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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • “Species concepts are human classification systems, and everybody can disagree and everyone can be right,” she says. “You can use the phylogenetic [evolutionary relationships] species concept to determine what you’re going to call a species, which is what you are implying… We are using the morphological species concept and saying, if they look like this animal, then they are the animal.”

    “If they look like this animal then they are the animal” really doesn’t sound like a particularly useful (or scientifically rigorous) position.

    Not least because there are lots of animals that look alike but aren’t the same species.


  • In my limited experience experience, Gemini responds better with flat, emotionless prompts without any courteous language. Using polite phrasing seems more likely to prompt “I can’t answer that sorry” responses, even to questions that it absolutely can answer (and will to a more terse prompt).

    So I think my point is “it depends”. LLMs aren’t intelligent, they just produce strings based on their training data. What works better and what doesn’t will be entirely dependent on the specific model.




  • Orwell’s Animal Farm would seem like a good way to go. Not having any Orwell in a dystopian literature class would seem like a miss, and Animal Farm’s heavy parable style sets it apart from the others in the list.

    Off beat suggestion: The Lorax by Dr Seuss. It might be interesting to study dystopia aimed at younger children as part of a full exploration of the genre.

    Possibly somewhat on-the-nose, but It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis is fairly timely.

    Back with the classics, perhaps The Trial by Franz Kafka. Very effective and highly distilled form of dystopian text, boiled right down to its elements.

    Shout out to The Last Man by Mary Shelley, which is a contender for the first true dystopian novel (certainly one of the first worth remembering).






  • Two very different recommendations.

    First is the Southern Reach novels by Jeff VanderMeer (the first one being Annihilation). Unsettling, surreal Lovecraftian sci-fi. Gorgeously written, beautiful prose, and very memorable.

    Second is the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (starting with Red Mars). Hard sci-fi on an almost unprecedented scale: a comprehensive and incredibly detailed narrative of the colonisation of Mars, which covers almost every possible aspect of the story in glorious, engaging detail. You get everything from the love triangles and personal rivalries of the colonists, to politics and religion, to macro-economics, to superstructure engineering, to long deep chapters covering hydrology, micro-biology, the finer points of lichens and mosses, to architecture, art… Honestly, it’s breathtaking in just how thoroughly it covers its subject whilst still being a poignant, engaging, story. Not to everyone’s tastes, but it could certainly make an impact.


  • Git is the underlying code management and version control system. It can be used directly, and also forms the backend to a number of other systems.

    Code “forges” are platforms which integrate a version control system (like git), a code repository (a file server), and front end utilities.

    Some git forges are open source, others are proprietary. Certainly with the open source ones, but also with the proprietary ones in some cases, you can either self-host or use a hosted service.

    GitHub is a proprietary forge, and GitHub.com is the company’s fully hosted service. They’re now owned by Microsoft.

    Gitlab is an open source forge. Gitlab.com offers a hosted service, but many projects self-host.

    Forgejo is a fork of Gitea which is a fork of Gogs. These are all also open source. As far as I know, neither Forgejo nor Gogs offer a hosted version, but Gitea does.

    A few other notable forges include GNU Savannah (open source), Bitbucket (proprietary), Sourceforge (proprietary), Launchpad (open source), Allura (open source).

    At the end of the day, they all do the same thing. They have different feature lists (especially around some of the project management and user interaction side), different user interfaces (some are shinier and more modern, others more minimalist), and different communities and support models. You choose that one that works best for your needs.

    GitHub is probably the most feature-rich (and/or bloated) of them. GitLab is competing in the same space, and self-hosted GitLab seems to be something of a sweet spot for many projects that want a premium experience without needing to use a proprietary Microsoft product. I don’t have much experience with Forgejo or Gitea. The rest tend to exist in their niches.



  • where [it] comes from

    You imply it comes from:

    The “thin blue line” symbol has been used by the “Blue Lives Matter” movement, which emerged in 2014

    But you link to a Wikipedia article that says:

    New York police commissioner Richard Enright used the phrase in 1922. In the 1950s, Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Parker often used the term in speeches, and he also lent the phrase to the department-produced television show The Thin Blue Line. Parker used the term “thin blue line” to further reinforce the role of the LAPD. As Parker explained, the thin blue line, representing the LAPD, was the barrier between law and order and social and civil anarchy.

    The Oxford English Dictionary records its use in 1962 by The Sunday Times referring to police presence at an anti-nuclear demonstration. The phrase is also documented in a 1965 pamphlet by the Massachusetts government, referring to its state police force, and in even earlier police reports of the NYPD. By the early 1970s, the term had spread to police departments across the United States. Author and police officer Joseph Wambaugh helped to further popularize the phrase with his police novels throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

    The term was used for the title of Errol Morris’s 1988 documentary film The Thin Blue Line about the murder of the Dallas Police officer Robert W. Wood.

    I have no idea about this guy’s politics, but it’s a pretty well known phrase with a lot of different contexts.




  • Patch@feddit.uktoLinux@lemmy.mlXFCE Vs MATE
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    5 months ago

    For me it’s MATE.

    For some reason I’ve never really gotten on with XFCE. Tried it in earnest many years ago, and have dipped into it a few more times over the years, and for whatever reason it just doesn’t gel with me. Always feels like I’m fighting it to get it to do what I want it to do.

    MATE has the familiarity and comfort for anyone who spent serious years running GNOME 2. It’s pretty much as lightweight as XFCE these days, but feels more polished and intuitive for it.

    Ubuntu MATE is still one of my go-to distros for limited hardware (even though that project specifically seems to have stagnated somewhat in recent years).