Software patents shouldn’t exist!

Learning how to ride a bike as an adult can be a bit scary and much more difficult than for a child. But it isn’t rocket science! You can do it 👍

REI has an excellent guide on learning how to ride as an adult:

https://www.rei.com/learn/expert-advice/how-to-learn-to-ride-a-bike-as-an-adult.html

As an experienced street and mountain rider, I read it and it makes perfect sense. Follow their advice but also:

• Bring a first aid kit (for the large variety of bandages) and a great big tube of Neosporin/triple antibiotic ointment. There’s a chance you’ll get a scrape on your first try. It shouldn’t be anything serious (barely any pain sort of scrape) but you don’t want an infection 👍
• Don’t try to pedal right away! Just push with your feet on the ground and get used to balancing when coasting. Also remember: There’s a threshold where you’re going fast enough to easily balance or too slow where it’s easy to fall to one side (instead of falling though, you’re an adult and will simply place your foot down after stopping by holding the brake, right? 🤣).

Once you get used to pedaling to keep yourself going it’ll be like a switch: Before that moment you didn’t know how to ride a bike and now you do! I’m certain it’s a great feeling because I still remember it when I learned to ride as a kid! It’ll likely become a “core memory” 😁

Don’t stop there though! Practice balancing on your bike while moving slower and slower. Get the hang of a rapid foot-down (or dismount, haha). Eventually you can get good enough to literally stand on your bike while not moving at all and that impresses other people vastly more than any other bike trick I’ve ever performed, haha. Even super experienced, professional riders will be like, “WTF! How do you even do that‽” Hahaha

Anyone can do it it just takes lots of practice and if you try it every single time you stop it’ll eventually come naturally. Of course, you’ll look super goofy/clumsy the first hundred times (haha) but eventually you’ll have a biking superpower 😁👍

Edit: Once you’ve decided that biking is for you take some time to learn how to do basic bike maintenance. Even if your tires are fine deflate one and take it off then put it back on. You don’t want to be figuring out how to do that in the middle of nowhere on the side of the road (and always travel with an extra tube… That’s what tiny under-the-seat bags are for!).

Nobody likes having to change out a tube in the middle of a trail/out on the road but is inevitable if you bike a lot. Also, if you smash your wheel hard enough it can get bent enough that you can’t ride. No big deal though! Just bend it back! I used to encounter so many people on trails carrying their bikes with bent tires and I was like, “oh! Let me fix that for you…” <WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!> against a log/curb and it would be straight enough to ride on again 😁👍

The article sucks. The FTC isn’t going after Microsoft’s cloud services because they’re good/bad. They’re going after Microsoft because of forced bundling. Same abuse of monopoly power they were found guilty of when they started forcing everyone to use Internet Explorer.

Microsoft is forcing customers to use their cloud services under all sorts of scenarios. Many of which have no logical reason other than to force customers into Azure.

For example, if you have a lot of Windows servers in Azure they will stop supporting you once you reach a certain threshold unless you also sign up to use their enterprise cloud AD service.

They already do this with regular Windows–you have to use AD if you’re a business customer and you go past a certain threshold of systems–but in that case you can just get some Domain Controllers and call it a day. You can put them wherever you want (locally, in AWS, in Azure, wherever).

With Azure Windows servers though you’re forced to use Azure AD (or you lose support and possibly access to other bundled services). You can’t host Domain Controllers anywhere else. I mean, they’ll let you have as many off-Azure DCs as you want but they must still be joined/synchronizing to Azure AD.

There’s probably many other anticompetitive tactics in place within the world of Azure but that’s the one big one I know off the top of my head.

It was a tired story until OH DEER it wasn’t anymore.

After replacing writers and artists it is now replacing the entire category of, “old people”. AI has reached the, “final solution” faster than I thought possible!

Because a lack of rest always moves projects forwards with absolutely no problems at all!

Exactly! I love how AI image generation can come up with funny surprises like that 🤣

I hope the hilarity never ends!

I use it for the hilarity!

I made a whole series of images representing the usual hair colors just for fun:

I have so much fun with images like this in Discord/Matrix and the occasional Lemmy post 🤣

That’s a lot of dough

Stopped reading after this:

Take, for instance, the Democratic Party, whose immigration policy, at least for a large portion of the Biden presidency, has been to effectively open the southern border to all comers

What a load of bullshit! Border crossings went down under Biden earlier this year because of his aggressive enforcement efforts:

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/26/border-crossings-drop-biden-policy-00165055

Not only that but the article is implying that immigration through the southern border is where nearly all illegal immigrants come from. Most illegal immigration is from people who enter the country legally (from wherever) then overstay their visa.

The southern border is a problem for sure but the border policies of the Democrats are simply on par with the Republican policies (they both don’t accomplish much since the border is just too fucking huge!). Basically, there’s very little that can be done that hasn’t already been tried.

Even if you institute mass deportations the people will just come back because getting into the US is just too easy and it’s physically impossible to actually police the entire southern border let alone the entirety of the land and sea that borders the US.

I think this one can be attributed to, “mere poor taste” and a lack of imagination.

If I were in charge of the leading image in the article I’d replace “cloud” with “shitstorm emoji” in the prompt. Then it would make more sense and be more applicable to VMWare.

What it proved is that the super rich have too much power. A power that shouldn’t exist in a democratic society.

Right wing media has been given far too much leeway in spreading disinformation and misinformation. Every show, podcast, and news article that spreads easily disproven falsehoods should be prosecuted. Fuck “corrections”. If an organization has to issue a correction that should be all they’re allowed to say for at least a 24 hour period (basically, put them in timeout).

Basically, they need to be held to account for not doing due diligence on what they’re reporting as fact. Unverified claims? It’s simple: Don’t publish that. Don’t even bring it up as news at all until you feel safe defending your statements in a court of law.

We already have standards for defamation of individuals. What we need are standards of defamation of reality.

We can’t rely on the civil court system to protect society from total bullshit. It’s too expensive and there’s so many ways to spout dangerous bullshit without defaming anyone.

Software patents shouldn’t exist!

I don’t believe he thinks that abstractly. Maybe his advisors will tell him as such and he’ll do it but I have my doubts.

He wants his followers to love and worship him. Not operate in a, “I scratch your back, you scratch mine” sort of way. He just wants the, “you scratch my back” part.

By pardoning them he’s sending a message that he’ll do something for them for free. That’s not how Trump operates. He’s going to want something immediately in return; power or money or both. The Jan 6th insurrectionists don’t have much of either.

It will be difficult because the AI only returns short results (relatively speaking). A sentence or two does not make for copyright infringement.

Except there’s nothing illegal about scraping all the content from websites (including news sites) and putting it into your own personal database. That is–after all–how search engines work.

It’s only illegal if you then distribute said copyrighted material without the copyright owner’s permission. Because that’s what copyright is all about: Distribution.

The news sites distributing the content in this case freely gave it to OpenAI’s crawlers. It’s not like they broke into these organizations in order to copy their databases of news articles.

For the news sites to have a case they need to demonstrate that OpenAI is creating a “derivative work” using their copyrighted material. However, that’s going to be a tough sell to judges and/or juries since the way LLMs work is not so different from how humans do: They take in information and then produce similar information (by predicting the next word/symbol, given a series of tokens/a prompt).

If you read all of Stephen King’s books, for example, you might be better at writing horror stories. You may even start writing in a similar style! That doesn’t mean you’re violating his copyright by producing similar stories.

No, it brings certainty: They’re not going to get it.

If they throw out the rule of law like this there’s no reason why anyone should follow the law at all. If Trump and his allies don’t have to follow the law why should anyone else?

If the only thing that motivates these people is violence that’s what they’ll get.

If being captured means a death sentence then there’s no reason to peacefully surrender. In fact, it is your human right to fight for your life in self defense.

If you make peaceful revolution impossible you make violent revolution inevitable. The billionaires should remember that all their wealth is built upon the trust the world has in the US’s stability. If that goes away then so does the majority of their wealth.

I have a Giant Sulcata Tortoise. She’s almost 100lbs.

Super easy to care for. She mows the lawn to eat but St Augustine grass doesn’t have all the nutrition she needs so we supplement her diet every two days with some fresh lettuce, fruit, and tortoise pellets.

Right now our yard is full of pumpkins donated by our neighbors that she enjoys very much (her poops turned a bit orange, haha). Watching her eat them is a surprisingly satisfying and relaxing experience.

Her home is an old lawnmower shed that my father-in-law had lying around and she goes into it every night (we cut a tortoise-shaped hole in the front and put some “baggage flaps” over it to keep the heat in). Interestingly, we didn’t need to “train” her to go in there she just figured it out on day 1 and settled in the very first night.

She comes when she’s called and loves to come see us when we’re out in the yard (hoping for treats!). We often get the leftover produce from Publix that’s going to be thrown away and feed her that. She doesn’t care that the lettuce has gone all wilty or about damaged fruit so it’s better than sending it into the trash 👍

Now that Trump doesn’t need to get reelected I think conservative Christians are in for a very big surprise: He actually doesn’t give AF about them. In fact, he thinks they’re idiots (he’s said so in the past).

I seriously doubt he’s going to attempt to appease them much at all during his next administration because he doesn’t need them anymore. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he completely throws them under the bus in any number of fashions.

I guarantee we’re going to get a lot of headlines next year similar to the woman who said, “he’s not hurting the right people!” This will include a whole lot of conservative Christians who thought Trump was going to institute their agenda but will instead totally screw them over.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he demands the taxation of churches so he can further line his pockets with more grift. He’ll say it’s necessary to pay off the debt or something like that then we’ll find out that the money is directly going into his and his allies pockets.