Of course bitcoin is a scam. It’s a “currency” you can’t spend anywhere. It’s only purpose is a pump and dump scheme for early adopters.

I was the opposite, I accepted going bald early on and went full-shave for a few years. When it grew back a bit everyone said it looks way better, and I regret spending most of my 30s with a shaved head.

Yeah I always cringe when I see the “hair transplants are gender affirming care” meme. It’s so embarrassing when someone on your side of the argument says something so dumb. Going bald isn’t feminine?

How does this argument not also apply to photography? A modern camera is a computer, you fiddle with the settings, press a button and it automatically makes a picture for you. People produce billions of shitty photographs a day which aren’t art, but that doesn’t mean someone working in photography as a medium can’t be an artist.

In my experience it’s only non-artists who make this argument, because in their heads they’re comparing AI to painting. But for visual artists there are tons of mediums and disciplines where you don’t physically make the marks yourself and it’s the concept and composition that’s important.

There was an exhibition of AI generated art at the big local gallery here last year and I expected artist friends to be against it, but they were just like “oh, that’s interesting”. They just see AI generation as another way of creating an image and whether a particular image is or isn’t art depends on the intention not the process.

Looks like they commited a change to Piped bot two hours ago which accidentally removed the functionality to actually change the link. Whoops!

Absolutely. I tried getting back into Usenet a few years ago and it was like Yahoo Answers.

Funny thing is, my career is more successful than my parents but their pensions are still more than I earn lmao

I suspect a lot of “breakages” were failed pacman updates due to signing issues, before pacman knew to update arch-keyring first. I know one person who moved to another distro when that happened.

Do you have any cases you can point out?

I can’t find it now either, but I’ve read about a German doctor convicted as a serial killer solely because she was present at the deaths of too many patients. In that case she was present at the death of every patient for like 3 months, which sounds like strong evidence against her. Until you think about it and realize that if she murdered them, that means no one died of natural causes for 3 months. Also in that case the number of deaths on the ward actually went up after she was arrested.

Similar but not to do with doctors, Sally Clarke was wrongly convicted of killing her children, purely because both of them had died of SIDS. The prosecution said SIDS is rare and so it happening twice was impossible. What’s worrying about that case is, everyone now says the miscarriage of justice was that the prosecutor incorrectly calculated the chances of two children dying of SIDS, when the actual fallacy was using the statistics as evidence at all. 1 in 73 million is the chance that one specific child will die of SIDS. The chance that any child will die of SIDS is 100%! 200 die in the UK every year! You can’t just go around arresting every parent on the basis that they were unlucky!

What’s really missing in everything I’ve seen is an actual statistical analysis. Everything I’ve seen is just “She was present at 20 deaths, when her colleagues were only present at 10”. Yeah, but how unlikely is that? How many nurses per year will be in exactly the same situation in the UK, or in the world? How unusual was the number of deaths in that hospital while there was supposedly a serial killer operating, versus a normal year?

Sure, the chances of her specifically being that unlucky are astronomical. But the chances that somebody out of the 9 billion people on earth will be that unlucky are pretty good.

Having tried to do something similar, “Nothing, Forever” must have some pretty serious coding to engineer the prompts and reconstruct tiny snippets of AI generated dialogue into a full meaningful script. I wonder if that’s enough for the creators to claim copyright.

We might still be wrong about her.

Honestly this looks like one of those statistical murder convictions. Random chance means that every few years, somewhere in the world, some medical professional will be present at a series of unusual deaths. They end up in prison even though there’s no other evidence.

I’m trying to find out what the actual evidence against Letby was, but so far I can only find one scribbled post it note written during a mental breakdown after being arrested. Which, she could have just been writing down things people were saying about her.

Interestingly twitter’s “block” function did originally just mute people. I remember being blocked in around 2010 and it didn’t stop you following or reading their tweets. At first I was confused when people started requesting the true block functionality - what’s the point when tweets are publicly available to logged out users?

When you’ve never been harassed, like me or Musk or twitter’s original engineers, you don’t immediately understand that allowing (muted) interaction feeds the harassment and can still spread it around into a pile-on by non muted users.

Luckily most people get it now, but it looks like Musk wants to turn the clock back on it.

Honestly I think Beyond Meat/Impossible style burgers are aimed at meat eaters who want to reduce animal cruelty/their carbon footprint. It’s actually kind of annoying they’re so popular now, as restaurants that used to have creative vegan options now sell Beyond Meat as the only choice.

Vegans don’t tend to care if a veggie burger is “realistic”. Some find the idea of meat gross and don’t want to roleplay eating it (my wife says they make her feel sick). Even if you don’t mind, the longer you give up meat the less interesting it is as a flavor. I’d take one of those shitty frozen veggie burgers that are 90% potato over an Impossible burger.

In a mastodon thread this week we estimated that banning private jet usage globally would save about 100 million tonnes of CO2, while normal Americans would save 4.5 billion tonnes by reducing their consumption to global average levels.

Disproportionate harms are annoying but a tiny minority acting disproportionately still matters way less than how normal people act. Banning private jets is pointless if nothing else changes.

So if billionaires put out a statement that they will never stop private flights, and governments announce that they won’t legislate on it, what’s your plan? Destroy the planet out of spite?