Mastodon does in fact not render markdown from other instances. They get converted to HTML by the sender instance.

International Women’s Day and start of daylight saving time in the USA. I guess this post is referring to the latter.

Hopping on a train alone for a couple of hours has been my default mode of transportation since long before I was 18. Mostly to visit friends so I didn’t have to worry about a place to stay overnight so if you don’t have that, maybe start out with a day trip.

That’s the universal human experience. Listen to every marginally famous person and they will tell you that a single negative comment feels like it weighs more than 100 positive ones. Then factor in that people who disagree feel compelled to voice their opinion while those who agree often silently nod to themselves and move on. So the 100 positive comments are likely representative of 500 people who agree but don’t say anything.

So far, you seem to be doing well. Don’t let a couple of the haters get to you.

Of course, if a pattern appears of many comments criticizing the same thing, then you can think about if there’s something you should change about your behavior. But even then, the change should come from your own realization that you want to change something, not from a desire to appeal to the faceless mass of terminally online weirdos.

Alice really is one of the most wholesome people on the fediverse.

From your other posts, I guess you are around 18 and this is your first long-term relationship. If that’s the case, don’t worry too much about it. Don’t expect your first relationship to last forever. Or your second. Or third. Enjoy what you have for as long as it lasts but don’t be afraid to move on when either of you becomes uncomfortable with it. If you treat every relationship as if it must last forever, you won’t recognize the signs if something develops in the wrong direction and you risk locking yourself into something you don’t want, just because you don’t realize that you have other options.

Breakups hurt like hell but they also help you grow. With each one you learn something about yourself, your life goals and what you like and dislike in a partner. I’m in my late 30s now and if you count everything that lasted longer than a year, I’m in my third long-term relationship right now, with a hand full of shorter ones in between. The longest one lasted for about seven years and ended because we figured out that our plans for the future had changed in a way that no longer fit together. Breaking up was the right choice and maybe we should have done it a bit earlier but at the same time, I’m grateful for every single day we had and regret nothing.

So in short: see where the journey goes. Be open-minded either way. Maybe you’ll stay together for another month, another year or another decade. Enjoy each other for as long as you’re both happy but don’t be afraid of ending things when you’re not.

I think it’s meant to be short for Mega-elements, so millions of elements.

Yeah, that should be fixed as soon as possible. But compared to the hoops Americans need to jump through to be able to vote, 40€ every 10 years to renew your ID card is not that much.

Fascists cosplaying as Christians? If they had ever opened a bible, they might have noticed that one of the gospels’ most important message is loving your neighbors. Not just your cis white hetero normative neighbors, all of them. Even those who might not follow all the rules should be treated with compassion, not hate.

I’m not a practicing Christian by any measure but I think the world would be a far better place if self-declared Christians actually read their fancy book instead of blindly repeating something they heard from a TV preacher.

Edit: there also seem to be huge regional differences in interpretation. Protestant churches in Germany allow gay and trans people not only to participate and get married but even to become pastors. A couple of churches (but certainly not all of them) fly pride flags outside to signal that if God made you queer, you’re more than welcome. The Catholics are slowly coming to the same conclusion but I figure they might still need a decade or two.

I would argue it’s very dumb to give anyone, including humans, access to weapons of mass destruction.

Okay, that changes my first sentence a bit but the rest still stands. Because as a German I am required by law to have valid ID and the government is required to issue one to me, it would be incredibly hard to invalidate any ID that they themselves issued without providing a replacement.

I would trust Skynet a lot more than an LLM. At least that would be purpose-built for actually calculating likely outcomes.

As @Th4tGuyII@fedia.io said, this experiment didn’t contain any proper reasoning about costs and benefits of using nuclear weapons. It’s just a few glorified autocomplete scripts playing “which word comes next?” over and over again. And in the context of modern warfare, many texts in the training corpus happen to mention nukes so they’re bound to show up at the list of most likely next words eventually.

I’m still baffled by the fact that for most US citizens, a drivers license is the only government ID they have. It’s not that hard to issue an ID card to everyone and when everyone is required by law to have one, it’s way harder for rogue lawmakers to take it away.

Here in Germany we’ve had mandatory ID for decades and it works really well. Even if our government suddenly decided that being trans isn’t acceptable anymore, the worst that would happen ID-wise is that your card shows your deadname (gender isn’t listed explicitly). Sure, that sucks (a lot!) but at least it doesn’t take away people’s ability to vote or otherwise identify themselves.

Yeah, we figured that one out back in… checks notes 1983. There is a reason why WarGames still holds up as an amazing movie even though the technology it depicts is far outdated.

Compared to AGI it is.

The same way the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs are small and cute compared to a modern hydrogen bomb…

If we don’t solve the AI problems we already have, there is no point speculating about AGI because our lives will be unbearable long before it arrives.

I warn about AI. I don’t care about AGI (yet) because we are far from it.

I’m worried about (in no particular order):

• Software companies amassing technical debt because AI-generated code gets used without proper review
• Massive security problems in critical infrastructure, for the exact same reason
• Cost savings being used to make the rich richer while the people who used to do the work are just fired
• Companies forcing AI into every single product even if it doesn’t make sense, just to make their shareholders happy
• Rapidly increasing prices of RAM, SSDs, HDDs, graphics cards and consequently pretty much all electronic devices
• The environmental impact because companies would rather build new power plants than optimize AI for efficiency
• A lack of education about the limitations of current implementations. People tend to feed every question they have into ChatGPT and trust the results even when they’re completely incorrect
• The inherent privacy nightmare that comes from funneling that much data into a centralized service

Nothing about this is small or cute.

I would be totally fine with something that I can supervise and that can run locally on my laptop without cooking it and doubling my energy bill. Also an economy where productivity gains benefit the workers, not the CEO. If I can do the same work in half the time, let me have the rest of the day off at full pay instead of doubling my workload and firing half your staff.

Hey, at least this one won’t become a murderer when the relationship breaks apart.

Wäre es gut gewesen, die Gemeinden, die die Strom- und Wasserkosten für den Spabereich übernehmen, darüber zu informieren? Bestimmt.

Aber daraus jetzt so ein Theater zu machen, finde ich dann doch ziemlich unangebracht. Die Leute, die da arbeiten, machen wortwörtlich einen der beschissensten Jobs der Welt und haben es sich mehr als verdient, im Anschluss sauber und entspannt nach Hause zu gehen. So wie die Kommission damit umgeht, muss man nicht lange überlegen, warum das geheim gehalten wurde.

Pretty much that, yes. I remember stopping for a moment and wondering what had just happened. I was of course aware that I had existed before. Who and where I was. At the same time it felt like all that was vague and distant, like suddenly waking up from a dream.

Realistically, it was probably just an unusually intense doorway effect but the fact that I can still remember it so vividly, even decades later, shows how significant it must have felt to 3-year-old me.

When I was about three years old, I walked down the hallway from my room toward the living room. I remember that even in that moment it felt like I had blacked out halfway through and my brain started working a couple of steps from the living room door. Everything before that is blank, yet I have tons of memories from the weeks and months after that event.