From Wikipedia:

These were defined by October 2010 as part of the Unicode 6.0 support for emoji, as an alternative to encoding separate characters for each country flag. Although they can be displayed as Roman letters, it is intended that implementations may choose to display them in other ways, such as by using national flags. The Unicode FAQ indicates that this mechanism should be used and that symbols for national flags will not be directly encoded.

I don’t think you’ll be able to find a source that specifically says “yeah, they did this to avoid having to make a decision about which countries are important/independent enough to have flags”, but like… why else would they go with this more complicated system over just defining separate codepoints for each flag?

This reminds of how when the unicode consortium had to add flag emojis, instead of opening the can of worms on what countries are independent or not, they just noped out of it and let the implementers decide which combinations of regional indicator letters render as country flags.

Aside from the political stuff, I’m also concerned about proton from a technological standpoint. You can’t use a standard mail client with proton, you have to use their own. So, if they wanted to, they could push out a single malicious update which would render all of the end-to-end encryption stuff pointless. You could argue that using Thunderbird + GPG + Gmail is more secure/private.

A lot of people seem to think that all ai art is low effort garbage, which is just not true. There can be a lot of skill put into crafting the correct prompt to get the image you want from an image generator, not to mention the technical know-how of setting it up locally. The “ai art is not art” argument to me doesn’t sound any more substantiated than “electronic musicians aren’t musicians, go learn a real instrument” or “photographers aren’t really artists, all they do is push a button”. But regardless, I agree that we need good tagging, or as @ThatWeirdGuy1001 said, different communities. Even though the output looks similar, actually drawing things and wrangling prompts are two completely different skillsets, and the way we engage with the artistic product of those skills is completely different. You wouldn’t submit a photo you took to a watercolor painting contest. Same with ai art and non-ai art.

Anyway, just thought i’d share my opinion as an ai non-hater.

A lot of people seem to be opposed to this argument, seeing it as a kind of government overreach, but I think it can work if done correctly. Things like USB and HDMI are already governed by collectives of companies, I think having the government work together with them can be beneficial for both consumers and producers alike.

I wouldn’t support it because I don’t like censorship.

Yes this is so confusing to me. There was a blast of attention about it when it was launched that lasted like a week max and then everyone completely forgot about it. I thought it was a short-run experiment that got shut down. What reason is there to use threads? Are there any actual humans who still use it? I’ve never visited it but something tells me that it’s just like reddit with at most 100 real users and the rest is just bots replying to bots.

I can’t decide what is more bewildering to me, the fact that you seem to have a threshold below which certain injustices can just be ignored, or the fact that genital mutilation is apparently below that threshold.

The one who should go back to reddit is you. Penises are great and awesome, obsessing over them in a non-derogatory way is fun and natural (I’m a straight man btw). People have been obsessing over penises since before recorded history, some loser on lemmy is not going to change that.

Yes in casual conversation I always say “DDoS” regardless of whether or not it’s distributed because “DoS” makes people think of the operating system.

1. Invent some incredibly specific but entirely false fact (e.g. the kingdom of bolivia was once ruled by King Aron the Benevolent before he was brutally murdered by his cousin-in-law over a dispute about the colonies)
2. Embed said fact in invisible font among material you own the copyright to
3. Let AI bots suck it up as training data
4. Ask random AI bots about King Aron the Benevolent of Bolivia and sue the companies since you now have proof that they violated your copyright

I mean this probably wouldn’t work from a legal standpoint, but whatever. It’s nice to image.

This reminds me of that one time a guy figured out how to make “gzip bombs” that bricked automated vuln scanners.

Hmmm but what if your balls are too warm and you want them cooled down? Sounds like a win-win in that situation

I think people who are 18+ and want to get a circumcision for themselves should be allowed to, but otherwise it should be banned.

idk what to call this genre of meme, but I’ve been seeing it a lot recently and I like it

To all the people downvoting: plastering the political compass in contexts where it makes no fucking sense is a kind of ironic humor meant to highlight the reductive nature of judging political ideology by two axes. It’s a shitpost, and a top-tier one at that.

What desktop environment? KDE, right? Just make sure you aren’t using the encFS backend for your vaults, it’s insecure https://defuse.ca/audits/encfs.htm

I don’t use KDE, so they may have already dropped support for encfs, idk. Just wanted to leave a warning for you/anyone else

You’re being sarcastic, right? There’s no way in hell that a sign that says VERBODEN TOEGANG VOOR BROMMERS, SNORFIETSEN, EN MOPEDS is somehow more readily understandable than a pictogram that I could recognize from 20 meters away in a low-resolution photo

Sometimes people need space to come to terms with their frustration (i.e. bitch to someone about it) before they can act constructively to tackle the issue.