if you ask your interlocutor "are you human?" and it lies, the liability that attaches to that should be existential.

@pluralistic on CFPB: "the common thread running through all these orders is that they ban deceptive practices – they make it illegal for companies to steal from us by lying to us. Especially in these dying days of class action suits – rapidly becoming obsolete thanks to 'mandatory arbitration waivers' that make you sign away your right to join a class action – agencies like the CFPB are our only hope of punishing companies that lie to us to steal from us." https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

@grmpyprogrammer in either case, i'd recommend if you can, think about a visit. transylvania is just a lovey place in summertime. sighisoara has its dramatic architecture and vlad dracul history. i haven't been to biertan but it sounds great. it's a big world full of beautiful places, but you have at least a hint of a connection to explore.

What is the best plaintext editor for less technical people?

Like, if a non technical friend was going to edit some config or a bit of boilerplatey code.

Notepad / TextEdit wouldn't be great, but neither would emacs or vim (and they're not going to mess with any IDE).

@phillmv i might put it less uncharitably, in that several of the people in my broad community did come here for a while, got a lot of normative pushback about content warnings and the like, and left. perhaps that reflects can’t be bullied into submission here, but it also rendered here not so hospitable for those conversations. i found i could well enough resolve that issue by switching instances, but that’s burdensome, especially for less technical people, so they just left.

@Alon sounds about right. you can see how one might be torn across ones bridge communities.

my main LLM use case thus far has definitely been thesaurus. it's fun to be able to describe the sense of the word i want, not just spider a graph from some related word as with conventional thesauri. and it's nice to be able to ask for more options providing more hints about what i'm after. but it hasn't been a miracle. it only occasionally offers good candidate words i haven't already considered. most are inevitably bad choices or words i've considered. still, on net it's been helpful.

@franktaber @marick i guess you'd like to think noting characteristics of the conveyance would be part of their standard process. but you'd like to think a lot of things, or i would.

@franktaber @marick i feel like shelling out ~$5 for certified mail should signal costly genuine interest. but i guess there do exist some very wealthy astroturfers.

@Alon how would you characterize Mastodon?

@design_law hypothesis: if everyone learns swedish we will have better economic policy.

N=1, but it's an undeniable empirical regularity.

i was never an active facebook user, so the comparison is hard for me. i did find twitter a place for interaction with communities of common interest. i find here to be that too, but only some, a particular subset, of my interests seem common. and many of the particular people i used to interact with remain divided between bluesky and twitter. my community here is mostly (not entirely!) new.

we use "visitation" to describe what ghosts do to mortals, and what the unincarcerated do to the incarcerated.

there is perhaps something hopeful in the analogy.

does the Department of Homeland Security (or the Department of Defense for that matter) pay a lot of attention to targets like GitHub or Sonatype?

It’s frustrating, what of my old policy-centric conversation does not remain with economists-who-don’t-give-a-fuck still on Twitter has mostly migrated to BlueSky rather than Mastodon. But I don’t know that I trust BlueSky not just to be Twitter with a make-over yet. And it's hard for me to track / decide where to post over multiple microblogospheres, so if I ever do jump into BlueSky, I expect to feel torn, friction, confusion, as I do like the community I've found here.

@dougjballoon this is my favorite random post in a while. may your COVID be a blessing, so mild it doesn't matter except for the amazing Scooby-themed creativity and memory for you and your kid.

"If it has to query a backend to load it will one day die." @Chronotope https://aramzs.xyz/essays/the-internet-is-a-series-of-webs/

@grmpyprogrammer after the war, before Canada, was he in Germany or Romania? (lots of Romanian Transylvania is Saxon in architecture and history, but much of that population was displaced by/after the war.)

it used to be that when you write to your senator or congressional representative, you’d always get a response.

usually just a dumb, barely responsive form-letter precomposed about whatever issue you addressed. but still. something.

nowadays i find it is usually nothing. there is just no response, whether the communication is by submitting an online form, or sending certified postal mail.

i know. i am old.