I was reading about new antisemitism the other day and I thought it was interesting.

Most canny antisemites have turned to the old (and formerly totally fine) canard “criticizing Israel is not antisemitic” to shield their actual antisemitic criticism. Not wanting to call Hamas a terrorist organization is a perfect example. They’re only terrorizing Israel, which isn’t inherently antisemitic! /s

But yeah it’s really everywhere now. Sometimes it’s mask off as in this incident. But frequently it’s mask on.

Antisemites of a feather flock together I guess.

One of the first books I can remember reading was a Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. The concept of tesseracts totally blew my young mind.

I love how Republican brinksmanship leads to this absurd self-fulfilling prophecy that government doesn’t and can’t work. It turns out bad faith reaps bad outcomes.

I’m only going to answer the first part of your question, not the AI/generated part.

No one really chooses what or who they’re attracted to; it kind of just happens to you. For example, you might be watching a TV show and someone gets lightly, comically spanked… and suddenly a light bulb goes off above your head and you think, “whoa, that might actually be kinda fun.” People are wired in ways we don’t understand to want things we don’t even know we want.

To that extent, pedophiles are themselves victims of their own desires; there’s no “logic” behind it. It’s simply an urge they experience.

Of course that doesn’t make succumbing to this urge excusable, and any children who are impacted are of course victims and the pedophiles, predators. But no one is training pedophiles in pedophile camp. It’s just humans being human, unfortunately.

It was tulips all along, but stupider.

Your day is coming soon, cryptocurrency.

Such a great series! I just finished a reread of it; totally worth it.

The only misstep in the series, in my opinion, is the novel-length Network Effect. I think the perfect format for Murderbot is novellas. Wells’ longer form felt like a couple Murderbot stories mashed together and didn’t work as well for me.

It’s never explicitly stated what Murderbot’s gender presentation is. I do visualize it as feminine presenting personally, but I just finished a reread and it is never stated anywhere. A character calls it “third mom” at one point but it’s unclear if this is because it looks feminine or because it was smothering her as her extant mothers do.

What

Out of the top collections, the most common price for an NFT is now $5-$10.

Still overpriced!

I actually doubt it, but I can’t find any semi-recent Obama polls to say otherwise. Michelle Obama is polling great right now however.

Everything he says is projection, so it’s not very surprising.

“We have a man who is totally corrupt and the worst president in the history of our country, who is cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead, and who is now in charge of dealing with Russia and possible nuclear war,” Trump said. “Just think of it. We would be in World War II very quickly if we’re going to be relying on this man.”

Obviously, Trump meant to say “World War III.” Insisting that we’re on the brink of another great war, and maybe even nuclear annihilation, has been part of his stump speech for months. But that isn’t the only line he flubbed. At another point in the speech, Trump seemed to mix up Biden and Barack Obama, suggesting he’s currently leading his predecessor in the 2024 polls.

Lol.

Surprising, it seems like a lemmynsfw.com person would’ve enjoyed this.

This title definitely makes it sound like this is a Democrat policy goal or that Democrats are actually responsible for this, when actually, as the article gradually makes clear, the people responsible for this are opposed to mainstream Democrat goals:

Democratic lawmakers and the Joe Biden administration have touted a wealth tax as a way to tackle record levels of inequality and fund programs that slash poverty and expand access to health care and education.

The people involved are not politicians. They are an advocacy group and apparently unaffiliated with the Democratic organization at large. The main guy seems as “Democrat” as Tulsi Gabbard, since he spent a lot of time and energy defending Trump and his policies on various talk shows.

Anyway, kind of a disingenuous framing.

It benefits the end-user.

People do not want to be in dependency resolution hell; where they have three programs that all use different versions of libssl and require them to install all of them properly and point each application to the correct one. Most users have no ability to resolve problems like that. By not bundling, the application developer is forcing them to either try anyway or just not install their software.

Bundling dependencies with Flatpak or Snap helps the end user at the cost of only a few extra megabytes of space, which most users have in abundance anyway.

But this is DEFINITELY the end of his political career!

That’s it, I’m convinced – I definitely won’t vote for him now!

It’s entirely not irrelevant. Even if you create a program to evolve pong, that was also designed by a human. As a computer programmer you should know that no computer program will just become pong, what an idiotic idea.

You just keep pivoting away from how you were using words to them meaning something entirely different; this entire argument is worthless. At least LLMs don’t change the definitions of the words they use as they use them.

I’m giving up here but evolution did not “design” us. LLMs are designs and created with a purpose in mind and they fulfill that purpose. Humans were not designed.