• 5 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 5th, 2024

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  • Mathematically, assuming perfect knowledge about the future (if we can remove an animal, we might as well see the future):

    Define S_0 = the number of piles of dog shit I will step on in the rest of my life assuming no dog has been removed.

    Given dog d, define S(d) = the number of piles of dog shit I will step on in the rest of my life assuming dog d is removed right now.

    Select d_1 = argmin{S(d}}. (If there’s a tie, just pick one arbitrarily or use a tie-breaking metric)

    If S(d_1) < S_0, then remove d_1.

    If S(d_1) = S_0, then there is no improvement over baseline - maybe whichever dog I could remove just gets replaced with another dog. In this case, I could still remove d_1 if the tie-breaking metric did find an improvement, otherwise see next case.

    If S(d_1) > S_0, then no matter what dog I try to remove, somehow I end up stepping on more piles of shit in my life?! Ugh. Remove the nearest ant or something.


  • “One animal” could easily mean an individual animal. This makes things tricky. Ruling out humans (because that’s no fun), how can a single animal’s disappearance affect anything?

    Well, I don’t think it can. The biggest effects would happen if you remove an individual from a critically endangered species, but I don’t see anything good coming from that. For just about all other species, it would be like a drop in the ocean.

    So, given that I probably can’t make the world meaningfully better, I’ll aim smaller. I’ll remove a dog that shits in the street without its owner picking it up, causing innocent people to step in it.



  • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.deOPtoLemmy@lemmy.mlTesting a URL bug
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    4 days ago

    For context, in the original post, this was the result:

    http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=5%EF%BF%BD2%26%238242%3B51.59%26%238243%3BN+9%EF%BF%BD7%26%238242%3B23.26%26%238243%3BW+-+28%EF%BF%BD17%26%238242%3B7.68%26%238243%3BN+121%EF%BF%BD38%26%238242%3B17.31%26%238243%3BE%0D%0A&MS=bm&DU=mi

    Note that single-quotes %27 became %26%238242%3B which encodes &#8242; which is an HTML entity for U+2032 , i.e. smart quotes but broken all the way to hell and back.


  • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.deOPtoLemmy@lemmy.mlTesting a URL bug
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    4 days ago

    Trying to recreate the weird smart quote conversion.

    www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=5%B02%2751.59%22N+9%B07%2723.26%22W-28%B017%277.68%22N+121%B038%2717.31%22E&MS=wls&DU=mi with http: becomes:

    http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=5%EF%BF%BD2%2751.59%22N+9%EF%BF%BD7%2723.26%22W-28%EF%BF%BD17%277.68%22N+121%EF%BF%BD38%2717.31%22E&MS=wls&DU=mi

    Edit: oh, it’s fine… maybe it’s a kbin issue?







  • If you’re in the CachyOS Discord and have a lot of patience, this is where I dumped all of my complaints and feedback on the day that I really tried to use it: https://discord.com/channels/862292009423470592/1500254688380063934

    Keep in mind I was pretty new to Cachy/Arch and coming from Linux Mint, make of that what you will.

    More specifically, this is what raised the alarm for me: https://discord.com/channels/862292009423470592/1500254688380063934/1500507281840668852 and following messages.

    Basically, I tried to install openrgb-next-git from AUR using Shelly. The operation failed but was reported as successful. And the Shelly dev I was chatting with didn’t really seem to acknowledge the severity of the issue. After many more attempts, I eventually gave up on Shelly installed the package using paru. I don’t remember if there was any problem during that installation, but it did get installed in the end, which is more than I can say for Shelly.

    This exchange was 2 months ago, so it’s possible that things have improved since then, but that’s not enough time for me to give Shelly another chance yet.

    What I’m about to say is pure speculation, and I have no concrete evidence, just my gut: I think Shelly, or at least its GUI, is vibe-coded. Too many things about it are half-baked but with the appearance of polish. Windows and dialogs that look pretty but are too small for their contents. No way a human developer would push that if it was tested even once.

    A Shelly developer explained to me that it’s not a wrapper for pacman or any other tool, instead they re-implement the functionality provided by pacman using a lower-level library. To this I say: Shelly has not earned my trust in their code to manage packages on my main PC. When it’s more mature, when it has more eyes on it, and when it doesn’t give me the half-baked vibe, I’ll happily give it another chance.




  • Watched Avatar: The Last Airbender with Hebrew subtitles, there were loads of mistranslations. Sometimes stating the exact opposite of what the English original said, other times the transistor just completely doesn’t understand what they’re translating and results in random nonsense statements. Sorry I don’t have any specific examples, but really it’s too common.

    Lest you think it’s because it’s a kids show: more recently I’ve been watching Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators with my mom (a British cosy mystery comedy-drama television series, thanks Wikipedia), and mistranslations in the subtitles are just as common.

    It really makes me worry about how common similar mistakes could be in e.g. Japanese content (anime, video games) subbed to English. I don’t know any Japanese, so my ONLY source of information is the English sub, and if it’s as flaky as the Hebrew subs for English sources, I really could be missing out :(





  • Note: some flags (like 🇸🇾Syria) were changed recently enough that the emoji could look different depending on your operating system and which app or browser you’re using for Lemmy. Gboard shows me the new flag (green on top, 3 red stars), but Voyager/Android 16 shows the old flag (red on top, 2 green stars). It’s unavoidable when Unicode is used to encode things that can change, like flags. But it’s better than nothing!

    The only way around it is to embed pictures of flags, but that takes more effort. And data.


  • A reply for one that hits too close to home… Israel’s flag, it was our flag long before and I don’t think it necessarily represents the atrocities of the past few years. I definitely hope for (and try to work towards) a “regime change”, by which I mean more of a regime resuscitation as it is kind of a democracy on its death bed, which has always been flawed to some capacity but isn’t unsalvageable. I think. (Honestly though, what do I know about regime change…)

    Getting sidetracked, but back to the flag. Israel has flown this flag basically since its first independence, and while it never actually was at peace (welcome to the middle east…), there have been long periods where it actively sought peace and even made great concessions to try to achieve it. It seems wrong to disregard that history, and only associate the flag with what the state has done in recent years. The flag doesn’t need to change for the state’s policy to change. If it did, then it would already have been changed.

    As a point of comparison, the flags used by the British Empire are not so tainted by the atrocities of imperialism that they can’t be used today. England has changed, but its flag doesn’t have to. It carries its history, the good and the bad.