FriendOfDeSoto

I don’t think you did anything wrong. I hate people striking up a conversation like that as well.

You can train yourself not to panic, deep breaths, focusing on something in the middle distance, closing your eyes, counting to ten - whatever works for you. And then you can ride a situation like this out. Either by masking your discomfort or giving very curt replies. You can also just say “I’m very sorry, I’m not in the mood for a chat.” But you mustn’t worry that you made an extrovert sad. She’ll get over it and maybe learn from this experience as well.

This is not the final word on the subject. This is just a court’s ruling. Somebody will appeal it.

And it ruled it’s okay to train your AI with books under two circumstances. You paid for the book and the so-called AI doesn’t imitate the authors’ voices. They didn’t initially pay for the books so they have another trial to figure out a penalty for that.

And I personally don’t buy the no imitation thing. You can make a model that does nothing else but create sloshfic. I think that’s what the plaintiffs’ lawyers will appeal the decision about.

I fear this has the potential of becoming the copied standard unfortunately. Fear of terrorism is like think of the children. All it will do is force people who need visas into having squeaky clean innocuous public profiles and operating anonymous accounts with actual opinions. Terrorists will do the same. So this privacy infringement will only catch really dumb people.

No, it isn’t. They may already like you but how will they know you care if you don’t offer an array of easy to misunderstand signals?

Sounds Swedish.

This feels like an ad.

It’s gossamer thin, admittedly. But there is a shred of a justification for striking Iran that is covered by international law. I’m not saying it is a proven case yet that a preemptive strike against their nuclear program was called for, against a state whose raison d’être is to destroy Israel. But if the circumstances were just right, the Israeli-US allies could get away with it. (And if no good proof materializes, I suspect they will get away with it anyway. Remember Colin Powell’s PowerPoint? Did that have consequences other than killing people next door? I suspect that’s why they’ve crossed this bridge.)

There is not even a hint of a justification for what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Not in international law. And any possible moral high horse has already been shot long ago. It’s just imperial ambitions.

So we should not equate these two special military operations just yet. We may in the future and then we can throw all our rotten tomatoes at DC. But right now one probably should reserve judgment and refer to them as “alleged orcs” if one is given to name calling.

One ping only.

If these two companies are in bed with each other, they are hate-fucking each other though. Carnal pleasure but no love lost.

I don’t find this that infuriating. And you have choices to run a different browser. Granted, most of them are chromium based. Edge’s only use case is to download a Firefox fork and/or a better chromium that is neither Edge nor Chrome.

You are judging work by somebody who doesn’t feel compelled to follow guidelines made by other people with those very same guidelines. Those other people looked much more closely at flags for geographical entities, not movements, to come up with their guidelines. No one is required to follow them or retroactively abide by them. They are a great style guide but not the law.

Every flag serves a purpose. This flag’s purpose is to show representation by color and design for everyone in the community. It’s was the point to be busy.

Why don’t they just stick with the rainbow flag? Because the idea of the rainbow encompassing everyone was made at a time when gay and lesbians came out with pride but many of the letters that abbreviate that community today were still marginalized more harshly, maybe even within homosexual circles. They weren’t all suddenly anthropists and free from discriminatory points of view. Development of ideas and communities takes time. And that’s why an artist took ideas from many different flags that were created over time and combined them into one. It is eye catchy and instantly recognizable, even at a medium distance still.

I don’t find the result aesthetically pleasing either. But I recognize a) that wasn’t the point of it and b) I’m not a member of the LGBTQ+ community. If from within that community a movement rises to change the flag into something else, by all means. Other than that my design opinions - and I suspect many other ones in this thread - are largely academic and frankly irrelevant.

Good flag bad flag is not the gospel. Take it as a starting point for new designs but don’t scrutinize all existing flags by it.

Dehydration is but a secondary concern as you’re being chased by a sabertooth tiger.

Do you have Inkscape installed? I think it would be easier to draw the mask, i.e. the edgy edges, in there. You could just trace the one from your example pic as well. And then you could go back to GIMP and attempt the same procedure again. I would just make sure you convert all your images to PNG or JPEG. And to make sure you add the alpha channel before you do anything else.

Tbh I would use the clip function in Inkscape and then export the image as PNG to use in your slide. But I’ve always been more comfortable on the vector side of things.

That’s great, I wasn’t aware of that.

I’m not sure what point that is. My inkling is that OP doesn’t live in the States.

No, you’re not overreacting. You know you and you can point at serious consequences now. Keep the license valid if you can - you don’t know what life still has in store for you and you want to keep your options open. But by all means toss the keys to somebody else.

The American fear of a proper ID system is puzzling to me. It’s constant fear mongering of overreach by the man and not enough appreciation of the benefits. The first one is a self-updating voter registry that eliminates the process of registering or having to check on your registration to make sure you didn’t get knocked off for no good reason. All people need to update their home addresses when they move. Another benefit is - if implemented well of course - that everybody could have a 2FA-quality chip in their pocket to allow for many services to be done reasonably safely online. The dreaded lines of the DMV come to mind. Another benefit is you could prove very quickly who you are, especially if fingerprints are on the chip, to counter mistaken identity arrests that may or may not have been instigated by a so-called AI.

So the government knows everything about you, sure. But it’s not a one-sided deal. And frankly, even if the government did not have this information on you before it turned tyrannical, it would ID you as a possible malcontent in no time. Your data is already available for sale on various data broker sites.

I realize that me preaching the benefits of a proper ID system to the Americans in times of 47 and ICE raids is a bit wonky. I am not going to speculate if the self-updating voter registry could’ve prevented 47. And ICE under 47 might find its job “easier.” But from what I’ve read and heard they haven’t exactly been detail-oriented public servants. When the rule of law breaks down everybody gets effed. And so-called illegal immigrants also have phones and use the internet so their information was also available for sale before stable genius returned to the orange office.

Of course there are dangers that need to be addressed. Access to the database needs to be tighter than a sphincter and every query needs to be logged. Every system will be abused. Checks and balances need to be there, ideally with a right to find out who looked you up and for what reason for everyone. I’d prefer a system embedded in law over internet data brokers.

Med al ret!

I think both Apple and fictitious closed Android would be way more interchangeable and data from within would be more portable. Developers would get more of a cut. The saving grace for Google in the real world is that they can do Apple shenanigans while pointing at the open-source availability of Android and not get dumped in hotter antitrust water. If we only had two OSs and both were closed especially regulators in Europe would hit both of them much harder. And like tougher environmental restrictions on cars became the de facto US standard for everyone, the forced equal playing field (the EU guys LOVE an equal playing field) would over time make shit better for all users everywhere.

If there was no Android I think we would have a long list of failed attempts to build one that all fail because every company wanted to build their own walled gardens, and didn’t get enough traction. iOS probably would have succeeded thanks to Apple marketing budgets and their somewhat cultish follower base. But I suspect it would have followed more the initial Steve Jobs idea of doing most stuff in browser; the app revolution wouldn’t have happened. So there would be a big iOS share and then the lower 30% or so would be fractured into other walled gardens for poor people. One result of that would be an earlier agreement on a RCS-like texting solution and not just in the States but everywhere. Because more players would have a stake in seamless communication because stuff like WhatsApp (a reaction to high texting rates, mostly in Europe) and blue/green bubblr iMessage did not happen.

You do you et bon appetit. I’m sorry if I got hung up on that for no reason.

Maybe he likes being a tad unpredictable. If I had to choose if I wanted to be his friend or if I wanted to be stuck in an elevator with him for an hour, I’d clearly say neither, thanks. History will probably record him as a stirrup-holder of full born fascism.