Womble

Yes, the French have palaces too, but they attract nothing like the numbers as the actual real, functioning palaces and castles actually used by a real, breathing monarchs.

Just FYI, this is incorrect, Versailles gets more visitors a year (15 million) than all British palaces combined (~2 million.)

You know that those dishes are British because people of South Asian heritage moved to the UK, brought their food with them and then merged with the local palate? Do you think they’re not British?

FWIW on piefed (a re-implementation of Lemmy essentially, I’m posting from it here) you can do instance level blocks that prevent you from seeing any posts from users on the blocked instances, which might be more useful to you. I have .ml blocked myself, and can report significant tankie spam reduction.

Fediverse is not private in any sense. Anything you post (or up/downvote) is blasted out to every federated instance and only gets deleted if that instance respects the delete command, which you cant rely on.

So calling someone disagreeable a dick, or a bellend, or a prick, or a tosser, or a knobhead, or a wanker, is fine. But calling them a cunt is beyond the pale?

Isn’t the time skip in the books like 20-30 years? its a while to wait until the actors have aged that much. I’d love to see it though.

The US still has a lot of soft power, you shouldnt underestimate that. But it has vastly less than it did a decade ago, Trump has burnt through a huge amount.

Damn the writing in SMAC was so good. How do they get you nodding along to a Christian theocrat thinking “Well I dont like her, but she makes some good points”

They’re campists. The thinking extends as far as USA (and the west more broadly) bad, therefore anyone opposed to the west good.

Its how you get supposed Marxists simping for a theocratic dictatorship in Iran and a gangster oligarchy in Russia.

Honestly, even if you dont want to watch the rest of the show, watch that episode. Its almost entirely self contained, all you need to know is that its set in a post-apocalypse zombie world. Its probably the most moving episode of television I’ve ever seen.

I dont think the large trillion plus parameters models are going away in the short term, unless theres some big breakthrough on model architeture. But I think the small local or cheaply cloud hostable models will take over the vast majority of tasks

Alexander and Catherine are both great, but so is Peter.

Well, like I said then: full of shit.

The median US full time salary is 62k, you’re earning 2 and a half times that. Anyone who tells you that’s poverty is either full of shit or deliberately trying to bring you down.

Thats fine, I’d agree with that advice, though I dont think its a 100% never ever do this under any situation.

My sole point was that a young woman going on an ill advised date should not be mixed up with children being raped, which is what you were doing by calling someone going on a date with an 18 year old a pedo. That would apply if the man in question was 28 or 68.

You may be shocked to learn that there are positions available between loving the idea of your adult daughter going on a date with someone 10 years older than her and screaming “pedo!” at them.

The part where you call someone going on a date with an 18 year old a paedophile.

Can we please not demean the horrors of child sexual abuse by conflating it with two concenting adults going on a date, even if you find the age gap icky.

I actually used this same example further up. Yes the GWOT made some terrible legislation that has done real damage, but it wasnt a slippery slope. They didnt make laws a little bit invasive but generally ok before slowly nudging it further until it got to the point where it was able to be used for ill. They went in hard and fast with abusable legislation which could be criticised for what it actually was, not what it would lead to in further legislation down the line (and it was criticised at the time).

I know its a metaphor, but you can come up with any metaphor you want its still just speculation based on nothing. It’s precicily the same argument that conservatives made about gay marriage: this is just the thin end of the wedge, it starts with allowing people to marry people of the same sex and then they’ll move on to incest and bestiality.

Its a crap argument, if you want to oppose something show how this wither makes things worse or how it makes worse things easier to happen in the future. A good example would be the freedom restricting legislation brought in after 9/11. Despite assurances at the time that it would just be used against “terrorists” there was nothing in it to garuntee that, at you could make the argument that the legislation with no further changes could be used to do harm. Lo and behold it was.

Just pointing at something and saying “slipperly slope” or “boiling the frog” is not an argument against something unless you can show how it makes the next step easier, and I havent seen any actually thought through argument how this does make mandatory identification easier.