$60 can buy you a lifetime license for the Affinity Designer 2, which is a fantastic alternative to Adobe’s Illustrator, which some people can’t live without. AFAIK, Serif isn’t backed by a venture capitalist as well. So, are you still happy paying $20 more for a social media app?

Like, look, I get that we should support devs for what they do, especially if they don’t take venture capitalist money to sell their products for cheap to gain market share. But this seems really overpriced. What are you getting with an $80 app for social media?

DoFo looks for what gets him votes and does the thing. I’ve, thus far, seen no other principles behind this man, maybe except for his obsession with Toronto. Of course he’ll play Captain Canada cause why would you not play that to get people to think they can rely on you? He targeted bike lanes because Ontario is car-centric and most people are forced to be motorists, who are generally inconvenienced by bike lanes in the short term, and it’ll get him the support he wants. He struck down education workers’ rights to strike, because families are inconvenienced, and there are a lot more families than there are education workers. 200 bucks rebate with no regards to the cost of actually sending out that money, just because it’ll most probably get him the support he wants.

And lemme guess what we’ll hear in the next couple of weeks or months:

“I’ve made the best deals with Canada and Mexico. They’ve been rude and uncooperative in helping us secure the borders, but now look, they had to.”

And then there’d be the the suckers and ass-kissers:

“Fentanyl’s not a thing anymore in the USA because of Trump.” (says a person who lives in a neighbourhood never affected by fentanyl abuse)

“President Trump has made our country more secure than ever, preventing illegal immigrants and drugs coming in from Canada and Mexico, while making them pay for it.” (vixen news or something)

“Illegal immigration was at an all time low under President Trump.” (says a person who’s never looked at the stats)

Given what was actually realized, Trump did not have to play coy and use tariffs as threats, and it would’ve been a rather easy call to ask for what he wanted. He’s essentially sent US allies on a wild episode to essentially bully them to show off his regained powers.

Oh, and of course he only “pauses” the damn thing. He could re-use it after all. Classic bully behaviour.

I don’t think I’ve known of a “designated tourist area” in Japan. I lived there for a month in some town that I doubt there’d be any foreign tourist and nobody harassed me and my friends. We were even helped by the locals and police when one of my friends lost their wallet, and they were super patient about it too.

I’ve read (in Japanese, written by Japanese people) that those places will actually welcome you in if speak Japanese and is respectful of the place and other patrons, the latter 2 conditions just like any respectable human should. It could be that they’ve put those up due to xenophobia, but there are also those that just don’t want to deal with people who don’t respect their culture.

Which will in turn affect business. Nobody can buy their stuff is nobody has the money for it, unless their plan is just to keep the wealthy people alive, while at the same time, making them poorer

It might take a while for this to play out though.

Fwiw mentioning, the level of fentanyl crossings is not even high, and is simply an enlarged wedge issue for the Trump administration to stave off dissuaders and forcibly push their way pass Congress to do whatever they want.

You could create an account that blocks off communities for news and technology, and any other communities that have a high likelihood of reporting on current events. Just switch to the account on days where you just don’t want to read such news, for any respectable reason you may have (it’s understandable, it can be draining).

This should be a no-brainer, but Lemmy doesn’t really filter stuff out by default, unless the admins decide so. So as long as you’ve created an account on a fairly managed instance, and given that the current news cycle, especially in the Western & English-speaking world, you won’t be able to escape Trump and Musk, especially when they’re dominating headlines due to how they are literally affecting the lives of millions, if not billions, of people.

For some, human pride and dignity have literally no value, or is something they will hold simply to trade it off whenever convenient, especially in a world that can value it, so it’s just like a commodity.

It’s the 21st century. Many of us are educated enough and have a strong enough image of what a country is. Any country may try to annex any land, but they’ll almost always face resistance. Even in the event of a full annexation, you can’t stop the people from revolting, essentially making your country look as miserable as possible to everyone. Heck, even the full cleansing of an entire population won’t guarantee you’ll reach long-lasting stability on annexed lands; people will hide, repopulate, teach their descendants about their past and forever torture your nation and its people, however horrifying of a worldview it may sound like.

I remember reading somewhere that some department in the US gov have a paper on their inability to annex or even control foreign lands and their people. Essentially, it doesn’t matter if the USA has the most powerful military in the history of humanity; it cannot conquer the minds of people today, and will suffer from instability for a very long time.

Says the company that literally crawled the Internet without anyone’s permission to train their damn model.

Rules for thee, not for me.

You come from a healthy background is what I’m hearing. And that’s good, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. What you have there is absolutely the right mindset to have. These tools are made by humans, who have their own set of problems they want to solve with their tools. It may not be the best tool, but it can work pretty damn well.

However, it’s also not uncommon to see communities rage and fight over the superiority of their tools, if not just to shun those that they think are inferior. It’s a blatantly childish or tribalistic behaviour, depending on how you look at humanity. And you’ll see this outside of programming too; in the office, in town, on the streets. People engage in this behaviour so that they can show that “I am on your side”, for the side where they think is the right or superior side, based on factors like a perception of group size, a perception of power, a perception of closeness. It appeals to a common human desire to belong to a strong group. It appeals to the human desire to feel safe. And when you start looking at it that way, that’s not too different from how animals behave. It’s important to note that not all humans have the same amount of desire for this sort of tribe, or would give into that desire to engage in such behaviours, but it’s not surprising to see.

In any case, this article is essentially a callout to the sort of toxic behaviour done for the sake of feeling superior, that exists within the programming community, to a point where some may even say is a major subculture.

Didn’t something similar happen just a couple months ago?

This. Any time someone’s tries to tell me that AGI will come in the next 5 years given what we’ve seen, I roll my eyes. I don’t see a pathway where LLMs become what’s needed for AGI. It may be a part of it, but it would be non-critical at best. If you can’t reduce hallucinations down to being virtually indistinguishable from misunderstanding a sentence due to vagueness, it’s useless for AGI.

Our distance from true AGI (not some goalpost moved by corporate interests) has not significantly moved from before LLMs became a thing, in my very harsh opinion, bar the knowledge and research being done by those who are actually working towards AGI. Just like how we’ve always thought AI would come one day, maybe soon, before 2020, it’s no different now. LLMs alone barely closes that gap. It gives us that illusion at best.

Is there anyone here who’s familiar with the paper(s) mentioned in the article? I’d actually like to read them, so if you do, it’d be great if you could share it with me. I couldn’t really find it in the article, unless it’s just hidden under one of their links.

I found the following paper with the authors mentioned:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.11582

But not sure if that’s it. It does have some semblance to the topic though. My search-fu isn’t really doing me great with just author names though.

Most of us can’t help but feel powerless while trying to change the world. That’s normal, because the reality is, no one can change the world as quickly as we can make a turn at the next junction. Not Donald Trump, not Elon Musk, not Vladimir Putin, not Xi JinPing. They’ve spent decades getting to where they are today, but the best they can do is do big strokes to sway the world to some extent. And these people just look so lonely; nobody seems to really understand them, neither do they seem to truly understand people, aside from knowing enough to take advantage of them, and they put up some sort of distance between themselves and others, distance in various ways you can measure. Meanwhile, most of us spend our times to be close to those we love and care, trying to be a part of a larger society in a healthy and responsible way.

If the alternative is to give up and watch this beautiful world burn and die, watch wonderful people suffer and I turn a blind eye to their pain, I would rather continue trying, and one day die knowing that I tried, instead of regretting alone.

The world? Or just many world governments that have the power to do so? There are many people out there doing what they can to dissuade governments from supporting the genocide, and they make up a fair size of “society”. Do you no longer care about them then?

You care. You’re just tired of seeing that nothing’s changed despite people’s efforts. But that’s totally okay. Great powers don’t and won’t immediately change to what we desire it to be, and there is a vested interest for some to keep the status quo, so it’s hard. We get it, and so do you.

Go take a rest.

Knowing how these people behave, it’s “rules for thee, not for me”, and “yes that’s true but every woman should follow, but I’ll continue to say whatever the fuck I want anyways”. Cognitive dissonance on the surface level does not stop them. It’s always been a “I will say whatever the fuck I want and hide behind some pretty words, and all I have to do is to ignore your criticisms. You can’t touch me.”

I understand that. I have coworkers with about 15-20 years in the industry, and they frown whenever I put a bash script out for, say, a purpose that I put in my example: self-contained, clearly defined boundaries, simple, and not mission critical despite handling production data, typically done in less than 100 lines of bash with generous spacing and comments. So I got curious, since I don’t feel like I’ve ever gotten a satisfactory answer.

Thank you for sharing your opinion!

I’ve never had that impression, and I know that even large enterprises have Bash scripts essentially supporting a lot of the work of a lot of their employees. But there are also many very loud voices that seems to like screaming that you shouldn’t use Bash almost at all.

You can take a look at the other comments to see how some are entirely turned off by even the idea of using bash, and there aren’t just a few of them.