[-] Womble@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago

Cool, 13 years seems better than I'd expect for paying it off that far north. I'd be interested to hear how it does over winter.

I suppose the other variable is equipment failure and degredation rates, do the installers give you any guaruntees about those?

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago

Yes, thats the exactly place to go hard left, full on no compromises. In the Democratic primaries.

Not in the presidential election when you know one of exactly two people will win and your choice is which one of them you favour over the other.

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago

Just for reference, roughly where are you with this setup? What looks good for say Arizona is going to look very different for the Netherlands (for example)

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago

Compared to

It’s easy when you’re an obscure band to bellow “kill your local MP” or bray “up Hamas, up Hezbollah”.

Yeah, pretty much. Very few people would argue against stopping killing Gazan civilians (even if they are not willing to back the measures that would result in that, like applying real presure to Israel), that makes it a fairly apolictial thing to say. Advocating killing MPs or supporting Iranian proxies is certainly a lot more contencious.

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Thanks for showing what a lovely person you are so clearly. Off to the blocklist you go.

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

I'd like that too! But that is completely separate to this bill. All this bill does is allow people who are in severe pain and about to die in less than half a year to get assistance in ending their lives if they dont have the capacity to do it themselves.

Thats it.

If your argument is that the world isnt already perfectly equitable and so we shouldnt make anything better until it is perfectly equitable then I completely disagree. I think that is a recipe for never improving peoples lives and just a way to get angry at the system without doing anything to improve it.

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Huh? This my only account I dont even know who you are paranoidly accusing me of being a sock puppet for.

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

For the record I disagree with you (and that wasnt clear from your previous post), but thats a resonable concern to have.

comparing someone to hitler is not.

As to the substance of your concerns, do you think that doesnt happen now? There are plenty of deaths of dispair in the world currently. This bill does absolutely nothing either way for someone who becomes paralysed, loses their job and puts a gun to their own head. What it does do is allow people who are going to die immenently have the peace of mind that if it becomes unbearble to them they will be able to end their life even if they cant physically manage it any more.

I just dont see how providing assistance to die for those who require it has any bearing on people who end their lives due to financial hardship, would you want to go back to making suicide a crime?

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I honestly cant tell what argument you are trying to make. Yes the world can be a shit place with people suffering and dying for the profit of others, but what does that have to do with legislation being put in place for people - in intolerble pain, with less than six months to live and have been judged by independent review and to be of sound mind and uncoerced - being assisted if they choose to wnd their life?

As to you being the "despised voice" not unless the other comment was from your sock puppet. They were comparing Starmer to Hitler by calling him Sturmer, despite him not having anything to do with this bill. I do in fact see lying about genocide as despicable.

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 17 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

And yet, the overwhelming majority of people in the UK, including disabled people, want this change in the law. So much so that literally every single constituency in the UK has a majority in favour of it, most with 2/3s majorities or more.

The people arguing against it are pretty much all religious groups, often with funding from the USA, who are being coy about their motives. They often dont anounce that the same groups protesting this are the same groups who advocate against abortion for example.

And yet still you still get people like the tanky replying on this page trying to make out that this is kier starmer (who did nothing to promote this bill other than vote in its favour) personally organising a genocide of disabled people for the profit of American pharma companies.

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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by Womble@lemmy.world to c/localllama@sh.itjust.works

I've recently been writing fiction and using an AI as a critic/editor to help me tighten things up (as I'm not a particularly skilled prose writer myself). Currently the two ways I've been trying are just writing text in a basic editor and then either saving files to add to a hosted LLM or copy pasting into a local one. Or using pycharm and AI integration plugins for it.

Neither is particularly satisfactory and I'm wondering if anyone knows of a good setup for this (preferably open source but not neccesary), integration with at least one of ollama or open-router would be needed.

Edit: Thanks for the recommendations everyone, lots of things for me to check out when I get the time!

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submitted 2 months ago by Womble@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

A new progressivism, one that embraces construction over obstruction, must find new allegories to think about technology and the future

Black Mirror fails to consistently explore the duality of technology and our reactions to it. It is a critical deficit. The show mimics the folly of Icarus and Daedalus – the original tech bros – and the hubris of Jurassic Park’s Dr Hammond. Missing are the lessons of the Prometheus myth, which shows fire as a boon for humanity, not doom, though its democratization angered benevolent gods. Absent is the plot twist of Pandora’s box that made it philosophically useful: the box also contained hope and opportunity that new knowledge brings. While Black Mirror explores how humans react to technology, it too often does so in service of a dystopian narrative, ignoring Isaac Asimov’s observation: that humans are prone to irrationally fear or resist technology.

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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by Womble@lemmy.world to c/globalnews@lemmy.zip

Countries including France are said to want to tie a new post-Brexit security deal to more beneficial access to British waters, potentially holding up military cooperation.

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submitted 3 months ago by Womble@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

I think of AI as alternative intelligence. John McCarthy’s 1956 definition of artificial (distinct from natural) intelligence is old fashioned in a world where most things are either artificial or unnatural. Ultraprocessed food, flying, web-dating, fabrics, make your own list. Physicist and AI commentator, Max Tegmark, told the AI Action Summit in Paris, in February, that he prefers “autonomous intelligence”.

I prefer “alternative” because in all the fear and anger foaming around AI just now, its capacity to be “other” is what the human race needs. Our thinking is getting us nowhere fast, except towards extinction, via planetary collapse or global war.

Not a piece I think I completely agree with, but it's nice to hear from a creative writer who's thoughts on AI don't stop at indignation that they aren't receiving royalties from being included in a training set.

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submitted 4 months ago by Womble@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
[-] Womble@lemmy.world 160 points 9 months ago

There’s no apparent way to disable the Microsoft 365 account manager in the Start menu, and there’s no option to deactivate the constant nagging to upgrade to a paid Microsoft 365 subscription.

Sounds like an ad to me.

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submitted 9 months ago by Womble@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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submitted 9 months ago by Womble@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

I considered leaving Twitter as soon as Elon Musk acquired it in 2022, just not wanting to be part of a community that could be bought, least of all by a man like him – the obnoxious “long hours at a high intensity” bullying of his staff began immediately. But I’ve had some of the most interesting conversations of my life on there, both randomly, ambling about, and solicited, for stories: “Anyone got catastrophically lonely during Covid?”; “Anyone hooked up with their secondary school boy/girlfriend?” We used to call it the place where you told the truth to strangers (Facebook was where you lied to your friends), and that wide-openness was reciprocal and gorgeous.

“Twitter has broken the mould,” Mulhall says. “It’s ostensibly a mainstream platform which now has bespoke moderation policies. Elon Musk is himself inculcated with radical right politics. So it’s behaving much more like a bespoke platform, created by the far right. This marks it out significantly from any other platform. And it’s extremely toxic, an order of magnitude worse, not least because, while it still has terms of service, they’re not necessarily implementing them.”

Global civil society, though, finds it incredibly difficult to reject the free speech argument out of hand, because the alternative is so dark: that a number of billionaires – not just Musk but also Thiel with Rumble, Parler’s original backer, Rebekah Mercer (daughter of Robert Mercer, funder of Breitbart), and, indirectly, billionaire sovereign actors such as Putin – are successfully changing society, destroying the trust we have in each other and in institutions. It’s much more comfortable to think they’re doing that by accident, because they just love “free speech”, than that they’re doing that on purpose. “Part of understanding the neo-reactionary and ‘dark enlightenment’ movements, is that these individuals don’t have any interest in the continuation of the status quo,”

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submitted 11 months ago by Womble@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

Earlier this year, a Boeing aircraft's door plug fell out in flight – all because crucial bolts were missing. The incident shows why simple failures like this are often a sign of larger problems, says John Downer.

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 139 points 11 months ago

Microsoft has Windows Defender, its in-house alternative to CrowdStrike, but because of the 2009 agreement made to avoid a European competition investigation, had allowed multiple security providers to install software at the kernel level.

Its all the EU's fault for having the temerity to think users should be able to control their own hardware instead of us!

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submitted 1 year ago by Womble@lemmy.world to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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Womble

joined 2 years ago