Being unavailable. As in, being reasonably sure people won’t repeatedly contact me, as if they expected me to be checking my phone 24/7.

Nuss, nem lembrava!

White on (3,14). Pi-rfect spot!

A bit frustrated, to be honest.

It’s always a bloody chore to extract meaningful pieces of info from my mum, and so far I had to do it this week multiple times: asking her if my sis is going to dine with us tomorrow or lunch with us Sunday, which bills she wants me to pay (she has a bit of a hard time with online payment), which dishes she wants me to prepare, stuff like this.

It could be worse, I guess. At least I didn’t need to ask her directions.

And speaking about old ladies, my 17yo cat has also been extra annoying. Kika decided to rummage my recyclables bin, as if it was a toybox. For the sake of an empty cigs pack. And then went “MEEERRRRWWWOOOON MEEEWWWWRRROOWWWN” = “I finds hunts!”, three o’clock of the morning, in one of the few days my sleep schedule was normal. Then the other day she decided to hop onto my bed, found Siegfrieda (the other cat) sleeping on my belly, and picked a fight with her. Over me.

Three hypotheses:

1. It’s easier to find news content than other stuff. And your typical forumverse user is more likely to share what they find, because they know this place needs more content.
2. News content gets more engagement than hobby content.
3. Feedback loop: more news content attracts people who are mostly interested on news content, and those people post more news content.

My all feed can empty pretty quickly when I turn on the politics/news filter, I just wish there were more chill posts.

That’s also my experience with manual subscription in Lemmy.

My comment doesn’t, but the OP does. Four downvotes in Beehaw is quite a lot, given the local users don’t downvote. Same thread is in the negatives in one of the cross-posts even if it’s on-topic.

And, like. I get why people would react negatively towards the product itself, but I don’t think it’s good tone to react like this towards the news being shared, you know?

People, please stop shooting the messenger. Please.

With that out of the way: I wish Mozilla didn’t waste so much money on chasing the latest trend of the season, and instead used it for its main products. Including Thunderbird. The one asking for donations.

Some years from now Thunderbolt will likely pop up in this list, of abandoned Mozilla products. Because it isn’t the result of Mozilla finding a niche to create an AI product to benefit users; it’s simply execs chasing the latest trend.

*Beehaw users are likely not seeing this, but this post has a bunch of downvotes.

All dogs are gold. At least in spirit!

For me he’s mostly black (at least in this picture), but I can get why you’d call him grey as a whole.

Most people agree with her. But for me calling such a warm tone “grey” is weird, it’s like calling your typical red apple “pink” instead of “red”, you know? To complicate it further I typically refer to fur colour with the same words I’d use for human hair colour, and I’m not sure they don’t map 1:1 with colours used for objects.

(Another situation this pops up is when talking about magenta. But it’s more like a discussion about the “main” colour vs. hue.)

Man, colour perception is weird

It is! And colour words are weird too. And they somewhat influence your perception, too.

I often get into similar “fights”, but because of mismatching colour terms. For example, if Siegfrieda’s coat is “cinza” grey:

For me the colour is a bit too warm to be “cinza” grey, it’s more like “castanho” brown. But my mum insists it’s grey.

(She’s probably in the right, though. My mental colour palette is all fucked up.)

That makes sense; it would be a mix of “if you can do it and I can’t, you must be cheating” and “your a bot than you’re arguement is invalid” ad hominem.

I think unnecessary combativeness might be also a factor. I’ve noticed on the internet people who want to fight against “something”, it doesn’t matter what; so they pick any low-hanging fruit they can find to fight you.

I’m actually using more those resources (em dashes, three points lists, “it’s worth noting that”, “it’s not X, it’s Y”, etc.) after AI popped up. They’re a damn good way to detect assumptive people, eager to conclude based on little to no info or reasoning; the same ones OP is complaining about. They don’t want a conversation at all, they want to whine, so if you give them a low-hanging fruit you can detect them early and block them as noise and dead weight.

That’s in my “casual” writing style, though. Professionally (as a translator) I mostly play by the tune, trying to preserve the style of the original. (Plus I barely translate things into English, it’s usually into Portuguese, very rarely Italian.)

That might not necessarily be the case – there is a possibility every example is completely organic – but it’s a sign of the times that we can’t just relax and assume the things we see and hear were made by people.

Guys, I found em dashes! The author is a bot! Bring me my pitchfork! /jk (those are en dashes, by the way.)

I think the text leaves the worst parts out: assumptions, decontextualisation, faulty reasoning, focusing on individual words instead of what they mean, and things like this. As in, issues with that part of comprehension that depends on logic, not on language proficiency.

All of those were already a problem before chatbots. But since chatbot output is really bad at those things, I think increased exposure to chatbots might make the problem worse.

If you develop some feature (or bug!) of course some people will find a decent way to use it. That doesn’t mean the feature should be there on first place, specially when the possibility of abuse is so obvious. Plus if the pressure behind this anti-feature was “only” single page applications, and nothing else, I bet it would be implemented in a different way.

Also, look at the big picture. In isolation, one could argue giving pages access to your browsing history was a necessary albeit poorly thought feature; but when you look at other stuff browsers nowadays are supposed to do, you notice a pattern:

• Browsers giving more info to the page about your system than just “I’m a browser, I can browse pages”: the browser software, its version, the operating system, the fonts you have installed, your screen dimensions…
• Letting pages decide the behaviour of mouse clicks. And if the window is focused or not.
• The ability to show pop-up messages.
• etc.

Are you noticing it? All those “features” are somewhat useful, but with such obvious room for abuse it would be insane to add them, in retrospect. And that abuse is usually from money hoarders, or people controlled by them.

Worse: all of them crammed into what was supposed to be a system to show you content, but eventually got bloated into a development platform, transforming browsers into those bloody abominations of nowadays, with a huge barrier of entry, dominated by a single vendor (and where the vassal of said vendor got ~3% market share). I’d say that not having a monopoly is more important than all those features together.

And odds are the ones pushing for those features (like Google) knew they were insane, and that they would raise the barrier of entry for new browsers. But that was their goal, innit? Enshittify the web while claiming control over it.

Mass nouns get no S

More accurately, a mass noun cannot be assigned a grammatical number. For example, compare

1. *one bread, *two bread, *two breads, some bread
2. one sheep, two sheep, *two sheeps, some sheep

Asterisk means “agrammatical”. #1 shows “bread” is a mass noun, and #2 shows “sheep” isn’t, even if “sheep” doesn’t accept the ⟨s⟩. (It’s just a weird plural.)

…that said I think your take is bad. “Countability” is rather unstable, specially if there’s some semantic pressure to keep both the countable and uncountable meanings. That applies to “mail”; in fact the word used to be only countable. (It meant “bag”. Nowadays that meaning is archaic, but still.) Add dialectal variation (e.g. Indian English speakers seem to be rather fond of using “mail” as a countable noun) and language interference, and the whole thing becomes an “I only accept when people use a language the same way as I do!”.

Nah. The medium interacts with the message, shapes it, but it is not the message itself.

Single page applications are only a necessity because pages are expected to be huge behemoths, so requesting a new page would take too long and put a burden on the server. And that is mostly the result of corporations bloating their sites with advertisement, to the point our expectations on what’s an acceptable page size became distorted.

(Note Angular was released by Google in 2016, and the anti-feature is from 2015. I don’t think this is a coincidence.)

I’ll expand here what I mentioned in another comm.

Most back button hijacking relies on the browser history API. Further info here: “The replaceState() method of the History interface modifies the current history entry, replacing it with the state object and URL passed in the method parameters.”

So for example. You visited site A, then site B. Your browser stores this as “user went A then B”, so if you click the “back” button while navigating B, it sends you back to A. However Javascript in the site B can tell your browser “no, the user didn’t visit A then B. They visited C then B”. So as you click “back” you’re sent to a third site you never visited.

Why is this anti-feature there on first place? Why are sites even allowed to interact with your history? Because corporations really, really, really want to know your browsing history: which sites are directing traffic to it site, which pages within that site you visited (imagine those pages show you products you might potentially buy), so goes on. It has practically no reason to exist for non-commercial sites. Now remember Google is a corporation, it profits the most from advertisement, and has a role in the web standards, and you’ll notice Google was at least partially responsible for this anti-feature.

And now, the same Google is using its monopoly over search to dictate which should be the rules for the usage of the anti-feature it added. As if the internet was Google’s property: it’s who decides which features should be on the internet, and how you’re allowed to use them.

Moral of the story is: even if it looks like Google is doing something good, remember they were responsible for this mess on first place.

Also, free will implies there’s someone making a decision. What is that “someone” and where is it?

Yup, I agree it isn’t something epistemically real.

The reason I still find the concept of free will a desirable fiction is that it pushes people towards doing things that benefit other people, not just themselves, without necessarily curbing down their power. You can use it for example to drill people “yes, you have the choice to cause harm, but you should not act on it”.

…or something like this. It’s one of those things that is rather clear for me in my thoughts, but not so much when worded.

I don’t think so.

The main problem with dictatorship is that whoever is in power will act to their own benefit, even when this harms you. You don’t need to rely on the concept of free will to show this is a bad idea.