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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • The Algorithm has been A Thing long enough to have impacted young adults during their formative years.

    At 25 I’m barely old enough that I entered adolescence just as “youtuber” became a career for many people (around 2012ish). The Algorithm has been part of it all my teens though I witnessed it becoming increasingly eldritch throughout and teaching its final untethered form in the second half of the 2010s. Today’s 20 year olds never knew anything else as they were 13 when elsagate was in full swing.

    TL;DR how are your knees grandpa?





  • That’s what Sweden has been doing yes. However it very much is a “mutual understanding” type situation where Sweden is very attached to the SKE and the EU just doesn’t really want to bother due to the situation being low-stakes high-friction. The UK also fits all criteria for “must use the Euro”, but would not benefit from the same “mutual understanding” that Sweden does because the stakes for the Euro would actually be very large. It is quite unlikely that the EU would just bend the rules and let the UK keep their own currency this time. It is also quite unlikely that the British public would even come close to accepting the Euro.

    Regardless of your position on the matter, remember that Brexit negotiations completely broke down multiple times over much, much simpler and lower-stakes questions. The British Ego is at least as large as the French’s, and if four years of Brexit should have taught us anything it’s that they have extremely unrealistic expectations and actually think that the EU should bend over backwards to have them back.


  • These are the pitfalls with the “amazon reviews/yelp” model.

    A decent implementation of the Wikipedia/FOSS model sidesteps this because it theoretically is run by opinionated curators. No amount of bots/shills can break the article soft-lock ounce foul play is spotted.

    That’s not to say these systems haven’t been occasionally broken through more sophisticated attacks, but empirically it seems clear that the model generally works well enough given enough community engagement (which would be the biggest challenge IMO, because maintainers can’t be expected to buy every product, and reliable primary sources may be hard to come by).



  • Wait until you learn about debhelper.

    If you use a debian-based system, unless you have actively looked at the DH source, the one thing that built virtually every package on your system, you do not get to say anything about “bloat” or “KISS”.

    DH is a monstrous pile of perl scripts, only partially documented, with a core design that revolves around a spaghetti of complex defaults, unique syntax, and enough surprising side effects and crazy heuristics to spook even the most grizzled greybeards. The number of times I’ve had to look at the DH perl source to understand a (badly/un)documented behavior while packaging something is not insignificant.

    But when we replaced a bazillion bash scripts with a (admittedly opinionated but also stable and well documented) daemon suddenly the greybeards acted like Debian was going to collapse under the weight of its own complexity.


  • The lack of even the most basic understanding of parliamentary politics flying around in this thread is appalling, but certainly illustrates the reason why there are so many wild takes flying around on Lemmy.

    To summarize:

    • The right got a 2/3rds majority in parliament. The united left had the most votes of any individual group, but that’s only around 1/3 total.
    • The reason the left proclaimed they “won” is they came “first” and thought the center-right party would ally with them rather than the “hard right” (welp)
    • That, in isolation (!), isn’t antidemoratic. A majority of French representatives (presumably) approve of the government. Simple maths. A government can only govern with the approval of parliament, it literally can’t work otherwise.
    • However the French voting system very strongly relies on strategic voting, and the far-right came very close to having a parliamentary majority. Therefore the center-right party only got the seats they did because everybody left of the far-right made electoral agreements to pull out their candidates so only the candidate with the most chances to win against the far right would be running. This heavily benefited the center-right party who then allied with the hard right, which is being perceived as treason (for lots of reasons that I’m not going to get into). Strategic voting is a democratic failures and leads to suboptimal choices for representatives (thought that is still miles better than whatever the fuck the CCP is doing, since apparently that needs saying on here). Furthermore this whole shift to the right certainly isn’t going to help with the socio-economic issues and is going to end up benefiting the far-right.

  • Why would you think only valid military targets were next to these?

    That’s… not a war crime is. I don’t want to be the guy who justifies the death of civilians, because each one is a tragedy, but unfortunately in war there is such a thing as greater evils.

    Why are you still believing the IDFs first reports when the vast majority of the time they’re lying?

    Now that’s fair. And of course we can as well point out that their whole war is self-inflicted to start with so there’s not much legitimacy to any of their acts of war, even the less illegal ones.


  • I’m as critical of Israel as any reasonable person but that’s like the one thing they did recently that was actually a (at least somewhat) targeted attack against their enemies.

    Calling that a war crime unnecessarily and dangerously dilutes the term. Leveling cities and starving the fleeing population is a war crime and a crime against humanity. Intentionally shooting civilians, children, aid workers, and journalists is a war crime. How about we focus on those, it’s not like there’s a shortage of israeli war crimes to report on.

    EDIT: Apparently Lebanon reports 2800 injured and 12 dead from these attacks… How many fucking explosive pagers were involved? I doubt a significant percentage of those were Hezbollah, which would make that a war crime. The callous inefficiency of IDF operations will never cease to amaze me.


  • France’s historic language policy is certainly highly problematic yes. Although the point is not genocide but class warfare and/or colonialism, not that it’s much of an improvement.

    And now do Belgium. French is the language of the elites (the monarchy and, historically, the aristocracy and bourgeoisie) but also a minority regional language. Is Flanders banning French on public signage a form of oppression? I personally think it’s stupid Flemish nationalism but I wouldn’t call it oppression.

    So how about we stop making blanket statements. Moscow’s erasure of Belarusian identity is at least oppressive and imperialistic and follows a long history of oppression. IDK if that qualifies as genocide (IMHO that undermines the gravity of something like the Holodomor), but something not strictly being genocide doesn’t make it unimportant.


  • IMO the proper thing to do is to answer the question and make damn sure the poster isn’t falling for the XY Problem.

    Sometimes the weird solution is justified by a weird context, and we gotta treat people like adults. But also, you’re probably asking the wrong question.

    Like, I can tell you how to disconnect your bike’s brake lines, but if you’re asking how to do that with no context I would most definitely like to know what problem you think you’re solving.


  • Socialists have been the go-to vote of the proletariat in Europe since the early 1900s, and most of these parties were in power at some point or another since 2000.

    However these parties have fallen off a cliff in popularity, and the reason why will depend heavily on who you ask but it boils down to “workers don’t feel represented by socialists”.

    • The socio-economic landscape moved on since 1917, but the left-end of socialists did not. Orthodox Marxism says tertiary sector workers are basically part of the bourgeoisie (I’ve had Extremely Online Marxists explain that one to me with a straight face, so as an IT worker I’m afraid to say I am not allowed to partake in any True Socialism because I do not sell my Labor).
    • Conversely the “center-left” socialists are hardcore neoliberals (who just happen to think that some social programs serve the neoliberal agenda) and their policies have therefore failed to meaningfully curb the degradation of public services and standards of living.
    • The Left™ got stuck in the trap of being pigeonholed as “pro-immigration” during what most people felt like was immigration crisis. Doesn’t matter how you feel about it, this culture war bullshit has profoundly hurt their polling scores and benefited bigots.
    • Parties with an internally democratic governance have been dreadfully slow to react to changes in the political landscape in the past 25 years. Retirees are voting in the primaries whereas extremist parties are led by autocrats who fully understand how to capitalize on online media attention (hence the better polling numbers of the far-right with thr youth).

    Fighting fascists with “but socialists good for proletariat” is worse-than-useless. Voters know what socialists stand for, and that’s kind of the problem because they feel it hasn’t helped. People don’t have hope in traditional European socialist policies, and only vote red out of tradition or as a barrage vote against the far-right.





  • The Catholic Church: Co-opts a pagan holiday and re-brands it

    Two millennia of tradition: Mix pagan imagery with Christian imagery

    Nonbelievers: Co-opt it back without the explicitly Christian imagery

    You: Nooooooo it’s religious!


    The Church has had an iron fist over much of my continent for near two millenia, so of course you can find a religious tie for every holiday (except the First of May probably). However my family is almost completely non believing and we’ve always celebrated Christmas and Easter, with Coca-Cola Santa and no Mass. Why this laic co-optation is so controversial I will never understand.


  • Easter is not inherently a christian holiday goddammit. At least not in its popular celebration. Last I checked Jesus didn’t pop eggs from his butt when he resurrected (that we know of) and the preachings of the Easter Bunny are unfortunately not canon in Catholicism.

    To complain about “religious persecution” of profoundly pagan (if not outright heretical depending on who you ask) traditions is… certainly an interesting exercise in religious cognitive dissonance.


  • It makes some sense contextually.

    Purple and light purple are “NFP (left)” and “not NFP (left)”. Socialists are traditionally red.

    The two blues are “LR (right)” and “not LR (right)”. Liberals are traditionally blue.

    Yellow are center-right neolibs.

    The independent left/right seats don’t matter much because they will vote predictably with their political side on most issues, so since this will be a coalition Parliament there is not much point in outlining individual party affiliation (anyways the NFP is already a coalition of several parties).