C++ pays the bills

Many English names are derived from job names. If you're called Baker, Clark or Smith, you probably have an ancestor who baked bread, kept records or worked with metal. So how come some people are called Abbot?

@CuriousMagpie@beige.party @DavidM_yeg@beige.party @broadwaybabyto@zeroes.ca Refusing to mask really is irrational. This article, recently posted by @violetblue@mastodon.social , says: Globally, around 40 per cent of healthcare workers included in multiple studies experienced long COVID at an average follow-up of 22 weeks, while 26.5 per cent remained affected at 12 months. Does your doctor want long Covid? That's how you get #LongCovid.

@Di4na@hachyderm.io @ChrisMayLA6@mastodon.me.uk Mmm, you say "wealth-hoarding"; I say we worked hard and saved for our retirement. You say we hoarded electoral power; I say we went out in the rain on a Thursday and voted. I don't like the way a lot of us voted, but if young people had voted as keenly as we did, we wouldn't now be staring into the abyss of Brexit.

@LaChasseuse@mastodon.scot Since some Covid infections are asymptomatic, she's probably had it even more than three times and blithely spread it to her patients. 😖 @broadwaybabyto@zeroes.ca , I'm really sorry for your doctor's ignorance and stubborn refusal to mask. Keep the faith!

@brettezeleliquide@h4.io Or, dessous son doigt, on lit "Enter adult only."

@Wyatt_H_Knott@mastodon.sdf.org With maybe a side-order of constant hypervigilance and living two seconds in the future? Uh-huh. @Wallflower@beige.party

@iju@mastodon.social Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, I agree. @fesshole@mastodon.social

@CarmePont@mastodont.cat She bears a striking resemblance to Holliday Grainger.

@Eetschrijver@mastodon.social Not quite. #Caste suggests an association with race; Rishi Sunak and Kemi Badenoch, both recent or current leaders of the Conservative Party, aren't white. #Class also has more flexibility than a caste system. As a child, Alan Sugar lived in a council flat, but now he's a billionaire who sits in the House of Lords. @fesshole@mastodon.social

@revk@toot.me.uk Good point! You've sent me to a search engine. The law seems to be different for fleet operators and private individuals. Apparently there's a narrow exemption for domestic purposes, which lets you use #dashcam footage for a police report or an insurance claim, but that exemption evaporates if you share the video on YouTube or social media. Fleet operators, in contrast, have to comply with #GDPR in all its majesty. @anon_opin@mastodon.social @mikecox@mastodon.iow.social

@bleuje@mathstodon.xyz I was surprised by the experiment's stability. Then I realised: the smaller a territory, the more often its ball strikes a boundary and enlarges the territory. Small territories grow faster than large ones, and so they all tend to stay at about the same size.

@i0null@infosec.exchange Mm, yeah. Not brilliant for infection control, though.

@christopherkunz@chaos.social Laithwaite's wine in my case. Last year it was all "pay £7 for a year's free delivery and we'll deliver today's order free." This weekend it was "your Unlimited subscription is about to renew for £29.99." Fortunately, I cancelled in time. Blighters! @Daojoan@mastodon.social

@fesshole@mastodon.social Every reply I can think of is lewd. I'm sure your son is very happy. Don't ruin it for him.

@chewie@mammut.gogreenit.net @duncanstephen@mastodon.social @fesshole@mastodon.social I hang long clothes on the upper rungs and short ones on the lower rungs, so that no damp clothes rest on the carpet. It doesn't matter who owns them because I don't take them down till they're dry.

@carnage4life@mas.to Quite apart from the ethical problems of using #AI and the personal risk of letting it loose in your private affairs like this, don't you get a sense of unease about who's doing this? #Meta already wants to insert itself unnecessarily into all human communication and shoulder-surf without consent on all activity on the Web. Isn't that more than enough already? Should people be letting Meta take an active role in their finances and daily lives as well? My own disclaimer is that I've configured #Blokada on my phone to block all Meta properties at DNS level, and I moved to a Fedi instance that blocks Threads. That shows you how little I trust Meta. We're not going to reach agreement here, but I hope we can still have a civilised and fruitful conversation.

@fesshole@mastodon.social It's called brewer's droop, and a surprising number of men seem to be unaware of it.

@anon_opin@mastodon.social Accents associated with certain regions, classes and ethnicities are stigmatised. You have the perfect right to change the way you speak, the way you dress, the food you eat and the music you listen to.

@Eetschrijver@mastodon.social Every dude should have one. @anon_opin@mastodon.social

@anon_opin@mastodon.social You say that, but I think it's more general. We recently saw a Pink Floyd tribute band. They were really competent, except for the female backing vocalist, who really let the side down. Their rendition of The Great Gig In the Sky was just an embarrassment. Here's how it should have sounded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PMnJ_Luk_o&t=199 As soon as we got back to the car, everyone started talking about that backing vocalist, rather than how good the rest of the band had been. So I think a band is only as good as its weakest member.

@edboythinks@beige.party Why? I like #Okular. It's fast and responsive and it avoids running nine gigabytes of AI-infested Adobe slop.

@fesshole@mastodon.social Ahem. Stereotyping much?

@fesshole@mastodon.social Lots of women won't date shorter men, and even filter them out using dating apps. Is it a wonder that some men are unhappy about it?

@SteveClough@metalhead.club My opinions, for what little they're worth: As you've implied by writing two separate questions, intelligence is distinct from sentience. Intelligence can be measured by visible performance. It can be limited to certain areas or tasks, just as it is in humans. AGI (if that turns out to be possible) is not a binary thing: an AI could be more intelligent than humans in some areas and less intelligent in others. Sentience — or consciousness — is harder to assess. I can't even prove that a dog is conscious, although I believe it is. A practical definition of consciousness is the ability to suffer. Can a dog suffer? I believe so. Can an amoeba? I think not. But I don't know where the boundary lies. There's no such thing as a soul, and therefore no machine has one. Behaviours often ascribed to a soul emerge from human biology and society. Bonus fourth opinion: I don't see why consciousness couldn't arise in silicon; I don't see any reason why it has to be carbon-based. But I don't think LLMs will ever get us to AGI or to conscious machines.

@muddle@infosec.exchange That's different: it means "that proposal is completely unacceptable. I'm not doing it." @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social

@revk@toot.me.uk I think you're right, as long as you don't record anything that happens outside your property. Any wall-mounted camera had better be angled downwards rather than pointed straight out at the street. @anon_opin@mastodon.social @mikecox@mastodon.iow.social

@misty@digipres.club Hmm — Sophos thinks that's a phishing site: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/21ea8b52d8740d912ff131d674cc79794d21210c494b67b143090c73bf06d6a2?nocache=1

@fesshole@mastodon.social Think rationally about it for a few minutes, come up with some probing questions, and you'll realise that you don't have a soul, either. No one has. A soul is a child's answer to the question "why am I me and not you?" It raises lots more questions, and doesn't answer any of them.

@xkcdbot@me.ns.ci More than twice as big! In diameter or just in volume?

@jonpsp@mstdn.social Producing a cotton towel requires lots of water: It currently takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce a single cotton t-shirt or pair of jeans. Many of today's cotton fields require irrigation, and are often located in regions where water is scarce. In the Indus of Pakistan, a top cotton producing area, agriculture sucks up 95% of water used by people. https://web.archive.org/web/20240222172132/https://www.worldwildlife.org/blogs/sustainability-works/posts/water-the-next-carbon Packaging, selling and transporting a towel has a carbon footprint. Regularly washing it costs energy, water and laundry chemicals. There's an environmental aspect to this story, and I applaud you for bringing it up, but I honestly don't know how to work out which solution is worse. @fesshole@mastodon.social

@leyrer@23.social That was a hoax. I mean, we tried all that stuff with the black candles and the chickens, sure — that was just a normal Thursday afternoon — but SCSI still didn't work. @sophieschmieg@infosec.exchange

@ben@bluetoot.hardill.me.uk I say, steady on, Ben. @cstross@wandering.shop

@Noorvee@zirk.us Supersonic the Hedgehog. @lowqualityfacts@mstdn.social

@anon_opin@mastodon.social Elderly Relative 1 drags his left sleeve over his dinner, so whichever part is driest (typically the chips) goes on the left, typically leaving the meat and sauce on the right. I trust you'll grant me a papal indulgence?

@TheBreadmonkey@beige.party Sure. Have the battery drive a tiny electric motor that powers a dynamo that charges the battery. (This is a joke, of course. The reason it wouldn't work is that a dynamo pushes back against you if you draw current off it. That's how an EV's regenerative brakes work. You always get less power out of a dynamo than you put in, just as you do with a motor, and just as you do with a battery.)

@fesshole@mastodon.social I would pay much more than 50p to avoid having to do this. I hope you washed the coin before spending it. It didn't occur to you that one 50p piece is pretty well indistinguishable from another?

@fesshole@mastodon.social A few quid? You should see what tree surgeons actually charge. 😨

@veronica@explains.social They thought what? 😆

@lightspill@tailswish.industries I'm not sure I follow. Could you give an example, please?

@lydiaschoch@mastodon.social A #respirator is also good for pongy jobs like turning over the compost. It doesn't eliminate the smell completely, but it certainly helps.

@lowqualityfacts@mstdn.social Girl scout cookies are at least 70% cannabis. Keep them away from fire.

@jbz@indieweb.social Dammit! I must cover up this phone camera again.

@iju@mastodon.social I see it differently. If a soul, as I've defined it, were an essential part of a human being then, yes, it would be impossible to function socially (and probably to survive at all) without one. However, I think all the functions ascribed to the soul, such as consciousness, conscience and a sense of self, arise in other ways that don't require the existence of a spirit world. @fesshole@mastodon.social

@anon_opin@mastodon.social Some supermarkets don't even sell kidneys any more. And I can't remember the last time I saw them selling rabbit.

@mattotcha@mastodon.social That's a 404, I'm afraid.

@iju@mastodon.social I'm using "soul" in its usual English sense: an immaterial source of life and identity, which (usually) survives the death of the physical body and goes on to some kind of afterlife, and which interfaces with the physical body and mind in some way that's never clearly defined, and whose eternal fate may depend on what the body and mind do and think. I see life as a set of processes that emerge from our complex biology and society and the properties of matter, rather than as an ethereal substance or object with an independent existence. When a candle gutters and burns out, the flame dies with it; the flame no longer exists, save as a memory, a bit more carbon in the air and perhaps some soot on the ceiling. So it is with life: the processes we call life continue until the body can no longer support them, and then they stop. I'm not denying the existence of everything else called "soul", such as Black American culture, soul music, soul food and so on. @fesshole@mastodon.social