On a related note, I think libraries do need a bit of a facelift, and not just be “the place where books live”. It’s important to keep that function, but also expand to “a place where learning happens”. I know lots of libraries are doing this sort of thing, but your average person is probably still stuck in the “place where books live” mindset, as you allude. I’m talking stuff like 3D printers, makerspaces, diybio, classes about detecting internet bullshit, etc.

Threads like this, with highly upvoted comments like

americans are more propagandized than they think citizens of the DPRK are

They also use sarcasm try to push the narrative that North Korea is actually just fine, OK?

Guys you don’t understand; the West has spoken; we MUST hate North Korea, our governments have already decreed it so.

Many of them are also seemingly physically incapable of communicating without hexbear’s custom reaction images, which is a weird behavior common to many cults. Makes it harder to communicate with the outgroup.

I think LW is defederated from them (or vice versa) so you can’t post over there, but for further examples, try making an account over there and saying that maybe, just maybe, Putin did a bad thing by invading Ukraine, and they’re defending an imperialist.

https://hexbear.net/

I’d be fine with copyright going away altogether. People sometimes object to this on the grounds of “But Disney will just steal your ideas and make money off of them”. If their works don’t have copyright though, you can do the same right back to them.

This is also one reason that I appreciate generative AI. Short-term, yes it will help Disney and the like. Slightly longer-term, why would anyone give Disney money if you can generate your own Marvel movie yourself?

The genie also isn’t going back in the bottle. Copyright is a dead man walking. If you dislike what large companies like Disney are doing/going to do with generative AI, push for anyone training a model to be forced to let anyone whose work went into that model for free.

The original duration in the U.S. was 14 years, plus the option of a renewal for another 14. IMO we should move back to something close to that. One idea I’ve seen is that there’s an initial cost of however much for 7 years, and then the price doubles for every 7 year extension beyond that. Not even Disney can beat exponential growth, and it would force them to pick what they actually care about.

I’d also prefer explicit registration. We’re losing too many works because nobody’s sure who owns the copyright, and nobody knows if it’s safe to archive them.

I’d say that the original Star Wars trilogy should be public domain by now, for a concrete example. Disney can make new stories and characters in the universe and make money off of them, but everyone else should be able to as well.

Also as an aside, here’s Richard Stallman on why the term “intellectual property” shouldn’t be used. It’s an umbrella term that doesn’t really make sense, and more explicit terms like copyright or patents or trademark should be used.

From here:

On occasion, a writer will coin a fine neologism that spreads quickly but then changes meaning. “Factoid” was a term created by Norman Mailer in 1973 for a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it’s not actually true, or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print. Mailer wrote in Marilyn, “Factoids…that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.” Of late, factoid has come to mean a small or trivial fact that makes it a contronym (also called a Janus word) in that it means both one thing and its opposite, such as “cleve” (to cling or to split), “sanction” (to permit or to punish) or “citation” (commendation or a summons to appear in court). So factoid has become a victim of novelist C.S. Lewis’s term “verbicide,” the willful distortion or deprecation of a word’s original meaning.

I think !shortstories@literature.cafe would be a good place for it. The community sidebar says your own stories are welcome. You might want to add that you’re specifically looking for feedback

Sorry, I should clarify I mean first chronologically, not in importance. As in, “here were the warning signs”. Also I’ll concede that this won’t be first chronologically either, it’ll be Guido stepping down as BDFL, and then the Tim Peters thing, then things like this.

To be fair, the comment had been moderated for like 4 days, and was only restored recently after people noticed. Hopefully somebody realized that it wasn’t a good look.

He’s not being run out of the project… yet. This is not a good direction, though. This comes across as the first link that’ll show up in a github gist of “What happened to Python?” in a few years. Hopefully not and it’s all just an automod mixup, but after the Tim Peters btfo, I know what I’d put my money on.

deleted by creator

At this point if I feel like getting fancy with Pandas, I’d reach for Polars first. My experience with it so far has been great

For a direct replacement, you might want to consider enums, for something like

enum Strategy {
    Foo,
    Bar,
}

That’s going to be a lot more ergonomic than shuffling trait objects around, you can do stuff like:

fn execute(strategy: Strategy) {
    match strategy {
        Strategy::Foo => { ... }
        Strategy::Bar => { ... }
}

If you have known set of strategy that isn’t extensible, enums are good. If you want the ability for third party code to add new strategies, the boxed trait object approach works. Consider also the simplest approach of just having functions like this:

fn execute_foo() { ... }
fn execute_bar() { ... }

Sometimes, Rust encourages not trying to be too clever, like having get vs get_mut and not trying to abstract over the mutability.

IMO Hacker News handles this better. Threads/comments are rarely deleted, they’re mostly minimized and you have to log in to expand them

Use Tor for everything. Search for “disposable email”, find a service that you can use in Tor. Sign up through Tor using that disposable email address for any service that you want to post to. Be aware that some services try to deny access to Tor and/or disposable email addresses. Try a different service or a different disposable email provider if you encounter that.

You should define your threat model. Longer essays can probably be deanonymized with stylometry. The above will probably work fine up to maybe the NSA taking an interest in the origins of the essay. You can probably post something to the Fediverse and reputation-wash it to a larger audience by saying “look at this link that i have no affiliation with”, but it’s more likely that someone would figure out that it’s you. You can use the Tor method to post on Reddit, but many subreddits will have automods that delete posts from new/low karma users.

Those verses don’t conflict with evolution. They don’t conflict with anything, because they don’t mean anything. What scientific advancements happened because of those verses? None, because science advanced to the point where we understood how evolution works, and some religious people copied their homework and went looking for meaning after the fact. If those verses meant something, there would have been centuries of progress on evolution before Darwin. There wasn’t.

There’s plenty of things you can convince me of, you just have to provide evidence, which you haven’t done.

What could I say that would sway you into realizing that your religion is as silly as the rest? If the answer is nothing under the sun, then you’re using a cheap rhetorical trick of projecting your intellectual shortcomings onto other people in order to make yourself feel better about them.

He designed you then made your design better. He formed you then made your forms better. We created them and strengthened their forms.

That’s not how any of this works. None of these require the process of biological evolution, they’re clearly written as the islamic equivalent of intelligent design. Those describe some wizard creating something and then working to make it better, which is the opposite of how biological evolution works. Relying on “evolves” having several different meanings (evolves (strengthens in its form)) is not an argument that is made in good faith. The process of biological evolution is not described in any religious literature, including yours.

And Allah has created from water every living creature

I assume you bolded this because it’s important somehow. It’s not, though. It’s a vague allegory that has no predictive power, is not science, and has nothing to do with the process of biological evolution.

At some point you’re advocating for Deism. Which is fine enough, but doesn’t really provide any satisfactory answers. You need to define exactly what you mean by “God” before any further useful conversation can be had.

The scientific process, including evolution, has dispelled the myths found in any religious textbook ever written, including their particular definitions of “God”. I’d suggest you just drop the word and the associated baggage, and start from scratch. Come up with a new word, and define properties for it that make a coherent argument.

I like Bluey and metal, so this shirt is perfect for me

Better than Dreamworks, though

Watching Parks & Rec for the first time, and I also noticed this. IMO it’s missing something, maybe if only one of the characters acted that way towards him or something it would be better. He’s pretty much Meg from Family Guy, and I never really cared for that dynamic either.