“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: […] like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift

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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • I feel like this video has somewhat interesting bits sprinkled within, but for the most part, it sets up a problem most people already recognize, never actually explores why it happens (besides vaguely “money”, which I think anyone could guess), and then interviews Don Norman to give the most obvious “no shit” and high-level explanation for creating intuitive designs. We also get the solution to the door problem – which is also trivially obvious.

    Vox imo is usually good and in-depth (at least their written work is), so while inoffensive, this really surprised me.







  • efforts to extend Xorg’s life or replace it with similar alternatives continue.

    This is 100% true, but the efforts are negligible and not even worth consideration.

    • Xorg maintainers are doing just that: maintaining it (and, for the most part, begrudgingly). It will continue to exist for a long time, but that’s the only remarkable thing about it.
    • XLibre is made by some anti-vaxx conspiracy dipshit who thinks ^ is an exponentiation operator in C and who got kicked off Xorg for being a moron who did functionally nothing of any importance while carelessly breaking things like the ABI. Enormous quantity but zero quality to speak of. It will go nowhere and only has any crumb of relevance because of the maintainer’s virtue signaling.
    • Phoenix basically just started, yet Linux outlets are tripping over themselves to report on it, showing there’s very little real work to speak of in this space. It’s a nothingburger of a story. It doesn’t even do basically the only thing X11 is even good for anymore, which is support legacy applications.

    As GNOME and KDE drop X11 and DEs like Cinnamon adopt Wayland, more and more actively maintained applications will stop giving a shit about X11. Even if they don’t explicitly not support it, none of the developers will be using it, and most of the userbase won’t either; thus, applications’ support for X11 will just rot away if it isn’t outright deprecated. Obviously X11 will always have a base of legacy applications, but you’re going to be seriously hard-pressed even two years from now to find someone who would use X11 over Wayland – except for specific and severely outdated hardware, conspiracy nutjobs, and the rare case where XWayland doesn’t properly support a legacy application.






  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzBirbs & Dinos
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    10 days ago

    Any particular words you don’t know? Probably the most likely ones are para- and monophyletic. For a taxon (scientific grouping) to be a valid clade, it needs to be monophyletic, meaning it contains the most recent common ancestor of the group’s other members and all known descendants of that common ancestor. Paraphyletic, by contrast, means not all the descendants are in there. For example, imagine if the mammals just randomly excluded the bears – that would be paraphyletic, because the bears also share a common ancestor with the other mammals.

    So a monophyletic group of your family tree might include your grandmother, all her children, and all their children’s children, etc. A paraphyletic one might exclude Gertrude and her kids because she got drunk and stole and wrecked the LeBaron and we fucking know she did it and we don’t talk to her after that.






  • I would add that making ignorance of the law a valid excuse would be a logistical farce. Mens rea is a real thing that’s examined during a criminal trial. The defendant’s state of mind can absolutely factor into their sentence or even whether they’re convicted at all; “ignorance of the law is not an excuse”, ignorantia juris non excusat, even has some exceptions under US law. But you could not possibly for every crime burden the prosecution with proving that the defendant 1) committed the act 2) intended to commit the act, and now 3) knew the act they were committing was a crime. Mens rea, while necessary in a fair system, is hard enough; condition (3) would make it functionally impossible to convict anyone who didn’t a) explicitly refer to what they were doing as a crime, b) receive a formal education in the relevant area of law, or c) commit a crime literally everyone is expected to know like murder or armed robbery.