tenure was created to prevent nazi interference with academic freedom. and here we see nazi interference with academic freedom thwarted by tenure

it isn’t obvious to anyone reading mainstream news. news orgs are bending over backwards to obfuscate who’s actually doing the killing (one particularly egregious example being the NYT writing a whole-ass haiku instead of stating that Israeli soldiers opened fire on Palestinians seeking aid). sure, this particular headline would be ok if it was common knowledge that Israel is causing the wanton destruction in Gaza, but thanks to every other headline being like this, it isn’t

original report is here

oddly specific objection aside, where podcasting really shines is fiction. it’s the modern version of the radio drama. fiction podcasts like Welcome to Night Vale and Find Us Alive have narratives that are tailor-made for episodic audio and would not work in any other medium. a good fiction podcast is truly wonderful to listen to

they are so much more than that. Builder for example has a full tree view of your project, instant compiling (well, instant in the sense that the compile button is always accessible and you don’t have to leave the application to do it), live preview for markup languages, Git integration, unit tests, profiling, and several other things I can’t remember right now. so no, an IDE is an entirely different beast from a text editor

the ones I build. I have to admit the Switch is really fun, but at the end of the day it’s just another DRM machine. I’d rather have a rig sitting somewhere that I built to my exact specifications, that I can connect to from wherever, and that will run whatever I want

doesn’t the Bible specifically warn about people like Trump?

For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.

— 2 Timothy 3:2–5, English Standard Version

on the other hand, there could be an enemy of my enemy situation, because everyone in the Middle East hates Israel (and for good reason too: not only is Israel run by genocidal fucks, but they stole everyone’s land). it’s not impossible that Jordan, Egypt, and neighboring countries would gang up on Israel.

genocide and ethnic cleansing were inevitable from the moment Israel was formed. ethnic cleansing is the inevitable result of an ethnostate, and Israel was formed to be a Jewish ethnostate. an ethnostate is an ethnostate, regardless of which ethnicity it’s for

I’m not gonna speculate on what you’re buying, but I’m afraid you’re gonna get involved with shady people no matter what if you’re using cryptocurrency. the entire industry is in the midst of a cascade failure thanks to Three Arrows Capital going toes up, and con artists and thieves are cashing in. cryptocurrency exchanges are using their own customers’ money for not-so-good purposes, stablecoins are rapidly losing their pegs, and it seems like a bridge gets cracked every other day. my advice? if you don’t want to deal with shadiness, you really shouldn’t use cryptocurrency at all.

Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye. i can handle horror just fine, but Echoes of the Eye is on entirely another level of horror than most everything else. i was only able to complete about a third of it before i got too psyched out to continue

I can sort of see the appeal if it were able to plug into your smart home or something so it could respond to queries like “where’s the dog”, but as a general knowledge assistant it’s worse than useless (unless it magically doesn’t confabulate anything anymore)

it’s just a lot of Israelis seem to see all gazans as hamas now, which is problematic genocidal

fixed it for you

if you’re looking for a nice ultraportable, System76 has you covered

opt-in analytics! servers running Synapse can choose to send a bit of analytics information like number of users, but it’s opt-in so the number is potentially even higher

i’m not informed much either, but here’s what i gather; it’s centralized around the proprietary Snap Store and you can’t run your own Snap repositories, Snap apps take ages to start up, and each Snap app is mounted as a separate partition (???). there’s a whole bunch of technical issues that go over my head too, and Snaps have seen so little adoption that Canonical basically had to twist the arms of flavor maintainers to drop Flatpak support and support Snap out of the box. it’s evidently so bad even Ubuntu’s official flavors wouldn’t support it until Canonical forced them to

yes. it only surfaces citations that may back up the content better, an editor still has to read the source and approve the change

Wikipedian here - AI on Wikipedia is actually nothing new. we’ve had a machine learning model identify malicious edits since 2017, and Cluebot (an ML-powered anti-vandalism bot) has been around for even longer than that.

even so, this is pretty exciting. from what i gather, this is a transformer model turned on its side; instead of taking textual data and transforming it, it checks to see if two pieces of textual data could reasonably be transformations of each other. used responsibly, this could really help knock out those [dubious] and [failed verification] tags en masse

it’s in the name: generative pre-trained transformer. the one thing ChatGPT and GPT-3/3.5/4 are truly good at is transforming data. it can restructure paragraphs to have a different flow, take class notes and make flashcards out of them (that’s how i use ChatGPT), or even take non-textual data and potentially present it in textual format if trained right

‘The Onion’ Stands With Israel Because It Seems Like You Get In Less Trouble For That - The Onion posts absolutely fire satire (safire?) once again

oh hey, it’s the evil bit all over again

as others in this thread have mentioned, Linux Mint or Pop OS are the best for someone coming from Windows. both work really well out of the box. Linux Mint has a very Windows-like desktop, so it’s often recommended to people coming from Windows; but if you want a more unique experience Pop OS is the way to go

it redirects you to BreezeWiki, a no-bloat frontend for Fandom (example)

ugh yeah. especially the SEO war thing, the new website doesn’t even register on DuckDuckGo yet. at least there’s this extension called Indie Wiki Buddy which will hide Fandom results from search engines and redirect you to an independent wiki if you end up on Fandom anyway

answering your questions as best I can (I’m a straight male too) in order:

1. if he/him seems right to you, then your pronouns are he/him. if other pronouns seem right to you, then your pronouns are those pronouns. pronouns don’t have to match up with your gender or presentation, go with whatever you vibe with
2. when meeting new people, I give my name and pronouns. “hi, my name is salarua and my pronouns are he/him.” of course, it’s nice to give your pronouns when asked, but other than that it’s up to you
3. just including your pronouns in your profile is good. some people put them in their nicks, some in their bio or about me. if you have a Mastodon, Akkoma, Misskey, or Firefish account you can put your pronouns in your custom fields
4. you can try and figure out other people’s pronouns from how other people refer to them. many people will also give their pronouns if you introduce yourself with your pronouns. it’s not a faux pas to not know someone’s pronouns beforehand, although I admit I don’t know a non-awkward way to ask someone their pronouns
5. a good bet is to refer to people whose pronouns you don’t know as they/them. if you mispronoun someone by mistake, quietly correct yourself and continue with whatever you’re saying. “so after arriving at the office, he- sorry, they went to go see their supervisor about the presentation…” as long as it’s not done out of malice, people don’t mind being mispronouned if you acknowledge the slip-up and move on
6. I haven’t met anyone irl with neopronouns either. presumably people with neopronouns would go by them if they were among people they felt safe with. unfortunately most of the world isn’t safe :(

i don’t have one on hand, but it’s a physical letter sent through the mail which basically says “delete the copyrighted data we think you downloaded or we’re shutting off your internet”

i live in the US. seeding and torrenting in general is relatively safe here, although sometimes you’ll get a nastygram from your ISP because a copyright industry plant on one of the torrents told on you. the easiest way by far to prevent that is by getting a VPN. go with something paid (free ones do shady stuff) and with a no-logging policy. i use NordVPN because i know someone who pays for it and is letting me use it, but another great option is Mullvad

for every person who leeches on mobile data and can’t afford to seed, there’s someone who has a freakishly powerful rig that seeds like 17 different torrents 24 hours a day. if you can’t afford to seed, don’t worry about it, because people who can afford to seed often do. things balance out in the end

there’s a GNOME extension called Bedtime Mode that adds a quick setting to turn the screen grayscale: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4012/gnome-bedtime/

non-spoilery version: what do you do when you crawl out of your shelter? die, die again!

Firefish née Calckey is a microblogging platform like Mastodon, but that’s about all it has in common. Firefish has extra features like emoji reactions (like Facebook’s, but you can use any emoji, including custom emoji), quote posts, and better support for deep threads (it displays replies in a tree view like Lemmy or Kbin, unlike Mastodon which tries to linearize them and makes them a confusing mess). it also supports text formatting like bold, italics, headings, custom link text, and even animations (don’t worry, they don’t autoplay). it’s even themable, and supports migrating posts from other accounts so you don’t have to start over!

Blindsight by Peter Watts. it’s a really unique take on first contact, but wow is it dark

how so?

you don’t have to know coding to enjoy Linux! it’s got a reputation of being techie-oriented thanks to users of Arch Linux (a very techie distribution of Linux) dominating the Linux community, but there are plenty of distributions for everyday users, like Zorin OS and Elementary

i wouldn’t go with ranked choice voting. all the systems i know of have their own flaws: IRV can have really weird results with more than three candidates, Borda count disproportionately favors the moderate, and the Condorcet method can completely fail to select a winner. instead, what about approval voting, where instead of ranking candidates, you just check as many boxes as you want?

i’m sure you all have heard of Outer Wilds (which i highly recommend and is 40% off right now) but a lesser-known game is Rain World. it’s an absolutely brutal survival platformer where you play as a little slugcat trying to find their way home in a dying world. it’s not for everyone, but if you like exploration, ancient mysteries, action, a bleak atmosphere, and you don’t mind dying a hundred times, absolutely give it a go

conspiracy theories i agree with, but religion? organized religion, definitely. joining a religion with a hierarchy signals that you want someone else to give you all the answers, which is very much a mark of poor education. but religious beliefs are not an automatic marker of poor education, as long as they’re sincerely held, don’t supersede science, and are frequently revisited and revised based on personal experience and knowledge. even basic, broad frameworks like animism or some parts of Buddhism can help you make sense of the world when science can’t help you

taking Ayn Rand’s work seriously. five seconds of critical thought and her entire philosophy comes crashing down

i’d honestly love to visit St. Petersburg if that happens

it’s a known bug in Lemmy. sometimes comments get sent to the wrong thread