Smartphones aren’t the issue. You can access the internet in other ways. This feels very boomer yelling at clouds.

That said, as a recommendation, sure why not. People do seem a bit too glued to their phones overall. But I don’t think that’s anything new.

I also don’t know anything about japanese laws, so I have no idea if this is a concern, but anything potentially enforcable that cuts into people’s freedom arbitrarily makes alarm bells go off in my head.

So I didn’t get nausea when I first got glasses (that I remember at least, I had some as a child for a bit for other reasons and then in my late teens got them for short-sightedness) but I have 2 pairs - one I use for computers/reading/anything close-by (which, since I don’t bother changing them for my commute, is most of the time - and no I’m not in a car and I can see everything fine anyway, just distant text is hard) and one pair that fully corrects my vision that I use otherwise. When I’ve gone a while without using the stronger pair, I always get some nausea for a bit after putting them on, but it goes away after a few hours, and if I wear that pair for a few days, it stops happening completely. I think you’ll get used to it. I also have one eye with a much stronger defict than the other, and I think that might be related since correcting that probably affects depth perception.

While yes, the key thing is that at any point either party can say “nope no longer wanna do this”, it’s still a hierarchy, but it is mutually agreed upon. (Also, in reality, the sub has the ultimate control in bdsm because of the safe word, and if they don’t something is very wrong)

Static unchangable hierarchies are what no one enters voluntarily (at the low end that is).

Even outside of bdsm, it can make perfect sense to establish a hierarchy for e.g. faster response times, or because one person is far more knowledgable about something. It’s just important that the people on the lower end can always end it.

I have seen at least two different “BND Überwachungswagen 00x” here in germany as well. The BND is our national intelligence agency (and Überwachungswagen just means surveillance van).

Always a fan

What are you arguing against here? If you think you’re defending yourself then you think you’re defending yourself. If you think you’re helping the people you think you’re helping the people. Neither means the outcome will be good or the actions justified. All the person you’re responding to did was reason about Thatcher’s possible motivations.

Do you actually understand the term strawman because arguing against a strawman is exactly what you did there.

I think this mostly works with the current order of the world, but it would also mean that e.g. a white supremacist in japan is left wing (since the current social hierarchy there if anything has japanese people above the rest - and please no one twist this into me saying japan is ultra racist).

It seems more to me that a common thread for anything considered “left” is that there should be no or very little social hierarchy, whereas right wing ideologies think there should be a very strong one (be that inherently through circumstances of your birth or merit based). In reality most places do have quite a bit of social hierarchy (and used to have more) so it coincides with wanting to change the status quo.

There’s probably something I’m forgetting that is considered left wing and loves hierarchies

I also get those compliments and I also just use shampoo and conditioner (once or twice a week). When I travel and use hotel shampoo/conditioner my hair usually feels noticably worse after (sometimes the hotel stuff is actually nice though).

I think a lot of it is genetics, and not coloring or bleaching or anything also helps a lot. But conditioner is great and not a scam (and I don’t let the male targeted 2 in 1 soap/shampoo stuff anywhere near my hair anymore, that was noticably worse as well)

100%, furries get way too much hate. Especially considering how chill they’re usually are.

Though honestly unless your pfp betrays some insane political affiliation it shouldn’t have relevance on how you see someones reply. I know this is a shitpost but people do that for real. I think my favorite are the xitter boomers dismissing people because their avatar isn’t a selfie and they don’t using their real names.

Bad life rng, I think

For me it got progressively worse for the next 12 years then suddenly better and then suddenly even better after uni. But I’m lucky to have a job that pays well, that I don’t hate, with great colleagues.

Also germany, but yea makes sense, I don’t have gas canisters, rarely buy alcohol, the self checkouts around here stopped with the weighing, and I rarely buy more than 5 things at once+am decently fast at scanning, so it maybe costs me 15 seconds.

Also I did scan an item twice today and the lidl self checkout actually allowed me to delete it, at first I also thought I’d have to get an employee.

Ever since I saw that the grocery store near the train station in my city (which is famously one of the worst in the country in terms of crime) had self checkout without even a gate to scan your receipt for a while (they added it now) and has the handheld scanners, I’ve been assuming that the added theft from either really can’t be that bad, or is a result of poor security. Clearly it’s worth it for the higher customer throughput for that store, so I kinda doubt it could be that bad especially in safer areas.

Self checkout is the greatest thing ever and I will never understand why so many people seem to prefer waiting in line for a few minutes instead of just using the self checkout.

No human interaction, usually faster because I don’t have to wait. What’s not to love? Sure occassionally you might get selected for a random check and have to wait a bit, but that still beats the line.

They used to be awful here 10-15 years ago, with a scale for your scanned items that would complain over nothing all the time, but now everywhere I’ve been has done away with that in favor of random controls and the receipt for opening the gate. I think my highlight so far was the clothing store where you didn’t even have to scan, you just put your items in a box and it told you what you have to pay.

I don’t even get why. The person that did this for real has been posted about plenty, and there are pictures, so why not just use the real one? The AI generated one is also so much less funny than the real one bc it’s not just a painting of exactly what’s behind the fence

Holy confidently incorrect

LLMs aren’t generating the images, when “using an LLM for image generation” what’s actually happening is the LLM talking to an image generation model and then giving you the image.

Ironically there’s a hint of truth in it though because for text-to-image generation the model does need to map words into a vector space to understand the prompt, which is also what LLMs do. (And I don’t know enough to say whether the image generation offered through LLMs just has the LLM provide the vectors directly to the image gen model rather than providing a prompt text).

You could also consider the whole thing as one entity in which case it’s just more generalized generative AI that contains both an LLM and an image gen model.

Yes and no. Yes, they compete with the other ones and due to domestication have very high population, but also the same factors endangering honey bees (insecticides, monocultures) also endanger other bee species. So while “give the honey bees more sugar water so they survive” would be horrible foe ecological diversity, actually adressing the underlying factors would largely also benefit other species.

I wouldn’t even be surprised if to some degree that still applied to places where they’re invasive tbh

It’s not trash talk at all though. And even ignoring the language itself, trash talk is towards your opponents (where still most people don’t get how to do it in a non-obnoxious way, i.e. someone spamming ez after they win a game isn’t trash talk it’s being annoying). Most of the really bad flame happens towards teammates because everyone needs to blame someone else.

Irl sports get by just fine without people constantly being pieces of shit, I dunno why it’s so hard to apply that to online games.

That and it’s easier to make genuine connections with regulars. Nowadays for that you have to go out of your way to join a community discord or similar because nearly all multiplayer games are built to play with your existing friends.

That’s a lot easier to do than what I remember reading about, so thanks for the clarification!

But conservatives reacting to the word “pronouns” isn’t at all about systemic oppression? It’s about the immediate brain off that follows to instantly rant about “woke” or whatever, even if e.g. someone mentioned pronouns in a grammar context. It’s a stupid reaction born from opposition to a perceived “woke mind virus” (or equivalent).

Similarly, some people read “AI” and immediately think whatever follows is worthless garbage. Which, even ignoring that not everything labeled AI is always ML, is a stupid reaction born from opposition to the LLM (and general genAI) hype.

Sure, the “woke mind virus” is pure delusion, and I, too, want to throw up from the genAI hype every time someone mentions “AI” or “ChatGPT”, but AI isn’t even well defined and even ML has plenty of useful applications.

It’s the same anti-intellectual “I hate the things I associate with this word so anyone not hating on the word is stupid” while disregarding what the word actually means in the given context.

I guess the closest we might be getting anytime soon then is the digital euro. Which is supposed to end its preparation phase soon, and, in spite of being government issued, promises to be private (not like ccs are remotely private anyway, so nothing lost at least).

As always there’s some risk of it getting changed to allow tracking later down the line, but if done correctly it could still be a big improvement over the current situation for EU citizens. If it’s successful, maybe other governments will look into similar programs.

I feel like ideally the digital euro project would work with GNU Taler since the goals seem to align, with the main difference being that the digital euro would be government backed. I don’t have high hopes since governments always fuck this up somehow, but I guess in the best timeline the EU is that champion (since using the same technology even with a different currency would give some trust into the concept, so it could help with finding early adopters - likely outside of the EU since I’d imagine in that scenario the digital euro would just be preferred here)