About marriage between cousins: Historically, the christian church has forbidden marriage between even very distant cousins. Intended or not, this has dismantled the power of large family clans.
Over centuries this has a clear effect on psychology: more individualism, a higher willingness to trust strangers (cooperation between non-relatives) and more. Joseph Henrich (anthropologist) has a whole book about this called The WEIRDest People in the World .
Since you are already on Mastodon, I would start by checking out the instances of people you have interacted with. Many topic-instances are still pretty general-purpose. Decentralize yourself! Join two or three instances. Subscribe to different topics on each. See what sticks.
On a small instance, the local feed is much more important. Local users have a larger influence on what you discover. So, check the local feed first. It may be a bit boring but should be free of spam. Check the external feed. It should not be too tacky, and have a CW where you want one. Check the moderation policy. If you want to commit to only one small instance, find out who pays the hosting and maybe donate.
I love how you can pick almost any number between 1 and 100 and there will be instances in FediDB with exactly that many accounts. Long tail indeed.
Regarding students cheating with ChatGPT, I liked this article from a professor, quote:
“Students are afraid to fail, and AI presents itself as a savior. But what we learn from history is that progress requires failure. It requires reflection.”
But when failing anything in class, students usually end up having fewer options, need to get better marks elsewhere to compensate, or get forced to repeat a year. So they use any tool or technique that might help them pass.
That’s a good book, not terribly deep but very much fun to read. I’m sure bots thinking they are human has been done several times. First show that comes to mind is Westworld, which is kind of centered around that idea.
It doesn’t do OCR. It just automatically cleans up the pages for archival or sharing. (I use it to archive my handwritten notes and sketches, so technically yes ;-)
FairScan to scan documents.
Time to re-read Cory Doctorow’s “Unauthorized Bread”. I thought it was satire and way over the top, but reality keeps catching up.
As a pretty new user to PieFed (and Lemmy), I still find those combined feeds (“Communities”) confusing. It helped with discovery, but feels like I have been mass-subscribed and now need to unsubscribe each community individually. (I’m sure this is not the case and I just haven’t figured out how it works yet.)
In contrast, the cross-post feature (mentioned by sibling comments) was easy to understand, and looks like a great way to discover (and loosely connect) small related communities.
If you’re interested in human intelligence, don’t miss Joseph Henrich’s book, “The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter”.
It has a few fun examples where historical people follow seemingly absurd complex instructions/traditions that are actually beneficial, while nobody ever designed them or knows what they do. It puts logical thinking into perspective.
Telemetry is in Server -> General -> Allow Anonymous Usage Collection. When you opt-out, it also send a final message to the server that you’ve opted out. The the telemetry itself looks reasonable, I don’t mind sending it. It’s really just the dark pattern of opt-out vs of opt-in that bothers me.
The donate button is the heart in the bottom left menu (not visible in the settings). It’s unobtrusive. I wouldn’t bother to remove it, except the tooltip says that I have to pay to remove it - now it has to go. Asking for donations is fine, but asking for money to remove a button is disgusting.
I’ve set up Kavita for my e-books. Nice UI, looks promising, and I’ve added some books. I haven’t really used it yet, because half of this was just an excuse to try podman (instead of docker). I wanted to set it up to run as unprivileged user, without the docker daemon running as root. That wasn’t too hard, but it was definitely a few extra steps.
But something about Kavita didn’t sit well with me. Maybe I don’t self-host enough stuff to know what’s normal, but there is a donate button, which I don’t mind, but its tooltip says: “You can remove this button by subscribing to Kavita+.”
I’m donating to a few software projects already, and I have developed a substantial amount of free software myself. There is nothing wrong with asking for money. But what I cannot stand is when software running on my own device is intentionally acting against my interests. And this tooltip was very clear about not letting me do something that I might want to do.
So I checked the source code for more. I found another anti-pattern: telemetry is opt-out instead of opt-in. But that seems to be it, I didn’t find anything worse than that. So… fair I guess, if the author wants it that way. It’s still free software. It looks like I could delete all the Kavita+ stuff myself and re-build. Which I’m going to do if I keep using it. But this is now an extra step that prevents me from just using it, because I need to feel in control of what I run. Kind of self-inflicted, I guess…
More specifically, please don’t use PNG for photos. Just converting to JPEG should do the trick.
That’s a good article. Here is a related deep dive: Pineapples! (PDF)
Because the pineapple leaves close their stomata during the day they don’t have the benefits of evaporative cooling! Plants heat up and unless there is a breeze to move the heat out of the field they are prone to plant damage, fruit sunburn and “cooking” or “boiling”. Growth slows when temperatures exceed 36°C and stops at about 40°C.
I may have created two accounts when I got here, and I will be baited into replying to snarky comments only from this one! I also like the low-key split-personality feeling, and experimenting with a different set of subscriptions. Anyway, so I’m no content-generation machine. But I’m doing my part to keep up the signal-to-noise ratio!