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CoderKat CoderKat @kbin.social

I write ̶b̶u̶g̶s̶ features, show off my adorable standard issue cat, and give a shit about people and stuff. I'm also @CoderKat.

Posts 21
Comments 248
A very short survey on attitudes towards biological immortality
  • Agree. I added something like that in the "other negatives" box. There's that saying, society advances one funeral at a time.

    I like to think that myself, I'm very good at being open minded and adapting to the times (though honestly only time will tell). But I know many people don't do that. This is clearly evident in electoral polling as well as polls for social issues (eg, US 2023 support for same sex marriage is 89% among 18-29 but only 60% among 65 and older).

    Perhaps social changes could help with this problem. Clearly older folks can still change because the stat I just quoted was far worse in the not too distant past. Maybe our problems are with how we run news media or how we basically write off old folks as unlikely to change. Maybe it's because our society focuses on education being something you only do when young and you're never really expected to go back to school after that. Maybe we need to better teach empathy from a young age? Maybe us losing religion will make the biggest difference.

    Maybe we don't deserve this kinda advancement yet. To quote one of my favourite parts from the show The Orville:

    Technology and societal ethics have to progress hand in hand, each one supporting the other incrementally. Anything else is begging for disaster.

    • a member of an advanced, "space communism" version of humanity, talking to someone whose species has not yet advanced to the same point and wondering why they don't share their advanced tech with less advanced people.
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  • To be honest, I rarely noticed the votes tally. I think the bot just applied a flair to the post eventually? It wasn't that relevant to me. I could see from the comments what the top posts were saying. For most posts, it's usually obviously leaning in one direction, anyway. I always went to the comments for the discussion and drama, anyway.

    I do think the existing voting options are good. And think that all top level comments should contain either a clear vote or INFO, because I think the sub doesn't really work if people aren't voting in some way.

    One rule of perhaps interest is the not accepting your judgement rule. I'm not sure if I care for that rule in the late subreddit. On the surface, it makes sense, since why post here if you're not going to accept the judgement? But I think we have to be honest here. The sub exists because it's amusing. The cases where OP doesn't accept their verdict can be quite dramatic and fun in a certain sense. That seems like it's conductive to the true goal of the sub. Also, I'd rather have an OP that argues against everyone than one who never replies (especially when there's so many requests for info).

  • *Permanently Deleted*
  • I also can't stand the fact that smokers can take unlimited 'breaks' whenever they please just to come back stinking up an entire room with their smoke.

    That feels like a workplace problem. Why would a workplace give them unlimited breaks? And why would nonsmokers not be allowed comparable breaks? This feels odd to me. My recent jobs have been ones where nobody is micromanaging my time, so anyone can take whatever breaks they want. As long as productivity doesn't obviously suffer, nobody cares. My past jobs in retail didn't allow smokers to take extra breaks. They'd get the same breaks as everyone else (for an 8 hour shift, that meant a 30 min lunch and 2 x 15 min coffee breaks).

  • A very short survey on attitudes towards biological immortality
  • I filled it out, but let's discuss in the comments because filling out a one sided form isn't as fun as being able to have a multi sided discussion.

    I personally find biological immortality super appealing. Despite the word "immortality" in it, it actually just means you can live as long as you want, which takes away many of the downsides to immortality that often get discussed. Since I'm not religious, I don't believe in any kind of afterlife, so scientific advancement letting me live longer is the only way I can avoid death (which I'm afraid of). And more than just avoiding death, I want to avoid being a frail senior whose quality of life is severely diminished.

    That said, for me, I ranked the positive advancements with the disease prevention, medical advancement, and QoL above simply extending human life. I think these all do of course go hand in hand. But fewer people dying young is better than fewer people dying old. Dying young is really tragic, because there's so much of life you won't have experienced. Similarly, the big issue with growing old is age related diseases, which impact your quality of life. At a certain point, Alzheimer's and dementia seem worse than death. I feel conflicted because I don't want to die but if I had a disease like one of those, it seems like I'd no longer be myself and it's unlikely there's any hope for recovery before the disease eventually kills me. There's also the fear that perhaps I would be myself, but feel trapped inside a body, constantly confused and afraid by what's going on, which sounds horrible.

    On the negative impact side, by far my biggest concern is imbalance in access to this immortality. My fear is that regular folks (including myself) won't have access but billionaires will. That's worse than not having immortality, since billionaires are generally terrible people and not who we want living longer. Overpopulation is a bit of a concern, but one that I think we can eventually solve. e.g., with social changes to expectations about having kids, automation improvements to reduce our need for people to work, and eventually moving beyond just living on the surface of earth. Wealthy nations already have a declining birth rate, anyway. As well, I'm a bit skeptical about true biological immortality, as opposed to, say, extending life on earth for a good chunk of time, but eventually moving to a digital afterlife, where overpopulation is less of a concern.

    I didn't know how to answer the regulation question. I think most things need some level of regulation, but the options were "strict regulation" vs "unrestricted", neither which sound right to me. As well, regulation would likely be completely situational. e.g., obviously safety is a vital part of any form of medical treatment. We shouldn't be reducing any existing regulation there. But I certainly don't want research into the area to be unnecessarily held back. For a large part, I see this as no different from researching a cure for any other disease. Aging can be viewed as a disease.

  • A very short survey on attitudes towards biological immortality
  • It's not in kbin. It's a Microsoft Office form (similar to a Google Form or Strawpoll).

  • They know.
  • If you use WSL or some other flavour of Bash (anyone else remember Cygwin?), that's allowed!

    (The Windows command line feels so awful by comparison. PowerShell, I admit, actually seems quite nice. Though I can't be bothered to learn it when literally every other system I use uses Bash or a slight variation of Sh.)

  • The Supreme Court strikes down Biden's student-loan forgiveness plan, blocking debt relief for millions of borrowers
  • Well... I'm not surprised. Disappointed, but not surprised. We all knew this Supreme Court was not in favour of its citizens. The Supreme Court should have been stacked long ago. Leaving it be with its insane appointments just because stacking it might start a war with the GOP was a short sighted move, as the GOP is always going to play underhanded (that's how they managed to get so many SCOTUS appointments in the first place). Biden's insistence on trying to play nice with the GOP has always been his weakness.

    This really sucks for those with student loans who were depending on this. We're already in an economically rough place for the kinds of folks who would have student loans. Inflation has been sharp in recent years and wages have not kept up. In my field of tech, layoffs have been widespread and new grads would be the most severely impacted (they already struggle to get hired and now they're competing against an increased number of experienced people).

    As an aside, it's also a shame that lawmakers have not managed to pass a law for this debt relief. My understanding is that the strike down is specifically because it's not a congress passed loan forgiveness. But congress isn't willing to do the right thing (not in enough numbers to pass a law, anyway).

  • Canada will soon have new rules for clean fuel. Here's what they'll cost when you fill up | CBC News
  • And that's just what the Parliamentary Budget Office predicted. The article also has another prediction:

    "There's a zero per cent chance it would be worse than what the Parliamentary Budget Office is saying," said Wolinetz, who predicts a cost impact of under 10 cents a litre by 2030.

  • Canada will soon have new rules for clean fuel. Here's what they'll cost when you fill up | CBC News
  • Good. Some people will try to phrase this as a bad thing because yes, you will pay more (eventually, anyway -- article says they don't expect "any real bite until around 2025"). But we should be paying more given the environmental damage that burning this fuel causes. We should not be effectively subsidizing oil companies by paying the cost of their negative externalities.

    If anything, I think there should be even more than this. We should have Norway style taxation on fuel. They have a massive savings fund that massively dwarfs our own closest equivalent.

  • Family of missing Barrie woman fears human trafficking, expands search | CBC News

    It's been over three weeks since Autumn Shaganash, a woman from Barrie, was last seen or heard from by her family. They are urging the public to help with the efforts, and told CBC Toronto that police in Barrie need to follow more leads.

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    Stabbings at University of Waterloo send 3 to hospital, 1 person in custody
  • Some degree, I think is imported from the US. Let's be honest, US news dominates our internet more than Canadian news. I have to go out of my way on sites like this (or formerly reddit) to see Canadian news. I would actually say I am more familiar with American politics than I am Canadian politics (which isn't to say I'm unfamiliar with Canadian politics, but rather that I'm really familiar with American politics despite not being American). That means the current US culture war, which is very heavily attacking trans people and anything gender non conforming, is being a heavy influence on Canadians right now.

    But that's only "some degree". We aren't blameless. While it's nice that we have a PM that has a mostly pretty great on gender matters (no matter your opinion on Trudeau for his other faults, I think we can all agree he's very progressive on LGBT+ topics), that only goes so far. Canadian news media often leans right (and we're currently seeing a risk of the Toronto Star being acquired by a right leaning US media company). Pierre Poilievre has been stoking these alt right flames. And now we have a bill that is going to see more people using US media because Canadian media won't be found on Google search. And that's because of our own, badly written bill (it should have been written just so that sites couldn't copy/summarize most of the story without sending clicks to the original site, but for whatever reason they instead wrote it as requiring payment to link to news at all!).

  • Doug Ford’s right-hand man, PC MPP went to Las Vegas with Greenbelt developer: sources
  • They don't even try to hide their close friendships with developers.

    I guess it wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that the PCs clearly cannot separate business from friendship, too. We do need development in the province. But not at the cost of the Greenbelt. Nor do we need things like selling off highways or healthcare for profit.

  • Former student charged in University of Waterloo stabbings that police call 'senseless act of hate'
  • Truly terrible and I'm glad that nobody died. I wonder why the attacker hasn't (yet?) been charged with attempted murder?

    Some people in the class tried to stop what was happening, while others fled the room, he said.

    Those people who tried to stop the attacker are very brave. Kudos to them!

  • How do I give a community to another user?
  • Honestly, I'd suggest just leaving it be and waiting for an eventual feature change. I don't think it's scalable to be manually requesting all these kinds of changes from the (sole?) admin and this isn't particularly critical. I think Ernest has a lot on his plate just maintaining and developing this site.

  • Will it ever be possible for kbin to federate with PeerTube?
  • I think the main way that could be achieved is if Kbin and Lemmy had a convenient "upload video" option that actually uploaded the video to peertube. Convenience is king. Back before Reddit offered image and video hosting (and you'd usually upload to a site like imgur instead), there'd constantly be people commenting that they didn't know how to upload their content.

    That said, I'm personally cautious of PeerTube. Hosting small images is one thing, but video is something else. I don't really understand how PeerTube will keep running if it gets too much usage. Presumably, like most of these sites, it will depend on donations. I don't know if that will cut it for hosting video. My fear is that it'll be fine with low usage but as soon as it gets too high usage, we might see it going down (and taking a ton of content with it).

  • Losses of the Russian military to 30.6.2023
  • Does anyone know what special equipment includes? (I asked this last time but don't think I got a response.)

  • bread rule
  • Unsliced? Greatest thing since never.

  • How to create a decentralized kind of wiki?
  • Yeah, to be clear, MediaWiki is open source and also has alllll sorts of really cool extensions. You also already can download the entire contents of Wikipedia.

    I think this desire to federate everything is going too far. Most things don't benefit from this and in fact just become over complicated. If you can host a regular copy of a site easily... that's frankly most of the benefits there.

  • The Steam Summer Sale is on now!
  • That is the best part and honest one of the best parts of gaming in general.

    Kinda reminds me of burning the weed fields in Far Cry 3.

  • The Steam Summer Sale is on now!
  • That's the part that keeps me from doing it. While portability is nice, I have a really great desktop with an ultra wide. That ultra wide in particular is what makes PC gaming really great for me. I think I'd only use it on longer trips, which isn't that often.

  • What are y'all doing for Canada day?

    There's once again separate Canada day events in Waterloo Park and Downtown Kitchener (and probably several other places, too).

    Last year I went to the Waterloo Park one mostly because of the drone light show (which seems to be returning this year), but found that they were waaaay overloaded for food options.

    What were the other events like last year and where are you planning to go this year?

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    www.therecord.com Wildfire smoke returns to Waterloo Region, Guelph

    A special air quality statement has been issued by Environment Canada, but conditions are expected to improve by Thursday evening

    1

    TL;WR for June 26 through July 3 2023

    We probably should have signed the kids up for camp.

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    thesilphroad @lemmy.world CoderKat @kbin.social

    Squirtle Community Day Classic (July 2023) | Pokémon GO Hub

    On July 9th, 2023, Squirtle returns to Pokémon GO for a Community Day Classic event, giving players an opportunity to evolve a high-level Blastoise with Hydro Cannon once again. During the event, Squirtle will appear more frequently in the wild, and players will have a chance to encounter a shiny Squirtle. Blastoise’s exclusive Community Day […]

    0
    /kbin meta @kbin.social CoderKat @kbin.social

    Why do some Lemmy community not show up in magazine search (others on same instance do)?

    Yesterday I learned about https://lemmy.ca/c/ontario\_community\_directory (edit: I got a wrong link somewhere -- this one should have been https://lemmy.ca/c/ontario\_index) and my local city sub of https://lemmy.ca/c/waterloo. I can't find them in magazine search (eg, https://kbin.social/magazines?q=waterloo). They're not brand new (several days).

    If I visit the URL I expect them to have (eg, https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]), I get a 404 and no option to subscribe (I heard some people mention before how Lemmy would show empty communities until the first person on your instance subscribes -- not sure if that even applies to kbin and I can't seem to subscribe anyway).

    I can see other subs on the same instance. The whole reason I learned about these subs is because I can see https://kbin.social/m/[email protected] fine. So it doesn't appear to be the instance.

    Anyone have any ideas what's wrong and how to fix it?

    9

    I created a sub (aka community/magazine) for the Waterloo region (Waterloo, Kitchener, Cambridge)

    kbin.social Waterloo, Ontario, Canada - kbin.social

    A subreddit for the Waterloo region, including Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge, and several smaller towns.

    I intended this to be akin to r/Waterloo, since there's a ton of value in local recommendations and discussion. I've met some really cool people from the city subreddits and hope to rebuild that here.

    Link: @Waterloo [email protected]

    10

    What do you want to see more focus on in future Pokemon games?

    Eg, particular features, types of pokemon, stuff like open world, etc

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    /kbin meta @kbin.social CoderKat @kbin.social

    [Guide] How to make the Imagus extension work with kbin

    The Imagus Chrome and Firefox extension shows image previews on hover. Currently with kbin, hovering over the thumbnail in the frontpage or magazine view just shows the thumbnail but slightly larger, which isn't what we want (especially since the thumbnails have a distorted aspect ratio). Here's how to make the extension show the full image when hovering over the thumnail:

    1. In Chrome, open the extension options from the extension menu (puzzle piece icon in the toolbar). The Firefox version likely is somewhat similar.
    2. Go to the "Sieve" tab and click the "+" button to add a new rule.
    3. In the img field, use: ^kbin\.social/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/(.*)
    4. In the to field, use: media.kbin.social/$1
    5. Save and refresh any pages that you wanted to use this on.

    What the rule should look like

    Before ----------

    Before screenshot

    After ----------

    After screenshot

    For non-kbin.social instances, you most likely just have to update the domain in the regexes above (steps 3 and 4) to whatever your instance's domain is. I escaped the dot in kbin.social to be safe (if you don't escape it, it matches any character), but it's unlikely to matter.

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    At least 59 people killed after boat sinks off the coast of southern Greece

    At least 59 people have died and dozens are feared missing off the coast of southern Greece after a fishing boat carrying migrants capsized and sank, authorities said Wednesday.

    0

    B.C. man questions 9-year-old's gender in 'gobsmacking' track-and-field incident

    A B.C. family has garnered sympathy online — and international media attention — after sharing what they described as an incident in which a man questioned their nine-year-old daughter's gender during a sporting event.

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    /kbin meta @kbin.social CoderKat @kbin.social

    Can the magazine subscribe option be made much more prominent?

    One thing that made Reddit great and scalable was that you'd typically not view all Reddit subs (or even all popular ones), but rather you'd subscribe to subs that interest you.

    Kbin has subscriptions. But they aren't the default and are quite hard to figure out. I had to look alllll over on mobile before I realized that the subscribe button is really far down (basically underneath the entire page of posts). It should be at the very top.

    It'd also be great if when you create an account, there'd be some wizard to help you pick magazines to subscribe to.

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