luciferofastora

I won’t claim that “my/his/her…” are purely adjectives, but I will make the claim that they’re as much adjectives as they are anything else. Fair, but in that case, when the context is fairly clearly about adjectives as opposed to pronouns, saying “Well, actually…” is just pedantic nerdery… And I’m so here for it.

They’re their own special class of word, but they follow more adjective rules than noun rules, so you’ll see them called all kinds of things Does that make the present participle (progressive) forms of verbs like “writing” adjectives too, because they’re used like adjectives rather than like verbs (“I am tired”, “I am writing”, not “I writing”)? Does it make gerunds (unfortunately identical with present participles in English) nouns because they’re used like nouns (“I like cats”, “I like writing”)? They’re each their own class of word, neither strictly verb (despite being verb forms) nor adjective / noun (despite being used similarly) and I think we should treat them as such. I learned them in line with the declension of pronouns as analogues of nouns (which is generally less significant in English): I, my, me; you, your, you; he, his, him; she, her, her; it, its, it and so on. In some languages they have adjective-like declensions, but I think calling them adjectives is imprecise, because they’re more than that: They generally don’t make much sense without something they’re substituted for. For first and second person, that isn’t immediately obvious, but for third person, you can probably see what I mean: “Her car is rusty. Its tires are flat.” We can infer that “Its” refers to the car, but “Her” doesn’t tell us anything useful if we don’t know who that “She” is. That is a trait of pronouns: They’re substituted pro nomine. I can say “tired cat” and it is a semantically complete. “Her car” isn’t. Hence: I concede that they’re not purely pronouns, but rather pronouns with characteristics of adjectives. Their semantic intention is still to reference some other noun in the context, so I don’t think it’s fair to call them adjectives either.

You mean possessive pronouns? Because those aren’t adjectives. They’re a stand-in for a name: “Jane’s car” - “her car”

Mea sunt ille/illa/illud

How do? “her” isn’t an adjective

anyone that thinks they are safe are probably already being hit. Is that the IT Sec version of “If you think you’re never wrong, you already are”?

The extra knowledge, research and development in everything from materials, human biology, life support systems, to just engineering management improvements yield absolutely massive benefits to life on earth, greatly outweighing the alternative. This is the non-linear aspect of research, where discoveries and improvements in one field may prove useful for other fields as well. Not all research pays off, but you can’t predict what will and won’t, so the “duds” that end up going nowhere are just part of the cost for the bangers that change the world. And who knows, maybe one of those duds may end up going off much later still! Not to mention inspiring people to enter STEM, especially girls who are still hugely underrepresented. Which has incredible benefits. More brains and perspectives examining a given problem increases the chances for useful solutions. Getting women into STEM isn’t a diversity measure for diversity’s sake, but an enrichment of the mental resource pool. because it is leaning towards profit focus instead of benefit focus Now there’s a chorus I’ve heard a hundred times…

Karaoke is kinda like improv comedy: You need an easy, quick setup, then a punchline that’s also easily understood, but not too crude. High-brow comedy has a place, but a club generally isn’t it. For Karaoke, the song is the setup, so ideally you’ll pick a well-known one, while the punchline is the mediocre singing. Singing well is like telling an anecdote: interesting, for the right audience, but not what people go to Karaoke for. Take too long to get to the funny part and the anticipation is gone. Sing too poorly and it becomes unpleasant rather than funny. You can be good at Karaoke as a form of entertainment without strictly being an actual good singer, if you nail that balance and deliver it well.

I was just highlighting the juxtaposition in length and depth between the two comments by dropping a dumb meme one level deeper. I know, I get the meme. I just took it as inspiration for another wordy, serious comment, which I now realise continued the trend. I suppose the apt follow-up would have been some even shorter quip like “OK Boomer”. Instead, you had to make a serious reply of your own and break the chain. Thanks, Obama. I genuinely value your post. And I value your genuine response and explanation. We hope together. Absurdist humour is one of my coping mechanisms for exactly these kinds of topics That I can get behind. When confronted with the absurdity of our great ambitions and worries in face of our own insignificance, what else can we do but make memes? What better way to bear dark times than to make light of them? When life is serious enough, you don’t need to be. Live. Laugh. Shitpost.

Because limited liability corporations were created to avert liability from individuals. His firm is liable, but no single individual within it. Not even the ones making the executive decisions, despite their near-monarchic power. I guess since they’re appointed by a board of directors, it’s something like an electoral monarchy, except the board isn’t democratically elected so it’s a plutocracy by proxy. The ultimate culprit would be - and this is a chorus you’ve probably heard a thousand times on here - the shareholders, and going after them is hard. Particularly when the shareholders are themselves corporations… But the CEO is the pin focusing shareholder intent down into decisions and ultimately action. If they were effectively held responsible for their decisions, it would at least provide some counterbalance to the shareholders’ demands. It could also solve the “shareholders are corporations” issue, since you could make the CEOs of those companies liable for demanding illegal measures from companies they control. Of course, such a drastic change would be hard to actually push through, as things stand, since it would inhibit (illegal) profit and growth and “the economy” is a sacred cow. It’s still worth pushing for, in my opinion, but building awareness and support takes patience and tact to avoid pushing people into political apathy. The alternative I could see (and would prefer, but suspect to be even less attainable) is to dismantle the stock and capital system entirely. What you’d replace it with is a whole separate debate I won’t cover in this comment. Drastic systemic change is difficult to plan and enact, and building and maintaining the new system is difficult in the face of insecurities, old habits, unforeseen challenges that it may not yet have developed effective ways to deal with and generally all the growing pains that come with new things. They’re not mutually exclusive, and the first may be a step on the road to the second. Either way, public support is key, and that is rarely won quickly.

I’ll believe that if and when they actually force me to upload identification to prove that my birthday really is 1970-01-01 and my name really is Nunya Bissnis. Otherwise, it’s really no different from Steam asking my birthday when opening store pages or porn sites asking “click here jf you’re 18” and take my word for it. So long as it’s being enforced just as well as the realName field, I maintain that it is indeed harmless. If the point is to have a hilariously ineffective solution as a fig leaf against a stupid law, I’ll prefer that to efforts to actually implement verification.

It doesn’t as long as other init systems exist Of course, which is why I said it was “somewhat” central earlier in the thread: it’s not universal, even if systemd is widely used. Other init systems generally also have ways to store data (not specifically dates, just in general), and some overarching standard for securely accessing them would be useful for intercompatibility, but that’s a mess as it stands anyway. people can luckily choose, hopefully that will always be the case. Also agreed. Just because I personally come down on the systemd side of the debate doesn’t mean everyone should have to use it. Standards are nice, but there always should be alternatives, in case a standard gets captured by twats (which kinda is the debate we’re having: whether systemd has started bowing to fascists significantly enough to warrant migrating away).

I believe that’s on purpose so people can easily accept it and they can do worse later. That point, I disagree on, because systemd (not) implementing this doesn’t actually make it easier (or harder). Distros that want to comply would just write a file for it somewhere instead. Distros that don’t comply will just not implement any verification process. What systemd does here is offer a solution to secure it centrally (see the commit discussion about the most efficient and reasonable way to wipe that info from memory again). Considering the whole issue, I think its impact on feasibility of verification is minor, while the advantages of standardisation make it preferable to a wild growth of uncontrolled alternatives. Corporations are behind this, don’t forget that. Another user pointed out the concept of anticipatory obedience to me, and in that context, corporations pre-emptively bowing to authoritarian surveillance is definitely a cowardly move. We agree on that. Here’s to hoping this entire discussion becomes just as pointless as you expect the PR to become. If that’s what I end up being wrong about, I’ll gladly take the L for cynicism and the W for privacy.

there’s also a push for making opensource exempt from it Let’s hope it succeeds. Actually, let’s hope the law is overturned entirely. And while we’re at it, let’s hope Meta fails, crashes, burns and takes all its bullshit down with it, but that’s only tangentially related. It depends, if the purpose is age verification then yes I will oppose it. Then I’ll not tell you what I intend to use that encrypted hash I’m writing to my app’s data storage for. Any data storage can be abused. This one is transparent about its content, but I don’t see anything implying that you have to enter anything, let alone have to enter your actual birthdate. It can be used for parental controls, it can be used for age restrictions, but if I implement age verification, where I store that data on your machine is the least of your worries. Where I store your ID on my machine, on the other hand, should be more concerning, and even more so the fact that I need your ID at all. We can argue whether this is necessary, whether it can serve reasonable use cases (such as voluntary parental controls), but at the end of the day, it’s such a small and exchangeable part of the system that it’s not worth the shit people give systemd over it. I think controlled, transparent storage is better than intransparent, and any storage is only as evil as the things using it. Target those things instead.

I mean, I literally say that implementing actual verification would be an invasion of privacy. Storing data isn’t the problem, because we do that any way. This isn’t any different from the fields for your real name or location, which nobody gives a fuck about either. At least systemd are talking about ways to secure that data, whether to add a separate flag or save some CPU cycles before wiping it from memory and such. If you force me to enter something, that’s definitely shady. If you force me to verify that information, we’re in “fuck no, fuck you, fuck this surveillance bullshit” territory. But getting upset about this optional field in particular, but not any other data storage option, is hypocritical. Worse still, getting upset at the one effort to provide a standard that also makes some attempt at securing it is short-sighted. We have a hundred ways to store data. Cancelling one won’t stop the root issue: Collecting that data. Fuck that law, fuck the people that wrote it, fuck the people that passed it, fuck the people forcing you to surrender PII for plain bullshit reasons and fuck the people implementing those surveillance methods. That is worth raging about.

Remember to tell it not to put any bugs in its output! That's sure to help.

unless you’re getting paid to do it

Close air support Getting paid for it covers a multitude of sins

I imagine the price will be a factor too. Why pay money to be berated with no actual help?

A second grand achievement, e.g. Mars landing

I get to participate in a project to see how well-adopted AI tools are in our company… with the intent to see where we should invest in more promotion and schooling in how useful and valuable they can be. Didn’t have the heart to tell the manager requesting my assistance that I’m also one of the non-adopters and no amount of promotion or schooling offer is likely to change that. They’re lower management anyway, can’t change the decisions made higher up, and I’m not gonna pick fights and sour working relations where there’s nothing to win.

Thanks, new anxiety unlocked

I swear there are some people watching Black Mirror and furiously taking notes

If they were willing to fake grand achievements, why hasn’t there been a second one?

I recommend reading the whole thing. Most hilarious “what the fuck” I’ve had all week! Not that it has any strong competition…

I suppose congress should do something about this overreach then! *crickets*

Unexpected in the same way as you don't expect leopards to eat your face...

I mean, once they’re a state-sanctioned invader, it’s not longer illegal

And tomato does not belong in a fruit salad

I don’t want to have a garbanzo bean on me

type=exclamation&intent=approval&attributes=intense,profane&content="Hell Yeah

I think this is one of those cases where I ignore the providence of the image for the entertainment value. Certainly preferable to some other AI slop people produce.

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I also spent two weeks as a live-in cat sitter for a friend on vacation. He’d yell at me, and when I approached him, 1/5 times he’d lead me to his bowl. The other 4, he’d walk to the couch then look at me expectantly. If I laid down, he’d hop on my chest, then flop over into my arm and start purr-snoring within a minute. Hell Yeah I miss him. But it’s a good pain.

As protests go, I like this. More visible and tangible than sitting somewhere they’ll never go, but not really violent (at least not as violent as other things you could throw). I also liked the shoes that got lobbed at Bush for the symbolism.

Cheap shot. Not saying it doesn’t hit.

An elegant meme fot a more civilised age

They’re all the wrong way Some people just want to watch the world burn

Depending on the stakes, yes. It is categorically better than not voting at all. There is still the spoiler effect to consider, which may make voting third party a worse strategy in the complex, blind game that elections are. In elections where that isn’t as big of a risk, it’s a good way to indicate dissatisfaction with the status quo and the parties on offer. If there is a particularly convincing third party that many agree on, it also communicates what people do want. In presidential elections, in a country where the president already had so much power even before this whole shitshow, when one candidate is a much greater threat to the basic feasability of resistance, it’s a dangerous gamble, risking much for a fairly slim chance at an all-or-nothing victory. FPTP is one of the many things that are fucked up, but not every election has that kind of impact, and particularly if you’re in states where one party is so dominant that the spoiler effect is negligible anyways, it may be the more valuable choice.

Agreed on all points. It’s kinda like a robbery – you probably won’t arbitrarily hand a random stranger your wallet, but if they point a knife, things look different. Though in this case, it’s the robber barons getting mugged by their victims.

If, for whatever reason, the police collectively decides to no longer enforce the commands of those in power and no other group steps up to violently defend the status quo, a peaceful revolution in the form of civil disobedience would be conceivable. Getting to that point without some measure of violence is what I believe to be unlikely – not impossible, mind you, and I very much hope for it, but it’s quite likely that an attempt to create such a consensus would (at least initially) be violently suppressed just as violent resistance would. Even if it is achieved, the new society will need to guard itself against opportunistic egoists seeking to exploit the new power vacuum. Here too there may be at least an initial period of violence until that new dynamic is clear. As long as there are people willing to hurt others for their own benefit, they will have to be fought. But we should try to fight as little as possible.

The success of diplomacy and peaceful protest hinges on the existence of a credible threat that the alternative (war and riots, respectively) will be worse. Even if a (mostly) peaceful solution should be found, I suspect there will have to be some measure of violence to get that point across. As others point out, the elites won’t go down quietly, and as long as there are bootlicks willing to fight on their behalf, they’ll rather let their bootlicks die than make concessions. So while I don’t think violent revolutions are good for their own sake, they may be a necessary evil for good ends.

Revolutions stand or fall with public support. Voting is the most visible way to establish public sentiment. People like to quote that only a third of the US actually elected Trump, but do we have a clear idea of just how many oppose him, if so many voters apparently never expressed their opinion in any measurable way? Doing nothing and complaining on the internet is useless. Doing something is scary. If you knew you had your community at your back, wouldn’t you feel more confident to step up? You’re right that people need to know that voting won’t be enough, but it’s still important in order to communicate the public opinion that separates a revolution from a coup.