He's rich. First rule of being rich is never pay when you can borrow.

I still think old shitty statues and stuff should be put in a museum or something

I don't think anyone has a problem with that. But, that's usually not what the regressive types are complaining about.

To use the US example, the overwhelming number of "Confederate Monuments" were erected many decades after the Civil War, and typically funded by white supremacist groups or their close allies in city and state government. They were installed in public parks, on public easements, in front of public buildings, etc. Notably, they are typically not on graves, old battlefields, etc.

Folks quite reasonably think we should remove monuments that were put up as a big "F U" to remind black folks who is really in charge. These statues are certainly shitty, but they also are not "old". They're much younger than the people/conflicts they memorialize, and have no historical significance (except to the white supremacists who put them there).

Of course it's not just the US. I remember in the wake of the collapse of the Iron Curtain, communist sympathizers complained at the removal of Soviet monuments. I remember college professors complaining at the renaming of Leningrad back to St. Petersburg, calling it a "dangerous right-wing move" and an erasure of Lenin's history and legacy.

But that also makes it incredibly easy for communities on defederated servers to set up shop elsewhere.

And those communities may be the sole reason that the server was defederated in the first place.

I think a possible outcome is that the larger instances would have to put a stop to open creation of new communities, to prevent toxic groups from setting up shop and moving all their objectionable content and users into the space.

With respect, I think you're ignoring the facts. How it's prepared absolutely makes a difference in how it tastes, how easy it is to eat, etc. and there is a resulting effect on how much people eat.

Freshly grilled chicken and frozen chicken patties are both chicken. But the chicken patty is ground, pre-seasoned, pre-cooked, etc. This makes it easier to get ready and easier to eat than a fresh chicken breast.

The poison is in the dose, as they say. 500 calorie surplus every day is a pound a week of weight gain.

And as dieticians have shown us over and over again, you can eat shitty food and be healthy, you just have to eat an appropriate amount of it. There are diets based on cookies and snack cakes, if you eat at your maintenance and cover a few basics with supplements, you can easily thrive on them.

Pyle has a bunch of rules for Strange Planet comics, one of those is an absolute word limit for each comic, so he's always trying to come up with creative ways to say something in the fewest words possible.

asking if they subscribe to other myth based beliefs, religions, etc

What you actually said:

Out of interest are you religious or subject to some other form of mythical belief system? I ask because clearly you lack motivation for the truth, preferring hearsay and urban legend that I must assume supports a wider world view. by @Hackerman_uwu

My thought: this kind of behaviour is one of things that made Reddit fucking awful and I’d hate to see it flourish here in the fediverse.

Oh goody. There's a RickRussell_CA@lemm.ee and it's not me. And it's using one of my older profile pictures.

EDIT: 2023/8/29 update -- I posted to the lemm.ee support community and the admins decided to disable the account. Well done!

while she is a wonderful person, she just isn’t the right one for me specifically

That's what you tell her. It's totally appropriate to want someone closer to you in physical needs.

I don't mean to sound cynical, but at 39, she's probably wondering if she'll ever find somebody long term. That realization is probably one of the things that's driving her to stay attached, even when it's obvious that there are serious compatibility problems. And it's going to result in some strong emotions around this breakup.

Here's the thing. If you allow the cheating partner to leave without explaining it, they're gonna use that time to try and poison the well. They'll start spinning stories about why they left -- stories that paint the non-cheater as an abuser, for example. They have to bring the non-cheater down so that when the kids DO inevitably find out, they're left believing that the split was mutual.

By forcing her hand immediately, you made sure she wouldn't have time to create "plausible doubt" in the kids' heads. That's why she's really upset, not because they found out (they would have inevitably found out), but because she didn't have a chance to make you look as bad as she was.

I was banned from r/food for pointing out that a "homemade breakfast" posted by a user consisted of a frozen hash brown patty, fresh uncut fruit, a sausage link, and a toaster waffle, and I suggested that it seemed like low effort to call that meal "homemade".

Turns out I was wrong about the waffle, at least the user followed up with a picture of a waffle iron and claimed they made it themselves. Fair dinkum, I wasn't going to press the point.

A couple of days later I had a multi-paragraph screed from a mod where they went through my post history and complained about things I posted to other subreddits, like r/hotdog, and a permanent irrevocable ban.

The article's summary paragraph at the top attributes a statement to DeSantis that he didn't make.

Gov. Ron DeSantis says people aren’t living as long as they used to, so that should help protect them from losing Social Security and Medicare protections when they get old.

That paraphrasing is deceptive, IMO. In the text of his remarks, it's clear that he's drawing an actuarial conclusion that lower lifespans eliminate the need to raise Social Security and Medicare benefit ages. What he actually said:

So, I think it’s hard to say, you know, raise the age (for Social Security eligibility) when the average life expectancy is going down. We used to think that life expectancy was just going to keep going up and that’s just not been the case.

DeSantis says plenty of crazy shit, we don't need to invent stupid things and pretend that he said them.

You do good work.

An online cafe dedicated to harvesting baby seal fur SEEMED like a good idea...

On the one hand, I think it's a bit ridiculous to hold LTT's feet to the fire over ShortCircuit/Unboxing/Tech Preview type content, and Steve Burke takes himself a little too seriously sometimes.

On the other hand, LTT set themselves up for that criticism by making explicit product recommendations in those unboxing videos, and invoking claims based on "lab testing". LTT needs to draw a bright line between unboxing content and reviews, and make it super clear that unboxing content is not a review. "I wouldn't recommend" is not the right language for a tech preview.

And really -- letting one of your employees smack-talk the competition in a lab walkthrough? Just cut that part of the video out. LTT waltzed into this with sloppy editing.

I have back problems, high cholesterol, high blood pressure

As someone who waited way, way, way too long too lose weight, let me recommend that you review your situation with a doctor.

I've lost significant weight in my 50s and it's completely turned my health around. Cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar, almost every indicator was dangerously of whack. I was on a boatload of medications, it was doing jack squat.

Now I get tested and everything is where it's supposed to be. I'm down to small maintenance doses for blood pressure and triglycerides, and I'm off the diabetes medical entirely.

I don't know if weight it a problem for you, but if it is: you can get it under control.

Linux is still kicking as an independent project 30 years in, despite the success of monetizing it. The EEE strategy has been tried by many.

Granted, that's in no small part because Linus Torvalds keeps driving it. It will be interesting to see how he manages succession in the next few years.

I'm gonna call this intentional satire:

limited by screen width in how many files it could sh...

Part of it is looking back through rose-colored glasses. Sure, there was joy, but there was that time you stubbed your toe and you got so emotionally disregulated that you cried for an hour, or the time your parents put the wrong color socks on you and you screamed a bad word at them and refused to leave the house, or... etc.

You learned to regulate your emotions. That's mostly a good thing, but it also means that you learn to control yourself in the moment, and you don't tend to lose yourself in joy like you did as a child.

And that's OK. I enjoy things differently now, than I did then. Back then, when I played with a toy car, it gave me great joy but if something broke, or things didn't go my way, I also suffered uncontrollable anger and frustration. Today, when I take my TRX-4 trail truck out on the trails, I feel a different kind of joy that is mixed with intellectual understanding of the engineering of the machine, an appreciation of the beauty of the natural world that I didn't have as a child, etc. And if something breaks, it's not an emotional thing any more. I know I can fix it, I have the ability and the desire.

Heck, it's enjoyable to break things, take them apart, and fix them again. That certainly wasn't true when I was 6.

To their credit, they say "ultra-processed" to capture this distinction.

There is a so-called "hard problem of consciousness", although I take exception with calling it a problem.

The general problem is that you can't really prove that you have subjective experience to others, and neither can you determine if others have it, or whether they merely act like they have it.

But, a somewhat obvious difference between AIs and humans is that AIs will never give you an answer that is not statistically derivable from their training dataset. You can give a human a book on a topic, and ask them about the topic, and they can give you answers that seem to be "their own conclusions" that are not explicitly from the book. Whether this is because humans have randomness injected into their reason, or they have imperfect reasoning, or some genuine animus of "free will" and consciousness, we cannot rightly say. But it is a consistent difference between the humans and the AIs.

The Monty Hall problem discussed in the article -- in which AIs are asked to answer the Monty Hall problem, but they are given explicit information that violate the assumptions of the Monty Hall problem -- is a good example of something where a human will tend to get it right, through creativity, while an AI will tend to get it wrong, due to statistical regression to the mean.