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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The other layer of all this is that AGAB and “biological sex” aren’t necessarily the same thing. There’s a wide spectrum of people who were legally assigned one binary sex or another at birth that doesn’t actually describe their sex, let alone their gender.

    Centering AGAB as much as we do erases intersex people in addition to being bioessentialist and reductive.




  • I occasionally use middle mouse paste, but I switched my partner over from Windows recently and they were used to scrolling by holding MMB and dragging which seems to be the default on Windows…

    I expected there to be a toggle to turn off middle mouse paste but there just wasn’t. I had to go into multiple different places to disable it and enable autoscroll for all their apps. I ended up installing a hacky tool that would just clear the clipboard whenever MMB was pressed.

    If anything can make this process easier, I’m all for it.






  • Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneaffini rule
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    1 month ago

    The problem with a political interpretation of HDG is that it’s at odds with the fantasy escapism of being tamed by a plant monster that wants what’s best for you.

    Fundamentally, the Affini are bad. Their ideology is rotten and hypocritical and in real life it would not work out the way it does on the page. If you try to think about the political implications of HDG at all you will inevitably run into that. “Benevolent slavery” simply isn’t a thing.

    But there’s plenty of fiction that explores evil empires, the point of HDG is to have fun with the kinky idea of “what if a hot plant turned me into a pet?” Exploring the politics of the situation inevitably detracts from the fantasy of it being benevolent.


  • Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneaffini rule
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    1 month ago

    Calling the Culture anarchocommunism is somewhat accurate. Humans do have say in what goes on in the Culture, there are humans in high ranking roles in the Culture making decisions. Humans aren’t pets in the Culture, and Minds don’t own humans. Humans are only pets in the sense that Minds are superintelligent AI that largely do all the work to run society while humans live post-scarcity easy lives, but they are ostensibly equals.

    Here’s some background from the author: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

    HDG is kind of like what anti-Culture propaganda portrays the Culture as, but more rapey.



  • You’re arguing two different points here. “A VPN can act as a proxy” and “A VPN that only acts as a proxy is no longer a VPN”. I agree with the former and disagree with the latter.

    A “real” host-to-network VPN could be used as a proxy by just setting your default route through it, just like a simple host-to-host VPN could be NOT a proxy by only allowing internal IPs over the link. Would the latter example stop being a VPN if you add a default route going from one host to the other?


  • Fundamentally, a host-to-host VPN is still a VPN. It creates an encapsulated L2/L3 link between two points over another network. The number of hosts on either end doesn’t change that. Each end still has its own own interface address, subnet, etcetera. You could use the exact same VPN config for both a host-to-host and host-to-site VPN simply by making one of the hosts a router.

    I see your point about advocating for other methods where appropriate (although personally I prefer VPNs) but I think that gatekeeping the word “VPN” is silly.


  • “It has effectively the same function as a proxy” isn’t the same thing as “it’s not actually a VPN”.

    One could argue you’re not really using the tech to its fullest advantage, but the underlying tech is still a VPN. It’s just a VPN that’s being used as a proxy. You’re still using the same VPN protocols that could be used in production for conventional site-to-site or host-to-network VPN configurations.

    Regardless, you’re the one who brought up commercial VPNs; when using OpenVPN to create a tunnel between a VPS and home server(s), it seems like it’s being used exactly to “create private communication between multiple clients”. Even by your definition that should be a VPN, right?






  • The idea is that it isn’t just operating the vending machine itself, it’s operating the entire vending machine business. It decides what to stock and what price to charge based on market trends and/or user feedback.

    It’s a stress test for LLM autonomy. Obviously a vending machine doesn’t need this level of autonomy, you usually just stock it with the same thing every time. But a vending machine works as a very simple “business” that can be simulated without much stakes, and it shows how LLM agents behave when left to operate on their own like this, and can be used to test guardrails in the field.