DomeGuy @ DomeGuy @lemmy.world

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1 yr. ago

HIPAA is the worst sort of law: it prevents good outcomes, like publicing known spreaders during a pandemic outbreak, yet fails to prevent bad outcomes like "you don't need to lie to your doctor."

Your analogy is more telling than you think it is, and argues rather strongly against the idea that right wing transphobia has worthwhile points.

Yes, the (non) existence of God Almighty is both philosophically and scientifically unfalsifiable. But we don't as societies use this to assert that every last person who proclaims a faith is telling an intentional lie about belonging to a religion

Gender is not like whether or not God exists, but is instead like what church you attend.

Webassembly is a thing, and it's only a matter of time before Google or Microsoft ship either a dotnet runtine or a go interpreter or some other FOSS shippable component as a chromium plugin or something.

It's absurd and embarrassing and utterly devastating to our prestige, but "western" countries mucking up the rest of the world is very fucking much precedented.

Heck, name a country that hasn't done that and wasn't founded because of it, and I'll... Well, show you a young country with a strong ally who did all their mucking for them.

I wouldn't tease if I didn't love. :)

Americans think the French mock our food culture in the way that we mock their military resolve -- only in jest, or on the lips of the dumbest citizens of our respective countries.

America's far too obese to not have amazing food, and we would still be part of the British empire (or speaking German!) if the French did not know how to fight.

Well, good PR and a bunch of recipes that call for them

That we buy croutons in stores is why the French don't believe Americans can cook

Road signs are like zip codes : they aren't assigned based on desirability but volume of need.

While more Americans visit a library or courthouse than visit a prison, such places are almost always highly local. If you or your loved ones are sent to prison, it's probably going to be somewhere you aren't familiar with.

And don't discount that a lot of prisons were built as "job providers* in rural communities, so there are a considerable amount of employees that have to locate the place.

(If you want to be depressed about the American prison industrial complex, look up the statewide budgets for the departments of incarceration and contrast them with highway construction or education )

I wish more pop science reporters would report on "dark energy" and "dark matter" as the questions they are.

Dark energy is "our best models of physics say redshift is due to movement away, and when we apply that model to our best observations the furthest galaxies appear to be accelerating, what the fuck is making them accelerate"?

(Dark matter is, simpler, "why are all these galaxies rotating as if they have way more matter than we can see -- and why the fuck can't we see that matter?")

To be pendantic, science doesn't give anybody facts. It can help identify provable lies and identify the most-useful theories, but when done correctly it cares only a little more about "fact" as it does "truth".

Basic fundamental theorems like "reality is real" are pretty entwined in our language, though, so the distinction isn't always a useful one.

By way of rambling example : my phone tells me that it's 12:30 now and 26 degrees F outside. You in reading this only know as a fact that it's what the text says. You don't strictly know:

• That I actually wrote it
• That I actually looked at my phone
• That I faithfully reported it.
• That I believe it to true
• That the phone is an accurate report of the local weather station
• That the weather station was calibrated correctly
• What the expected variation between that station and my residence is.

For all practical purposes you can assume that they're all true and factual, though. But they're neither definitely true nor even scientifically useful facts.

Justices can absolutely be impeached, but Congress has three other levers they can pull to reign in a rogue court

1. Re-size the court, as you stated.
2. Specifically deny the court jurisdiction over certain matters.
3. Define exactly what "good behavior" means
4. Amend the constitution to do even worse.

The first is most likely because it's simplest and there's precedent. The last is least-likely because there hasn't been a successful amendment proposal since before Roe.v Wade.

The middle two are fuzzier and more uncertain, and would need congress to either impeach or stand firm with a clear consequence if the court attempts to ignore such action. Either can start with a simple majority vote action of Congress, however, which makes them possibly more likely than the others.

(Or maybe the Dems will sweep the 2028 midterms and President Jeffries can have a two-year term as "president fuck you". Although I don't think he has the temperament for it.)

"oh, some of us should starve so that the stuff I buy at Kroger is cheaper" is an indefensible position, even if wages and marker prices were strongly correlated. Which they aren't

They say "people will work less" like it's a bad thing.

It's cute that you think anyone who would co-opt a beloved brand like Firefox to make an "AI browser" would be at all stopped by past habits.

Screen shots are not developed by massive art theft, nor does the creation of such a feature burn so many megawatts of data center energy that it makes Bitcoin farming look efficient.

"Opt-out" means on by default. Installed alongside the parts that you use, and quite possibly embedded into the thing so thoroughly that the next automatic update or feature iteration will either switch it back on or remove the option entirely.

LLMs are controversial to say the least, and accomodation to those who are repulsed by their inclusion should not take the form of an option they need to jump through hoops to turn off.

Leaving them in but saying they can be turned off is like shipping pornography in your video game with a filter someone in the options you can enable. It's a pain in the ass at the least, and means that anyone making a moral or ethical stand against its inclusion has no choice but to go elsewhere.

It may vary by your smartphone, but even back in the days of T9 texting there were settings to automatically insert the period with two taps of the space bar.

Sorry if I was too obtuse to be clear.

It's subtle. In fact, it's a repurposing of a technique that whole generations of typists used to employ. Back to when typewriters were a thing. When monospace fonts made two spaces after each sentence a common thing.

"fake" diversity with an obviously proprietary option is substantially better than a fake "open" environment where the only web browser options are either made by a single for-profit company, a reskinned derivative of that for-profit company's work, or a semi-not-for-profit whose main funding source is that same for-profit company.

In a very real way, web standards beyond "whatever chrome does" died when Microsoft tossed edge's HTML engine for chromium.

None. Modern smartphones have put periods in automatically for so long that anyone bitching about it is just abusively making shit up.

An ellipsis, on the other hand, is passive aggressive. It ... always... implies that something has been omitted. Such as the profanity in the prior sentence.

Honestly, WoT balefire scarring would be epic as fuck. You had a foot replaced when you were young by a wizard,.and in the future the jerk gets balefire'd so hard that his entire lifespan back to when you got your foot replaced is undone.

The charactes's foot appears as a ghostly flicking outline, like the false light if you stare at something too bright for too long. It can make a few marks, but is not solid enough to support the character.

This could just be a clever detail, or it could be a setup for an epic campaign.

This is a consequence of America wanting to pretend that the rest of the government has to be funded in accordance with the constitutional guard against a standing army.

The only thing that Congress does that has a constituonal time limit is fund the army.