in my head, there’s a direct causal chain:

1. the court presents me with the accusation and the evidence.
2. i declare if the evidence supports the accusation.
3. the judge declares a punishment in response to that verdict.
4. law enforcement delivers the punishment.

if i believe (3) and (4) will function as stated, then it’s equally accurate to say that in step 2 i am deciding whether or not to confiscate $250,000 from this mother and cancel her home internet connection.

but a huge number of people i present this to refuse to admit that equivalence. there is some question about whether weakening the norm might cause more damage than mistreating the mother, but does that even weaken the point? the common answer from those who bring it up is “there’s too much uncertainty to say”: build a complex enough machine, and people are eager to deny the downstream effects of their actions.

(you can overcome most of the degradation-of-norms issue by making this a secret hearing, and still a lot of people will hesitate to admit the equivalence between their verdict in step 2 and the effects of step 3/4)

i’ve had better luck illustrating the point with a less abstract case: the 2000’s called and it’s your turn for jury dury. the case for today is that of a single mother who downloaded some Disney movies off Limewire for her kids to watch so she could get some time to herself to take care of chores.

should the jury find her guilty, you suspect that the judge will fine her $250,000 and cancel her home internet connection. you think such a punishment would do more net harm than good. but you don’t get to decide the punishment (that’s for the judge to announce after the jury deliberates), you just decide the guilty/not-guilty verdict.

you look at the evidence: the mother definitely downloaded those files. what verdict do you deliver the judge?

ourethra

oh god, Cybertruck culture is just incel culture applied to a different topic. different groups, maybe, but the same culture.

crafting a search term has changed over the years though. the old approach of “type 3-5 keywords into the box and get a list of pages that use those words close to eachother” isn’t supported anymore, and the new approach is “type a phrase and we’ll look for things semantically related”.

at that point, the input box isn’t that different from the chatbot box.

that’s a lot to remember and i don’t see the point of it. android girls are perfectly alright with me 👌

i know this form has only two boxes but you gave me this pen and there’s some room in the margin so –

hmm, who’s that lady my Aunt plays bridge with each Sunday? Jill something-or-other? she seemed kind 📝

Acchi Kocchi. just two oblivious kids crushing on each other in that “it’s obvious to everyone except them” sort of way. format wise it’s skit based, almost like if Lucky Star had been written to be more wholesome and less crude.

btw, i’d also appreciate recs from any other Acchi Kocchi enjoyers in the thread 😉

slide out keyboards are a niche that’s just barely hanging on. there’s the F(x)tec Pro, and the Cosmo Communicator, at least. seems they’re more in style for handheld game consoles: i’m crossing my fingers ASUS or one of the other mobile-phone gaming manufacturers will notice that and cash in.

soup is what happens when the fridge isn’t totally empty, but somehow’s still missing a key ingredient for every recipe you can remember.

so i guess that’s not far off, and the rest is just a matter of outlook (and taste)

first birds, now acorns? fvck, man…

troubleshooting sucks, and also, the default security model of desktop linux terrifies me. i legitimately don’t understand how i can be running all this random code off the internet without being pwned. i figure i probably can’t, and that it’s really just a matter of time until something real bad happens.

i went down the “sandbox everything” rabbit hole, and 6 months later random stuff still pops up like “trying to connect to an IPv6 link-local address at this LAN party… wait why don’t i have an IPv6 link-local address? i know IPv6 connectivity works fine when i’m at home.” turns out those NetworkManager hardening patches i’ve been meaning to upstream forever break SLAAC, and now i’m too worried what other edge-cases they break to try pushing them upstream, and now i understand why distros all run these things as root with access to way more resources than they probably need 🫤

so, i try to build a CMake project, i know i’m going to be tearing my hair out for a day. i’ll need the reference open just to know whether pkg_check_modules(A B) is searching for library A and assigning that to variable B or vice versa. and i know that once i do get it compiling, it’ll be another day before i can get it cross compiling from my desktop to my arm chromebook or mobile phone.

so i find a similar project written in meson, where a = find_dependency(b) is immediately obvious to me, and i can make sense of the thing or even tweak it a bit without a manual, just by following the patterns. i build it first try; 80% chance it cross compiles already – 20% chance it doesn’t and i can fix that and send the fix upstream (and now 81% of meson projects cross compile).

the CMake camp: “but we all already know CMake, this new meson thing doesn’t make anything easier for us. cross compiling? that’s called QEMU.” and they’re totally right about both of those things. but that’s useless for me.

sure, it’d be nice if the GTK/KDE split (for example) didn’t lead to so much duplication of the non-GUI parts. but if you just say “no splitting” that’s the same as saying “you half go find some other hobby”. it’s really not an easy thing to sort through all the little differences and steer things such that everyone can feel at home in the same project. that’s work, and unless you’re BDFL it means a whole lot of drawn-out discussions trying to convince everyone to change their ways for someone else’s sake.

link for the lazy

unless not linking is part of the joke somehow in which case tell me off & i’ll delete this.

another issue here is the sheer number of people who drive with their lights off after dusk. because if i flash my lights at them to alert them of it, they don’t get it. because the tendency here is to interpret any form of communication as aggression instead of as communication 😐 which, i mean… “self-fulfilling prophecy” isn’t quite it but it’s not far from the mark.

west coast is too passive about it in some places. i’ve pulled a turn and then seen a car in my mirror like 5 feet from my bumper, slamming its breaks. now i know i need to be more cautious around these low visibility intersections… but he didn’t even honk at me: how much unsafe shit am i pulling without knowing it because nobody ever tells me. honk at me, for god’s sake!

okay so the furries are all in on frontend while the Linux graybeards do the low level C shit. the femboys can’t get enough Rust and are somewhere in the middle doing web backends and services, the transfems like Rust too, but also weirder things like Nix or functional programming and lean more towards OS and systems type of stuff right?

i like this because it explains why the furries seem to have more visibility than the other groups, it lets each group have a little bit of space while still all being part of the same team, and honestly it matches the people i’ve worked with like 80-90%.

nah, the weebs have mastodon, the furries left for bsky, it was a mutual breakup. they left because it wasn’t hip enough, we stayed because oh my god they’re so full of themselves.

source: my avatar (weeabo) and my three intolerable roommates (furries)

from my limited experience, about half? i had to finally set up a robots.txt last month after Anthropic decided it would be OK to crawl my Wikipedia mirror from about a dozen different IP addresses simultaneously, non-stop, without any rate limiting, and bring it to its knees. fuck them for it, but at least it stopped once i added robots.txt.

Facebook, Amazon, and a few others are ignoring that robots.txt, on the other hand. they have the decency to do it slowly enough that i’d never notice unless i checked the logs, at least.

wow, way to devolve into the YouTube comments section, Lemmy. that’s so not fetch.