fonix232

Bad news then: almost all software engineers will be using various forms of genAI for their work, let that be LLMs for coding or image generation for quickly visualising things.

Overall, the UX, but also in big part due to marketing.

Corporate/for-profit solutions tend to have enough money to pay not just for the development but the marketing of a product. Let me show you a non-social-media pair: Plex vs Jellyfin.

If you go to the individual websites, the difference is visibly stark. As a basic user with little to no understanding, which website sells the product better?

Open source most of the time can’t afford the long user experience studies and full on designer teams that make a product more likely to be chosen by the average person. Hell, open source often can’t even afford lawsuits (which is why a lot of projects go dark and disappear after accidentally stepping on the toes of someone revengeful or looking for a quick payout)… in fact most open source software is solely driven by unpaid contributors. And while there’s tradition in software engineering to contribute to open source, the same doesn’t really apply for designers.

And that brings us to UX, the most coveted topic of software engineering. Why? Because it’s not always intuitive what the users will find intuitive. After all we’re engineers, we care about the raw information, not its presentation. Sure a tidied up Excel spreadsheet looks nice, but it isn’t more functional in an overwhelming majority of the cases, than a no frills, just data spreadsheet.

That’s why most open source software feels so barebones. They’re full of features but those aren’t fancy, they’re not a nice experience for the users but simply fulfill a singular purpose.

And that to date differentiates Plex and Jellyfin, as well as any other pairing of paid-for vs open-and-free software.

Not at the proof level needed for it to disinfect, at least not the earliest body piercings.

Alcohol is a disinfectant only at certain v/v percentages (or proof) - specifically between 60-90% (120-180 proof). 40% (such as vodka, whiskey, and most spirits) works in a pinch as well.

However the earliest alcohols were 10-15% ABV at most. We’re talking about beers and wines that came from accidentally allowing fruits, bread, etc., ferment in water.

Now, mind you, even a 5-7% beer or winde won’t have much microbial life in it, but that’s because of constant exposure to an alcohol-ic environment.

Now, distillation for alcohol didn’t come around until 1000CE-ish (distillation itself has been available since Ancient Mesopotamia, but was primarily used to clean water, or to concentrate perfume). Medieval monks were actually the first to distill wine into aqua vitae (a form of fortified wine)

So no, people ~2000 would not have had access to high enough potency alcohol to be used as a disinfectant.

First of all, I want to point out that 2000 years ago was essentially still the height of the Roman Empire, who were far from unknowledgeable about a number of topics, including the human body. In fact, the Romans are actually closer to us modern people than to the first humans who wore body jewellery - any type of jewellery that required body modification (such as, a needle cutting through flesh to create a tunnel).

The oldest ear piercing evidence for example goes back 7000 years, around 5000BC, pre-dating even the Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures. The oldest mummy ever found had its ears pierced.

As to how this came to be… I think it’s pretty straightforward. Humans have liked pretty jewellery since the dawn of time, and there’s even proof that such items were used to barter, as a pre-currency, pre-coin form of money. This includes gold and silver and other precious metals, but even pretty shells and stones.

However the main issue with jewellery is that it’s easy to take from your body. How do you make it harder? By embedding it in your body.

What I think happened is that a group of humans discovered the generally antiseptic properties of silver (potentially a silver arrowhead or similar item embedded itself into a human, it wasn’t removed due to fear of bleeding out, and the wound didn’t get infected days later, allowing it to heal around the item), and began utilising it as a way to provide more protection for their jewelry - after all it’s much harder to remove an ear, nose, lip, or nipple ring than a bracelet or necklace.

Such practices spread easily with trade, so it’s no surprise that in a few hundred years it was all over the place that you can, in fact, cause a bit of pain to yourself to have some permanent value added to your body.

Some fun facts:

• Romans did indeed wear nipple rings as a symbol of status (no, not as a way to attach their otherwise quite heavy cloaks!)
• while in India, nose rings were more common (both septum and nostril rings)
• in (mostly sub-Saharan) Africa, lip rings, lip and ear stretching were “the big thing”
• in the furthest parts of SE Asia - modern day Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea - a number of tribes marked adulthood and other major life achievements with genital piercings, primarily for men (mostly foreskin and frenulum piercings), but also some women (labia and clitoral hood piercings).
• In the western world, piercings fell out of fashion between 1400-1600, partly because of the discovery of the Americas, where more intricate body piercings (tongue piercings for example) were used in religious rituals that the Europeans considered barbaric or even downright demonic.
• Their popularity was restored partially by the unsubstantiated rumours of Queen Victoria I’s husband, Prince Albert, after whom the piercing was named, having a ring in his glans to contain his enormous size in the back then fashionable trousers (the Victorian equivalent of skinny jeans). Mind you these rumours started a solid hundred years after his death… in the 1950-1960s
• the 1960-70s were the resurgence years in western culture for body piercings, in part thanks to the hippie movement, and in part thanks to the gay subculture (which was already pretty big on body piercings as a differentiating factor) becoming more mainstream (Stonewall etc.).

I literally specified that the changes in TSA will affect airports “in other countries”.

Barfing in that pre-TSA the US air travel market was a shitshow contributed nothing to the discussion of how introducing the TSA and their stringent, invasive procedures fucked up air travel for other countries. Which, again, I very clearly specified.

For a very short period.

Phones became a mainstream way of communication in the 1880s.

Public transport, in the form of trains and buses and street cars have become widespread in the early 1800s, mostly around 1830-1850 (e.g. London had railway services but the first underground service opened in 1863).

Mind you, most of these services were connecting small-ish town sections (even London wasn’t really a unified city until the 1900s, but a bunch of parishes, boroughs and towns connected by railway), so your “friend living on the other side of town” was usually a 15-30 minute walk away at most. In fact most people, the average people anyway, had friends only in the local community as they’ve rarely left said community and ventured beyond their immediate vicinity. Those who’d have friends from far away - let it be a city a few dozen to a few hundred miles away or even another country - would be either the upper class (nobility and high earning professions like solicitors), or merchants (also rich). Long distance travel was a luxury most couldn’t afford.

It was the industrialisation that allowed for cheaper transport and for towns to grow larger and denser, so the overlap of the availability of public transport, the NEED for such transport to meet friends, and the lack of telecommunications wasn’t as widespread as one would think.

That’s because you’re US-centric still.

Other countries, interestingly, didn’t have all these issues prior to TSA hardening the screening process post-9/11.

All those countries and airports, however, upped their processes when the US did, making air travel a chore instead of a good experience.

Getting rid of the TSA would be such a helpful step forward better air travel.

Most countries’ airport security is to some extent modelled after the TSA, and was done in lockstep with the US increasing “travel safety” via invasive processes. Obviously it is toned back A LOT, but if the US were to get rid of the TSA and provide more lax regulations on air travel, most international countries would follow.

Just because the authority isn’t used it doesn’t mean it isn’t present. You can have a hierarchy with authority assigned to higher-ups, and still work in a flat structure a la anarchy on average days. Authority ideally is only utilised when it has to be. In a work environment, for e.g. an IT team, that authority would be used when shit hits the fan and something mission-critical needs fixing and there can be absolutely zero miscommunication, so everyone does their tasks to their best abilities, but the team lead still takes charge.

Yep. Anarchy sounds great on a small scale, but cannot work on a larger scale (country level and above). Any complex enough task requires delegation, and at least a semblance of hierarchy, providing a level of authority to certain people within a group.

Just think about it. Building a simple carriage? That’s something you can do with 2-3 other people, no hierarchy needed. A modern car? Even to just assemble one you need 6-10 people doing the physical work and 2-3 “leaders” who coordinate these people, to do so effectively. And to build a rocket that can actually reach space? You need hundreds of people working in lockstep from design to manufacturing and to final assembly. With redundancies and checks and whatnot all planned for. Try to built a rocket without any hierarchy and you’ll just never reach the goal.

Anarchy is something people should strive for, but it’s not something we can achieve truly. It’s more a guiding principle rather than a concrete goal.

I’m not even a bread bro, I just happen to have ADHD and got a few hyperfocus sessions into sourdough 😭

Well, there’s a number of reasons for the shape of the various bread types. The dough type - from the kind of flour used, through the resting time, fermentation time, raising agent (let it be any of a variety of yeast products, wild yeast aka sourdough starter, baking powder or baking soda, there’s tons of options), how hydrated it is, and so on. The oven type and baking approach. The purpose of the bread.

Your first picture is of a standard toast or sandwich bread. It’s supposed to be a fairly loose, soft bread with a soft crust and an engineered shape for easier baking - with conduction baking on all sides except the top (here conduction baking refers to the fact the sides and bottom of the bread is held in place by a heated metal tray, transferring heat directly without letting air or steam escape, resulting in the soft crust). A more industrial yeast type is used (usually dry or instant yeast), which result in relatively small gas bubbles, giving it a dense but fluffy interior. The flour is usually a light wheat flour, and both resting and fermentation times are low - that’s why it’s a more industrial bread, you mix the ingredients, let the mixture sit for 30-60 minutes then bake it, easily automated.

The second picture is of a sourdough loaf. This usually uses wholemeal wheat flour, often mixed with rye or other grains for better texture, and is a fairly tedious bread to make with multiple stretch and fold sequences and long resting periods, allowing lots of gluten to form, which means every stretch and fold sequence doesn’t mix the dough but rather layers and shapes it. The yeast comes from a sourdough starter, and is allowed to ferment longer, which is why you get an intense flavour. It bakes quick in a Dutch oven first covered then uncovered, allowing it to fluff up but then shape a hard crust. You get much larger bubbles and an internal structure of long strands of gluten forming swirls and such.

Then the baguette, it uses a different approach to sourdough but with a similar effect. Unlike sandwich bread, the dough for baguettes - as well as what I’d call “European medium bread” (medium here meaning the hardness and bakedness of the crust) - a crispy crust that isn’t as well baked as a sourdough, but also isn’t soft, with a well developed gluten structure, using more predictable yeasts (again usually instant quick yeast or dry yeast, or in some areas, live yeast cubes). Mind you the baguette you’re showing is more of a hypermarket style baguette that is intentionally baked to a lesser darkness, and traditional baguettes are more on the golden brown part of the scale.

Overall, the kind of flour determines the flavour, but also the raising and resting times. Some flours (especially wholemeal or grain mix flours) need more time as the more complex proteins and sugars take more time to be broken down by the yeast thus they rise slower. Hydration determines how tough the dough is to shape (e.g. pasta is only hydrated by the eggs, making it a hard, dense dough, pizza needs to be flexible so it’s high hydration, and it gets extra raise in the oven as the water quickly evaporates). Yeast determines the flavour, the raising time, and in the final product, the texture and airiness. The baking method can fuck a lot with the texture. A regular convection oven can dry the crust out making it tough and thick, forming quickly and stopping the bread from rising, but adding some ice in a pan at the bottom can generate enough steam to let the bread rise properly by delaying the crust hardening. Same idea for sourdough using a Dutch oven, you create a high moisture environment, a steam box, to keep the crust soft while the bread rises, then remove it at the end so the crust can cripsen and brown. The sandwich bread is medium hydration thus it keeps the sides moist while they bake, giving it that brown but soft crust. If you were to plop the same dough just into the oven, without the baking shape, due to there being little to no gluten development, it would just fall apart and harden into the world’s shittiest giant cookie.

But also you can bake bread in a Dutch oven over an open fire, giving a more rustic style bread with thick, chewy, but also cripsy crust. Toss the same dough with lower hydration into a circle and onto an upside down pan in the same fire and you got some awesome flatbread with a nice center air pocket you can open up and stuff with meat.

Then, you can decide to just fuck it and add as much high fructose corn syrup as possible without fucking up the bread, and you get American style bread.

He’s a symptom of the sickness that is the alt-right fascist-nazi movement which sadly wasn’t snuffed out proper when we had the chance.

The issue with that is as you explained: it’s up to the instance admins (who often don’t care and/or are too busy to deal with it), and visibility due to it happening on instance support community is low.

Bake it into the service, and I guarantee you, average uptake of new moderators for stale communities will improve.

Instead of closing stale communities, I’d like to see a more federated versions of what Reddit does:

• a community goes stale
  • this can be further supported by modmail sent to mods requesting immediate active moderation within X days, if that doesn’t happen, then consider it stale
• all accounts that signed up to the community are notified about it being stale and requesting moderators to apply
• any account that has interacted with the community in X time (say, the last year or 6 months) can then apply to be a moderator
• a, say, 30 or 60 day period follows allowing moderator applications and community member votes (not just signed up members but accounts that interacted with the community in Y time, this can be larger than the previous moderator application timeframe requirement). Only those whose first interaction with the community was before the stale announcement are allowed to vote.
• at the end of the period, the new moderator team is picked by automation based on the votes and total number of applicants.
• if necessary, the instance owner(s) can also step in to provide assistance in assigning moderators

How is it clickbait? The title literally says the name of the ship, and the ability to read a word backwards should be something one acquires by around 5th grade.

Specifically, foxes shagging.

Which tends to sound like an infant being raped. Super distressing.

Dumb can be helped. Most people tend to be “dumb” in the sense of lexical knowledge or lacking the understanding of logic, not the ability. Which means they CAN learn to become smarter, even if they require help and appropriate education (something the generic education system can’t provide).

Perfect example are the three “worst students” in my high school class. They were troublemakers, because they didn’t find the classes engaging, because they didn’t understand them - all because they didn’t understand the basics, as it wasn’t taught to them in a way they could process it. I tutored them for a few months and every. single. teacher. No, I’m not joking, literally every single teacher made comments on their sudden improvements, often even testing them separately, not believing that students who just barely passed for 2-3 years suddenly were getting 80-90% on their tests.

So yeah, a lack of lexical knowledge is not a major issue for me. I’d definitely date someone who’s attractive but dumb, because the latter can be “fixed”.

What’s more important in my opinion is their general attitude, approach to life. Are they kind? Are they a good person? How do they treat others - let that be friends, strangers, animals, waitstaff/service workers, etc.?

Dumb can be fixed, but an awful personality most often can’t.

Nah, the issue is much deeper rooted. fElonia has been a white supremacist moron for a VERY long time.

When he sold his first company, Zip2, to Compaq, the latter said that the code was practically unusable.

Later on, he funded the formation of the original X dot com, an online bank, where he fired all other founders within the first half year due to “creative differences”, basically stole their work, and within a year they merged with Peter Thiel’s PayPal/Confinity. A few months later Musk got ousted as CEO because of mismanagement. Go figure.

Half his ventures since have been abject and utter failures, which would’ve ruined anyone else financially, but because he’s got his rich emerald mine owner daddy, he always had a nice little trust fund to fall back on.

And his views also go back to his father, who was a fervent supporter of the Apartheid state, and is essentially a white supremacist (also an elitist piece of shit). Don’t even get me started about mummy dearest, to whom muskie had to run just so he didn’t have to fight Zuckerberg…

At SpaceX there literally used to be a “Musk management department”, solely tasked with giving the imbecile random tasks that don’t affect mission critical stuff, and making sure he’s not saying absolutely moronic BS in interviews.

He’s basically stuck on the mental and emotional level of a 13yo teen who just hit puberty, combined with that Cybertruck shaped body, more gender affirming care than your average post-op trans person, and a botched micropenis he can’t even use. Him going full on alt-right wasn’t a question of if, but when.

This tends to happen with nouveau riche - the generation that makes the initial wealth usually grows up in relative scarcity and is better due to it (learning money management and the importance of not overspending, but saving as much as one can). But they lack the skills or ability to pass this education on, the second generation is spoiled because the parents want to give their kids everything they couldn’t have in their childhood, and thus that generation becomes entitled little shits who care not about money because they always seem to have enough for anything they want, let it be a new car, a new bachelor pad, or paying off the right people to get out from a DUI or drug charges.

This even tends to happen to people whom aren’t even rich rich, just well off enough so that money isn’t really an issue. Real estate can be one of those businesses where one can get to that level of well off.