Good to see Khoshekh on this site!

Subscription-based models are a plague, but at least Jetbrains products eventually offer a perpetual fallback license for if you stop paying.

It’s absurd that Adobe can just take tools you might depend on away after years of paying the subscription.

His friends started responding to his emails for a span covering years? That’s a bit strange, I don’t understand why or how they’d do that unless asked to and given the credentials.

If those friends are included in the people who haven’t heard from him in years, I’d consider that behaviour a little suspicious.

If you can’t find any evidence of activity, or anybody to vouch for him - I’d consider filing a report.

They know that suppressing disability benefits will cause excess death, they just don’t care.

It doesn’t matter to them if their decisions drive vulnerable people to destitution or even suicide, so long as they can feed a few extra bodies into the gears to pump their numbers.

People with mental health conditions and other disabilities need support that the health and social care services can’t provide because the government have spent over a decade cutting them.

Instead we get thinly veiled eugenics, a cynical revival of social Darwinism.

It’s not as though the existence and mechanisms of piracy are a coveted secret. There’s a decent chance that they’ll learn about and attempt it independently, and the method they learn about online might expose them to greater risk than if they did it with more consideration.

On that basis, I think that knowledge transfer is at worst harm reduction. If it’s immoral, which I don’t believe it is, then at the very least your intervention could prevent them from being preyed upon by some copyright troll company when they do it despite your silence or protestations.

You might be thinking of the 1997 book Foundations of Geopolitics by the Russian ultranationalist and neofascist Aleksandr Dugin.

There have been many reports over the years that it’s popular amongst those close to Putin - and there are definitely comparisons to be drawn between the book and actually occurring events.

Can’t speak for them, but I’ve had a smart monitor which shows live consumption. Took note of the consumption while using the oven against baseline consumption, and the same for the air fryer.

Air fryer consumed approximately half the electricity for an equivalent amount of time in my case, but it’s made better by the air fryer needing less time to reach temperature and cook whatever it is I’m making.

Not particularly surprised.

By most accounts they’re very capable pieces of hardware, but the prices are way too high for current conditions.

Think there’s also a case of incremental performance improvements in the form factor becoming less perceptible, and also more people favouring phones and tablets over laptops for everyday use.

Those titles don’t, the person you’re responding to is being sarcastic because the article sorta implies that removing the microtransactions from an indie title is somehow novel.

It’s not configurable through the UI, but if you’re the admin of an instance you can change the character limit with some fairly simple source code tweaks.

This data is for South Korea only, which unfortunately itself has the highest suicide rate of the OECD countries.

It felt like it happened practically overnight when Let’s Encrypt released.

I don’t think it’s especially likely that you’ll find consistently interesting, well-reasoned discussion through any platform bringing together anonymous strangers in an ephemeral manner.

I think consistently interesting discussion has shared stakeholding as a foundational aspect - participants need to actually care, either because the discussion is a product of some commitment they’ve each made (e.g. reading something for a book club), or because the participants are familiar with each other and the outcome tangibly matters (e.g. a physical town hall meeting).

Otherwise, I think you’re more likely to get what you’re looking for from adopting some tangential hobby and having those discussions with the friends you get through that.

Doctor-patient power dynamics deserve so much more scrutiny than they get.

It’s always heartbreaking to hear of somebody who died or continued to suffer because they couldn’t convince the gatekeeper of care to examine them properly.

Ah, of course - that’s unfortunate, but thanks for the pointer.

Not well versed in the field, but understand that large tech companies which host user-generated content match the hashes of uploaded content against a list of known bad hashes as part of their strategy to detect and tackle such content.

Could it be possible to adopt a strategy like that as a first-pass to improve detection, and reduce the compute load associated with running every file through an AI model?

The rule of the 196 community is that you’re supposed to post a submission of your own before leaving, and it’s customary to include the word “rule” in your post in reference to that rule.

I don’t care about sharp words from a brutish authoritarian.

You’re free to continue endorsing an institution and approach which generates further undesirable behaviour as recidivism whilst preventing little wherever it’s implemented. You can continue to pretend that criminality is a phenomenon completely local to the actor and not a reflection of broader social and structural issues which we need to address. You can proceed with turning out more victims by proxy of the traumatised ex-incarcerated continuing to deal harm if it’ll satisfy the sadistic streak inside of you demanding that infractions incur the infliction of suffering and trauma in turn.

Regions which engage with mass incarceration and operate more sadistic prison regimes overlap with those regions with the highest rates of repeat offending. That’s not a coincidence, but a product of thinking like yours.

Prisons which exist with actual commitments to rehabilitation, and which respect the dignity of the incarcerated, while imperfect, turn out far fewer repeat offenders than those who don’t.

If you care about victims of abuse, as I do, then you’ll turn instead to approaches which result in fewer of them to be counted: alternatives to incarceration, and the pursuit of relative normalcy within the institution for the incarcerated where it still exists.

I hope for a future without coercion, abuse, violence, or pain. I would hope that we all do.

I don’t especially care whether there’s a formally enshrined right for incarcerated people to be vegan - I’m saying that if we continue to insist upon locking people in cages with an ostensible objective of rehabilitating them and not simply performing retributive cruelty for its own sake, then we must treat the incarcerated people with diligence and respect as baseline. You can’t expect for well-adjusted people to emerge from a system of institutionalised dehumanisation, cruelty, and uncaring indifference.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to respect an incarcerated person’s ethical commitment to not exploiting animals, and to be diligent in providing food of a reasonable nutritional standard which doesn’t violate those commitments to consume. Peanut butter sandwiches do not fulfil that criteria by themselves.

I’m not sure what you mean by “my cultists” - I didn’t bring anybody here, and I found this thread independently through my own feed.

In order to preemptively address some of your assertions in reply to another person in this comment thread:

This thread is not about you, not about vegans

It’s not about vegans, no.

It’s about respect for a person’s ethical commitments in a scenario where you’ve deprived them of the ability to satisfy those commitments themselves. My argument would not have to substantively change in order to comment on a person whose religious dietary restrictions aren’t being respected by the available options, to give an alternative example.

It’s true that the final paragraph of my original response speaks specifically to animal liberation, but that’s because I’m passionate about that issue independently of this one. That said, I think my original reply would remain perfectly sound with that paragraph removed if you’d prefer to take it that way.

the fact that a dude who stole billions

I don’t think the crime or characteristics of the incarcerated are especially relevant here. My argument would remain unaltered if the incarcerated person was poor, from a marginalised background, and in prison for much less exceptional reasons.

is more important than justice and literally everyone else

I don’t think that whatever justice there is to be found in the prison system is nullified by respecting incarcerated people’s ethical commitments, and I think that applies to all incarcerated people.

Unless you think we haven’t noticed you’re hiding behind a debate about the importance of punishment, the viability and legitimacy of the prison system and abuses of the U.S. prison system in a situation that has nothing to do with them because you’re trying to promote veganism.

I’m a prison abolitionist first and foremost, and I thought that’d be clear from the overall thrust of my original post - but apparently not. Respect for the incarcerated, their humanity, and their ethical commitments is very much the compromise position.

Some of the replies here are absolutely vile: if you’re going to endorse locking people in cages for years if not decades and pretend that’s a justified response to anything short of their being an immediate physical danger to the people around them, then the least you can do is accommodate their most basic needs and ethical positions.

Prisons are pitched to us as places of rehabilitation - somewhere to pay penance and right wrongs before returning to the community, better for having served the time. I think it’s a deeply disingenuous characterisation which serves mainly to let people avoid facing up to the reality which is prison’s purposeless and ultimately harmful cruelty, but it is the dominant characterisation nonetheless.

But, if we blindly accept the rehabilitation narrative, then how exactly do we expect to rehabilitate people by fracturing them psychologically? By forcing them to violate ethical commitments which are sacrosanct to them, by alienating them from their communities and forcing them to abide by a clockwork dictatorial regime without any semblance of comfort or dignity, by leaving them to rot miserably for years?

No, and no wonder prisons are factories for broken people and recidivism if this is how people think about them. Get a hold of yourselves.

Also, before anybody retreats to the flimsy position of “but prisoners shouldn’t eat better than schoolchildren” or “but what about the poor” - yes, those people are also underserved, and we have resources available to improve conditions for all of them too. All that’s lacking is will.

Last but not least, if you concede that you care about neither the incarcerated nor the society they come from and will return to in time - then there’s also the question of why animals should suffer? If people aren’t even worthy of being afforded their basic preferences, then why should the default be the option which necessitates the lifelong suffering of sentient beings on an industrial scale?

Seriously, develop a sense of empathy.