I write bugs and sometimes features! I'm also @CoderKat@kbin.social.
Yeah, in colloquial usage, most people understand that China and Taiwan are two different countries and there's no confusion over which one is which.
We absolutely could do things if society as a whole agreed to. Billionaires only exist because we let them exist. The only thing stopping us from taxing all money over a certain amount is us.
Unfortunately, I have little faith in our ability to convince people that we should massively step up our taxation. We can't even get billionaires to pay the percentage of income tax that they're theoretically supposed to pay. How are we supposed to convince enough people to go above and beyond?
A huge number of people somehow have the idea that billionaires deserve this money. Or that just because their wealth isn't cash means we can't take it away.
If they try to leave to another country, arrest them for tax evasion and seize every asset they have. Don't let them do any business in the country without paying their share. Get other countries to band together on this until there's nowhere for them to run except shitholes. Even if we can't stop them from being rich in Ireland (and on that note, we should punish tax havens with sanctions), we can stop them from using their wealth to affect other countries.
In Canada, pretty much every fast food restaurant has poutine these days. McDonalds is the worst one IMO. They have the best fries for plain fries, but for poutine, Burger King is much better (and offers poutine with bacon, which is the best combination).
Poutine is also super common in sit down restaurants, which often offer fancier versions. Buffalo chicken poutine is a really fun combination. Some places will have like half a dozen different poutine options, with stuff like hamburger poutine, loaded with multiple kinds of cheese, mushroom gravy, butter chicken, pulled pork, etc.
How does this happen? Really soggy, thawed pizza?
Bear in mind that some instances blocked Hexbear and similar. This means that what people perceive as the fediverse can be very different. Some instances are super curated while others see warts and all.
Plus some users have blocked the instance on their side. Easy to forget how bad things are when you utilize blocking.
But we (as a collective) do need to remember that what we experience isn't the same as what a potential new member experiences. Which is why I now advocate defederating instances like Hexbear. I really didn't want to for a while, but eventually it became clear that they're too aggressive and bad for the fediverse as a whole.
Yeah, it's so weird that they're sooooo in love with Russia and China. They claim to be communist and/or socialist, but those countries aren't what I'd consider to be either of those things. They're just... regular ol' dictatorships full of human rights abuses. Why the hell would they want to support them?
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Hot pursuit was the one that let you play as or against cops, right? I freaking loved that as a kid. I'm not much for racing games, but that's the exception.
They're talking about the list having a person's name censored. They tracked down which article was visited (pretty easy to do, since removing a name from a headline doesn't make the headline hard to search for).
I suspected it was Snowden. I mean, who else has there been for notable US defectors that got prominent news articles?
Which half the provinces don't even recognize (as in, not a stat holiday). Not that it really matters that much. No problem has ever been solved by merely declaring a holiday and there's no shortage of shitty actions speaking louder than any holiday could.
Yeah, the average consumer doesn't buy Windows. They buy a computer and it happens to come with Windows most of the time. Those consumers aren't going to want to pay for a subscription. Especially when you look at the prices of the kinds of computers that most people are buying. They're budget machines. No way a subscription would go over well. And why would OEMs want to deal with the fallout of people not buying their computers because of subscriptions?
The "fun" intersection of incel with sovereign citizen bullshit.
Agree and I sympathize with all the points.
On the financial point, we, as a society, badly need to stop depending on jobs for survival before it's too late. But I know that we're unlikely to change until a lot of people get hurt.
And on the self-worth point, it feels awful to be replaced, even if the money isn't an issue. People take pride in their work and want their work to be celebrated. Yet, we're quickly approaching a point where it's going to be very difficult for people to create art by hand that can hold a candle to AI art. Sure, there's still many master artists, but they got where they are through hard work. How many new potential artists will be willing to put in that hard work when any random Joe Blow can generate something better in seconds? Human made art (from scratch) won't go away, but it is harder to feel good about what you create when it feels like your art has no place anymore.
I don't think that's necessarily a dead giveaway. Because there's been controversy about AI art that added watermarks. The controversy being because it implied the AI was scraping images that it definitely wasn't allowed to use.
Hands are only a give away for bad AI art. There's no shortage of examples with great hands (especially when using features like Stable Diffusion's ControlNet, which allows you to give hints to the AI for the shape that something should match). Just so many people posting AI art generate once or twice and post that. If you're more selective and selectively regenerate, you'll be able to get much more believable results.
This is also a rapidly changing area, with the most cutting edge AI being way better than something from even a year ago. Used to be that no AI could do even remotely believable text, but in recent weeks, I've been seeing many examples of AI art that got small amounts of text perfect.
I only guessed a single one as generated by AI and I was wrong on that (the mouse in the boat drawing felt like unusual shaping and shading for a human). I really could not identify any telltale signs of AI in any of them, so answered entirely honestly that none of the others looked like AI generated.
To be honest, I expected that. The telltale signs people often talk about are only problems for bad AI art. Well done AI art really is indistinguishable. Stuff like weird fingers, faces, and teeth are only problems if the prompter is lazy and just picks the first thing generated (and doesn't selectively regenerate). If you're selective, you can get AI art without the things some people claim make AI art easy to recognize.
It's like photoshop or movie CGI. Anyone can detect a bad photoshop and we're used to seeing those. But well done photoshops by experts can be near impossible to detect (short of careful pixel level inspection, which doesn't really apply to AI art). Yet, a lot of people are over confident in how well they can spot photoshops.
I wonder if this will change anyone's mind? I've always wanted to do this for a few topics, including AI. I've also wanted to do this for trans vs cis people (so many transphobes claim they can "always tell"), movie CGI vs practical effects (see also: Captain Disillusion videos), and for various kinds of food and drink (so many people are elitist that something tastes better -- simple example that I've actually seen disproven is the various kinds of eggs, including store bought vs locally sourced).
High speed is a big thing. And actually high speed, at that. A massive number of trains are very slow and even a number of "high speed" trains are not even remotely as high speed as they could be, with proper investment. It's hard to replace planes when we're talking at least twice the travel time.
I'd love to have more train options in Canada. There is a train that spans the width of Canada, but it is so slow and deprioritized that it's not actually a viable means of transit across Canada. You can fly Toronto to Vancouver in a little over 4 hours. So maybe 6 hours with the airport overhead. By train, it's 4 days. That's something you'd only do for the experience and it'd be a significant part of the trip (one person I know who did it said that they wish they utilized more stops along the way, because by the end of the trip, they were getting pretty sick of it -- despite the fact that they recommended it glowingly). With a high speed rail, that could become less than 1 day trip, making it a lot more feasible (a lot of people already view the day they fly as a day spent only on travel).
And that's an extreme. Getting around southern Ontario is far more common and practical (it's an extremely population dense area). But the trains we have for that are very low speed and have mediocre schedules (sometimes only good for commuting). Even though a train is an option, I often find that the bus is actually the fastest way to get to my destination, cause the train is so infrequent and really not fast.
At the very least, it should be illegal to use the misleading tactics they use for things like seats. Not sure if airlines in the EU differ (I'm Canadian), but seemingly every airline here tries to make the seat selection seem like it's mandatory. While I've never fallen for that, I wonder how many people pay for their seats simply because they didn't realize it's possible not to?
And Flair here in Canada is the budget airline whose whole thing is that they advertise prices that don't include a carry-on (which is standard with every other airline in Canada). But if you want a carry-on, they'll charge so much that their flights are often roughly the same price as the competition (and they push bundling carry-on + checked bag so that people will pay more than they need). Flair is great if you know what you're doing, since a backpack fits the "personal item" size limit and is all I need for short trips, but many people don't realize how it works and think they have to pay for the carry-on, plus Flair gets their listings to show up higher in search results because they will list the base price. Google Flights makes it clear that there's no carry-on, but it still shows those flights first and someone without familiarity with Flair won't expect carry-ons to cost as much as they do.
I think that breed is known as "cutie".
Wait, is Karlak gonna leave over Minthara? I've been planning to do an evil playthrough, since my first playthrough was goodie two shoes, so naturally killed Minthara. But Karlak is the best!
Also, I kinda want as many companions as possible so I can see the different path I can get them to take.