Louis Ingenthron @LouisIngenthron@qoto.org

@levisan Hmm. I just tried it. That sounds strange to me without the second H.

@lucretia I would agree that disruptive actions are far less reprehensible than destructive actions.

> It's to cause direct negative effects to the owners of the thing being sabotaged
Is that worth it if it turns popular opinion against the saboteur, though? Seems like a one-step-forward-two-steps-back result before you even consider the moral implications.

> I would argue that if anyone is being childish, it's someone who decides they oppose enviromentalism simply because the news told them that some activists broke something
There's a big difference between supporting a moral or idea and supporting a cause. For example, I'm all for ethical treatment of animals, but fuck PETA. Ultimately, we're social creatures, so if activists act like lunatics, then normal people will want to distance themselves from those lunatics, and they do so by distancing themselves from the activism.

Why do we pronounce "threshold" like it has two Hs? "Thresh-hold"

Shouldn't it be "thresh-old" or "thres-hold"?

I have a client who uses Unity and recently passed the threshold for Unity's free license, so they had to upgrade. They asked me if we would get any improvements from the upgrade that we could use for their software that I'm building.

I had to tell them that they were being required to pay $2000 a year for the right to remove the Unity splashscreen, and that's about it. 🤦‍♂️

At this point, the Unity Engine is running only on momentum. It's just a matter of time before it crashes and the company dies.

@ThinkingSapien Are you sure you're actually employed by a real company and not just an elaborate Truman-Show-esque series of pranks designed to see how far engineers can be pushed?

@lucretia Fwiw, I strongly disagree with the initial premise voiced in your post.

Protest makes me sympathize with the environmental cause and want to support it.

Sabotage makes me think the cause is full of short-sighted childish wannabe-terrorists and shouldn't be supported.

The former gets more votes from regular folk, which is what ultimately drives change in a democracy.

There's a pretty decent chance that when the #Factorio expansion drops, I'm gonna vanish from the face of the earth, only to mysteriously reappear a year later as an uncivilized smelly caveman savage who can only speak to trains.

@JustinH @tchambers But more importantly, answering "I don't know" first requires you to know if you know, and these things don't know that, or anything else. They're simple pattern matchers. Trying to act like they know *any* facts (even facts about what they know) is giving them more credit than they're due.

@JustinH @tchambers Fwiw, they absolutely could be trained to respond that way, but "I don't know" doesn't fit the specs of the people buying it. That's not a restriction of the algorithm; it's a restriction of business.

If you're a fan of space and science and history, today's a good day to watch "Hidden Figures".

The movie can get a bit preachy at times, but quite frankly, after what those women went though, they deserve to preach a bit.

@WiredForFlight @w7voa Plausible. But if that was the goal, you'd think we'd see them chipping away at individual bricks with a pick instead of just banging their head against the whole brick wall over and over.

@tchambers They absolutely are getting better, but also yes, it is an unsolvable problem... mainly because they aren't designed to be fact machines, so we need to stop treating them like they should be.

@WiredForFlight @w7voa If that's the goal, then they're failing hard at that. In my state, Ron DeSantis has spearheaded over a dozen pieces of legislation that have been overturned as unconstitutional.

If anything, these cases tend to be slam dunks for the feds that confirm and reinforce past precedents rather than chipping away at them.

WTF is with conservatives passing blatantly unconstitutional laws lately?

Like, they know damn well that the only thing this law will accomplish is costing taxpayers millions to defend in court before it's obviously overturned by a federal judge.

It can be quite startling to see how quickly "we have specious evidence that our opponents are doing this horrible disgusting terrible thing" often evolves into "we should do this thing".