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Haven't had McDonald's in a while, but Katy wanted it, so we got some. As a diabetic, my drink options are limited, but I opted for a sugar free cold brew coffee.
I'm shocked at how much I enjoyed it. I think I might actually like it better than the stuff I make at home. I'm kinda mad about it, actually. 🙃
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@silverwizard @Kevin Davy I get a specific brand of beans from Costco (don't remember the name but recognise the bag when I see it) and fresh grind them. I'm fortunate in that our tap water seems pretty good just on its own for hardness and so forth. The rest is just about the consistency of the measurements. (It was actually at your suggestion a while ago I started using a kitchen scale.)
I don't know that it's the best coffee in the world but given that pre-made cold brew is generally expensive and rather hit-and-miss for me, and this produces what I deem to be a consistently good cup of coffee at a fraction of the price, I've deemed it Good Enough for Me™.
@silverwizard Also, the recipe I adapted mine from said that a pitcher would keep in the fridge for up to two weeks. At first, I had no reason to doubt this because it never lasted me that long anyway.
I've since had to moderate my caffeine intake, and have learned to make less at a time because the quality seems to degrade a bit after about a week.
@Jonathan Lamothe I've made coldbrew based on your video on it, so good full circle!
Yeah, that's shocking. I find coldbrew does better sweet than a lot - was it that it had a solid creamer you're missing out in? I use a squirt of stevia syrup these days (for complex reasons invovling too much stevia)
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Yeah it's got to the point where I have to start every medical appointment with, 'I do not consent to an AI transcript'
And then they have to dick around for 5 or 10 minutes, figuring out how to turn it off
it’s responsible to the shareholders.
Put enough pressure on clinicians that they can’t keep up without compromising and using AI. Fire the ones who lag behind. When malpractice hits the remaining ones, oops, not our problem, no payout, no premium increase.
Medicine has too many administrators and C levels at the wheel.
adhd special move: the lighthouse
standing in one place and spinning, looking for the thing that was just in your hand
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#OpenSCAD question:
if in wanted to emboss text around the outer rounded edge of a cylinder, how would I go about doing that? I don't know how to transform an object on a curve like that.
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shapes3d.scad
The Belfry OpenScad Library, v2.0. An OpenSCAD library of shapes, masks, and manipulators to make working with OpenSCAD easier. BETA - BelfrySCAD/BOSL2GitHub
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Any technical solution that is supposed to block teenagers from anything is not going to work very well, because you are facing an opponent that:
* is smarter than you,
* is very dedicated,
* has a lot of free time,
* has an extensive network of friends,
* faces no serious consequences if caught,
* outnumbers you,
* considers you an immoral crook.
You really, *really* want to have them on your side. That means education rather than control.
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@david_colquhoun David, David, David.
I am 63. I still remember my youth. Did we get alcohol? Yes. Was there age verification to buy alcohol? Also yes.
Did we "phreak" free long distance and local telephone calls in the era of phone booths? Yes once again.
It is an incurable optimism to believe that somehow, although our generation read Playboy and Penthouse, our children and grandchildren will be blocked from porn because hand-wavey promises about age verification.
@david_colquhoun Politicians want votes from people who simply don't understand how good kids are at getting booze, cigarettes, and porn.
Furthermore, many people do not appear to grasp the unintended authoritarian consequences of internet gatekeeping.
They tell us it's about porn. But what if it’s also about birth control? Or gender? Or consensual sex? Or socialism? Or anything else deemed "inappropriate?"
I’ve seen the books they ban from schools. I fear what they will ban online.
@raganwald @david_colquhoun Moreover: In retrospect, was it so terrible that you managed to get all those things? Why restrict access so badly when us older people managed to do just fine in our youth?
There are lots of things I'd like to "shield" young people from. The list doesn't start with porn though. And it doesn't work though age verification.
…monitored by volunteer moderators who believe in protecting the community to provide a safe and welcoming social space for all our users…at least it is in our corner of the Fediverse.
@wizzwizz4 facebook-addicts I know believe all kind of racist-motivated disinformation and are OK with
- fascism
- genocide
- bigotry
- climate-change denialism
- anti working class/leftist and pro-billionaires and pro white collar criminality bullshit
- hate toward cyclist and road rage justifications/denialism because "cyclists put others in danger" (total BS when you look at facts)
I don't think there is "moderation" on facebook…
@wizzwizz4 My point is not to promote authority.
My point is: Vertical "moderation" doesn't work because vertical "moderation" is specific to for-profit scructures that design moderation rules (as opposed to collaborative moderation) and those rules are designed in a way that doesn't "conflict" with profit. Hosting hate speech is profitable.
Also capitalism needs fascism to impose its bullshit through violence
Groomers do, but from victims confessions, groomers very rarely, if ever, use porn, because they don't want the kids AWARE what is happening is sex. Which is why groomers are HAPPY for any sex education being barred from children. Which is what actually happens with blocks like that (sex education being labeled adult and verification-blocked from children).
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@david_colquhoun even assuming what you say is correct, what is an acceptable price for that? Is it ok to out closeted people by forcing them away from anonymity into a database that *will* be leaked at some point? Or anyone that had a slightly different preference? This doesn't just add age verification it removes online anonymity for everyone. And once that bits gone other bits will follow.
Or any price is acceptable to "protect our kids"?
this is a really good point - the very thing being proposed completely undermines the number one (maybe number zero) rule that kept kids safe from predators on the internet!
It's kinda sweet that there are people who believe the opposition to age verification comes from people who want to access porn rather than people who don't want Big Tech to have access to everyone's verified identity.
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@david_colquhoun Age-restricting media is only ever going to hurt all vulnerable kids more than it will protect any kid from being harmed by a predator.
Like the book purges in the US, these laws will prevent queer kids, kids of color, and kids being abused, from accessing age-appropriate material that will help them survive their traumas. That's intended with these parentalistic laws. The "think of the children" battle-cry is used to trigger a protective reflex to manufacture consent.
everyone is acting like children exist in a vacuum. Children (most, anyway) have parents, it is their responsibility to teach children how to participate in society, how to interpret different things (even when said interpretation may not be to your taste). The children can protect themselves if they are given tools and strategies, and told about dangers.
This right-wing "think of the children" crap is all about surveillance and power over others. If you (as a political force) really cared about children, you would fund the education system and healthcare, so the children can grow up to be responsible adults raising responsible children who can think for themselves.
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One of the neighbours smoke detectors was going off for an extended period of time. Just as I was about to go investigate, it stopped.
I assume this either means it was a false alarm after all, or the smoke detector itself has been destroyed in the blaze. 🙃
1. asleep
2. being cute
3. VIOLENCE
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So, I've been getting reasonably decent with #OpenSCAD. I've debated opening an Etsy store, but I don't own a #3DPrinter. While I do have access to a couple for personal projects, I have nothing that would be suitable for commercial use, nor do I have the seed money to buy one.
One of the services I'm thinking of offering in the interim is creating custom STL files for people based on a rough sketch or photo, but I don't know if that would be a viable thing.
Is that a thing anyone here would have interest in?
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Someone else this morning had a lovely turn of phrase (third paragraph) around the same experience you might enjoy, if I can offer a bit of secondhand brilliance in solidarity. hachyderm.io/@uberduck/1149061…
I am now being required by my day job to use an AI assistant to write code. I have also been informed that my usage of AI assistants will be monitored and decisions about my career will be based on those metrics.I gave it an honest shot today, using it as responsibly as I know how: only use it for stuff I already know how to do, so that I can easily verify its output. That part went ok, though I found it much harder to context switch between thinking about code structure and trying to herd a bullshit generator into writing correct code.
One thing I didn't expect, though, is how fucking disruptive it's suggestion feature would be. It's like trying to compose a symphony while someone is relentlessly playing a kazoo in your ear. It flustered me really quickly, to the point where I wasn't able to figure out how to turn that "feature" off. I'm noticing physical symptoms of an anxiety attack as a result.
I stopped work early when I noticed I was completely spent. I don't know if I wrote more code today than I would have normally. I don't think I wrote better code, as the vigilance required is extremely hard for my particular brand of neurospicy to maintain.
As far as the "write this function for me" aspect, I've noticed that I tend to use the mental downtime of typing out a function I've designed to let my brain percolate on the solution and internalize it so I have it in my working memory. This doesn't happen when I'm simply reviewing code written by something else. Reviewing code and writing it are completely separate activities for me. But there's nothing to keep my fingers and thoughts busy while I'm coming up with what to write next.
I didn't think we were meant to live like this.
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My opinion of ducks (rubber and living) increases every day. XD
Pretty sure I've had a more enjoyable conversation with an actual living quacker than an LLM, particularly an LLM stan. XD
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@Thomas Preece It's an old video, but:
PeerTube Admin 7: Using Chromecast on a TV to watch PeerTube videos with Chromium
Korea vlog: tube.jeena.net/videos/watch/pl…How to switch on casting on Linux:
- alien.slackbook.org/blog/casti…
- unix.stackexchange.com/questio…Casting to your ChromeCast in Chromium
I have a Google ChromeCast, it is an extremely convenient gadget to stream all sorts of audio and video to your television, regardless of its make or brand. Today I learnt something new, so let me …Alien Pastures
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Pretty sure Rogers keeps disconnecting my internet in the middle of the night without notice to do some kind of maintenance hoping that nobody will notice.
I keep having to reboot the modem every morning for the past few days. This time I was awake when it went down.
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I can't draw analogies like this. When I learned to program, it was by reading hundreds of printed man pages for TI-BASIC and MS-DOS. I have little hope that a 5yr old from today would do the same. I think if I didn't know how to program and had to learn that way today, I might not.
The old ways are not the new ways, and they aren't even that sacred. They are just barely the known.
@BoydStephenSmithJr I think back in the day, you still had a chance to stumble upon someplace decent to start. You could be browsing the library and come across something like "Beginning C64 BASIC programming" or "How to tell the computer what to do" and they had a good chance of being half-way decent starting points.
You also need intellectual curiosity. That spark that goes "can I make the machine do this?" or "what happens if I do that instead?". That in turn requires feeling *safe*.
@mkj I think if you have the intellectual curiosity you can still get started from most computers by using the JS console.
But, I haven't checked to see how locked down many iOS devices are now.
The TI PC was hard to get started, but once booted it wasn't locked down at all.
Went to a large grocery store and waitied in the parking lot with a book for a few hours hoping to pick up an Instacart order. Didn't get one, but as I tried to start the car to go home, I found that I'd left the lights on and the battery's dead.
Waiting on my father to show up with jumper cables, but at least I'm not so upset about not getting an order. Would've sucked to find the battery dead when I tried to deliver it...
"It does not appear that he (Edgar Allan Poe) ever wrote or spoke of it, nor is there any evidence that he even noticed it. And yet that house, to the two persons in possession of certain information, equals or outranks in horror the wildest phantasy of the genius who so often passed it unknowingly, and stands starkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably hideous."
— H.P. Lovecraft: Necronomicon, p. 233
This is just Lovecraft's not-so-subtle way of saying "I'm a better horror writer than Edar Allan Poe".
What a pompous ass.
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Why I stopped ordering food delivery:
Modest Meal..... $14.99
Drink.... $3.43
"I will enjoy the Modest Meal and a drink." 😇
Bill:
Modest Meal $14.99
Drink. $3.43
Tax $2.80
Service Fee $5.35
Fee ... $2.80
Area Charge ... $6.90
Delivery ... $4.80
Just Go With It Fee $3.04
Movement Charge? ...$2.94
Delivery Fee... $2.80
Snakes ..$2.34
Vendor Notion $2.80
Just Because Fee $4.81
Ghost Removal $6.03
Vibes ... $1.03
Fee Tax $6.30
Total: 65.56
Tax Again For Some Reason: 11.62
True Total: 77.19 😲
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I kind of stole this joke from someone who posted it as an image without a description, but I changed it up.
I *would* have just boosted that post, but the image wasn't described and as I started to write alt text I thought of some changes to make... so the moral is if you wanna get boosted include the alt text!
yeah by the time i finish preparing the alt text it becomes infinitely easier to just post that instead
saves everyone's bandwidth too
LLMs are not intelligent but they ARE good for spouting extruded text that mimics the zeitgeist of their training data and if that training data includes the overflowing sewer that is the unfiltered internet you're going to get gaslighting, lies, conspiracy theories, and malice. Guardrails only prevent some of it from spilling over.
Humans base their norms on their peers' opinions, so LLMs potentially normalize all sorts of horrors in discourse—probably including ones we haven't glimpsed yet.
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Some AI lobbying takes the form of cheating out wins in competitions.
fortune.com/2025/01/21/eye-on-…
decrypt.co/302691/did-openai-c…
the-decoder.com/openai-claims-…
theatlantic.com/technology/arc…
techrepublic.com/article/news-…
We’re Entering Uncharted Territory for Math
Terence Tao, the world’s greatest living mathematician, has a vision for AI.Matteo Wong (The Atlantic)
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@Charlie Stross A million times this.
Are there very narrow areas where AI can be useful? Probably, but easily 99.9% of the stuff it's being shoehorned into, AI ought never to be trusted with.
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I think it’s dope af that plants take air and turn it into solid material
why aren’t more people awestruck that this shit happens all the time?
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It's any unnamed vegetable oil that you would use to make a salad dressing; the key characteristic is that it doesn't have much flavor. It's often sold as a mix of whatever's reasonably cheap: soybean, canola, peanut, and in some cases, cottonseed.
You can substitute whatever you like, especially if you think the recipe would improve with avocado or olive oil.
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I'm sure it's a product of its time, but good God there are some racist passages in this book.
(comment on Necronomicon)
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SP⟁CED GO⟁T likes this.
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Bank machines have business hours now? How is that a thing?
Are the machines that are replacing us demanding better working conditions now? 🙃
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🐓 I live next door to 18 chickens now. Therefore, be aware that a Chicken Report could happen at any time during Dubious Goals Committee. 🐔
Also simf. Simf can happen at any time during DGC. 🎹 🎵
Dubious Goals Committee airs EVERY single day at 19:30 UTC! 🕢 That's:
3:30 pm Eastern (North America)
2:30 pm Central
12:30 pm Pacific
21:30 St. Pauli (Hamburg) ☠️
16:30 Tierra del Fuego (ARG)
#radio, #anonradio, #sdf, #synth, #tob, #livestream,
Listen here: anonradio.net/
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I need to request that *all* programmers remember that some of us are visually impaired and need to be able to edit the actual tar out of the font sizes for your menus, main bodies of your programs, etc. We need font resizing options, bolding options, color options, and font type options. For everything. If it's text, it needs to be able to be redone by the user. Also, that needs to be on a "global" and then a "per pane" basis, including the main area a person is working in.
Complaint trigger: All these M'Fkn' "Media Players" that are written for dinky little smart phones that no one over the age of 45 or 50 can even read hardly at all. I don't care that most of the people who download these things are around 12 to 25 years old. Some of us need to use these things in order to start or operate businesses and are *real grown ups.* We need these things but when we can't read them, they're useless to us.
Please fix this in every application on this planet. Thanks.
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For the Androids amongst us:
f-droid.org/packages/me.zhangh…
f-droid.org/packages/com.trian…
Untracker | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository
Remove tracking information before sharing linksf-droid.org
Kevin Davy
in reply to geekysteven • • •