I looked into doing something similar with Winipedia and the recommendation is also to use Kiwix, and the offline file size is also very large.

Welcome to the collapse! Hoarding “clean data” for personal use is like hoarding clean water and food: you need a place to keep it, and it starts going stale the minute you shelve it. So either buy a digital bunker to load up with what you need or ask the all knowing AI gods for answers like the other poors.

Also the Stack Exchange software used to be open source, surely there’s still a fork somewhere. You could certainly run your own Developer QA site, but like with Lemmy, the problem then is getting enough traffic to be able to productively tap into the collective wisdom.

I also stopped posting there years ago for much the same reason. You could feel the strangulation of the community as duplicate questions started getting shouted down, posts got turned into “community wikis” against your will and your own questions started getting edited to better fit someone else’s plans and ideologies. The company was sold shortly after, so maybe animals can sense their pending extinction (some of them anyway)?

I miss those days when writing an answer genuinely felt like helping to grow the global community of friend developers. It’s a shame no technology has been discovered that will let the small amount of collective good in us all work together against the assholes, but alas it seems the opposite is always true.

“Censorship forced me to flee a pro-nazi site to another pro-nazi site,” is a contradiction worth noting. It highlights the general pro-nazi vibe going around big tech.

I donate about $7 a month to my masto instance (Hachyderm, funny enough) because:

• Twitter wanted $10
• I know about 1% of users donate
• I like having an independent instance run by people I feel ideologically aligned with.

For similar reasons I will very likely donate something to db0 this quarter to support my Lemmy habit.

I still have reason to use Facebook, reddit, Instagram, and those places all suck. It’s so dire scrolling there and literally 80% of the content is ads. I canceled all my streaming services this year but I’m still going to pay for independent social media because it’s worth it.

Many people consider it an unseamly career, and most who go to school for it come unraveled or wash out early. They needle you everyday, and it’s all too easy to get caught in a tangle. And then even if you manage to graduate, the job market is only sew-sew!

Grim stuff but beautifully (?) done!

Hmmm, yeah, I suppose broadly (unless souls exists). If a creature evolves like… a dozen photosensitive patches, like a proto-spider, would we say that creature has sight but no eyes? If that’s the case, do compound “eyes” actually count?

I guess now I’m just musing on where the fuzzy line is between a bunch of eyelets and eyes (made up of single-celled photreceptors). I think sight is just what eyes do. Something like “insight” comes from a metaphor (“looking” within) and I… don’t know if there’s a different word for like… what the experience of being a plant and sensing the sun on your leaves would be called?

The attacks are more sophisticated and with Ai able to be performed at far larger scales. Cybersecurity practices have been eroded for years by, I suspect, intentional effort by multiple spook groups to make security more complex and less accessible to normal people. Multiple fascists governments globally have also made strong efforts to weaken education, sow mistrust of experts, and in general promote anti-intellectualism.

The result is a population of over confident, uneducated people who believe they can detect scams and lies with their vast superiority, and who widely lack tools, training, and access to real cybersesomehow.

They probably think NordVPN protects them from phishing too, somehow.

Depends on what you mean. Obviously plants and photosensitive tissues have been sensing light for a long time, millions of years. But hose aren’t eyes, and most wouldn’t even call that poor sight.

A baby human usually has its eyes closed at birth, and the brain isn’t completely formed until 25 years old. It takes at least a few years after birth for all the basic parts to settle in and get developed. So does a baby have sight if it hasn’t yet used it’s immature eyes? Does it truly process what it “sees” into anything meaningful in the beginning?

If there is a spirit that exists before life, does it “see” and with what?

Crossposting my comment (when will my people truly be free federated?):

Daoists spent thousands of years developing alchemy and practices to attain immortality. It’s wild to me, because the Daodejing seems pretty clear in it’s praise of nature, cycles, and being one with the order of nature. So to decide, collectively, that actually breaking those cycles and living forever is definitely what Laozi would have wanted is really something.

So yeah, considering that 90% of the canon is books of magic for achieving spiritual perfection, I pick and choose!

Syncretization and selection are the norms in all beliefs though. How many people who claim any ideology truly believe in all the tenets and consequences of their chosen system? How many Christians are just asking their buddy Jesus for a hand and have no idea of a single thing the man actually (allegedly) taught?

Reminds me a little of Legend of Mana’s art style! I adore this storybook style, so cozy! Love their approach too, thabks for sharing, going to pass this along to my parent friends!

I suppose while we’re conquering a grab bag of countries Trump remembered exists, Putin is supposed to be using his North Korean troops to take over the rest of Europe? Goddamn, WW3 is going to be so fucking stupid, right up until the nukes fly because the might of the Greenland national guard proved too great for us.

The first time I played Crisis, I was already in awe because of that brilliant sunrise opening scene. As I’m creeping through the jungle towards the next objective, I hear loud running water and decide to see what it is.

They put in an absolutely stunning waterfall off to the side, complete with rainbows and ferns growing up around the base. One of those few memorable, special times when a game had the right art direction, graphics tech, and hit at just the right moment for me to all culminate in a real feeling of wonder and joy.

I tend to be very cynical about games being able to do that to me anymore, and it is much rarer with how commonplace high-definition but artistically uninspired assets have gotten. But it still happens now and then, the last time being Elden Ring which did have impressive art and design, and did “wow” me several times.

Why? No one listens to them, seems like a very frustrating job.

What actually works: practical patterns. AI-first draft, constant conversation, and “trust but verify” patterns.

So… being an expert who communicates, being an expert in copying templates, and being an expert who knows what they’re doing?

Yes, it turns out that “Effective Leadership,” contrary to what people selling you books about AI and business are saying, remains the same as it’s been for thousands of years:

• Listen to the people who do the work
• Support them in doing their work
• Get yourself and other obstacles out of the way of people doing the work

Ah but that won’t sell books or convince the Board that you and you alone have the Sauce which will counteract all collective human knowledge and make them infinite money.

Salesbros and SEO and the takeover of tech by business have utterly destroyed what it means to be an engineer, an expert, or even just a person.

A keylogger on the back of the boss’ computer? A hardware VPN backdoor to the company’s network? Oh maybe bring a flash drive full of malware and viruses and just drop it in the break room?

Jork-Aff Videos, for jorkin’ aff!

Adios Johnny-boy, looking forward to the three ring circus that will be finding his replacement.

Actually on second glance I think the setting is a train or subway. (there are people sitting in a line around them, and they’re holding a pole like in the middle of public transit vehicles.)

My favorite bird! So beautiful!