Notices by cleopatra@c.im

@inthehands @ct_bergstrom
That looks like it can get pretty nasty ☹️.
Cheating-detection is the kind of stuff where you have to be *sure*, and if your algorithm just searches for people writing in simple and broken english then it won't be the rich white guys getting accused.

imo there's a related issue that was already exposed by 'the shadow scholar' a few years ago: too many damn essays, too few real exams where you have to sit in a room and where cheating is pretty hard.

@pettter
..You loan money to entities you believe can repay it...

I don't think that's always true.
Sometimes the goal of lending is to get someone in a debt they will never repay: any loss of money is well worth it to see them struggling and/or make them kiss your ass.
(And sometimes the interest on those loans is so high that you really don't want them to ever start paying down to principal)

It used to be how the west treated Africa, nowadays it's how China treats Africa and the USA.

@dgar
Alien biologist: the left specimen appears to be carrying a small egg between its fused tentacles, the egg will grow twice as large and will then be transferred to the right figure who is carrying 2 eggs close to what appears to be a kind of upper cloaca.....

@incitatus
tbf: i don't want face interaction and old people who want to always call about everything are dying off.

The banks in The Netherlands have joined forces to have a shared ATM available at every shopping mall. But i rarely use cash anyway, since electronic payments are free and less hassle than cash. All the little holdouts from 30 years ago (such as farmers markets and consumer-to-consumer selling) have also long gone from cash to digital payment.

For big ticket items (like a mortgage) i prefer video-call over having to travel to a bank office. I'd rather not talk to a human at all but there's a legally mandated explainer session for anyone taking out a mortgage (even if the customer is a financial expert)

@JessTheUnstill @platypus
Reminds me of an argument about the washing machine being the most important invention in history: it freed up a whole day each week for women to do other stuff (to work or go to school or whatever).

People always seem to mock the idea of 'giving your wife a vacuum cleaner', but i imagine it was way more appreciated by 1950s housewives than a shiny jewelry box that doesn't even has much resale value.

And somehow, the moment westerners stopped doing chores by hand we started thinking they are easy and effortless: i can't count the number of hippies i met who dream about 'a simple existence without machines' and think 'being home watching tv' is fundamentally the same as 'being home scrubbing floors'. You are at home, right?

And that can be pretty harmful: why strive for the poor to have washing machines or fridges if you totally could spend an entire vacation without them. Just dig a hole to keep your beer cool, people!

@georgetakei
Gotta love how the NRA is trying to doubledip:
towards white folks: 'buy a gun to protect yourself from scary black people'
towards black people: 'see all those white people buying guns? better buy a gun yourself to hold them off'

@Moon @io
There used to be a whole trend of professional opinion-havers taking those new terms (such as 'neural network' or 'selflearning') very seriously and spinning a whole sloppy argument out of their misunderstandings.

Haven't seen that in a while, thankfully. But it did leave me with a kneejerk 'please only comment on tech if you can code' reaction

@danwentzel
A real 15-minute city is one with mixed-cost housing and mixed schools and not a yuppie version of a gated community in a crazy-expensive city center

@Hypx @serklarvel @ketan
The future is trains.
With some small(!!) electric cars for those unable or unwilling to ride a bike

@Mrfunkedude
????????????????????
?????????????
☕☕☕☕

@futurebird
I'm not using twitter/mastodon commercially, so i don't want to come down to hard on people who are worried for their income.
But i've had similar experiences re followers: it grows pretty fast when you write some toots and follow some people.

At Twitter i had to build from scratch, but here i could start by following a few dozen other accounts from the twexodus, who alerted me to other cool accounts, etc etc.

There will always be some people who somehow 'hacked' the twitter-algoritm to perfection and won't find the same succes on mastodon. But i think that most people will find the mastodon-experience equal to or even better than Twitter.

@stemid @iyalei
There are still so many companies that have like a completely modern interface on their website where you enter information, and than behind the scenes someone is painstakingly copy-pasting that stuff into an Excel-spreadsheat so the company can actually process the information

@almaember @iyalei
No, everything that could be outsourced already has been.
With all the predictable problems of western managers not communicating clearly what they want, and getting useless (but technically correct) code and bussiness analysis back.

@tb
I am of the 'if you kill Hitler someone else will do what he did' school of thought. I think in patterns rather than coincidences. It is fun to reduce historical events to that one pivotal moment ?, but in almost every case that pivot was bound to turn soon anyway.
I think we can (and should) change the present, but i think that is way to hard work for any timetraveler to accidentally screw up.

The future does not change because i accidentally stepped on a butterfly and caused a storm, the future changes because we collect thousands of butterflies and make that storm happen!! ?