Programming started as a hobby for me as a teenager. I always "liked computers" so thought I'd give it a try. I never intended to make a career out of it because it seemed so hard at first, but over a decade later, I'm decently accomplished in my field and get paid bank for it.

As a hobby, it's fantastic. You can add in missing features to open source software you use (including the one I'm posting this to right now!). You can make your own little apps to fill niches you haven't found an existing program for. You can automate boring stuff from other work. You can make mods for certain types of video games. Or if you're really ambitious, you can even make a video game (but I gotta tell you, video games are hard and need much more than just programming -- I do not recommend making video games as a goal unless you've thought out just what that involves).

If you make a career out of it later, cool. But even if you don't, it's a fun and rewarding hobby that costs almost nothing. As long as you have a computer (preferably not a mobile phone, though it's technically possible to use a phone), you can program. Hardware doesn't generally matter. Any cheap laptop works. All the tools you need have free and often open source ones you can use. You only need to pay for web hosting if you make a web tool and want to share it with others.

We don't want your disinformation on this platform, either. :)

Fortunately for everyone, they had to define "woke" during a court case.

DeSantis' general counsel, Ryan Newman, responded that the term means "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them."

So there we have it. Recognizing the flaws in the justice system is woke.

Yeah, it's good to see reporters actually pressing back on these blatant trolls with their well understood tactics. It's a shame, however, that the more centrist media is rarely willing to do the same. It's a common trap that people think you must give equal time to both sides in order to be fair. Reality is that some sides are so dumb and inconsequential that they don't deserve any air time.

It's stupid that the school district even moved the kid to a different class. They never should have caved an inch. That just empowers these maniacs to keep doing this racist, time wasting drivel.

As annoying as it is when someone else breaks the CI pipeline on me, it is utterly invaluable for keeping the vast majority of commits from being able to break other people (and from you breaking others). I can't imagine not having some form of CI to preventing merging bad code.

I don't think that makes sense if you're worried about defederation. Porn instances are particularly at risk of being defederated from (and thus you potentially can't interact with large communities).

It needs to be regulated to hold manufacturers responsible when their software isn't good enough. My understanding is that there already probably is enough regulation and government agencies just need to hold Tesla accountable.

Personally, I'm all for cars driven by AI iff it's better and safer than a human driver. Human drivers make a lot of mistakes and driving is the most dangerous everyday activity many people do. But if the AI isn't better than a human, that's a problem. I don't need AI drivers to be flawless, as that's an unrealistic bar. I just need them to be undeniably better than humans. Everything I'm hearing about Tesla's self driving is that they aren't.

I'm strongly of the opinion that we should never be hiding the domain for either communities nor users. The domain is an important part of both of those. !Technology@beehaw.org and !Technology@lemmy.world are entirely separate communities and may have very different rules, so it's important to know which one you're on.

And for users, impersonation aside (because let's be honest, impersonation could just as easily utilize display names or look-a-like characters), there's also just plain confusion from legitimate users. Common usernames are totally going to be used across multiple servers. If you're seeing comments from john@smith.name and also john@lemmy.world, you're gonna wanna be able to tell them apart (display names kinda run counter to this and I'm not certain they're a good idea).

The problem is that even if 90% of people don't need an SUV or truck, you can't tell if someone is in that 10% that does need it. You can't just look at an empty truck bed. Obviously nobody is gonna use their bed 100% of the time. They might have the truck for work purposes and also use it for personal use. They certainly shouldn't own multiple cars, cause that's even worse.

Spam callers have basically ruined telephone as a medium. For many, a phone call is more likely to be fake and spam than it is to be legitimate. And even if the call claims to come from a source you might trust, good odds it's spoofed and thus cannot in fact be trusted.

A shame on telecoms for not being willing to tackle the problem.

Yeah, it's so weird that they're sooooo in love with Russia and China. They claim to be communist and/or socialist, but those countries aren't what I'd consider to be either of those things. They're just... regular ol' dictatorships full of human rights abuses. Why the hell would they want to support them?

It's depressing how much Republicans want to make a real life Handmaiden's Tale. And what's even more depressing is that they have a sizable number of supporters. Even most Americans support abortion access, but a good chunk of them still either vote for Republicans or stand by and let it happen (ie, don't vote).

Not to mention that this sub is unapologetically pro LGBT while practically every authoritarian government (including particularly those that tankies support) has been anti LGBT. eg, China prohibits same sex marriage and adoption, while forcing trans people to get permission from their family to transition (spoiler alert: they ain't progressive).

Democratic socialism with actual equality for all (which goes hand in hand with the root issue socialism is supposed to solve) makes sense and is reasonable. But that's not what tankies support. They're defined by support for authoritarian states that have nothing to do with equality except pretending that they care about it.

Yeah. A troll might post something like a ton of oversized images of pig buttholes. Who the fuck even has access to CSAM to post? That's something you only have on hand if you're a predator already. Nor is it something you can shrug off like "lol I was only trolling". It's a crime that will send you to jail for years. It's a major crime that gets entire police units dedicated to it. It's a huuuuge deal and I cannot even fathom what kind of person would risk years in prison to sabotage an internet forum.

Because using random tiny servers is worse in other ways. With all due respect, nobody knows you and they don't know how committed you are or how much time you have. When your server gets DDoSed or hits a bug causing data loss, what will you do? Do you have the technological know-how to recover and quickly? If your server suddenly grew and it became more expensive to run, how does anyone know if you will keep paying the bills? If Lemmy has a bad zero day, will you upgrade quickly?

There's no need to answer these questions. I'm not actually asking you personally. But these are the kinds of questions that users have to worry about from random, small, unproven instances.

(Also, Lemmy does not favour small instances because the "all" feed, searching, and going to new communities are all better the more diverse users you have.)

In Canada, carriers are required to only sell unlocked phones for the past several years.

It feels like the obvious first step is for the people with many followers to start posting all their content on multiple sites, so that the second point no longer applies.

The trickiest part is the lack of a fully agreed upon alternative. Do you go to Mastodon, instagram, threads, etc? While some folks might have an alternative that they view as a no brainer, it's pretty clear that there isn't overwhelming consensus. Mastodon seems perhaps the most popular as a direct Twitter alternative, but it regularly faces complaints about usability and discoverability. If people post to both Twitter and some random alternative, if that alternative varies wildly, followers will stay on Twitter cause it's where all their favourites are.

Yeah. I don't understand it even in context.

"This shooting was racially motivated, and he hated Black people," the sheriff said at a news conference. "He wanted to kill n------. "That's the one and only time I'll use that word," Waters said, referring to the racial slur.

Like, what??? Why use it even that "one and only" time?

Lol, the summaries of quotes are hilarious.

Rudy Further Argued That Legal Filings Themselves Are Really Just Meant to Be Wild Guesses

And

The Panel Did Not Buy the “Dog Ate My Evidence” Claims

Or this one-two punch:

Rudy Thought an Appropriate Punishment Might Be a Slap on the Wrist

...

Because Rudy Refuses to Admit He Did Anything Wrong, the Panel Disagreed About the Slap on the Wrist

The "fun" intersection of incel with sovereign citizen bullshit.

I don't agree at all. SR3 and 4 were peak for me. I don't want a game that feels like it lives in the shadow of GTA. SR4 really had it's own personality and it was a ton of fun for me.

Wait, so I know furries exist, but do people really crush on the statue of Liberty, of all things??? I've literally never heard anyone say they crushed on that before.

If it's stable diffusion img2img, then totally, this is a misunderstanding of how that works. It usually only looks at things like the borders or depth. The text based prompt that the user provides is otherwise everything.

That said, these kinds of AI are absolutely still biased. If you tell the AI to generate a photo of a professor, it will likely generate an old white dude 90% of the time. The models are very biased by their training data, which often reflects society's biases (though really more a subset of society that created whatever training data the model used).

Some AI actually does try to counter bias a bit by injecting details to your prompt if you don't mention them. Eg, if you just say "photo of a professor", it might randomly change your prompt to "photo of a female professor" or "photo of a black professor", which I think is a great way to tackle this bias. I'm not sure how widespread this approach is or how effective this prompt manipulation is.

I swear every single JRPG has some kind of precursor race. It's to the point where I'd be interested in seeing alternative ways to keep things fascinating. I actually do love the mystery that "mysterious vanished" precursor races bring, but surely they're not the only way to give that feeling?

Heck, I'd say even give money to those big corps so long as they are being reasonable with the price and availability. Reasonable varies by person, of course. But for me, I'll pay for any $70-90 game (the normal price for new games now in Canada), but stuff like Sims DLC or how the original Mass Effect only let you get DLC through some dumb BioWare credits are cases where I'd pirate no regrets even with my current income.

After all, there won't be AAA games if people don't pay for them. I have (mostly) no qualms with big publishers pocketing a significant profit on those games if they get made well. Bigger problem I have is with games that get rushed to the point of impacting quality, but that's something I see more for changing how you approach that individual title. Stuff like mistreating staff (crunch time) is a bit iffier. I still lean towards giving them my money, since nobody enters the game dev business without knowing it'll involve crunch and I do want the devs to be rewarded for their hard work with a commercial success (cause that's unfortunately just how success is measured in our capitalist society).

Naw, that about sums it up. It's depressing and pathetic.

Similarly, I think it's dumb that places are always starting with decriminalization instead of legalization. Let's be honest. We all know why they do both of these things. They're scared of not appearing hard enough on "crime". They know that there's a ton of scared voters who associate drugs with bad things and they are afraid of losing those voters.

We see the same thing happening in countless places with marijuana, too. Despite many places having already proven that legalization works and does not, in fact, open a portal to hell.

If we accept that shrooms shouldn't be illegal, it doesn't make sense to keep them illegal for longer. Similarly, it doesn't make sense that it's still illegal to sell them. Like, are they expecting that they just magically appear in the hands of consumers? No, I think they know exactly what they're doing and it's all just catering to the older voters who scare easily.

Well, nobody claimed they'd be a moon power, too.

That was why it took me so long to discover I have ADHD (which I got diagnosed with in my 20s, after I had already graduated university).

I recognized challenges I was having, but I both had the issue from the meme and also the issue from your comment. I was a pretty good student despite the ADHD and just developed habits for powering through or "just dealing" with the symptoms. It's a shame, cause now that I'm medicated, it's like night and day. All those periods where I struggled to meet deadlines because I couldn't concentrate... Many of those could have gone away if I had discovered this sooner.

his disdain for the poors.

Correction: his disdain for everyone who isn't himself. He doesn't even treat his own kids well. His trans daughter changed her name to not be associated with him.

If he wants to honor god, shouldn't he become a priest or something? It's bullshit how many politicians think it's okay to push their religious views onto everyone else (and even more bullshit how they don't even get punished or stopped from doing so).

I'm not sure if it's dying because this constantly happens. Practically all the image hosts I grew up died ages ago (and many of their replacements, too). Dead image links in older forums are more common than working links. I think it's very difficult to create a sustainable image and video host, especially when people want to use it mostly in embedded or direct links, which really limits the ability to monetize.

I think websites hosting their own images is often ideal because:

1. It will reduce how many places link to an image, since where forums and social media are concerned, so that if the host of the image goes down, so does the place that links to it, avoid the quite frustrating issue of dead links (which can clutter search results in an unhelpful way -- search results generally will never be able to find the image without the page that references it, anyway).
2. The forum is best able to monetize. Direct links to images on different hosts can't really be monetized, but if it's the same host, then it's just one, obvious host to pay for (and so far, the Fediverse seems to be getting a sustainable amount of donations -- heck, I've donated $20 to my original host so far myself).
3. It ensures that the users of the image are the ones that feel the pain of hosting. When it's a separate image host, it's removed from you. But if it's your Fediverse instance (or reddit or whatever social media), the sustainability is closer to you and thus you're more likely to donate to help it run or be understanding of things like ads.

That said, the big downsides are inefficiency and tooling. Central hosts meant more efficient caching. Stuff like GIFs in particular are often common memes. I bet the 1000 most common memes are reused by thousands of sites worldwide and thus work great in a CDN (content delivery network -- basically a distributed cache for media files). As well, central sites can build embeddable widgets or stuff like GIF keyboards (e.g., the default Android keyboard, GBoard, has GIF support with I think GIPHY and Discord seems to use Tenor). If every site has to host their own, that's a lot of reinventing the wheel. Common libraries can help, but not to the extent that a managed cloud service can.

As an aside, I wonder if Google and Discord pay for that GIF integration into their products?

In Ruby, 0 and "" is truthy,

What the fuck?

Them being mixed feels like the worst part of that.

Did everyone else just stand by while this guy did this? Or was he fired as soon as it was discovered?

Why do they compare it to coke as if coke has a lot of caffeine? It's apparently 200 mg total, which is the same as you'd get from a large coffee in many places (and also a common size for caffeine pills).

I think the risk simply depends on if people understand how much caffeine that is, since they have to regulate their consumption like you would with coffee. Which ironically isn't actually something you have to do with most energy drinks, cause most are significantly less caffeine than coffee.

Logan Paul sucks ass, but as long as it's very clearly labeled, I don't see how this is a problem. And honestly, even then, it's not like Starbucks clearly labels "tall coffee has 260 mg caffeine" (I mean, it's on their website, but I don't believe it's prominently on the menu or cups or anything).

Senate passed the bill by unanimous consent, although several senators stated later that they would have objected if they had known that the bill could pass. No iteration of the bill has passed the House.

WTF? Why the heck would those people have wanted it to fail and why would they vote for it if they did?

And since it got unanimous consent in the Senate, why the heck didn't it go to the house? It's the rare case of a bill that I think everyone likes.

This is the first thing that came to my mind, too. I'm a omnivore myself and admittedly love my meat, but it's very bad for the environment and I can't deny the ethical concerns are there. At the very least, I can see low key vegetarianism being the norm in 20 years, where the norm would simply be to not have meat products, and meat might instead be a more niche diet or simply not the norm.

If lab grown meat manages to become scalable enough, I can also see that nearly completely replacing "real" meat. Once it's at least as affordable, I think "real" meat's days would be numbered. It'd become a thing only for purists/elitists/exotic diners. I would even expect that lab grown meat would eventually become cheaper than "real" meat simply because it would be far faster to grow and take fewer resources than to grow an entire animal to adulthood.

As an aside, would labe grown meat be considered vegan? I think it would be since no animal is harmed in the making of it. I imagine many existing vegans wouldn't want to eat something that tastes like meat, but it would be the thing that converts practically everyone else. I sure don't see why I'd ever want to eat "real" meat again if I could get a comparable lab grown meat that doesn't harm animals and is better for the environment. That's just a win win.

Sadly yeah. We absolutely should use email signup because it filters our the absolute lowest effort bots, but it does nothing against higher quality bots or humans. Not only can you easily spin up new emails on the fly, but many emails allow ways to make the email appear unique (eg, Gmail ignores dots and anything after the + sign), there's plenty of temporary email services with a variety of domains, and if you own a domain, you can trivially create unlimited emails until they catch on and ban the entire domain.

Inactive admins are also an issue, but if malicious users are determined enough, it doesn't matter that much how active an admin is. An active admin can mostly help by making IP banning an option (imperfect, but will work on many humans) and can temporarily turn on approvals to make it easier to weed out low hanging fruit. Nothing will work against someone determined enough, but could at least reduce how many instances they can turn to.

Do you know how many people literally die every summer because they don't have AC (let alone simply suffer)? AC is becoming a growing necessity.

Besides, AC is pretty small game compared to the big polluters.

What kinda adult would care about your ISP knowing you watch porn?

VPNs are often over blown. Their ads will make it seem like they're some critical privacy thing, but these days virtually every website is encrypted (HTTPS). Your ISP can know the IP address you're visiting (and thus typically the site), but pretty much everything else, including what page you're viewing on the site, is known only to you and the site in question. VPNs had a lot more merit before HTTPS was ubiquitous.

They're still useful if you're visiting illegal sites or using peer to peer technology (most particularly illegal torrents), but that's not the case for many and certainly not for just viewing normal porn.