Emily (she/her)

In my experience, an LLM can write small, basic scripts or equally small and isolated bits of logic. It can also do some basic boilerplate work and write nearly functional unit tests. Anything else and it’s hopeless.

Women have been historically and presently marginalised, yes.

If people want a respectful space to discuss among themselves I don’t see any good reason to force myself into the conversation. Not every space on the internet (or real life) needs to be a stage for the free marketplace of ideas, especially when you’re talking about already marginalised communities who are easily disenfranchised by many of the kinds of people attracted to that style of space.

Personally, looking at the interaction between yourself and the mod, it reads to me like you was the one who was sarcastic and rude.

I hope she makes a full recovery and I’ll be keeping my thoughts with her 🩷

Oh yeah no fair enough, thanks for hearing me out. Those kinds people are exhausting

I agree, it feels like we’ve been arguing over semantics. When I (and I’m assuming the person you originally responded to) say “real”, I don’t mean to claim that it doesn’t have material effects, I mean that it has no biological basis - i.e. it is socially constructed.

You do not need to believe race is a biological reality to acknowledge that the perception of others as you (+ your ancestors) being a member of a race has materially affected your identity

I don’t really think I can come up with a more concise way of summarizing the idea than anthropologist Audrey Smedley did on the first result of the Google search “race social construct”

Race is a culturally structured systematic definition of a way of looking at perceiving and interpreting reality.

I would recommend you read something like “Feminism and ‘Race’” from Oxford Readings in Feminism or some of bell hooks’ work to understand the idea better.

Saying that race isn’t real is not the same as saying that we live in a post-racial society.

This feels more like two questions, so I’ll answer them both:

1. When I’m not programming for my job, I’m programming one of many side projects I have going on at any time. Same with any other professional who has a career in their hobby. These are often projects I think would be useful to me and I believe would let me learn new skills.
2. I use Linux (and MacOS) because the Unix environment, particularly the command line tooling is far superior to Windows. Developers often work on Unix, so they build their tools for the platform and thus improvements stack up. I also just like the FOSS philosophy underpinning most Linux.

If you’re trying to learn programming and know at least some basics, my only advice is to pick a project you’re even a little interested in and get started. Don’t worry about operating system, it doesn’t actually matter that much unless you’re working on iOS or MacOS! A weather app for whatever language/platform you’re working with is usually my first suggestion for students.

Google is free. The moderator time you waste by reposting this already removed post however, is not

Fingers crossed they do🤞

To add, this is happening against a backdrop of a historic swing against primary votes for the two major parties. That means that, under our preferential voting system increasingly more people are voting third party/independent first, with the two major parties further down the ballot. Labor is still winning enough seats to form majority for now (due to preference flow), but it points to a population increasingly frustrated by the inaction of the legacy parties and increasing polarization.

Ok, first up the players: Labor is the major centre-left party led by Anthony Albanese, Liberals are the centre-right (think economically liberal) led by Peter Dutton, Nationals are right wing, Greens are left wing, and there are a handful of “teal” independents who are mostly politically centre women with an environmental focused. The Liberals and Nationals make up the Coalition and essentially act as one insane party with the Libs at the helm, so you can mostly treat them interchangably.

Labor won the last federal election in 2022 by a slim majority (2 seats), but the Coalition lost in one of the worst defeats in our history. The Liberals were hit the hardest, losing 19 seats, putting them at their lowest representation since their formation in 1944. They were in power since 2013 and lost for a lot of reasons, but a major one was that Prime Minister Scott Morrison was rightfully loathed.

Since the last election, the Coalition has been steadily growing in popularity due to the same reasons other non-incumbents have globally (ui.e., inflation, high energy prices, etc). Add to that a (mostly true) perception that the government was doing too little to fix problems like our crumbling healthcare system wasn’t helping.

Finally the election is announced in late March (our elections aren’t fixed) and the parties start campaigning. Dutton, the Liberal leader, looks like he is going to win a majority at this early point. The following things happen:

• Labor announces and immediately implements a universal tax cut, Dutton announces he will repeal it and replace it with a cut on fuel prices.
• Labors announces a major initiative to improve bulk billed healthcare (bulk billed = free to the patient), which Dutton immediately matches. Labor runs a major attack campaign claiming that he cannot be trusted, since last time his party was in power they tried to destroy bulk billing among other things.
• Dutton announces a cut of 41,000 jobs to the public service, a substantial portion. He faces significant backlash as people worry it will result in degraded frontline services, remembering the issues with veterans affairs and Medicare last time they were in. The 41,000 he wants to cut is how much the public service had grown since 2022, so this seems like a reasonable worry. He “clarifies” that no frontline workers will be cut. He also adds that the cuts will be through attrition, not firing. Following continued backlash, he “clarifies” that he always meant the cuts were to come from Canberra, the capital. This is a mathematical impossibility, as he would have to gut the upper ranks of every department and probably defense to achieve that number.
• He announced an end to work from home for all public servants. This is bad for the Liberals, because they’ve had massive problems with women in the past (including a woman allegedly raped in a ministers office and subsequently an alleged cover up), and people quickly pointed out that the policy would disproportionately affects women, who are unfortunately still expected to bear most of the burden of childcare. Banning working from home prevents them from holding down many jobs. Dutton responds, typically out of touch, that women can job share. He then “clarifies” he only meant it to apply to Canberra, then changes his mind about the policy completely.
• He rejected Labor’s renewable energy transition and instead proposes a transition to Nuclear. No industry group except the one they hired thinks this is realistic, a good option, or feasible. Unrealistically short time-frames, bad assumptions, etc are used to make it look good on paper. Finally someone points out that the places they plan to put the plants don’t have enough water.
• Just yesterday, on the eve of the election, they announced their budget they intend to introduce if they win shows a budget deficit worse than Labor’s during the next term, but magically improving after that. This exact tactic worked in 2013 but isn’t now.
• Other minor things. They keep crashing campaign trucks into polling locations. Dutton has zero charisma and looks creepy, and was a Queensland cop (that’s really bad, they’re as corrupt as the worst American cop).
• Also a Liberal Senate candidate for this election personally tried to induct me into a culty MLM a few years back so fuck them specifically.

This has resulted in polls gradually sliding for the Coalition to the point that it now looks like they will lose even more seats this election and Labor might even gain one. Dutton may lose his own seat. It looks like the teals may pick up another member, with the Greens and fringe right wing parties staying about the same.

Fair use commentary generally requires as little of the actual original work to be used as possible. Summary may be ok, clips/recordings are ok, but they must be minimal. That commentary must also be substantive.

Reproducing a work in full (thus obviously limiting the commercial viability of the original work - another factor considered) with light commentary over the top probably wouldn’t hold up in court. The commentary just avoids automatic systems in the increasingly poorly moderated internet.

I think it would be great if more men read (or just read summaries of) basic feminist texts, especially Judith Butler and people of her ilk. Before I realised I wasn’t a man they helped me. I think the deconstruction of gender that feminism offers serve men just as much as women - it made masculinity feel like less of a prison (nevermind that I ultimately largely moved more feminine).

I remember reading authors like John Stoltenberg, the aforementioned Judith Butler, and some perspectives of feminism/masculinity in a working class context.

Mr President, a second signal chat has hit the buildings

The Affinity suite is not an Adobe product.

I think its most useful as an (often wrong) line completer than anything else. It can take in an entire file and just try and figure out the rest of what you are currently writing. Its context window simply isn’t big enough to understand an entire project.

That and unit tests. Since unit tests are by design isolated, small, and unconcerned with the larger project AI has at least a fighting change of competently producing them. That still takes significant hand holding though.

I knew something was wrong but I didn’t put the dots together until my early 20s. I’d definitely had “I wanna be a girl” thoughts as a kid/teen but wasn’t super aware that being trans was a thing so shoved them to the back of my brain and allowed myself to just kinda feel broken instead.