The two that immediately come to mind are Clarence Darrow and Cicero.

I think it’s a reaction to another institutional tendency, which is to treat the best known theories as if they were incontrovertible facts.

Science and history are largely the search for closer and closer approximations to truth, but those approximations are always flawed and incomplete. And if they’re presented as already-attained truths, a critic can point out the flaws as evidence of deliberate deception—and then present any alternative they like without its being subjected to the same scrutiny.

The current version of Affinity is great and will continue to work forever—there’s no need to switch to an alternative if you’re already using it. I just don’t have much hope for its future development.

Just over a year ago.

I guess technically, Raspbian.

The Affinity Suite is great, but I’m suspicious of its acquisition by Canva—I’m afraid their solution to “bringing the suite to Linux” will be turning it into a web service.

They’re NFPA 704 signs.

If history is any guide, it’s about even odds.

If labor becomes worthless, money will be based on control of resources. Those with resources will sell to each other, and everyone else will have literally nothing to work with.

Or non-random—watch how many Instagram/Meta critics get their accounts flagged as underage.

A steelman argument (the opposite of a strawman).

While the project is still in early stages, we’re told there’s an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that has a social feed.

Dammit—I can see that actually taking off with many audiences, if it generates an eye-catching fake image to go with every text post.

It’s less useful because you can’t modify it to do whatever you want.

It’s less dangerous (than proprietary AI) because no one else can, either.

Great—let’s test it on politicians and law enforcement first.

Before copyright, storytellers sharing and reusing characters, settings, and plots was the norm. It’s the way humans evolved to tell stories, over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. We instinctively want to hear stories about characters we know, and to see new twists on familiar tales (aka “shit getting weird”). It’s why franchises, fan fiction, and adaptations are so popular.

And copyrights were never intended to protect the work of artists—they were first introduced after the invention of the printing press to censor subversive works being written for a newly-literate public, and quickly evolved into a means of creating monopolies for commercial printers. Writers were eventually given a stake in order to create a new rationale for copyright laws after they were suspended due to public backlash—but that was a minimal concession by the real commercial beneficiaries, not the main purpose.

Take the sentence “Police accused John Doe of inciting a lynch mob to attack the alleged rapist“. The police aren’t alleging that the victim was a rapist, they’re saying the rape allegation was part of the context of their own accusation against John Doe.

If an act is described as an accusation, it’s already implied that everything within the description is an allegation by the accusers. But if something within the description is itself labeled as “alleged”, that nested allegation becomes part of scenario the accusers are reconstructing.

All of it is being alleged—that’s what an accusation is.

But they’re not accusing her of arranging sex with boys who were allegedly wearing masks, they’re accusing her of arranging sex with boys who were actually wearing them. In the context of the act of which she’s accused, there were no allegations.

“Alleged” isn’t idempotent—every time you add it, it modifies the meaning.

prosecutors accuse her of arranging group sex with middle and high school boys as young as 13 years old while they allegedly wore Scream masks.

Can someone re-train journalists on the use of “allegedly”? The accusation is that she did these things, not that she is alleged to have done them.

Sprinkling the word around with no logical consistency just trains people to ignore it, which defeats the purpose.

As others are pointing out, there are mass protests going on—but I think there’s more to it than that.

The general message of all protests is “listen to us or else”. In the US for the last fifty years, “or else” has been understood to mean “or else you’ll lose the next election”—but it’s becoming clear that this threat has no leverage with Trump, either because he’s confident he can manipulate elections (through whatever means) or because he intends to accomplish his goals in his current term and doesn’t care what happens after that.

So protests need to find some other goal and some other message. Right now they’re looking for other weak points (e.g., Tesla dealerships), but once it’s clear they’ve got a strategy Trump is actually afraid of, the numbers will grow.

Yeah, jpeg converts to lab (or something similar, I think). But the dimensions are the same: one channel for lightness, and then a number of channels one less than the total number of sampled frequencies to capture the rest of the color space.