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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I’d say, yes, you are literally consuming your food to take anything of value that your body can extract from it, often at the cost of everything for the thing you’re eating (but definitely at the cost of the parts you eat). Like I’m a bit baffled as to how you can consider it not a form of theft. Hell, I’d even argue it is the purest form of theft there is and quite likely the original theft that only scavengers, photosynthesizers, and other life forms that survive on non-biological sources of energy aren’t thieves in that manner.


  • Bees (and relatives) do it too. If you need to deal with a wasp nest or something like that, do it at night and their defense will be much less enthusiastic.

    When I last dealt with some, knocking down the (small) nests would have a guard harass me until I moved about 10m away from the nest during the day. At night, it would just buzz me a bit before settling back down to rest without me even moving.

    Note that I’m not saying it’s safe to harass a nest/hive at night, just safer than doing it during the day. The ones I dealt with were small enough that I only ever saw a single guard plus one worker, and even during the day, sometimes I’d just fight the one guard instead of running, since it’s hard for a single wasp to sting you if you can track it decently and manage any fear. Trying to deal with a large nest could still be fatal at night.


  • Yeah, I’ve got a logitech mouse but didn’t want logitech’s software on my machine, so I just used the mouse by plugging it in. Which worked, but I had no way of knowing the battery level until the mouse itself started blinking low power.

    When I installed fedora, I was confused a bit because it had a system tray icon saying the battery was charging. I was thinking it thought it was a laptop until I realize it had just picked up the battery information from my mouse. A feature I had written off under windows just worked without me even considering it or needing to install software that was partly about using my hardware and partially about advertising more ways to get my money.


  • Considering all of the comments saying that a big part of this is people not wanting to buy new computers and choosing linux because it will run on their old machine, I’d like to add insult to injury and say I built a new PC before Oct and windows was never even a consideration.

    And despite it being my first Linux install I planned to play games on, everything went smoothly and I’d even say the “setting up the PC to my preference instead of the defaults” step was better because there wasn’t a “figure out how to disable the shit ms really wants you to run for them” substep, or a “figure out what new shit ms added that I’ll want to disable” discovery mode that, with win 10, lasted most of the time I was using it and included “figure out if a recent update reset settings to annoying defaults”.

    I bet this is why people are so vocal about switching to linux whenever there’s another complaint about ms. It went way better than expected, like I was about to do something that would cause ongoing pain and frustration to get away from something even worse, but there’s been nothing at all that has made me miss windows.









  • Yeah, I was talking about the magic of science or extreme coincidences.

    Ultimately (having read your other reply), I don’t think biological definitions are useful when it comes to social things like gender. It’s just trying to change the argument into an easier one. “What is normal?” vs “what is possible?” or “what is ok?”.


  • The word “make” does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to pregnancy. A word like “nurture” might fit better. Once the sperm and egg combine, it starts doing its own thing, the mother’s body just provides resources for it to continue growing and a safe place to do so for the first 9 months give or take.

    So the way to make human egg cells would be to either be conceived as a female and have everything go well enough to grow those eggs, or probably some other methods involving introducing various chemicals to unspecialized cells to trick them into behaving as if that was happening.


  • Yeah, who the hell associates macs with higher competence? Before the 00s, I associated mac users with stumbling on the worse option but not realizing it, after the 00s, wanting to follow trends and/or overpay for hardware to seem rich. They’ve always been form over function, and simplicity over power, which are things that novice uses look for, not more experienced ones.

    Or maybe more experienced ones when most of those experiences went badly and little was learned.






  • Github copilot can do some impressive things, but it also ignores my instructions to not try to run anything and leave testing to me that I’ve stopped bothering saying it and just block the attempt when it asks permission. Just yesterday, it confidently said it had figured out an issue I was debugging with it and made a bunch of code changes that literally only affected comments. If I leave it in agent mode (which allows it to edit code) when asking a question to clarify something and not intending any code changes but wanting to think about the answer (and telling it that), sometimes it still runs ahead and tries to make changes anyways.

    When it does well, it’s uncanny how effective it can be these days, but it’s not reliable enough to be trusted to be in control of the whole system. Plus I don’t trust Microsoft enough to put my data on onedrive, and believe that access to data is the real reason behind their AI push, no matter how much usefulness and reliability improves.