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Joined 29 days ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2024

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  • No. And he’s not just mad at cat ladies.

    This whole idea that people with biological children are more invested in the future of the country than those without kids is just a thinly disguised dog whistle that’s firmly rooted in misogyny and homophobia.

    This is a line that theoretically doesn’t precisely and specifically just target homosexuals, there’s also “collateral damage” to infertile couples and those who choose to go child-free. And there’s a sufficient number of those people that it serves as the basis for plausible deniability. That they specifically call out “cat ladies” fully reflects the misogynistic aspects of it. But make no mistake, this is undeniably a basis they might use to deny rights to the LGBT+ community.







  • Edit: I need to see what dried beans I have and maybe go shopping. I will give this a try with a couple different types of beans and report back if I fart or not.

    Hope you have some alpha-galactosidase at your disposal.

    The simplified explanation: A reason beans give some people gas is due to certain types of sugars and carbohydrates they contain. Those sugars are water soluble. Seems like brewing beans would concentrate those sugars and lead to epic tootage.

    Also, one method for reducing how much gas that beans cause is to soak them in lots of water. Basically, soak them for up to 8 hours, drain, rinse, and repeat a couple more times. It works on the same principal, that the soaking process will remove at least some of the problematic, water soluble sugars. Supposedly adding a small amount of baking soda helps, too. I’m less certain about that.



  • I recently joined WTF and based on the list of the instances this place is federated with, my assumption is that’s the basis for the WTF name. So, maybe something like this could be useful for choosing an instance that’s not 1/2 filled with bat shit insane posts by default rather than requiring significant and immediate curation (i.e. blocking stupid shit like hexbear and ml).



  • This actually is a good point and is one of the reasons that overuse of emojis can be annoying for some folks. Basically it boils down to the fact that a lot of people using them don’t use them effectively or in a way that provides any “value” to the reader.

    For an otherwise clear and benign statement, a grinning emoji to signify that the writer wants their statement to be “fun” isn’t particularly useful, relevant, nor insightful for the reader. At best, it comes across as unnecessary filler like an ad at the end of a sentence. It makes no difference, it’s just there for the writer’s own pleasure. Nothing wrong with that, but hopefully you can see that it would be annoying for some folks.

    On the other hand, using emojis effectively, like putting one after making a sarcastic statement provides insight and meaning to people reading. In other words, it has value for the audience, provides useful context. A lot less annoying to people when they actually derive some benefit from it.

    One issue is, a whole lot of people don’t recognize this and/or don’t care.




  • Imagine if every language in the world used the exact same alphabet, exact same words with the exact same spelling, and exact same sentences but the meaning of those words/sentences varied from person to person, region to region, in different contexts, and sometimes changed day to day. Then on top of that, the words even rendered differently from device to device.

    Additionally, there was no way to look up what those words meant to the person writing them, who you don’t even know. Even if you ask for clarification, there’s less than 50% chance they’ll respond at all, let alone provide a sincere, meaningful, and accurate answer.

    That’s what emojis are like to me. Sure, some of these same complaints apply to text-based communication as well, but emojis take it to the extreme.

    I don’t typically care that much if people use them – for instance, to reinforce the meaning or intention of their message. But it’s mildly annoying when the emojis are a message all of their own and that person is trying to communicate with me.

    Additionally, there’s an extremely high degree of correlation between people and messages that use a bunch of emojis and actual quality of the message/meaning being sent. In other words, if someone’s using a lot of emojis to communicate, I can pretty much completely disregard anything they have to say because it almost certainly holds no value to me. And that’s okay.

    So maybe in a broader sense, comments/titles/descriptions with lots and lots of emojis is annoying similar to seeing advertisements at the top of my search results and interspersed in the front page posts. It’s useless drivel that mucks up the experience.

    And even to use your description as an example:

    I don’t understand at all how that emoji is necessary or even insightful. It seems completely contradictory to the “But seriously” at the start of the sentence, it doesn’t seem like anybody with any degree of reading comprehension would mistake what you’re saying as being something negative/nasty/mean/hurtful/etc so it’s like if I ended my sentence with “and I’m currently chewing gum”. Okay, nice to know I guess, but why would I need to be told that?


  • Are you finding that the assistance it provides has gotten worse over time? When I first started using it, it was quite helpful the majority of the time. In truth, it’s still pretty decent with autocomplete, just less consistently good than before. However the chat help has truly gone into decline. The amount of unfounded statements it returns is terrible.

    And the latest issue is that I’ve started getting responses where it starts to show me an answer, but then hides the response and gives me an error that the response was filtered by Responsible AI.

    Glad I’m not directly paying for it.