All we need to do is find a woman bigger, faster, and stronger than him, and then he's officially a woman by his own legislation.

Sure.

Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation will probably eradicate polio.

Before people jump on the bandwagon about how Gates is evil and problematic, that there are no virtuous billionaires, and a government or an NGO or an equivalent should have been the one to do it... I know. But the question was "name one billionaire that's done anything good," and I think it's pretty difficult to argue that eradicating polio isn't good.

Yeah it's truly awful.

The worst part is how disingenuous it is. It clearly exists because Google:

1. Wants to circumvent ad-blockers since ads are its primary business model, and
2. Link butts in chairs more closely to web browsers so they can sell better advertisement targeting.

If they just said they were doing it because they're an advertising company and they need better ads targeted to people, at least they would have the benefit of honesty. And in that case you might actually get some big sites on-board; like if a site can explicitly say "I need to recoup hosting fees and the only way for me to do that is targeted advertising and that makes this easier/better" there's actually a value proposition there.

But don't pretend this is for the benefit of consumers or the Internet overall, and definitely don't cloak your meaning behind vague platitudes about identity authenticity.

I'm only going to answer the first part of your question, not the AI/generated part.

No one really chooses what or who they're attracted to; it kind of just happens to you. For example, you might be watching a TV show and someone gets lightly, comically spanked... and suddenly a light bulb goes off above your head and you think, "whoa, that might actually be kinda fun." People are wired in ways we don't understand to want things we don't even know we want.

To that extent, pedophiles are themselves victims of their own desires; there's no "logic" behind it. It's simply an urge they experience.

Of course that doesn't make succumbing to this urge excusable, and any children who are impacted are of course victims and the pedophiles, predators. But no one is training pedophiles in pedophile camp. It's just humans being human, unfortunately.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful. — Seneca

The older generation has basically always resented the younger generation for:

1. Their lives being easier,
2. Their music and clothing being awful,
3. Doing sex wrong.

It's like a constant of recorded history. The Romans said these things in ~300BC.

I want to imagine Republicans actually care about driving out good teachers. But getting rid of education is probably just a win for them.

Out of the top collections, the most common price for an NFT is now $5-$10.

Still overpriced!

It’s always the people you most suspect.

There’s nothing inherently superior, just what people like more. If you want to use Mint that’s totally fine and valid.

“We have a man who is totally corrupt and the worst president in the history of our country, who is cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead, and who is now in charge of dealing with Russia and possible nuclear war,” Trump said. “Just think of it. We would be in World War II very quickly if we’re going to be relying on this man.”

Obviously, Trump meant to say “World War III.” Insisting that we’re on the brink of another great war, and maybe even nuclear annihilation, has been part of his stump speech for months. But that isn’t the only line he flubbed. At another point in the speech, Trump seemed to mix up Biden and Barack Obama, suggesting he’s currently leading his predecessor in the 2024 polls.

Lol.

This has been their platform literally forever; rather than have to learn anything or improve themselves, just deny that knowledge or betterment exists.

A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women,

As suspected but also yikes.

A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.

Also pretty clear. He wants to be a tinpot dictator in the same vein as Putin and Kim.

CNN reached out to the Trump campaign Monday afternoon, telling officials there that a former administration official had confirmed, on the record, a number of details about the 2020 Atlantic story, without naming Kelly, and seeking comment. The Trump campaign responded by insulting the character and credibility of retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley, who had nothing to do with this story.

Lol.

I’m so sorry this happened to you!

Allow this gay to say: you are 100% a real woman, full stop.

And anyone who thinks otherwise is a transphobic asshole, not a queer ally or interested in queer liberation, and you are better off without them in your life.

So they can inject their versions with malware.

That's it, I'm convinced -- I definitely won't vote for him now!

I went full Linux a few months ago and haven't looked back. Steam has superb support for basically everything I could want to play -- in some cases I feel like Linux actually performs better than Windows on the same hardware. I really appreciate the huge investment Valve made into making Linux gaming work.

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

But I was assured racism was over because Obama was President!

Putin simps and tankies defending the war are just mind-blowing to me. It smacks of Nazi sympathizers in World War 2 arguing that Hitler can do whatever he wants in Poland.

Why did Hunter Biden do this??!

The power a government has over you, and the power your employer has over you, are totally different.

The government is legally authorized to separate you from your possessions, your freedom, and even your life in extremis. Your boss can't do any of that and if they try the government should stop them.

Some people believe democracy is what prevents the government from punishing you capriciously, or allowing corporations to just do whatever they want to you. So they are willing to die to defend it.

I would say traditional liberal ideals are closer to what they'd want to defend than democracy itself, and I don't 100% agree in either case, but I can see the point of view.

What, after firing all of them and removing their best tools?

Hilarious that there are still people accusing the Ukrainians of being neo-Nazis.

It's much more difficult to reach and sustain 30 mph on a pedal bike, and if you're doing that you're typically quite invested in it. E-bikes on the other hand it's really easy to get to a very high speed, and I frequently see people doing it while on their phone, without wearing a helmet, and/or with additional passengers.

I think a little bit of education here could go a long way.

Your siblings and cousins are gaslighting you.

Your feelings are valid.

If you love someone more than your mother as a mother, then you love that person more than your mother as a mother. That's totally fine.

Many LGBTQ+ people have to create their families out of caring people that they meet and come to love and trust, because their families reject and hate them. Those bonds are as valid (and in some cases many times more valid) than bonds of mere blood.

[GPT-4] is fed, like, a line of text from some source, but with the last word missing. It guesses what the last word might be, and then it gets told whether or not it got it right so it can adjust its internal math.

GPT-4 cannot alter its weights once it has been trained so this is just factually wrong.

“It had to build, in its internal wirings and all its software neurons, some understanding of what an egg is - In other words, to get the next word right, it had to become intelligent. It’s quite a thought. It started with nothing. We jammed huge oceans of text through it, and it just wired itself into intelligence, just by being trained to do this one stupid thing.”

LLMs are really cool and very useful, don't get me wrong. But people get excited by what they seem to do and lose sight of what they actually can do. They are not intelligent. They create text based on inputs. That is not what intelligence is, unless you have an extremely dismal view of intelligence that humans are text creation machines with no thoughts, no feelings, no desires, no ability to plan... basically, no internal world at all.

An LLM is an algorithm, not an intelligence.

I seriously doubt these people would be suing if their “investments” had gone up in value. They speculated and they lost; claiming Sotheby’s misled them seems absurd when millions of people were shouting from the rooftops that ugly JPEGs are worth nothing regardless of how much math is done to them.

Can we please stop with the drama

Makes another post discussing the drama

This article has a very weird definition of the word "conservative."

It argues that Democrats working to restore reproductive rights to women is a conservative value, because it's trying to return to the Roe v. Wade detente that existed prior to this Supreme Court. But that ignores the entire history of the conflict, which is that conservatives, traditionalists, and the Religious Right fought long and hard to undo women's access to reproductive rights... against liberals. Now that they've succeeded, they're not suddenly liberals and Democrats are not suddenly conservatives. These words mean something other than pro-status-quo and anti-status-quo, which this author seems to ... not know I guess?

And even if you were somehow to say "Republicans are anti-status-quo and Democrats are pro-status-quo," in what sense are Democrats protecting the current abortion status quo? Improving women's access to reproductive healthcare is an explicit Democrat goal.

You can use exactly the same framing to claim that Democrats are conservative about LGBTQ+ rights because they fight hard to protect and expand existing LGBTQ+ protections. But that's not politically conservative; that's still a liberal goal.

Anyway, strange framing, Atlantic!

Yeah I think this is a pretty valid concern. It's similar but more subtle to what explicitly happened at the Economist.

The New York Times would never allow op-eds or culture articles wondering guilelessly whether Jews are actually who they say they are, whether they regret their religion, or indeed if Jewish identity exists at all. They'd never pen multi-page articles tenderly and sympathetically exploring the lives of those opposed to Black people's political and social power. Yet that's totally okay when it comes to trans people.

The Gray Lady's assumptions about the questions that are permissible to ask about trans identity need to shift to match expectations around any other minority identity.

Consider first whether or not this is really your news to share. Maybe the mutual friend would want to come out themselves?

If you feel you must, it’s okay to dead name informationally/correctively. (I.e., “let’s go meet up with Jack” “oh, Jack is Jill now, just so you know!”) It’s bad contextually, like when used to deny the person’s gender identity or transition.

This title definitely makes it sound like this is a Democrat policy goal or that Democrats are actually responsible for this, when actually, as the article gradually makes clear, the people responsible for this are opposed to mainstream Democrat goals:

Democratic lawmakers and the Joe Biden administration have touted a wealth tax as a way to tackle record levels of inequality and fund programs that slash poverty and expand access to health care and education.

The people involved are not politicians. They are an advocacy group and apparently unaffiliated with the Democratic organization at large. The main guy seems as "Democrat" as Tulsi Gabbard, since he spent a lot of time and energy defending Trump and his policies on various talk shows.

Anyway, kind of a disingenuous framing.

There's enough weird pro-Russian tankies around I'd believe it's at least partially native.

Oh no!

Anyway

It benefits the end-user.

People do not want to be in dependency resolution hell; where they have three programs that all use different versions of libssl and require them to install all of them properly and point each application to the correct one. Most users have no ability to resolve problems like that. By not bundling, the application developer is forcing them to either try anyway or just not install their software.

Bundling dependencies with Flatpak or Snap helps the end user at the cost of only a few extra megabytes of space, which most users have in abundance anyway.

This is really a microcosm of the problem of "free speech communities." They wind up being infested with trolls and Nazis.

The only plausible reasoning for the admin not banning this community is they don't mind it. Glad Beehaw is not federated with a place like that.

We have. There’s no evidence for them so scientifically they’re donezo.

The craziest part is these people are volunteers and were the entire reason his stupid site worked to begin with. Why go to war with them? They can just walk away, they never got anything out of this to begin with. And why would anyone new join up if the previous generation is being treated this way? Just super mysterious behavior overall.

Well yeah. Google is an advertising company.

I do hope this is shooting themselves in the foot though. Users largely would see no advantage to this, and there are several very immediate downsides.