From Wikipedia:

These were defined by October 2010 as part of the Unicode 6.0 support for emoji, as an alternative to encoding separate characters for each country flag. Although they can be displayed as Roman letters, it is intended that implementations may choose to display them in other ways, such as by using national flags. The Unicode FAQ indicates that this mechanism should be used and that symbols for national flags will not be directly encoded.

I don’t think you’ll be able to find a source that specifically says “yeah, they did this to avoid having to make a decision about which countries are important/independent enough to have flags”, but like… why else would they go with this more complicated system over just defining separate codepoints for each flag?

Alternatively: The only ethical consumption under capitalism is eating the rich

This reminds of how when the unicode consortium had to add flag emojis, instead of opening the can of worms on what countries are independent or not, they just noped out of it and let the implementers decide which combinations of regional indicator letters render as country flags.

Yeah, time to slam that word out of existence!

Nah, no need to bring those back. The role is already filled by microplastics and PFAS

Aside from the political stuff, I’m also concerned about proton from a technological standpoint. You can’t use a standard mail client with proton, you have to use their own. So, if they wanted to, they could push out a single malicious update which would render all of the end-to-end encryption stuff pointless. You could argue that using Thunderbird + GPG + Gmail is more secure/private.

Now I’m curious, how hard would it be to write a lemmy bot that mimics Stinky’s behavior just to troll people lol. Ask generic questions like “I don’t understand, could someone explain please?” on random posts and then reply with k to any answer with over 4 lines of text. Like a simpler but much more infuriating version of that Tobllort account from the other site.

What does privacy badger do that isn’t covered by UO? Is it worth it to install privacy badger if I already use a browser like librewolf that nukes all data every time it’s restarted?

A lot of people seem to think that all ai art is low effort garbage, which is just not true. There can be a lot of skill put into crafting the correct prompt to get the image you want from an image generator, not to mention the technical know-how of setting it up locally. The “ai art is not art” argument to me doesn’t sound any more substantiated than “electronic musicians aren’t musicians, go learn a real instrument” or “photographers aren’t really artists, all they do is push a button”. But regardless, I agree that we need good tagging, or as @ThatWeirdGuy1001 said, different communities. Even though the output looks similar, actually drawing things and wrangling prompts are two completely different skillsets, and the way we engage with the artistic product of those skills is completely different. You wouldn’t submit a photo you took to a watercolor painting contest. Same with ai art and non-ai art.

Anyway, just thought i’d share my opinion as an ai non-hater.

if they finally decide to turn full evil.

Yeah this is the brave experience. Free and open source product that behaves as advertised… from a company that acts like they’re perpetually on the brink of fucking you over. Really hope this doesn’t happen, brave’s approach to antifingerprinting is actually quite interesting and completely different to what we see in the firefox-based hardened browsers.

I really wish this “haha furries bad” joke would just die already. It’s not funny, even ironically.

I mean nowadays its more like

A lot of people seem to be opposed to this argument, seeing it as a kind of government overreach, but I think it can work if done correctly. Things like USB and HDMI are already governed by collectives of companies, I think having the government work together with them can be beneficial for both consumers and producers alike.

I wouldn’t support it because I don’t like censorship.

At least in my country, google is going balls-to-the-walls mode with the chrome psyop. Like every third ad on youtube is an ad for chrome. And if you’re a little older, you’ll remember their countless other ad campaigns that propelled chrome into the mainstream. The only reason so many people use chrome is because they’re brainwashed into it.

Yes this is so confusing to me. There was a blast of attention about it when it was launched that lasted like a week max and then everyone completely forgot about it. I thought it was a short-run experiment that got shut down. What reason is there to use threads? Are there any actual humans who still use it? I’ve never visited it but something tells me that it’s just like reddit with at most 100 real users and the rest is just bots replying to bots.

I tried using it with a friend, and it completely nuked my phone’s battery, while my friend’s phone silently killed it (likely for using too much battery). I understand that truly privacy-respecting messengers will always use slightly more power than apps that use the google notification thing, but simplex is just a complete power hog beyond any reasonable limit. Hopefully they fix it at some point, it seems like a pretty solid messenger otherwise, and their approach to privacy and anonymity is unparalleled, at least in theory.

computer components aren’t real. It’s all just tiny gremlins doing maths really fast and turning pixels on and off

I can’t decide what is more bewildering to me, the fact that you seem to have a threshold below which certain injustices can just be ignored, or the fact that genital mutilation is apparently below that threshold.