pulsewidth
@pulsewidth@lemmy.world
- Comment on Trump asks Australia, Albanese to join Gaza 'Board of Peace' 3 days ago:
Honestly wtf do we have to do with Israel and Palestine? We’re on the other side of the world and not involved in their politics at all, beyond as being a US/British ally. We had a minor terrorist shooting? It’s none of our business without Trump involved, and absolutely none with the way he’s planned it (each country pays a billion into a fund that Trump alone controls. Lolwhat).
The ‘Board of Peace’ just seems like a new ‘how do we make money for businesses rebuilding the Gaza strip to the whims of the Israelis’ Iraq-rebuild style plan, with a side-hustle of Trump skimming for himself to build new Trump Gaza Towers.
- Comment on Promoting and inciting racial hatred - the proposed new Australian offence | Constitutional Clarion 4 days ago:
Its worth adding that this proposed legislation has now been abandoned by Labor thanks to the Greens saying they would not support the bill in its current format without provisions for genuine protest - the Liberal party also said they’d not support it, for very different reasons. Either way, it’s dead.
From video description:
UPDATE: The Government has since announced that it is abandoning its proposed law about promoting and inciting racial hatred. As this analysis now only has educational, not practical relevance, the comments have been closed.
This video is about one part of the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026 (Cth) which
will[was to] be introduced and debated in the Australian Parliament on 19 and 20 January 2026. - Comment on Promoting and inciting racial hatred - the proposed new Australian offence | Constitutional Clarion 4 days ago:
OK well then that’s completely fucked.
- Comment on Promoting and inciting racial hatred - the proposed new Australian offence | Constitutional Clarion 5 days ago:
Israelis are not a race though, they’re just citizens of a country.
So it would not be able to be classified as ‘racial hatred’ and then they would have to pivot to charging that you’re inciting hatred against Jews, which would be much easier to defend. Protesting against Israel is not protesting against Jews - in fact there are a lot of Jews that protest against Israel.
- Comment on Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document 1 week ago:
Well, of course, that’s crazy behaviour.
But if you did it in a religious ritualistic ceremony and sucked the blood off the tip of the babies dicks afterwards, well that wouldn’t be weird now, would it.
You could even call it “Metzitzah B’peh” and it would happen so regularly and kids would get herpetic infections from the mohel’s so often (sometimes even dying that the New York Health department would have to issue warnings about it, and it would still not be weird, even when the families of the babies affected would refuse to name the mohel’s to allow the health dept to investigate and have them banned from performing the practice on future babies.
- Comment on Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document 1 week ago:
Literally the same thing that female genital mutilators say about their ‘cultural right’ to circumsize their daughters.
What are kids anyway in your eyes beyond property that parents should have the right to permanently brand with their mark of religion.
- Comment on Evidence 2 weeks ago:
97% was reported by earlier small surveys, but I think the most rigorous and widely reported survey of scientists was Harris Interactive in 2007.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Scientific_consensus_on_climat…
That was followed up in 2010 by a survey of specifically climate scientists, whom hit 97-98%.
The ‘concensus’ has been constantly challenged in conservative media and circles so there have been many such surveys / meta-analyses continuing over the years and it’s been hitting 100% for the last several years. If any idiot ever parrots “science doesn’t work on concensus” my usually response is something like, “no it doesn’t, but when an entire field of scientists have determined a theory to have vast evidence-based backing its considered settled. The only thing that would change that is significant contradictory data being presented, yet instead every year we’re measuring huge volumes of data that confirm the concensus.”
- Comment on Still trying to figure it out... 2 weeks ago:
Sure is. Like Cliff said, it’s a Western Pygmy Possum (from social media source).
Pic from Wikipedia :
- Comment on Teenage Jehovah's Witness can receive blood transfusion, judge rules 3 weeks ago:
The judge would never make a legal argument that “religious propaganda had reduced a person’s legal capacity” as it would have wide-ranging implications and would be challenged (and overruled) in short order due to freedom of religion laws.
The hospitals legal team appealed for an order because the kid was effectively killing themselves and they have a duty to do no harm.
This prompted the health board to go to the Court of Session to seek an order which would allow its doctors to administer the blood transfusion up to two weeks following the child’s procedure.
Its legal team told Lady Tait that such an order was necessary because blood loss was an “inevitable consequence” of the operation.
The judge deemed that weighing the child’s personal beliefs and medical risk it was in their best interest to allow the order. That is their justification and it follows other case law examined, there is no legal need for them to deem the kid incapable of making the decision. It’s only made the news because religious people making dumb decisions about their health is a common public interest story.
Lady Tait also wrote about cases examined by English courts, before concluding that in the context of the case brought before the court, it would be in the best interests of the child that the order be granted.
- Comment on Teenage Jehovah's Witness can receive blood transfusion, judge rules 3 weeks ago:
Sounds like a slippery slope fallacy. Just because a judge has carefully weighed that this is in the 14 year olds best interest now, does not at all mean more dire decisions against personal rights will be made in future.
I’ll worry if the courts ever start making decisions that go against the childs best interest.
The judge said they’re ordering this because there would not be time to solicit the court for an order if a transfusion does become necessary, and risk of death would be significant.
I’m fine with letting adult religious zealots bleed out if they’re too god-brained to accept help, but for a 14yo I think it’s pretty reasonable to save them from themselves so they can live to have a fully-developed brain.
- Comment on Recommendation for Android File Manager 4 weeks ago:
I use Fossify FM for most on-device stuff, thumbs up from me too.
If I need to copy/move files between my phone and my NAS I use Ghost Commander as it has SMB support and the dual-panels make moving between devices easier to grapple with visually.
- Comment on Positivity 😇 4 weeks ago:
Thanks for that, they have a bunch of silly fun stuff on Giphy and found there original comics from your info.
- Comment on Positivity 😇 4 weeks ago:
Why is this cropped and scrubbed so that we can’t see who the original artist is?
- Comment on Anon lives on a budget 5 weeks ago:
4chan users love playing Schrodinger’s Racist, so we’ll never know for sure.
I just treat racism as racism, unless it is set up with the most obvious irony or sarcasm beforehand - this ain’t, seems like a genuine whine at their real situation.
- Comment on Anon lives on a budget 5 weeks ago:
Also called it Obongocare which made me immediately lose any empathy to them for the racism, but it is 4chan I guess.
99% likely they vote Republican based on the attitide also, which is the root cause of a lot of their complaints (min wage, shitty employee protections, expensive Internet [almost certainly one of the monopoly ISP areas], has to rely on a car because public transit is socialism).
Yeah, the Democratic party sucks by and large for many other reasons, but id rather live in a D city than an R one any day of the week. /end obligatory response to “but Dems”
- Comment on Why do you hate AI? 5 weeks ago:
It is absolutely predefined - if you make the same moves it will give you the same results, every time. Same as playing ChessMaster 2000 from 1986.
It may narrowly fit into the broad definition of ‘AI’ (like, since the 70s) but that’s not what’s being discussed in this thread.
Believe what you like though.
- Comment on Why do you hate AI? 5 weeks ago:
I agree it’s great at writing and frame-working parts of code and selecting libraries - it definitely has value for coding. $1500 bil value though, I doubt.
My main concern there lies in the next gen of programmers. The work that ChatGPT (and Claude etc) outputs requires some significant programming prior-experience to allow them to make sense of the output and adjust (or correct) it to suit their scope and requirements of the project. In additions it’s taking away the entry-level work that junior devs usually do and have cleaned up for prod by senior devs - and that’s not theory, the job market is dying now.
- Comment on Why do you hate AI? 5 weeks ago:
When people say “I fucking hate AI”, 99% of the time they mean “I fucking hate AI™©®”. They don’t mean the technology behind it.
To add to your good points, I’m a CS grad that studied neural networks and machine learning years back, and every time I read some idiot claiming something like “this scientific breakthrough has got scientists wondering if we’re on the cusp of creating a new species of superintelligence” or “90% of jobs will be obsolete in five years” it annoys me because its not real, and it’s always someone selling something. Today’s AI is the same tech they’ve been working on for 30+ years and incrementally building upon, but as Moore’s Law has marched on we now have storage pools and computing power to run very advanced models and networks. There is no magic breakthrough, just hype.
The recent advancements are all driven by the $1500 billion spent on grabbing as many resources they could - all because some idiots convinced them it’s the next gold rush. What has that $1500 bil got us? Machines that can answer general questions correctly around 40% of the time, plagiarize art for memes, create shallow corporate content that nobody wants, and write some half-decent code cobbled together from StackOverflow and public GitHub repos.
What a fucking waste of resources.
What’s real is the social impacts, the educational impacts, the environmental impacts, the effect on artists and others who have had their work stolen for training, the useability of the Internet (search is fucked now), and what will be very real soon is the global recession/depression it causes as businesses realize more and more that it’s not worth the cost to implement or maintain (in all but very few scenarios).
- Comment on Why do you hate AI? 5 weeks ago:
I know you’re meming, but in Civilization (as in most games), you’re playing against predefined scripts and algorithmic rules that the computer opponent has, as well as having cheaper costs for resources than the user at higher difficulty levels - because it cannot compete with a skilled human player at that level (it literally cheats).
No LLM, no neural network, no deep learning… not ‘AI’ in the modern sense that’s being discussed here.
- Comment on Why do you hate AI? 5 weeks ago:
… And NVMe SSDs, and large HDDs.
I bought a Crucial P310 MVMe 2TB card barely three weeks ago for the already-inflated price of $132.58 (not on sale).
The exact same card from the exact same retailer is now $225.13.
70% increase in 21 days.
That’s the average amount of inflation we’d have in eighteen years.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Optimus Robot shuts down after reproducing the gesture of its human operator removing their headset 1 month ago:
They’re actually shot in the head when their shift is over and they remove the headset - to prevent leaks of Optimus being a charade.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Optimus Robot shuts down after reproducing the gesture of its human operator removing their headset 1 month ago:
I’m sure we’ll see, “the AI was trained on human operator recordings - which unfortunately included headset removal actions, Tesla is now working to filter that from the model”.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Optimus Robot shuts down after reproducing the gesture of its human operator removing their headset 1 month ago:
My optimist: surely Musk will not be able to get away with being caught in this obvious lie.
My realist: he’s gonna get away with it again.
- Comment on Anon is a fan of GabeN 1 month ago:
Their policy was that if a game was activated on your account then you were not entitled to a refund. The fact that they pulled some games from the store due to significant complaints about those individual titles (or at publisher request), and subsequently decided to make an exception to refund that particular game for some people does not disprove that their standard policy was ‘you are not entitled to a refund’.
- Comment on Anon is a fan of GabeN 1 month ago:
Hmmm. Everyone takes Steam refunds for granted now. But until late 2015 they refused to do refunds for any kind of game purchase, even if the game was literally unplayable by buyers - until they were dragged through the courts by the ACCC and fined, with similar legal demands happening from the EU around the same time.
Dunno if I’d call that, “never abused their power to the disadvantage of customers”.
- Comment on Anon is a fan of GabeN 1 month ago:
The EU definitely helped. I’ll add that this was actually kicked off by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in 2014. They took Valve to court over their insistence that they can ignore Australian Consumer Law rights - in particular that if a product is ‘not fit for purpose’ then the buyer is entitled to a full refund, with respect to games. Valve offered no possibility of refund at the time. The case dragged on, but Valve eventually lost and was told to pay several million in fines, they appealed it to the High Court of Australia in 2016 - and lost also on appeal.
The judge was pissed at Valve, and wrote in their ruling:
“Valve’s culture of compliance was, and is, very poor”. Valve’s evidence was ‘disturbing’ to the Court because Valve ‘formed a view …that it was not subject to Australian law…and with the view that even if [legal] advice had been obtained that Valve was required to comply with the Australian law the advice might have been ignored”. He also noted that Valve had ‘contested liability on almost every imaginable point’.
Valve are generally a very positive force in gaming, but they’re definitely not the saints that OP image text implies.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
- Comment on 1 month ago:
“Pretty sure it’s a type of bigotry I just invented to suit me”.
People are downvoting because they can’t read it and this is an English language forum. They’d do the same to commenters posting everything in latin - it’s not helpful to post like this in this community, which is why repeat offenders become downvote magnets (or just blocked).
- Comment on 1 month ago:
People would also downvote if comments were being posted in latin or mandarin on an English language comminity: its unreadable to most of the participants and thereby negatively contributory to the discussion.
- Comment on mmm... tastes like chimkin 1 month ago:
Yes. The other person said they were “carnivorous” though. Giant tortoises are not carnivorous.
Horses are also not carnivorous even though they do eat meat on rare occasions to survive.
Words mean things.
You’re also wrong about horses. Put a steak on the ground in field of plentiful grass, horses will ignore it until it’s rotted away to nothing. They do not just eat stuff outside of their regular died because its risk free and easily obtained.