Luke

Not sure exactly what you mean, but maybe Extraordinary Attorney Woo would qualify.

It’s about “an autistic female rookie attorney hired by a major law firm in Seoul. Being different from her neurotypical peers, her manner of communication is seen by them as odd, awkward, and blunt.”

There’s significant attention paid in the stories to how her NT peers feel about interacting with her, in addition to her perspective about them. Quite an excellent show.

I agree!

An effect that becomes less surprising with repetition. At some point, it’s no longer a “surprising effect” but an entirely expected one.

I dunno, Mozilla developers have had 10 releases in the past 4 months alone, with many bug fixes in every release, and 3 of those releases being minor versions each containing multiple new features. I certainly consider bug fixes and new features to be improvements happening to the browser.

Internet Archive to the rescue: https://web.archive.org/web/20240923091701/https://peabee.substack.com/p/whats-inside-the-qr-code-menu-at

Edit: oops, @ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org beat me to it!

Right! It’s definitely fulfilling the purpose OP stated here in this post, as long as that’s what you’re using it for. I’m just pointing out that it doesn’t do the other things it claims to do in the readme for the repo, so that’s something to be aware of.

This seems like a valuable utility for concealing writing style, though I feel like the provided example fails to illustrate the rest of the stated goal of the project, which is to “prevent biases, ensuring that the content is judged solely on its merits rather than on preconceived notions about the writer” and “enhance objectivity, allowing ideas to be received more universally”.

The example given is:

You: This is a demo of TextCloak!!!

Model: “Hey, I just wanted to share something cool with you guys. Check out this thing called TextCloak - it’s pretty neat!”

The model here is injecting bias that wasn’t present in the input (claims it is cool and neat) and adds pointlessly gendered words (you guys) and changes the tone drastically (from a more technical tone to a playful social-media style). These kinds of changes and additions are actually increasing the likelihood that a reader will form preconceived notions about the writer. (In this case, the writer ends up sounding socially frivolous and oblivious compared to the already neutral input text.)

This tool would be significantly more useful if it detected and preserved the tone and informational intent of input text.

Next up: Discord!

I think you underestimate how oblivious many users are when it comes to using software.

Your statement did leave some wiggle room to quibble over what exactly “very popular” means, though I don’t see how popularity is a useful metric when we’re talking about free software which doesn’t rely on user purchases for revenue. Ultimately it comes down to how funding the development of each software is accomplished, and whether that can be done effectively without selling out.

However, if we must compare funding strategies based on popularity, then we can. I’m not sure where you got your usage numbers from, but I’ll use your percentage to normalize for the number of employees paid through the funding strategies of both examples to compare the effectiveness of the approaches:

• Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation together have roughly 840 employees as of 2020 (the latest numbers available on Wikipedia). I’m not sure how they split up who does what for developing the software, but I seriously doubt the vast majority of those 840 employees are developers.
• Blender Foundation has a team of 31 people (as of 2022). Most of them are developers/engineers/designers directly involved with improving the software.

For purposes of discussion, I’ll assume that you are correct that Blender has 2% of the popularity of Firefox. Normalizing that for comparison, 2% of 840 Mozilla employees is 16.8 employees (round down because you can’t have 0.8 of a person).

In other words, if Firefox were only 2% as popular as it is now (thus making it equally as popular as you say Blender is), Mozilla would be paying 16 developers with it’s funding strategy.

Conversely, Blender is able to pay 31 developers using their funding strategy. This means that, even when accounting for popularity, Blender’s funding strategy is 2x more effective than Mozilla’s at paying developers to work on their software.

Again, I don’t agree that popularity is an important metric to compare here, but even when we do so, it’s clear that it is entirely possible to fund software without resorting to tired old capitalistic funding models that result in the increasingly objectionable violations of user privacy that Mozilla engages in lately. They could choose to do things differently, and we ought not to excuse them for their failure of imagination about how to fund their business more ethically. Especially when perfectly workable alternative funding models are right there in public view for anyone to emulate.

it’s simply not possible for something to get very popular without being taken over by a corporation

Please don’t excuse unethical and exploitative behavior by pretending that it’s unavoidable.

There are examples of other funding models available; for example, what the Blender Foundation does. It turns out, if a FOSS effort focuses on their community, makes users feel involved and important, asks in good faith for contributions and suggestions, treats people with respect, maintains funding and organizational transparency, and has consistent ethical standards… it can work out very well for them. No selling out required. No data harvesting required. No shady deals with Google required.

Putting everyone into these little boxes and arbitrarily pitting them against each other

Just because you apparently don’t have any strong political opinions and the status quo works fine for you, doesn’t mean that everyone else’s opinions are “arbitrary”. What an ignorant thing to suggest.

can we stop with the divisions and no true Scotsman bullshit on the left

No, because (A) liberals are by definition not leftists regardless of how little they know about their own right-wing political advocacy, and (B) ignoring the fact that there are differences among leftists (and liberals and leftists) is both wholly unproductive and furthers political alienation of the people whose opinions you want to be able to conveniently pretend don’t exist.

Additionally, just because you don’t understand leftists when they tell you that liberals are not leftists, doesn’t mean they are engaging in a No True Scotsman fallacy. It means you haven’t engaged enough with them to understand.

Give it a shot again, something changed recently in Proton (I assume) that made Vortex “just work” for me on my Steam Deck. I didn’t even need to do any fiddling, I just ran the installer exe from desktop mode using Lutris and whatever Proton was latest, and it installed perfectly. Vortex now runs entirely as expected, even from game mode.

No idea if this is a useful suggestion, but I saw it spoken of in another thread about CAD software: there’s a free and open source plugin called BlenderBIM that is apparently a decent option.

I think you need to take a break and get some perspective.

Besides, the Twitter link was already posted by the OP, why would it need to be posted again?

Politicians need mandatory retirements. We need someone under the age of 65.

Ah yes, ageism.

There’s nobody over 65 who is a good political leader. Nobody under 65 is a bad political leader. Everyone immediately turns into a useless chump on their 65th birthday. They should all be puréed into a drink to sustain the rest of us.

Having to copy a line from a document titled “The Principles of Communism” just to sign up should’ve tipped you off that something was a bit weird.

Uh what? How is it weird to have a mild anti-bot task in a registration process? That’s pretty normal.

If you’re objecting to the content in the text, well that’s just silly. A communist instance referencing communist writings is not “weird”, that’d be entirely within the realm of reasonable expectation.

If you feel so threatened by the mere presence of communism in your bubble, maybe don’t try to join an instance by and for them? How dare the dastardly communists be so happy and welcoming to everyone!

Speeding is “illegal” too, so that’s not really much of an argument.