employee of a missed scan, it can cause some uncomfortable situations.

wishthane ,

NL is neither a Nordic country nor ethnically homogeneous. Just like all countries with a history of colonizing other people, many of those people are now in NL. Stop blaming everything on diversity

wishthane ,

How many people did the Fukushima incident actually kill? Meanwhile people are actively being killed by air pollution and climate change caused by fossil fuel energy. Nuclear energy incidents seem worse because they happen over a short period of time, but it’s just like with airplanes - plane crashes are horrific and disastrous, but statistically airplanes are massively safer than even rail and especially road transport.

It requires good governance and adherence to safety standards and upkeep to be safe, but we’ve shown that we can reasonably do that for the most part.

Renewables should of course be the first priority, though lithium mining is also a significant health hazard - but really when you compare everything statistically and not just by the significance of individual events, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be trying to eliminate fossil fuels by any feasible means, and that includes nuclear power.

wishthane ,

I assume they can power the train AI by pantograph or third rail - no reason to have nuclear powered trains, this isn’t Factorio.

wishthane ,

I can understand that but at the same time, it can also counteract a lot of localized perverse incentives. The majority of people might want more housing, but then at the same time there’s a significant part of the voting population (especially at a municipal level) that doesn’t want it in their community because of unfounded fears of higher density, so everybody wants it somewhere else and it doesn’t get done. Well, if you go up a level of government, it’s going to get done everywhere fairly, and people finally realize that it won’t be a problem.

wishthane ,

Sounds more like the Rules of Acquisition to me.

wishthane ,

They just saw that video on Roblox and said “yeah that sounds great, let’s do that”

wishthane ,

Well, Labour is legitimately sliding right, and it’s become somewhat common among the so-called “left” in the UK to make a scapegoat out of trans people - it really wouldn’t surprise me that an older, liberal woman in the UK would have some right-wing things to say.

wishthane ,

I do but only with people I’ve actually made friends with who I’m pretty sure will either agree with me or at least respect my point of view. I’ll share mildly political articles in discussion groups for those specific things at work sometimes, but those are places where people have specifically opted in to hearing about them and are interested in the topics.

wishthane ,

I mean those are pretty major things, especially if you’re part of one of the affected minorities. If I were trans I wouldn’t really want to work with a coworker who insists on misgendering me and makes a fuss out of me using the right bathroom.

If it doesn’t come up, it doesn’t come up. People can agree to disagree, also. But there are also cases where the disagreement is so fundamental that it makes it pretty hard to respect someone or even want to be in the same room as them.

wishthane ,

Well, I didn’t mean to say Labour is far-right or anything, just that they’re sliding in the direction of the right.

wishthane ,

You could argue that for major languages, where the translations would drive revenue, they should prefer to hire people to do the translations from within the target market - it would create some amount of economic opportunity rather than just being another way for the developed countries to suck up money on services from developing ones in particular.

wishthane ,

Yeah, I could imagine that, if we’re just counting the baseline minimum of what that production would cost. I think for the most popular podcasts they could easily afford it, though. It would certainly cost much less than what they’re paying Joe Rogan.

wishthane ,

They’re active in comments, but they’re also a small minority

wishthane ,

Yeah I don’t think this is completely true. I’m not in Gen Z but close enough and I do see that they’re a lot more accepting of a broad spectrum of attitudes toward sex, and that includes asexuality, but I think they’re also quite accepting of people being quite the opposite of that. I think where they get more weirded out and are willing to say so is when people - and because of patriarchy, it’s almost always men, but not always toward women - make sexual comments about real people who aren’t explicitly inviting that. That’s something that has been declining in acceptability over time anyway and Gen Z just more commonly takes it a bit farther, and has a better understanding of consent. But I’ve really never seen this “women aren’t capable of consenting” thing outside of a strawman for people who want to pretend it exists by misinterpreting real criticism.

wishthane ,

It probably won’t, but I think it will get better.

wishthane ,

Punishing drunk drivers is well-deserved, but as long as car-dependent infrastructure encourages drunk driving, it is considerably more difficult to actually decrease the rate of it. Taking a taxi is expensive and being a DD is no fun, so people take stupid risks. If you know you can take public transit home, there’s no reason to take such a risk at all.

wishthane ,

People can enjoy a drink responsibly, but you shouldn’t drive even if you’ve only had a couple of drinks. Even a small amount of impairment is unacceptable when you’re controlling a machine that could easily kill other people by mistake.

wishthane ,

I have serious doubts those folks are any more of a danger to anyone than the average driver or the average tired or emotional driver.

I think I agree with that except that I think that that is equally a problem. I don’t think people should be trusted to drive, en masse, out of necessity. There are too many things that make it dangerous when people really don’t have a lot of choice in the matter, and may have to drive when they’re not actually feeling up to it.

wishthane ,

You have to design around stupid, because this is the real world. People can only expected to be rational sometimes, and in aggregate, you need systems that expect people to take whatever is the most obvious or easy choice available to them, whether it’s actually a good idea or not.

wishthane ,

Yeah, exactly. It’s the same reason why punishment is only a deterrent to crime to certain extent, and it doesn’t work absolutely.

You could make the punishment for shoplifting be summary execution, and it would still happen on a regular basis. Because people think they won’t get caught, even with evidence of lots of people having been caught before.

wishthane ,

Yeah. “One more lane” is something that a lot of people unironically think, it’s not just a meme, so trying to ensure that everybody knows how silly that is and how much harm it causes is one of the main ways that that line of thinking can be destroyed

wishthane ,

There’s something about driving that innately dehumanizes - I swear I’ve actually seen studies about this. When people are behind the wheel, they don’t relate to the world around them as personally, empathy kind of disappears, it all becomes something like a game, and everything between them and their destination is just an obstacle to be overcome.

wishthane ,

It kind of screams co-opting by the fossil fuel industry, doesn’t it. Just like all of the efforts to make Alberta tar sands oil sound environmentally friendly, by pointing to the strong regulatory environment. Rather than focus on what will actually improve things the most, they want something that keeps them in business

wishthane ,

Voting is still good, but it’s the bare minimum. Not everyone has the time, but if you do, you should try to advocate publicly, and preferably in a group. Just like with unions, collective action is more effective. If I give feedback to my city individually, I’m a data point. But as part of an advocacy group, they reach out to us.

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