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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • someone painting him as a morally righteous

    The first thing @seSvxR3ull7LHaEZFIjM said was: “Assange is a bit of a scumbag” …

    The closest thing to “righteousness” said was: “his efforts for freedom of information should not land him in US torture prisons like many others.”

    Which, being true, it’s absolutely not challenged or contradicted by anything you said in response.

    Note that “freedom of information” is totally compatible with “picking and choosing” the manner in which you exercise that freedom. In fact, I’d argue that the freedom of “picking and choosing” what’s published without external pressure is fundamentally what the freedom of press is about.

    Assagne (like any other journalist) should have the freedom of “picking and choosing” what facts he wants to expose, as long as they are not fabrications. If they are shown to be intentionally fabricated then that’s when things would be different… but if he’s just informing, a mouthpiece, even if the information is filtered based on an editorial, then that’s just journalism. That’s a freedom that should be protected, instead of attacking him because he’s publishing (or not publishing) this or that.


  • The packager always should “explicitly require” what are the dependencies in a Nix package… it’s not like it’s a choice, if there are missing dependencies then that’d be a bug.

    If the package is not declaring its dependencies properly then it might not run properly in NixOS, since there are no “system libraries” in that OS other than the ones that were installed from Nix packages.

    And one of its advantages over AppImages is that instead of bundling everything together causing redundancies and inefficient use of resources, you actually have shared libraries with Nix (not the system ones, but Nix dependencies). If you have multiple AppImages that bundle the same libraries you can end up having the exact same version of the library installed multiple times (or loaded in memory, when running). Appimages do not scale, you would be wasting a lot of resources if you were to make heavy use of them, whereas with Nix you can run an entire OS built with Nix packages.




  • Flatpak still depends on runtimes though, I have a few different runtimes I had to install just because of one or two flatpaks that required them (like for example I have both the gnome and kde flatpak runtimes, despite not running either of those desktop environments)… and they can depend on specific versions of runtimes too! I remember one time flatpak recommended me to uninstall one flatpak program I had because it depended on a deprecated runtime that was no longer supported.

    Also, some flatpaks can depend on another flatpak, like how for Godot they are preparing a “parent” flatpak (I don’t remember the terminology) that godot games can depend on in order to reduce redundancies when having multiple godot games installed.

    Because of those things, you are still likely to require a flatpak remote configured and an internet connection when you install a flatpak. It’s not really a fully self contained thing.

    Appimages are more self contained… but even those might make assumptions on what libraries the system might have, which makes them not as universal as they might seem. That or the file needs to be really big, unnecessarily so. Usually, a combination or compromise between both problems, at the discretion of the dev doing the packaging.

    The advantage with Nix is that it’s more efficient with the users space (because it makes sure you don’t get the exact same version of a library installed twice), while making it impossible to have a dependency conflict regardless of how old or new is what you wanna install (which is something the package manager from your typical distro can’t do).



  • Ideally, it would be a P2P protocol where the main seeder is either the content creator directly, or a service paid by the content creator (who is funded by their audience and/or sponsors).

    I believe there are many podcasts that work somewhat like that (minus the P2P part, they just simply use RSS). Some hosting services have features to insert ads into the audio podcast being hosted… so the content creators still can choose to do that if they want, but the advantage is that there’s isn’t a monopoly for a single hosting provider and you can access the podcasts from many different podcast apps without needing to rely on a specific website and company that decides how you can watch it.




  • That might be a particular consensus in English grammar, but it's still 100% dependent on what your linguistics are. If, at some point in time, the consensus in English grammar were to assign different pronouns based on age, or what kind of job that person has… then that would still be a linguistic trait, even if you were linking it to a perceived physiological appearance / job position, they'd be doing it because the community in that language wants to do it, not because biology/economics dictates it.

    So, like every consensus, the only thing making it change is for people in that Universe to agree with the change. Something that happens frequently, and has happened already several times across history.

    300 years ago people used the pronoun "thou" for the second person in singular, and "you" was only used as a plural. And a lot of people pushed back against change too, but change did stick with the community, to the point that today everybody uses "you" and "thou" dissappeared.

    It wouldn't be unrealistic to assume that the same could happen, for example, with "they", another 300 years in the future.


  • This has nothing to do with biology, it’s 100% English grammar. Biology books are not the ones explaining what’s a “pronoun”. In fact, many languages don’t even have pronouns, and yet their biology books can perfectly be translated.

    English grammar is constantly evolving. In fact, it would make it a lot more realistic if there were more strange expressions and mannerisms, even outside of pronouns. Battlestar Galactica did add some funny nonsensical expressions like “frak”, “rook”, “frimp”, “pogees” and popular phrases like “so say we all” that added a layer of depth to their futuristic culture, making it a lot more believable.

    I don’t think this mod really helps with “realism”. It would in fact be unrealistic to expect no linguistic changes at all in 300 years. The only reason why I think some people are mad is because they think it’s pandering to a political agenda so they don’t even want to see an option be given at all… despite it actually being a totally optional and even totally believable aspect of a future hypothetical culture. Whether you agree with the direction that this hypothetical futuristic culture developed towards or not.



  • The mod doesn’t work, though. I can call my male character “Silvia” (a female name). The game gives you the option to choose names that do not match what is culturally traditional.

    They should give you less options. Don’t allow choosing names either.

    In fact, remove character customization entirely, then there won’t be any “imperialism”, right?

    I’d go further: make the game more lineal. Remove meaningful choices for the story. Do not allow the player to play in a way that might end up fitting any particular imperialistic agenda. People shouldn’t have freedom to choose to follow any ideal.



  • Note that “real world truth” is something you can never accurately map with just your senses.

    No model of the “real world” is accurate, and not everyone maps the “real world truth” they personally experience through their senses in the same way… or even necessarily in a way that’s really truly “correct”, since the senses are often deceiving.

    A person who is blind experiences the “real world truth” by mapping it to a different set of models than someone who has additional visual information to mix into that model.

    However, that doesn’t mean that the blind person can “never understand” the “real world truth” …it just means that the extent at which they experience that truth is different, since they need to rely in other senses to form their model.

    Of course, the more different the senses and experiences between two intelligent beings, the harder it will be for them to communicate with each other in a way they can truly empathize. At the end of the day, when we say we “understand” someone, what we mean is that we have found enough evidence to hold the belief that some aspects of our models are similar enough. It doesn’t really mean that what we modeled is truly accurate, nor that if we didn’t understand them then our model (or theirs) is somehow invalid. Sometimes people are both technically referring to the same “real world truth”, they simply don’t understand each other and focus on different aspects/perceptions of it.

    Someone (or something) not understanding an idea you hold doesn’t mean that they (or you) aren’t intelligent. It just means you both perceive/model reality in different ways.


  • Step 1. Analize what’s the possible consequence / event that you find undesirable

    Step 2. Determine whether there’s something you can do to prevent it: if there is, go to step 3, if there’s not go to step 4

    Step 3. Do it, do that thing that you believe can prevent it. And after you’ve done it, go back to step 2 and reevaluate if there’s something else.

    Step 4. Since there’s nothing else you can do to prevent it, accept the fact that this consequence might happen and adapt to it… you already did all you could do given the circumstances and your current state/ability, you can’t do anything about it anymore, so why worry? just accept it. Try and make it less “undesirable”.

    Step 5. Wait. Entertain yourself some other way… you did your part.

    Step 6. Either the event doesn’t happen, or it happens but you already prepared to accept the consequences.

    Step 7. Analyze what (not) happened and how it happened (or didn’t). Try to understand it better so in the future you can better predict / adapt under similar circumstances, and go back to step 1.




  • The AI can only judge by having a neural network trained on what’s a human and what’s an AI (and btw, for that training you need humans)… which means you can break that test by making an AI that also accesses that same neural network and uses it to self-test the responses before outputting them, providing only exactly the kind of output the other AI would give a “human” verdict on.

    So I don’t think that would work very well, it’ll just be a cat & mouse race between the AIs.