New Pride Flag for the irradiated wastelands just stopped!

From 1 internet stranger to another, thank you. It really means a lot to me that people are doing what they can at their own level like you. I know how demotivating and isolating it can feel to be the only one doing the necessary work.

You buying at a grocery store is out of convenience, the alternative is learning how to hunt like a survival hunter.

At some point that was an alternative, but today the natural ecosystems have been so encroached upon by human civilization that we can’t just decide to become survival hunters - we’d simply starve. Grocery stores are all you have if you’re living in a high-rise apartment in most cities, for example. Most suburbs can’t support enough wildlife to then be hunted for survival by the humans living there.

Vegetable gardens might be a better analogy than survival hunting. There are even some initiatives being taken to break the cycle of dependency that grocery stores encourage, which I suspect is what @subignition@fedia.io is getting at: collective effort is needed beyond just letting the techies do their thing in their own corner, otherwise we all suffer. Everyone needs to move beyond their comfort zone at some point, for some amount of time - be it the techies teaching others, or the others learning a bit more about how their tools work.

the average user wants the convenience of easy to use software, because they don’t want to learn the alternative […] If everyone was like you, then easy to use software wouldn’t be selling so much.

I can’t tell if you are simply stating how the world currently is or claiming that it is destined to always be that way, but in either case I don’t see how “people prefer convenience” is a good argument against trying to help them get over that preference. I don’t think convenience is nor should be the end-all-be-all of existence, in fact it can be actively detrimental to life when prioritized.

Unless I’m mistaken, the average user wanted asbestos in their walls, lead in their paint, and asked their doctor for menthol cigarettes instead of regular ones when said doctor was prescribing them for stress. The average user in the USA couldn’t tell that their milk was full of pus and mixed with chalk to the point it was killing their babies, all for the convenience of still owners and milk producers. Their society had built up so much around the convenience of drinking milk in places that couldn’t produce it locally, that it took an Act of Congress as well as the development of technology to safely transport milk long distances before the convenience stopped killing people.

Don’t get me wrong, convenience is great when it doesn’t come at the expense of our well-being - in those cases it tends to dramatically improve our well-being. I tend to agree with @subignition@fedia.io that currently the software market is overly delivering convenience to the point that it is negatively affecting our collective well-being - with regards to software, at the very least.

Also, wasn’t Trump the reason the largest non-nuclear bomb in the USA arsenal was first used in combat? The bomb that had never been deployed in the almost 15 years since it’s creation specifically because the US military thought it would create too many civilian casualties?

The same Trump that allegedly wanted to nuke hurricanes to disrupt them before they hit the US’s coast?

The dude just wants to play with the shiny toys and see things go “boom”. He has literally stated to his own biographer that

When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different."

(source: The Week)

I suppose it suits him just fine that Israel is now flirting with open warfare with their neighbors.

Paging Ray Bradbury… https://www.libraryofshortstories.com/storiespdf/the-veldt.pdf

I have gotten cynical to the point of assuming the “endgame” here is properly kicking off WW3, so that Trump gets an excuse to drop a nuke or two on an adversary.

“The last time we had a world war, we won it! We were the best - and we won it with our nukes, our big beautiful nukes - it’s really a shame we haven’t used them since, don’t you think? We ended the war by dropping 2 on Japan, and now Japan is our best friend. Why don’t we drop some nukes on Iran? Don’t we want them to be our friend?”

If this turns out to be a measurable and reproducible effect for most humans, online gambling and video game loot boxes just became a while lot scarier in my mind.

Alexa, play Owl City - Fireflies

More seriously, I’m pleased to see I’m not the only person who views this as a terrible loss.

I suspect there is wisdom to be learned from forest management, specifically how regular, small controlled burns are how you avoid huge, unmanageable forest fires.

It’s probably not what you’re imagining, but there is the lemmynsfw instance which is a Lemmy instance that is more or less explicitly for porn.

But there is one other, probably even more important advantage: Prolog is a programmer’s and software engineer’s dream. It is compact, highly readable, and arguably the “most structured” language of them all. Not only has it done away with virtually all control flow statements, but even explicit variable assignment too! These virtues are certainly reason enough to base not only systems but textbooks on this language.

The 90s certainly were a different time…

Which raises a larger question: Did prompt engineering roles ever truly exist?

All experts interviewed for this piece were skeptical. The market itself was real enough: The North American prompt engineering market was valued at $75.5 million in 2023, with a compound annual growth rate of 32.8%. But whether that translated into formally titled roles is another matter.

… How can the market be “real enough” if we can’t tell if any jobs actually existed? Maybe I just don’t know enough about economics.

Yeah, that’s closer to the truth. Also, state education makes sure that we are at least aware of a certain few parts of our history, from executing our King and subsequently fighting off most of Europe to preserve the republic, to armed resistance when the Nazis occupied and the state capitulated, and finally De Gaul’s staunch non-alignment (as far as Western former empires go). Not to mention that the biggest improvement in the collective safety net for our society was obtained thanks to an ostensibly leftist coalition in the 1930s.

So it’s very much in our collective consciousness that we can protest, and that it’s a pretty normal thing to do, all things considered.

More to your point, I don’t know how many people here in France still expect protests to meaningfully obtain anything nowadays.

The magazine coming with a free operating system is something that will probably never happen again. Wild to think about.

Does this make “be gay, do crime” easier or harder now?

I don’t expect ai/LLM tools to make it easier to create nice looking art, but they should make it easier for anyone to create their own placeholder graphics that at least would allow them to run the game on their own.

I mean, France adhered but still let Netanyahu fly through it’s airspace to reach the US.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/france-criticised-allowing-netanyahus-plane-use-its-airspace

I agree with OP, but also agree that Europe as a whole is only marginally better for “freedom” than the USA.

Interesting news, to be sure. It’s a shame that the article’s “What People Are Saying” section is really “what high-placed Russian officials are saying”.

Thank you, OP, for sharing an archive link.

I don’t think anyone can host a relay right now aside from bluesky.

People can host their own data / Personal Data Server, which is somewhere between self-hosting a mastodon instance and creating an account on someone else’s instance. The actual equivalent would be self-hosting your masto account separately from any instance (which is just not a thing with the current state of mastodon nor activity pub).

Sometimes it’s been butch cis women being accused of “being a man”.

Hate and bigotry really break people’s minds, it’s sad to see.