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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • For starters, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone say “anonym” in that sort of context before, so if that’s something you say regularly, change that habit, either leave it at “anon” or fully write out “anonymous”

    And I’m not saying that to be a dick, I’m illustrating a point, if you have a unique style of writing, that’s something that can be used to fingerprint you. That’s how the Unabomber got caught after all- someone noticed that in his manifesto that he said “you can’t eat your cake and have it too” instead of the more common “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” and said “hey, that sounds like Ted.”

    A while back there was a post on one of the food communities here where someone made a post about the “salmond” they cooked, and I immediately thought “is this the same guy who misspelled ‘salmon’ that same way like a week ago” and sure enough it was. Those stupid little things can stick out to people.

    And if you carry those quirks around to different websites, it’s possible for people to connect the dots if they really want to. Search around for different accounts across different websites that say “anonym” and they might be able to piece together a profile on you.

    Hypothetically, let’s say maybe somewhere on Lemmy you say that you’re a fan of the Chicago Bulls, and on xitter under a different username you mention that you grew up in New Jersey, but both accounts have used the word “anonym” and they figure they might be the same person. Then on still another site with a different name where you’ve also said it, you mention that you were in marching band and went to Catholic school.

    So now the profile is for bulls fans from New Jersey, who went to Catholic school and were in marching band. That is fairly specific. That might have narrowed down who you are to just a few hundred, or maybe even dozens of people.

    So the most important lesson is to just be really aware of what information you’re willingly putting out there about yourself and think about how it could potentially be used to identify you. It doesn’t matter if you’re on Tor and a VPN and all of the other technical measures you can take, because you’re still just putting information about yourself out there.

    Possibly the best thing you can do is to not to log ino post, comment like, subscribe, or otherwise interact with anything if it can be at all avoided.

    For most people, most of the time, that’s of course way overkill, I’m here writing this comment after all, and I’m sure there’s plenty of information about myself on this account for some to build a pretty good profile about me if they really wanted to.

    So really you need to consider why you want to be anonymous, and just how much you’re willing to sacrifice your online experience to meet that goal.



  • Alright. If that’s what you want to nitpick here

    The average adult (in the US) can ride a bike, whether or not they ever actually do is a different matter, but the majority of us learned how to at some point, and there’s a reason “it’s like riding a bike” is a saying.

    From being able to ride a bike to being able to ride it a reasonably long distance just takes time and work to build up to it, which is what he said.

    Now a lot of people won’t put in that kind of work, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t.

    I’m fat, I won’t sugar-coat that. In a couple weeks when it warms up a bit I’ll hop on my bike, and I’ll probably manage around 5 miles, and by the end of the summer I’ll probably work my way up to around 15 miles, and I’ll still be fat. I do this pretty much every year (and worth noting, I didn’t even learn to ride a bike until I was in my 30s)

    There are parts of the world where damn-near everyone gets around on bikes, they don’t have some sort of unattainable genetic advantage because they grew up in Amsterdam or whatever that gives them some “dormant athleticism” that Americans don’t have, they just ride bikes.

    The average adult can ride a bike. They just don’t or won’t.




  • My local council has a long-run ting exchange program with a Canadian council, where scouting is coed. Every 4 years we send a bunch of scouts up to camp and spend time with our Canadian counterparts, and then the next year they send a bunch down to do the same here.

    I haven’t looked into how they work it since they started allowing girls to participate, but back when I was in we had an arrangement with the local girl scout council for them to participate and host female Canadian scouts and to travel to Canada with us(and of course female venturers also participated)

    The program has been going on for almost 60 years, and I’ve never heard of there being an issue. Girls and boys camp in separate areas but participate in activities as a single unit.

    And that’s much the same way Scouts America is operating now.

    And on top of that

    Venturing and sea scouts have also been coed for a long time.

    There was always female camp staff at summer camp who were around our age.

    I’m sure along the way some kids have taken the opportunity to do what horny teenagers have always done since time immemorial, but I think it’s probably fair to assume that if not at scouts they probably would have found another time and place to do that anyway, not being in scouts certainly hasn’t put a damper on that for a great many people over the years.

    And of course, its 2026, gay scouts don’t have to stay in the closet anymore.





  • I’m an eagle scout, and I’ve been following this story.

    I’m going to be returning my medal as soon as I find a good mailing address that gives it the best chance of it landing on Roger Krone’s desk.

    I’ve been in touch with every eagle I know. A good handful of them are on-board with sending their medals back as well. Most of the rest of them are at least going to be writing letters and doing whatever else they can to draw some attention to this.

    Look, in the grand scheme of things, the changes they’ve agreed to change little to nothing about the scout program.

    But if they caved once, that just means that hegseth is just going to try again, and they’ll probably cave in next time too. And the next time.

    I’m not doing it lightly, I’m damn proud of my eagle scout award, that goofy little medal ranks among my most priced possessions.

    But after a couple more rounds of this bullshit, they’re going to twist scouting into something I’d no longer want to identify with, so one way or another my days of being proud of that medal are coming to an end.



  • I feel like that kind of illustrates the point though

    There’s a lot of precise grammar rules because the language is a little bit of a clusterfuck (I say that with love, I like the French language and speak a bit myself.) If you were to create a language from scratch, you’d probably choose to make one with much simpler grammar.

    Like most languages, French evolved organically out of other languages. There wasn’t really a point in time where someone said “hey I made a new language, here are the rules, I call it ‘French.’” Instead, for centuries people just kind of picked and chose what parts of Latin, Gaulish, Frankish, etc. that they liked and didn’t like, mashed them together in whatever way felt “right” and eventually French happened.

    Then when some eggheads decided to write down the rules, it was more of a “Ok, here’s all of the weird bullshit most of you are already doing, and there’s kind of a lot of it. It sounds very pretty, but let’s just all agree that thats enough and this is how our language works. Try not to add any more weirdness” (and they’ve been remarkably good at sticking to that, l’Académie Française doesn’t fuck around, which may or may not be a good thing depending on your views)

    You got a lot of words with letters that don’t make sounds or make very different sounds that you might think if you weren’t already familiar with the language’s eccentricities, you got some very common verbs that conjugate in weird ways, you sometimes mash words together with an apostrophe basically because it sounds nice, the Académie Française, when confronted with a new thing, sometimes decides that the terms that most of the rest of the world have decided on for that thing just aren’t “French enough” and goes and makes up a new word for it, etc.

    And again, I like French, I’m not shitting on it, English isn’t any better and the rules are certainly less formalized


  • I think it might be worth re-reading this comment through the lens of the other comment where you dug up the details of the (alleged) actual story. Not too sure which came first due to the edit in the other comment.

    The guy pulled his car over to grab her and lecture her after the incident happened. That’s not ok and shouldn’t be covered under good Samaritan laws. Really that could be grounds for something like assault charges in some jurisdiction. Potentially if she wasn’t a minor she could have even had a decent shot at a self-defense claim if she’d shot him when he grabbed her (this is 'murica after all) he continued to escalate a situation that was already resolved and introduced physical force into circumstances where it wasn’t warranted.

    What you probably pictured (I know it’s what I had in mind) was probably more like someone grabbing a girl to keep her from walking into traffic. That would probably be covered under good Samaritan laws.

    But holding onto her after that to yell at her probably wouldn’t/shouldn’t, that’s uncalled for, though there may be a little more leeway there since it would still sort of been in the heat of the moment. Odds are probably pretty good that she wouldn’t have even pressed the issue since he just potentially saved her life if that were the case.

    As for it being considered a sex offense, I think that’s a case of the laws being poorly-crafted, the insane way we craft laws to “protect the children” (except when the rich and powerful are involved apparently) and the justice system being broken because that aspect of it is kind of bullshit and probably should have been thrown out on appeal. What he did was wrong and I think there should be consequences for that, but I don’t think there’s any reason to think it was wrong in a sexual way unless there are other details to the story that have been glossed over.

    And the person you had the conversation with that prompted this either misunderstood the circumstances, possibly because they only got the information second hand themselves, or are trying to twist the details to suit their agenda. The first is probably more likely, but we can’t really know for sure.


  • If I were the type of person who was willing to give AI the benefit of the doubt and not assume that it was just picking basically random numbers

    There’s a lot of cases where it can be a shorter (by distance) walk than drive, where cars generally have to stick to streets while someone on foot may be able to take some footpaths and cut across lawns and such, or where the road may be one-way for vehicles, or where certain turns may not be allowed, etc.

    I have a few intersections near my father in laws house in NJ in mind, where you can just cross the street on foot, but making the same trip in a car might mean driving half a mile down the road, turning around at a jug handle and driving back to where you started on the other side of the street.

    And I wouldn’t be totally surprised if that’s the case for enough situations in the training data where someone debated walking or driving that the AI assumed that it’s a rule that it will always be further by car than on foot.

    That’s still a dumbass assumption, but I’d at least get it.

    And I’m pretty sure it’s much more likely that it’s just making up numbers out of nothing.


  • In addition to my advice on your bloody Mary abomination chili

    Around 10 or 15 years ago, I learned this chili recipe from this comic I probably found on Reddit. It has always served me well, and it is the basis for how I make chili today

    To this recipe I also add some chili peppers, usually jalapenos (because otherwise it’s not chili)

    A can of chipotles in adobo

    I’ve tweaked the ratios spice blend a bit to my taste and added a bit of cocoa powder and cinnamon.

    It should probably be noted that I tend to make bigger batch, often working with 2-5lbs of meat (and I prefer coarse ground or something even finely cubed meat as opposed to regular grocery store ground meat)

    I usually have 2 or 3 different cans of beans in mine because I like beans

    I’ll usually do 2 or 3 bell peppers, usually of different colors

    Some bacon, some chorizo

    Screw that “a shot of beer” it gets a whole can. Occasionally wine instead if that’s what I’m drinking while I’m cooking.

    Often some coffee and/or various liquors (whiskey, rum, tequila, or Brandy)make their way into the mix at some point. Sometimes there’s beef stock involved.

    I also pay really fast and loose about what canned tomato products go into my pot, whole, crushed, diced, sauce, doesn’t matter too much, it’s all gonna cook down into unrecognizable red-brown deliciousness by the time I’m done. Just try to get roughly that sort of ratio of tomato products to beef

    For bonus points, get your cowboy on and do this in a pot hanging from a tripod over a campfire.

    Normally I end up letting this simmer for up to around 6 hours. If it starts looking too thick/dry, add some liquid, usually beer in my case.

    Credit for the original recipe: cookingcomically.com



  • If you absolutely must use bloody mary mix for some reason

    Brown up your beef, saute up some diced onions and crushed garlic and the peppers

    Add it all to a pot, add the bloody Mary mix

    Season with some cumin, and (if needed, some bloody Mary mixes can be pretty heavily seasoned) salt, pepper, garlic & onion powder, chilli powder, maybe some herbs like cilantro, oregano, maybe basil

    Maybe a bit of flour to help thicken it, otherwise you’re gonna need to be very judicious about how much mix you use or it’s gonna take forever and risk the flavor getting weird trying to reduce it down and concentrating the seasoning in the mix.

    If it’s coming out a bit too tangy and acidic, a bit of sugar or maybe brown sugar can help cut that

    If you can, consider using some fresh or canned tomatoes, or even plain tomato sauce, that’ll probably get you a better texture, but I suspect that if that were an option you could, should, and probably would skip the bloody Mary mix

    I’d also maybe consider adding some bell peppers to the mix to make it a little chunkier. Maybe some corn.

    Maybe some bacon, chorizo, some diced meat in addition to the ground, etc.

    I like to add a beer, but starting with bloody Mary mix that’s probably gonna thin things out a bit too much. Wine and stock would be other options but with the same problem.

    End of the day, chili is a stew, and the origin of stews is pretty much just throwing whatever you have in a pot and letting it simmer, there’s not too much to it.



  • You are right that paint is kind of its own thing and doesn’t really fit into the RGB or CMYK systems

    But I would say it’s overall still subtractive. The paint and whatever you’re painting on isn’t giving off any light on its own, its just reflecting whatever ambient light there is (which is usually more or less white) and subtracting from that.

    You could maybe argue that it’s more replacive (is that a word?) than additive or subtractive. It just kind of is what it is. It’s just replacing the substrate’s reflectivity with its own since it’s opaque like you said.

    And when you mix paints it tends more towards that grey-brown because like you said it’s not layered, it’s more that each pigment is right there on the surface next to each other reflecting and absorbing their part of white light.

    So if you mixed cyan and magenta paints together, instead of light passing through layers of cyan and magenta until all the red and green are filtered out so that only blue light reaches the white paper and is bounced back to your eye, you’d have cyan piments reflecting blue and green, mixed in right next to magenta pigments reflecting red and blue. So both are reflecting blue and the resulting color will probably look blue-ish, but the cyan is reflecting some green, and the magenta some red, so that pulls the color more towards grey (somewhere between white and black, even if you mix all 3 it cant really get down to true black or true white because some light is always going to be absorbed and some reflected)


  • You are right, but I felt like that kind of gets a little too far out of an easy-to-explain model, and decided to kind of push that off into the stuff I said I was going to gloss over because colors are weird

    I suppose it’s sort of more like the pigments are intentionally imperfect to compensate for the also imperfect way that our eyes pick up colors that aren’t exactly red/green/blue

    EDIT: Or perhaps from a certain point of view the pigments are more perfect than our eyes are. The point is the whole system is pretty wonky, a bunch of happy evolutionary accidents happened that allowed our ancestors to be better able to tell what fruit was ripe and spot predators, and at some point we also invented art, computers, monitors, and inkjet printers, and all we have to look at them with are some squishy orbs in our skull meant to spot berries and lions.