Sex is indeed a spectrum. Intersex presentation makes up a meaningful though small percentage, somewhere around the 0.05% range. If it were a binary there would be two options, mutually exclusive. This is a bimodal distribution, with two very strong peaks for XX or XY karyotype and a bunch of variation around either different karyotypes, XXY etc, or differing activation or expression of those karyotypes, eg androgen insensitivity etc.

On top of that, what would you say sex is exactly? Which gamete is larger? In seahorses the males have the smaller gametes but the females use something very similar to a penis to deposit the egg into the male who then raises it and performs all the roles we associate with females in humans.

Is it based on which chroonosomes? In some animals it is a WZ or W karyotypes, so that can’t be it. In others it is just a presence or absence of a sex chromosome. In some plants they have more than two sets of everything, like strawberries with 7 copies of each chromosome. In others they have one, two, or four in some parts of the life cycle, but sometimes the thing we see is the higher number, sometimes it is the lower number. Some have a mix of male and female parts, having sperm and egg producers on the same plant but separated, some have both right next to each other in groupings. Some animals can undergo sex changing due to environmental factors.

Nothing in biology is as simple as the models we use to represent them. Sex is complex and while it sometimes seems simple that is the less common state. Genes are not often all the way on or all the way off, they are usually moderated and running at different levels across the organism cell by cell, and changing with time. The same goes for traits.

I would recommend learning more about ut biology if you really do believe sex is a simple binary. The world of biology is far more complex and varied than that idea can capture and honestly it is fascinating, I find it extremely exciting to find the examples of my own ignorance, they are usually super cool. Good luck!

Indeed, just as gender is a spectrum so is sex. I love when someone says “Its basic biology” because the best response is “and this is intermediate biology”.

none of these transphobic losers who use autism to attack trans people even gives a flip about people

Ftfy

OK so I can definitely see why it would seem pointless or really narrow, but I think this would have actually been very helpful for me and people like me. I have dyspraxia, a coordination disability. Mine is specifically graphomotor, meaning the exact types of movements involved in writing. My handwriting was absolutely terrible, causing pain in my hands (I also had incomplete hand dominance, so yay, both hands sucked equally), inability to express in a written form, and difficulty with tasks like painting, drawing, sewing, and cooking. Over the years the most helpful things were gaining strength and switching to printing only, no running writing at all.

If this tool could help with increasing the feedback from my hands to my brain and also push my fingers through the shapes of letters I think I would have had some benefit. I think people who have had a stroke may also potentially benefit, though obviously it would need thorough testing.

What do you do with a faulty RAID drive? Early in the morning!

I disagree. The current setup is like having the real estate have a key and you have a swipe card. The swipe card let’s you into parts of the house but you don’t have access to the basement or electrical box. If you wanted access to those you could ask but the real estate basically says no unless they really messed up, and even then they send a tradesperson to do the work and give them the key. If that tradespersons loses the key or gives it to someone else the real estate shrugs and says “What do you want us to do about it? Security is hard.”

They also have a contract for all the furniture, most of which is bolted down, so you can’t even rearrange your house, let alone install a hand rail in the bathroom for your disabled brother who needs support getting in and out. You also can’t install anything on the walls like a TV or a picture frame, and attempting to do so would lead to the possibility of piercing a pipe or cutting a wire in the wall because you don’t have schematics.

You can’t put a different OS on, you can’t modify the one you have, and breaking any of the protections on software is a violation of the DMCA, so you are a renter. You rent the device, they control the features, they decide what parts are available to the public (usually none), they decide when it will be end of life, and they make it very technically difficult to repair anything by using parts pairing. If they sold the device as a subscription with hardware upgrades included, repairs included, ongoing support included, then maybe locking it down would be OK, but otherwise no, it is unreasonable and I don’t think we really own our devices in a meaningful sense.

This is simply incorrect. Implementing a lock on a bootloader is not dissimilar to a lock on your house. A person breaking in doesn’t care that they are breaking the law, they just need to find the how of breaking in. If I as a consumer want to enter my house or give a copy of my key to someone else as a backup I should be able to do so. If I want to leave my door unlocked I should have that right however foolhardy it is. And when it comes to locking the bootloader of a computer most people won’t notice it in general use but that isn’t the point. It is about the edge cases, the end of life for the device, the lack of security updates.

If already cold a fridge should use very little power on an ongoing basis. The peak draw should still be high if it is running the compressor, but the peak may only be for a few seconds or even less. So an 800W fridge may peak at that full draw for just long enough to start the compressor then drop down to something similar to what you said you had for the rest of the cycle. If it were empty and warm to start I would expect a higher load for a while, but again, the big draw is starting the motor,kicking off the compression cycle, so 150W is reasonable to me.

And a much smaller footprint. It could even be binary data for tweaking your algorithmic profile, say the name of a branded product or in the case of a product with few options just the type of item. Audio runs in the megabytes per minute, transcripts in the kilobytes, but reducing to a conclusion of interest in a single specific item is really very small, hard to notice tbh.

I think he is saying that of the total interactions he gets he would expect a large amount of hostility to his opinion on Mastodon, and it is also a small population which is available to interact with on platform. Consistent, just talking about the experience and an objective measure. In my opinion Mastodon will be helped by Bluesky adding a paid membership. The worse it is the better for Mastodon, and honestly if people have already started moving out from Twitter to Bluesky they are not locked in yet so moving out again is easier, they already dropped Twitter but Bluesky is not solidified yet.

The claim by Meta that they block this type of material combined with the existing spread of this type of material mean that adding a temporary source of material does not carry the same level of harm as may be expected. Testing if Meta does in fact remove this type of content and finding it failing may reasonably be expected to lead to changes which would reduce the amount of this type of material. The net result is a very small, essentially marginal increase in the amount of self harm material and a fuller understanding of the efficacy of Meta filtering systems. If I were on the ethics board I would approve.

I think piecemeal is a good way to go. Switch from MS Office to LibreOffice, from iOS to android, from Photoshop to Krita, then go to dual booting Linux (probably Mint or similar) with Windows, learn more using both, find what things you reboot to Windows for, find solutions for those using Wine and alternative software, get used to solving problems in Linux land and learn the tools. Once you are comfortable with a mix of both get rid of what you can, use Windows less and less, try CalyxOS or Graphene for your phone if possible, keep making steps. Each step makes progress, and imperfect solutions are a better starting point for finding better solutions.

That said, for the earliest steps a virtual machine is an amazing tool, as is an old laptop. You can learn to solve problems on virtual or real hardware without making your life harder then inch closer to freedom. I’ve been using Linux since 2006 and honestly it has been a constant learning process. The first year was mostly VM learning, then an accidental install on my external HDD taught me about hubris and data protection. Since then I have kept moving towards more open hardware and software one step at a time. Getting started is the key, nothing teaches as well as trying.

What OS do you use? Windows, Mac, Linux? And same for your phone? Android? If so, you should be able to get it set up on your desktop and phone.

First, get it installed on your desktop. For windows and mac go to the Syncthing download page and grab the installer. On Linux you will find install instructing below, but basically use your package manager to install syncthing.

Once it is installed you can start it up and it will open a GUI, most likely through your web browser (probably 127.0.0.1:8384 or similar). From here you will have your Syncthing interface for your computer set up, so on to the phone.

On your phone install syncthing from whichever store you use, fdroid is my favourite. Once installed open it and you should have an option to add another device. You can use this to scan the QR code on your computer Syncthing interface.

Good idea is to use something like Syncthing to copy data between your phone and another device like a laptop or another phone. This depends on the app, for Drip you have to manually export the data yourself on a regular basis.

Another useful idea is if you have an old phone lying around get it connected via Syncthing and back up everything to it. If your current phone dies or is lost you can switch back immediately, a hot backup. If you have root on your device you can use NeoBackup to schedule backups of the data into a folder Syncthing can access and send to backup locations, say a home computer or spare device.

And the fashion, oh wow, such an aesthetic.

Trashing!

I don’t know about videos but having a look at the OSI model is a good way to start. It covers the abstract framework for packetizing data including things like the distinction between hardware and software, envelope, encryption, application layer stuff, the whole shebang. The cool thing is by going hardware, network, application you can see where responsibility are and it helps you understand where things can go wrong.

If you are interested there are plenty of CCNA style courses available on the internet, licit and otherwise, and they go into more depth, and the same applies to RHCE/RHCSA material. The training for certifications like that covers what you want to know but also puts it in context, and again licit and otherwise sources are available.

Do you want a grilled human? Because that’s how you get grilled human.

In Australia we have a robust and fast paper voting system administered by the Australian Electoral Commission. We get most results in the evening of election day with only really close races being a couple of days out. There is solid chain of custody on paper ballots and having been used for over a century we have all the kinks worked out.

The USA has about 330 million people, we have about 25 million. The voting population of each is smaller, but it is a much larger percetage of our population due to compulsory voting. If we can do it with less than 10% of the population it could be done there with the same ratio no worries, just assume out country was a state and you can see it can work.

Paper is safe and secure. It is well understood and all the hack and hijinks have been worked out. If you ask experts in IT if they think voting should be dine electronically they answer hell no without much debate.

Damn autocorrect, yes, absolutely, thanks for that