This is technically true but extremely deceptive if you don’t know the history. From “Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America” (Lauer, 2017; Columbia University Press):

Chapter 3: “By the late 1890s systems for evaluating the credit risk of individual consumers existed in metropolitan centers throughout the United States.”

Chapter 4: “During the early twentieth century millions of Americans came under the watchful gaze of newly formed credit bureaus. But these bureaus were only one arm of the emergent consumer credit apparatus. Their counterpart was the credit department of individual stores, where credit managers interviewed, documented, and tracked customers for their own benefit and that of the local bureau.”

Credit reporting has existed for a very long time in the US. So while a computerized score wasn’t there until the late 1950s (basically as soon as such a computerized score could exist, underscoring how eager banks were to implement it), your comment being technically true has no real impact on the argument of the merits of credit scoring.

It’s reasonably common in the developed world. And it’s a good idea that lenders be able to easily know how responsible borrowers are with repayment. That the US’ implementation of credit scores is problematic in some areas shouldn’t be used as a blanket dismissal of a credit scoring system.

A friend brought up Greenland nuking somebody as a joke. And I imagined how disproportionate a retaliatory strike could be, quickly remembering though that the current population is less than 60,000 and that I’m almost certain I’ve seen figures of more than 60,000 nukes during the Cold War, so I imagined a retaliatory strike where literally every person in Greenland had a personalized nuke.

The research was done make sure I wasn’t misremembering, that Greenland didn’t at any point exceed 60,000 (thus necessitating a closer comparison), and that I’m not Senator Armstrong-ing this.

OP, the site you’re linking to is LLM slop. Like seriously just look at this site for a second.

• There’s zero consistent theme.
• The images are generated.
• They’re all “BY JOHN” (no pfp, no last name, no bio, let alone no indication why they’re qualified to write about this cornucopia of shit).
• It only ever hyperlinks to itself – i.e. the sources may as well be “I made it the fuck up”.
• The way the articles are structured are LLM slop to a tee – randomly bolding words, meandering prose, overuse of bullet points, jarring logical flow, etc.
• At least five articles per day from the same “person” despite extensive length, perfect grammar, and alleged research being done.

Can’t you please link to an actual source to make this claim?

• sudo is telling the computer to do this with root privileges.
• chmod sets permissions.
• Each digit of that three-digit number corresponds to the owner, the group, and other users, respectively. It’s 0–7, where 0 means no access and 7 means access to read, write, and execute. So 077 is the exact inverse of 700, where 077 means “the owner cannot access their own files, but everyone else can read, write, and execute them”. Corresponding 700 to asexuals is joking that nobody but the owner can even so much as touch the files.
• / is the root directory, i.e. the very top of the filesystem.
• The -R flag says to do this recursively downward; in this case, that’s starting from /.

So here, we’re modifying every single file on the entire system to be readable, writable, and executable by everyone but their owner. And yes, this is supposed to be extremely stupid.

It’s so funny too, because in the very next article, they correctly call another proposal “proposed”. Like, Linuxiac, what is this:

Basically what @[email protected] said: the idea is to be practicable. Here’s a stream of disconnected thoughts about this:

• What you pointed out is actually consistent with how a disproportionate amount of vegans are staunchly anticapitalist.
• A cut-and-dry example of someone who’s still vegan but eats animal products based on “practicable” is someone whose prescription medication contains gelatin with no other pill type; vegans aren’t going to say “lol ok too bad bozo you’re not vegan anymore”.
• The core focus of veganism has traditionally been non-human animals with the idea that a reduction of cruelty and exploitation toward humans is, at most, peripheral. This is changing in my opinion, especially when questions like “vegan Linux distro” don’t involve animals short of what the devs eat.
• Based on what you say (as someone else pointed out), a distro based solely on FLOSS would probably be regarded as “the most vegan” if that were ever measured by anyone (it never would be).
• It’s a weird analogy, but after you’re done using and purchasing products derived from animals, what’s “practicable” from there is kind of like a vegan post-game. Many vegans, for example, won’t eat palm oil because of how horribly destructive it is to wildlife.
• Growing all your own food is in that post-game area of “practicable”. It’s up to you to decide if that’s practicable for you. It’s up to you to implement that if you think it is or, if it’s not, to maybe think about how else you can reduce harm with how you buy vegetables. It’s up to you if you want to share that idea and help other people implement it themselves. It’s widely accepted that it’s not up to you to determine if it’s practicable for others.

The original Wired article is a substantially better source than the IBT, which is slop that owns the likes of Newsweek and the Latin Times. On Wikipedia, we avoid citing it wherever possible.

I would say that most vegans, even if they’ve never heard it, at least approximately follow the Vegan Society’s famous definition:

Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.

Striking the parts that seem irrelevant to this specific question:

Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for […] any […] purpose […]

Keep in mind that “animals” in that first part is widely treated as “humans and non-human animals”. So you would have to decide 1) to what extent cruelty was inflicted to create the distro, 2) to what extent people and non-human animals were exploited to create the distro, and 3) if there exist practicable alternatives that meaningfully reduce (1) and (2).

OP, you linked to the comments instead of the top of the article. 💀

I’m not agreeing with their dumb point, but just pointing out: this satellite works on radar. I’m genuinely concerned how many people seem to be commenting without reading the article.

I don’t know why you’re assuming their ‘/s’ is alluding to sarcasm around this being surveillance versus sarcasm around needing more surveillance. “We need more surveillance (we actually don’t)” seems to be indicated here, not “This is surveillance (it actually isn’t)”.

Especially when Reddit types are notoriously, chronically unable to read articles before they go spouting uninformed bullshit in the comments.

Did you read the part where this is a radar satellite designed for monitoring the climate? That is, did you read anything besides the headline before you decided: “Yeah, I think I’m able to make informed commentary about this”?

Fucking thank you. Yes, experienced editor to add to this: that’s called the lead, and that’s exactly what it exists to do. Readers are not even close to starved for summaries:

• Every single article has one of these. It is at the very beginning – at most around 600 words for very extensive, multifaceted subjects. 250 to 400 words is generally considered an excellent window to target for a well-fleshed-out article.
• Even then, the first sentence itself is almost always a definition of the subject, making it a summary unto itself.
• And even then, the first paragraph is also its own form of summary in a multi-paragraph lead.
• And even then, the infobox to the right of 99% of articles gives easily digestible data about the subject in case you only care about raw, important facts (e.g. when a politician was in office, what a country’s flag is, what systems a game was released for, etc.)
• And even then, if you just want a specific subtopic, there’s a table of contents, and we generally try as much as possible (without harming the “linear” reading experience) to make it so that you can intuitively jump straight from the lead to a main section (level 2 header).
• Even then, if you don’t want to click on an article and just instead hover over its wikilink, we provide a summary of fewer than 40 characters so that readers get a broad idea without having to click (e.g. Shoeless Joe Jackson’s is “American baseball player (1887–1951)”).

What’s outrageous here isn’t wanting summaries; it’s that summaries already exist in so many ways, written by the human writers who write the contents of the articles. Not only that, but as a free, editable encyclopedia, these summaries can be changed at any time if editors feel like they no longer do their job somehow.

This not only bypasses the hard work real, human editors put in for free in favor of some generic slop that’s impossible to QA, but it also bypasses the spirit of Wikipedia that if you see something wrong, you should be able to fix it.

That’s because every company’s strategy aiming to monopolize is to:

1. Make a product that’s genuinely better than what’s on the market for some role. Sometimes by undercutting competition at a loss, sometimes by making things very convenient, etc.
2. Once you’re big enough, make sure as you keep growing that new competition can’t pop up to challenge you. Kick the ladder down behind you, and make sure to start greasing the palms of lawmakers so they can’t challenge you in step 3.
3. Once you’re so big that you’ve monopolized the market and can’t be challenged no matter what you do (both because of ladder-kicking and because everyone uses you by default), do what you’ve been wanting to this whole time and go from “boiling frog”-pace enshittification to “welp, this sucks, but now I have nowhere else to go” enshittification.

It’s why people who say “Oh, well I wouldn’t mind it if X had a monopoly because they’re way better than those other companies” are so painfully misguided.

“Play has no limits, but your credit card does. Let’s aim for that.”

it shouldn't be that hard?

OP, what’s your background to make you think that way, and if you’re qualified enough to make that assessment, why aren’t you getting to work building the ground floor of something potentially highly lucrative?

The response to “It shouldn’t be that hard” for FOSS is invariably “PRs welcome”.

Betteridge’s law in shambles

I don’t at all understand why the second law of thermodynamics is being invoked. Nonetheless, capillary condensation is already a well-studied phenomenon. As the scientific article itself notes, the innovation here over traditional capillary condensation would be the ability to easily remove the water once it’s condensed.

Re: Entropy:

• Entropy is a statistical phenomenon that tends to increase over time averaged across the entire body, i.e. the Universe. Not literally every part of the Universe needs to increase its entropy as long as on average it is increasing. You’re evidence of that: your body is a machine that takes entropy and pushes it somewhere else.
• Water vapor is a high-energy state compared to liquid water. What you’re saying therefore is the opposite of how the second law works: water vapor’s energy tends to spread out over time until it eventually cools back to a liquid. Liquid water is a higher entropy state than water vapor.

That’s mainly why I’m curious to see specific examples: I’ve fixed hundreds if not thousands of typos and can’t remember this happening, even long before I had much experience editing. I’m long past the point where I’d be considered a new editor, so any results I’d get now would be bullshit anyway short of violating the rules and starting a smurf account.

Regarding “in the clique”, people give a shit about who’s who a lot less than you’d think. Despite having 25,000 edits over 8 years, I’ve interacted with maybe three people in the top 100 by number of contributions (let alone even know who they are). I’m not a social butterfly on there, but I’ve interacted in hundreds of discussions when needed. Not only am I almost never checking who an editor is when I check their edit, but I maybe know 100 people total (orders of magnitude less than the pool of very active editors); even among the few people I’d consider acquaintances, I’ve had my edits reverted and reverted theirs.

The only instance I’ve seen of someone trying to play king shit of fuck mountain and not immediately failing is in our article for San Francisco, where they were insistent that there was a strong consensus for using only one image in the infobox instead of the usual collage we do in 99.9% of major cities. The image used was a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge in front of the San Francisco skyline – neither of which were represented well. They’d been shutting down ideas for a collage for years, and when other editors found out about this, it turned into a request for comment (RfC). Despite their now having 500,000 edits in about 18 years (this ought to put them in the alleged “clique” even though I’d never heard of them before) this swung wildly against them to the point of the RfC being closed early, and the article now has a (I think really nice) collage.

(TL;DR: the policy against trying to dictate the contents of an article isn’t just there so we can say “but c it’s agenst da rulez so it dusnt happin!!”; it’s there because the wider editing community fucking hates that shit and doesn’t put up with it.)