tyler
@tyler@programming.dev
- Comment on The planet still belongs to the dinosaurs. 9 hours ago:
The bird count is over 11k now! I think something like 11300ish. Let me look it up.
OK it’s 11250!
- Comment on If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties? 1 day ago:
The top comment I replied to stated that this was a black and white issue. Either you are a landlord and that’s unethical or you’re not and it’s ethical. You seem to have taken this conversation in a completely different direction. It is solely about whether you can be a landlord ethically.
I also did not assume the majority want to do anything.
- Comment on If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties? 1 day ago:
I know people (including myself who actually owns a house) who would love (or already do) travel the world and buying and selling houses in every location you travel would be a hindrance not a help.
There is no black and white, this is an ethics discussion, there are shades of gray for everything. Just because you want to stay in one location and never move doesn’t mean others want what you want.
- Comment on If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties? 1 day ago:
you say this as if most people would be like that. whereas most people don’t want to travel all the time
I do not, I say it because it has to be involved in any discussion of ethics. It isn’t a binary problem. There are shades of gray to everything, which people hate talking about.
I know many people that like renting because they want to move every few months or years. Their job affords it (which any reasonable nation also allows), they work remote, or they’re mobile, etc.
Acting like everything is black and white when it literally never is is making it impossible to have actually discussions that enact change.
Wouldn’t you like to travel the world and see the sights? Would you want to have to buy a house and sell your old one every single time you changed countries? I think not.
- Comment on A robot walks on water thanks to evolution’s solution 1 day ago:
Sorry, I should be more clear. I’ve seen water striders before, but this article is about a specific kind of water strider that’s faster than others due to its fan propulsion. I wanted to see that type of water strider because I want to compare with the robot they created.
Cool video though. I didn’t know that’s how they eat.
- Comment on If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties? 1 day ago:
That’s not my assumption. I know people that only want to rent, they don’t want to own. In that worldview someone owns it.
In regards to paying for shelter, unless you get rid of money, things have to be maintained, that costs money, and someone has to be paid to fix it, even if it’s the government paying a contractor.
The government doesn’t like owning things that require enormous amounts of maintenance. It’s a liability, because they can’t then focus efforts on actually serving their citizens. So if the government is already going to pay someone to maintain buildings, it’s better to not own the buildings and instead regulate in a manner than serves everyone.
That means there will still be landlords. There are still people that want to rent, the government doesn’t like owning buildings, so there will still be people owning and renting their places out.
- Comment on A robot walks on water thanks to evolution’s solution 1 day ago:
That’s of the robot. I want one of the bugs. It’s hard to understand what they’re replicating.
- Comment on If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties? 1 day ago:
In what way? The majority of affordable housing (as defined by the government) is housing to rent. Someone has to own it and it’s incredibly likely to not be the people living in it because they can’t afford it or do not want to be buying a house.
- Comment on A robot walks on water thanks to evolution’s solution 2 days ago:
Videos of the bugs in question would have been a good addition to the article…
- Comment on Would you ever give up your right to leave a bad review about a company? 5 days ago:
See the top comment
- Comment on Japan Just Switched on Asia’s First Osmotic Power Plant, Which Runs 24/7 on Nothing But Fresh Water and Seawater 5 days ago:
Gotta be careful about ecosystems though. River deltas are incredibly important and fragile areas.
- Comment on Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws 6 days ago:
Imagine the internet is a network of roads. The ISPs in some parts of town control the roads, in other parts they only control the stop lights. You can build your own road through private land to avoid the stop lights but it’s expensive. The isps can put traffic cops at the stop lights and monitor and stop you if they want. The only way to get around it is to build a road all the way to the destination.
- Comment on Is This Social Media? 1 week ago:
Thankfully I think most people are idiots who wouldn’t be able to name what their operating system is so I also don’t give one shit what they think Reddit is either. Turns out most of the population can’t use a dictionary or we wouldn’t be calling idiots Nimrods.
- Comment on Is This Social Media? 1 week ago:
But it’s not. Someone edited wikipedia to put a definition only cited in one business article from 2010. It was never the common definition until news companies started calling anything they didn’t understand “social media” because it became a catch all. Forums aren’t social media.
- Comment on Is This Social Media? 1 week ago:
I don’t give one shit what Wikipedia says. I’ve argued this on here before. Wikipedia’s definition includes every website on the planet because of how wide ranging and useless of a definition it is. Defining social media in that way makes the meaning useless and only serves politicians who want to block things they dislike on the internet. Essentially “social media” == internet to them.
- Comment on Is This Social Media? 1 week ago:
No: you don’t follow “real identities”, it’s a forum, not a user generated feed of personal life details, the votes are not likes/dislikes of personal content, but upvotes and downvotes to indicate whether that post belongs in that forum or not. For the most part users are not generating any media at all, though they can (exactly like a forum). The basis of the site isn’t around following anyone or the content they’re generating, but instead subscribing to communities.
It’s only social media if your definition of social media is “people commenting on stuff” which would mean that almost every website on the planet is social media. Clearly one of these definitions is wrong and I don’t really understand how we got to the place where “commenting on stuff” made it social media when it’s clearly not.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Sure, and not calling them fish is even more scientific. From a grouping perspective, (which is how you refer to it) there is no such group.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
In a break from the long tradition of grouping all fish into a single class (‘‘Pisces’’), modern phylogenetics views fish as a paraphyletic group.
Paraphyly is a taxonomic term describing a grouping that consists of the grouping’s last common ancestor and some but not all of its descendant lineages. The grouping is said to be paraphyletic with respect to the excluded subgroups. In contrast, a monophyletic grouping (a clade) includes a common ancestor and all of its descendants.
This is in contrast to the class
Mammaliawhich is a complete clade.In other words, I could make up a branch of science called
foobarthologythat studies Jurassic raptors, whales, and the Rock Dove, but that doesn’t mean those things are related, or a ‘true’ scientific group of their own. It just means I put them together for some other reason, either cause it’s easier for the requirements of the job, or I wanted to, or many other reasons including historical. - Comment on 1 week ago:
I think the even more nuanced answer is that “fish” is not a scientific category so comparing it to mammals makes no sense.
- Comment on It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes 2 weeks ago:
apparently you should be able to run any windows app with WinApps on linux, but I think they have a bug or something right now because I haven’t been able to get it to work.
- Comment on Americans’ junk-filled garages are hurting EV adoption, study says 2 weeks ago:
Too real
- Comment on What would be ancient ways to properly store vitamin C? 3 weeks ago:
Yeah. Fruit…
- Comment on Bird Calls 3 weeks ago:
Correct, it also could have been a call for a predator approaching. In other words, life or death.
- Comment on Why is land/sky so cleanly split between mammals/birds? 4 weeks ago:
There’s a lot of good answers here but there’s some missing things as well.
To start with, there was a separate category of flying dinosaur, those with ‘fingers’. They could climb trees, grasp things, etc. They were large and heavy. The heaviness was due to the increased weight that these joints added, including in their legs. When disaster struck, the lighter dinosaurs (descendants of today’s Aves) were able to escape the disaster due to reduced energy usage, snapper energy requirements, etc. The heavier ones were not.
Second, there are a lot of categories that birds fall into. Like others have said, birds in isolation eventually revert to flightlessness. It’s advantageous.
I’m not sure why you think mammals/birds are the dividing line either. There are many animals that “fly” that aren’t birds (bugs, bats), and there are many mammals that aren’t on land as well (whales, bats, etc).
I feel like your question is maybe more a question of “why are mammals so dominant” which probably comes down to many differences in avian biology, adaptations that explicitly make life easier in the sky vs land. Better usage of oxygen, ability to lay eggs out of reach of predators, explicit bone structure for flying. Flightless birds have lost many of these things. Mammals have other adaptations that make life easier for them on land. Trying to cross this boundary usually results in disaster for the evolutionary line and so it doesn’t happen.
- Comment on YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States 4 weeks ago:
not in proportional representation… If half the people are rural and half are urban and vote for different people then 50% of the representatives represent each side, no matter how the land is divided.
- Comment on GitHub CEO delivers stark message to developers: Embrace AI or get out. 4 weeks ago:
Company I worked at went through 5 CTOs in 4 years. 5.
- Comment on Florida sues some of the biggest porn platforms, accusing them of not complying with the state's age verification law 4 weeks ago:
Well that’s a really bad example you gave because gun laws explicitly cover that exact case federally. This is more like book banning. Books are banned in your state, not mine, you come and buy them here and take them back there.
- Comment on hygiene 4 weeks ago:
Wait are you suggesting I put a crumb tray under my chair or that my chair already has a crumb tray and I never noticed?
- Comment on Australia to ban under-16s from YouTube 4 weeks ago:
You’re the one redefining history dude. Even another person in this comment section is telling you how it never meant that to start with. You linked an article from a business school that literally makes up history. Your “source” calls the General Motors blog “social media”.
- Comment on Australia to ban under-16s from YouTube 5 weeks ago:
The dictionary definitions are rewriting history based on a word that hadn’t even been coined yet. They created a definition which retroactively lumped nearly the entire internet under that term. It’s incorrect and unhelpful to do so.
Exactly. The ‘academic’ source that roguetrick (not who you replied to) supplied that apparently ‘37 thousand citations’ are using, was written in 2009 and states that Usenet was a social networking site. Just a complete rewrite of history. Notably that ‘academic’ source was from a business school.
As someone who was around and heavily involved in tech during the bbs days, then walled garden services, then internet forums, THEN social networking and media, I agree not with you but with the prior comment.
Thank you for understanding my point of view. This is complete rewriting of history by (mostly) news corporations that serve only to make people mad. And ‘social media’ became an easy buzzword to refer to anything that had something wrong with it. This got very bad in the past 5-10 years (time passes weird now).
However, given that language changes and us old geeks don’t make the rules, “social media” now indeed includes the entire internet. I can’t argue with the dictionary, but I can explain the reasoning behind my disagreement with the term. I think that’s the same the last person was saying.
you can argue with the dictionary, that’s what I’m doing here. A term that refers to everything under the sun is a meaningless word, especially when it’s weaponized against its citizens, exactly like the UK is doing with ‘social media’ currently, by having it literally encapsulate every website out there, but making citizens think that it doesn’t. The only way you convince the dictionary to change is by telling people that social media doesn’t mean forums. That social media doesn’t mean YouTube. That social media doesn’t mean Wikipedia. (I have some other words I’d like to argue as well, but they’re completely unrelated to this thread).
So that’s what I’m doing here. Telling people that including these things in this all encompassing meaningless word not only devalues the word, but makes it so that politicians can fuck us over anytime they want by using the ‘social media’ boogeyman, and then firewalling Wikipedia, or anandtech.com, or fordf150ownersforum.com, etc.etc.etc.